1
200
5
-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Dean Rusk Oral History Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
United States--Officials and employees
Politics and Public Policy
Description
An account of the resource
The collection consists of 172 oral history interviews with Dean Rusk and his colleagues between 1984-1989. Includes audiotapes and transcriptions documenting Rusk's life from early childhood in the 1910's through his teaching career in the 1980's. The interviews contain information on Rusk's service as U.S. Under Secretary and Secretary of State during the administrations of Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson and his involvement in foreign relations including the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War. The interviews also document his position as president of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950s.<br /><br /><a href="http://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&range=&collection=14&type=&tags=OHMS&featured=&subcollections=0&subcollections=1&submit_search=Search+for+items">View all OHMS indexed interviews in this collection here.</a>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Richard Geary Rusk
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984-1989
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Oral histories
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RBRL214DROH
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
United States
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
OHMS Object
Contains the OHMS link to the XML file within the OHMS viewer.
https://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH-RuskAAAAAA/ohms
OHMS Object Text
Contains OHMS index and/or transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable.
5.3 February 3, 1986 Rusk AAAAAA, Richard Holbrooke on the Philippines, February 3, 1986 RBRL214DROH-RuskAAAAAA RBRL214DROH Dean Rusk Oral History Collection Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Richard Holbrooke Richard Rusk 1:|10(4)|20(12)|32(7)|45(10)|58(8)|67(12)|80(8)|91(16)|105(1)|116(3)|128(12)|140(4)|153(2)|163(1)|176(1)|187(10)|199(9)|210(15)|222(5)|234(8)|246(5)|258(13)|273(12)|283(2)|293(11)|306(4)|318(3)|331(6)|342(16) 0 Kaltura video < ; iframe id=" ; kaltura_player" ; src=" ; https://cdnapisec.kaltura.com/p/1727411/sp/172741100/embedIframeJs/uiconf_id/26879422/partner_id/1727411?iframeembed=true& ; playerId=kaltura_player& ; entry_id=1_1yszfl15& ; flashvars[localizationCode]=en& ; flashvars[leadWithHTML5]=true& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.position]=left& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.clickToClose]=true& ; flashvars[chapters.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[chapters.layout]=vertical& ; flashvars[chapters.thumbnailRotator]=false& ; flashvars[streamSelector.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[EmbedPlayer.SpinnerTarget]=videoHolder& ; flashvars[dualScreen.plugin]=true& ; & ; wid=1_1hfhvq9q" ; width=" ; 400" ; height=" ; 285" ; allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozAllowFullScreen frameborder=" ; 0" ; title=" ; Kaltura Player" ; > ; < ; /iframe> ; 13 President Marcos and the 1986 " ; Snap Elections" ; He was Secretary of State when Ferdinand [Edralin] Marcos was already President of the country. Holbrooke characterizes Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos as a corrupt dictator, alleging that Marcos might rig the 1986 Snap Election against Corazon Aquino. Holbrooke explains a loophole in Philippine electoral law that might allow Marcos to make his wife the vice president despite her not being on the ballot. He hypothesizes that Marcos may actually choose Paciano Laurel as his running mate to cause discord among opposition parties. autocracy ; corruption ; democracy ; dictatorship ; elections ; free and fair ; hybrid regime ; legitimacy ; semi-democracy ; split ballot 17 337 The Philippines's vice presidency Furthermore, there's a very unusual and unique relationship between Ferdinand Marcos and Laurel. Holbrooke explains that President Marcos and the Laurel family have a special relationship because Chief Justice Jose Paciano Laurel Sr. once reversed a murder conviction that would have resulted in the death penalty for Marcos. Holbrooke says this could lead to a political alliance between Marcos and Jose Paciano Laurel Jr., except that Mrs. Marcos will not allow vice presidents. capital punishment ; criminal record ; Jose Laurel Foundation ; murder case ; Supreme Court of the Philippines ; Tolentino 17 480 U.S. national interests in the Philippines Now let's look at the American policy. Holbrooke highlights important aspects of the U.S.-Philippines relationship, including economics, immigrants, strategic interests, and WWII cooperation. Holbrooke considers negative consequences of moving U.S. bases from the Philippines to Guam, Palau, or the Marshall Islands, and he indicates that the U.S. and the Philippines are both dependent upon U.S. bases there. Appropriations Committee ; ASEAN ; Association of Southeast Asian Nations ; Clark ; Congress ; foreign policy ; funding ; military ; power projection ; Subic ; Western Pacific 17 746 Thwarting communist insurgency / Economic interests in the Philippines Our second interest is to encourage the Filipinos to deal with the growing communist insurgency, the New People's Army [NPA]. Holbrooke classifies the New People's Army as the most dangerous communist insurgency in Pacific Asia, and he encourages the U.S. to support an anti-communist Filipino government. Holbrooke discusses the economic decline of the Philippines, mentioning debt, the brain drain, and unexpected growth by Japan and Korea. ASEAN ; capital flight ; communism ; Indochina ; revolution 17 997 President Reagan on the Philippines / The political future of the Philippines Now can any of that happen under Ferdinand Marcos? Holbrooke talks about the Reagan Administration's shift in foreign policy toward the Philippines, supporting Reagan's increasingly critical statements on Marcos. Holbrooke predicts political unrest and street demonstrations upon Marcos's success in the Snap Elections. Holbrooke says that the U.S. should have given more financial support to Corazon Aquino, Marcos's primary opponent. Although he claims that Marcos must lose power before any of the Philippines' major problems can be resolved, Holbrooke supports a peaceful transition and criminal immunity for Marcos. Bush ; communism ; Corazon Aquino ; elections ; Ferdinand Marcos ; foreign aid ; free and fair ; Mondale ; Ronald Reagan ; transition of power 17 1554 A fraudulent election / The coming fall of Marcos You talked about Marcos' control on the electoral process... Holbrooke says that Marcos will have to find a more creative way to manipulate the election than just buying votes because of substantial voter support for Corazon Aquino. Holbrooke predicts the impending demise of Marcos, but insists that the U.S. should not act to precipitate his fall. Congress ; corruption ; electoral fraud ; electoral process ; legitimacy ; opposition ; voter fraud 17 HOLBROOKE: --a kind of personal symmetry for me in the whole relationship. He was Secretary of State when Ferdinand [Edralin] Marcos was already President of the country. That' ; s how long Ferdinand Marcos has been President of the Philippines. Marcos has now been President of the Philippines for twenty of the country' ; s forty years as an independent nation. Clearly, one way or the other, that long year in Philippine history is coming to an end. I don' ; t think there is much question about the fact that Marcos will not be around too much longer, although it may seem inconceivable to those Filipinos who have lived under his rule for a whole generation or more by now. The question in my mind is not whether Marcos will leave, because I take that as given, but how he will leave, when he will leave, and most importantly, what will come next. Will there be a leadership in Manila which will deal with the country' ; s enormous problems or will the country fall apart still further? Will the opposition, which has united itself in a tenuous fashion around opposition to Marcos, fall apart as soon as Marcos is gone? These are very serious questions and they are complicated by the specific events which have led us to this remarkable election which is going to take place Friday. It really shows the unique quality of the Philippines that you have an election in a country which is widely regarded as run by a person many people call a dictator, and yet this dictator is fighting for his life in an election which he could theoretically lose. Although I feel it' ; s fairly unlikely that he' ; d allow himself to lose an election in which he controls the electoral process. I think, in one sense, the American press is misleading a lot of people who have not thought much about the Philippines up until now by letting the American public think that this is an election like an American election and that if Marcos wins, he' ; s won, that' ; s it. I think, in my view, the situation in the Philippines only begins to reach the critical phase after this election. Let' ; s skip a lot of background for now, although we can go into it when we have question-answer period. Let' ; s just talk about what might happen this Friday and what might happen after this Friday, and above all, what American interests are in the region. Because I speak to you today as an American, and I think the responsibility for Americans is to think of our own interests. That doesn' ; t mean we have to follow a policy which is against the interests of other people, but we have to think in terms of what is best for our own nation. There are really basically only three possible outcomes on Friday in my view. Corazon Aquino can win the election ; Marcos can win a fair election ; or Marcos can win a tainted election or election widely perceived to be corrupt. My personal view of the chances of those three outcomes are Aquino has about a ten percent chance of winning. Marcos, his chance of winning an honest election in my view is about zero. I do not believe that the Philippine people would support Marcos in a free election any longer. Therefore, by elimination you know that I think it' ; s about a ninety percent probability that Marcos will contrive to win the election through his control of the process. That isn' ; t to say that it' ; s totally impossible that Corazon Aquino would win, but very unlikely. Now, for those of you who haven' ; t studied Philippine electoral law lately, let me tell you something quite astonishing which is that there is an independent vote for the president and the vice-president, and indeed the election law is written so that you could substitute one candidate for another up to noon of election day. So in theory, people could vote at nine or ten in the morning for a Marcos-[Arturo] Tolentino ticket and by the time the vote' ; s counted, they voted for Marcos and somebody else. This has lead a lot of Filipinos to suspect that he will substitute his wife sometime around eleven o' ; clock in the morning on Friday as his running mate. I don' ; t think he' ; ll do that. I think it is suicidal for him. She is not an acceptable running mate and both of them know it no matter how much she would hope that it isn' ; t true. However, given the split balloting situation, it is not at all inconceivable that he could allow [Jose Paciano] Laurel, who is Mrs. Aquino' ; s running mate, to win victory for the vice-presidency. It' ; s not at all impossible. And if he does that, it would be, in my view, very much in keeping with his normal, traditional style of outguessing the opposition, keeping everyone off balance. It is well known that Laurel and Aquino don' ; t like each other and it' ; s reasonable to assume that if Laurel becomes the vice-president that it would split the opposition. He would certainly accept. Furthermore, there' ; s a very unusual and unique relationship between Ferdinand Marcos and Laurel. Laurel' ; s father was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1940. Marcos was indicted, tried, and convicted of murder of the politician who was running against his father in the local election. This man was shot through the head with a .22 rifle and Marcos happened to be a sharp shooter with a.22 rifle. And he got convicted and he was sentenced to death. That conviction was reversed on appeal by the Supreme Court of the Philippines and [Jose Paciano] Laurel Sr., the father, was Chief Justice at that time. And Laurel Sr. then went on to become president of the provisional Philippine republic government which was the Japanese puppet government of the 1940s. So he was a collaborator with the Japanese. But after the war, [Douglas] MacArthur, who knew Laurel from before the war, restored Laurel and did not punish him. And Marcos then became President at a later date of the Jose Laurel Foundation and has often spoken very warmly of Laurel. Indeed, he owes his life to Laurel in the most literal sense. So it' ; s not impossible for him to make a deal with the son, particularly since they united in the integral (unintelligible). And that would, as I said, split the opposition. The problem with that scenario, indeed the problem with all scenarios, is Mrs. [Imelda Romualdez] Marcos. The reason there' ; s been no vice-president in the Philippines for a decade now is that Imelda would not allow a vice-president to exist if it can' ; t be her. And since it can' ; t be her, she didn' ; t want anyone. Her theory has always been, if her husband falls from health or whatever, that she will seize power. That possibility is receding very quickly because one way or another, there will be a vice-president next week: either Tolentino or Laurel. Tolentino is seventy-five years old and she certainly would prefer Tolentino to Laurel ; but either way, she will be a little more distant from her dream of taking over. Well, as I said, those are the three choices. Now let' ; s look at American policy. Let me start by stressing what the American national interest is in the Philippines, because to discuss a policy one has to start with the sense of what are our interests. Obviously, Philippines is of critical importance to the U.S. [United States]. I mean, you could hardly tell this group here since by its very size I assume it' ; s the entire group of University of Georgia that cares about the Philippines and therefore knows something about the Philippines. But, by virtue of history, economic interests, strategic interests, political interests there are very substantial blood ties between our two countries and they are probably unique. There are other countries with strong blood ties but there' ; s no other country which combines all of the attributes of the Philippines in regard to the U.S. The tremendous sacrifice the Philippine people made for the United States in the forties, the large number of Filipino-Americans growing very rapidly particularly in Hawaii and California but scattered throughout the country, the economic ties make it a unique relationship. The bases make it strategically important. The economic relationship is important, but frankly it should not be over-stressed. We can live without the Philippines economically. The Philippines, however, would be hard put to live without us economically. It would have put them in position of considerable subservience to the Japanese and that' ; s something the Filipinos don' ; t want. Now, the two bases at Clark and Subic are of enormous importance to the United States. I negotiated those agreements with Marcos personally in 1978 after a negotiations had collapsed in 1975-76 under [Henry Alfred] Kissinger and [Gerald Rudolph] Ford [Jr.]. And we gave some thought at that time to what would happen if we couldn' ; t reach an agreement with the Filipinos to extend the base agreements. A lot of people would say--there' ; s an article in the New York Times last week--that you could move the bases to Guam or Palau or the Marshall Islands. It doesn' ; t really add up. You can create a base in the Marshalls or Guam or Palau, but it won' ; t be the same base. Congress will never appropriate enough money to give you the kind of deepwater-drydock facilities that exist in Subic which would cost three, four, five, six billion dollars. And in the era of Graham Rudman, nobody is going to appropriate that kind of money. Secondly, in terms of a value of the bases, particularly for airplanes, you' ; re four hours further from Korea, four hours further from the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. It just doesn' ; t have that strategic value. Third, if you leave the base in the Philippines, which are our forward positions in the Western Pacific, the political impact on the Southeast Asian nations, the members of ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] ; Thailand ; Indonesia ; Singapore ; Malaysia ; the Philippines itself ; Burnan ; the impact on Korea, the impact on the People' ; s Republic of China and Taiwan would just be enormous. It would have an effect on the United States perception in the region which would be irreversible. So we have to start by saying that like it or not, departure from Clarke and Subic changes American foreign policy in East Asia permanently. And to voluntarily leave those bases is a very serious problem for us. This does not, however, give Marcos a leverage over the United States in a negotiation. Marcos needs us to stay in those bases just a badly as we need to stay there. So people who ask me--and this question comes up over and over again--" ; Can Marcos call our bluff on the bases?" ; simply do not understand Marcos' ; strengths and weaknesses. He cannot be perceived as weak on the bases. It' ; s just not possible. He can' ; t be President of the Philippines that presides over the country. Indeed, I don' ; t think Aquino can be either. I don' ; t see any Philippine leader asking us to leave the bases. They might change the status a little in a cosmetic way. We did that with Marcos in ' ; 78, but not in a fundamental way. Our second interest is to encourage the Filipinos to deal with the growing communist insurgency, the New People' ; s Army [NPA]. That is not a joke and it' ; s not an invention of conservatives. There is a growing communist threat, guerrilla threat, in the Philippines. It' ; s the only serious guerrilla threat left in Asia of the classic Vietcong, Chinese communist, Mao Tse-tung style. Now there are low level insurgences still in Thailand, Malaysia. There' ; s an entrenched communist party in northeast Burma which has been there forever and will probably remain forever. But this is the only real potentially dangerous communist guerrilla movement left in the region. It is not as potent, nor do I think it' ; s likely to become as potent, as the Vietcong for the very simple reason, the Philippines being an island state, the communists do not have access to sanctuary and they cannot get endless resupply from a friendly neighbor such as North Vietnam or China. However, (unintelligible) the last few years in the Philippines based primarily on their exploitation of the opportunity offered them by the waning popularity of the Marcos regime. And so my second criteria for American strategic interests in the area is to encourage a Philippine government that can deal with the communist insurgency- This does not mean send U.S. ground troops to the Philippines, nor does it mean a heavy military advisory effort, both of which would prove to be rather ineffective in Indochina. It does, however, mean that we ought to seek to encourage a government which can do the kinds of things which are necessary to deal with the communists. We can get back to that in a minute in more detail if you want. The third criteria for Americans' ; interest in the area is in the financial area. The Philippines has a twenty-five billion dollar debt while the rest of East Asia' ; s economies have marched forward dramatically, so dramatically that that is the most impressive part of the world in terms of economic growth in the last fifteen years. The Philippines has turned from one of Asia' ; s most promising countries into its most declining. If you had told American foreign policy makers in 1945 or ' ; 48, or even ' ; 50, that Japan would be where it is today and the Philippines where it is today, people wouldn' ; t have believed it. Today we all take it for granted. If you' ; d told people as recently as 1960 or ' ; 65 that Korea would have outdistanced the Philippines, no one would have believed it. This is something which all of you now take for granted, but I want to stress that it runs exactly counter to our memories and perceptions and expectations of the countries of that region, and it is a great tragedy. The Filipinos with education and skills are leaving the country as fast as they can get out. Money is fleeing the country at a most unbelievable rate. Estimates reach as high as ten billion dollars of capital in flight since Benigno Aquino was murdered in August of 1983, and it is imperative that the next government deal with the debt problem. Now I would hazard a prediction that any government that succeeds Marcos will get a favorable hearing from the international banking community for rescheduling the debt. But this will have to aweigh in order the transition and the establishment of a more stable government in Manila. So those are the American interests: bases ; assisting and dealing with the communists ; dealing with the economic crisis. All of these I would subsume under the general umbrella of the Philippines becoming again a stable part of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Now can any of that happen under Ferdinand Marcos? I would submit to you it can' ; t, that in the twenty-first year of his rule, he' ; s finished. He' ; s sick, as I said earlier, probably dying, trying to hold on to power on a day-to-day basis, incapable any more of a vision or leadership skills which once distinguished him. Because whether you like Marcos or not, he is, or at least was, an extremely impressive man. And all of those attributes which so dazzled American policy makers in the sixties and seventies are gone. He' ; s just grasping at straws now, trying to survive on a day-to-day basis. Having outlined the strategic objectives for the U.S. and the three possible outcomes on Friday brings us logically to the most critical question of all from an American point of view, which is what should the United States do about the Philippines? Here I think it' ; s interesting to know the [Ronald Wilson] Reagan Administration is following a relatively enlightened policy. And I speak now as a card-carrying Democrat who ran U.S. policy toward the Philippines for four years. When George [Herbert Walker] Bush went to Manila in the summer of 1981 and made his fatuous remarks to Mr. Marcos, I was as appalled as anybody. I can' ; t imagine anybody, regardless of whether they like Bush or not--well particularly if they like Bush--they must have been profoundly embarrassed to see the man they like and support say things so completely ludicrous. However, in the four years since Bush' ; s trip, and really in the last year, the Reagan Administration has done a very significant turnaround. As recently as October of ' ; 84, in Reagan' ; s second debate with [Walter Frederick] Mondale in Kansas City, Reagan said the choice in Manila was between Marcos and the communists. That is no longer the Administration position. On the contrary, senior Administration officials have testified publicly before Congress that Marcos' ; continued power is beneficial to the communists and that his departure, although they always stress, and rightly so, in an orderly way, is critical to dealing with the problem in Manila. So my criticism of the Administration is going to be very, very muted. I might have some tactical differences with them on a day-to-day basis on how they proceeded, but you have those with your closest friends in the government on an ordinary basis in any case. The basic decision of the Administration was to distance themselves from Marcos since the summer of last year. That is a stunning event. And the interesting thing is that a lot of people, particularly liberals, don' ; t realize this is what is happening. I run into people all the time who call themselves liberals who are criticizing Reagan for supporting Marcos. And I say to them, " ; But you don' ; t understand. Reagan isn' ; t supporting Marcos anymore." ; He has allowed his administration to distance itself from Marcos. Don' ; t misunderstand me, Reagan is not trying to bring Marcos down, nor should he. But the Reagan Administration, starting with Senator [Paul Dominique] Laxalt' ; s trip last summer, has taken a very detached position. When Reagan issued his statement on Friday calling for free and fair elections, he went on to say that if they are free and fair we' ; ll give extra aid to the Philippines, but if they are not it will hurt the aid effort. Marcos immediately went on television in Manila and said this statement was supportive of Marcos. That was clever on Marcos' ; part, but that was not what the statement really said. The statement was really a warning to Ferdinand Marcos that if an election is stolen, as everyone in Washington thinks it' ; s going to be, that it will have a very adverse effect on our ability, or the Administration' ; s ability to get aid for the Philippines. On the other hand, having said that I' ; m basically in agreement with what the Administration' ; s done, let me say also that they have a hell of a dilemma in their hands, starting this weekend. They' ; re likely to confront Marcos reelected, widespread charges of cheating, Marcos in power in the presidential palace, the opposition in an uproar calling the United States to abandon Marcos, possible street demonstrations. An argument will immediately break out in the opposition over whether to go into the street or continue to use parliamentary means. The United States government will of course tell the opposition to stay off the streets and use parliamentary means, but there will be a tremendous temptation on the part of the opposition to go into the streets. There is a far left group supporting Corazon Aquino and a moderate group supporting her. There are people supporting her who are very conservative businessmen who think that Marcos' ; continued rule is bad for business. They' ; re not going to want to have riots in the streets. So the dilemma for the United States will be very real. If I have one partial criticism of the Administration, which I would not want to make publicly--this is off the--there are no journalists here I take it? RICHARD RUSK: Just the tape recorder. HOLBROOKE: Well, the tape recorder is for you. The only reason I don' ; t want to say it publicly is that I just don' ; t feel it' ; s fair to my colleagues since the people running the policy in the U.S. government include three of the key policy makers who were my deputies. And I don' ; t like to criticize them publicly because they' ; re both close friends and they worked for me and it' ; s not fair to them because they' ; re having their own internal problems. But I think that we should have done a little more to say to Mrs. Aquino, perhaps with money, that we were supportive of them, because they have no money at all. This is not a central issue. I think that the New York Times article last week correctly portrayed the Administration' ; s distance from Marcos. In summation, let me say that the most critical thing for you all to understand about the Philippines right now is that Marcos departure is essential to deal with the problems of the country. But his departure does not solve any of those problems, it only removes him as an obstacle for dealing with them. And of course, when I say Marcos I really mean Mrs. Marcos at least as much as I mean him. He is the best thing going for the communists in terms of their recruiting. He and his cronies are robbing the country blind and they are encouraging capital flight and a brain drain. They make no effort to build up the political structure of the country. And yet when he departs, his successors will face all of these problems with no solutions. And perhaps in this war he' ; s made a lot of internal divisions. So we shouldn' ; t be very sanguine about the future in the Philippines. In the short run, there' ; s going to be a lot of chaos. But it can be done. The U.S. should give considerable aid to the next regime. We should assist, if necessary, an orderly transition. In my view, we should do whatever we can to prevent Marcos from being personally punished. I know that he or his wife may be implicated in Aquino' ; s murder, but I think in terms of dealing with the problems of the Philippines, retribution against Marcos or an attempt to kill him would not be in his interest. Excuse me, it wouldn' ; t be in the country' ; s interest. It won' ; t be in his interest I guess. (laughter) But I don' ; t think that we should do anything to encourage his final overthrow. That puts me somewhere between the liberals and the conservatives on that issue, but I have some respect for Marcos and what he tried to do for his country in an earlier era. More importantly than that, I don' ; t think any useful purpose is served by a situation in which there is a blood-letting right at the onset of the transition of as historic importance as this one. Now, since this is a very small group, Tom, I would just suggest that we have a very informal discussion for whatever amount of time is left. And also, if you want to ask about questions other than the Philippines--China or Korea--I' ; d be happy to discuss that too. GROUP MEMBER #1: I' ; m sorry, but I' ; m a person here who hardly knows anything about the Philippines: you talked about Marcos' ; control on the electoral process. Could you talk more about that? Is it different than we might expect in this country? HOLBROOKE: Everyone always makes the analogy for obvious reasons but-- GROUP MEMBER #1: Will he be buying the votes or will he be winning votes (unintelligible)-- HOLBROOKE: Both. My guess is that he can' ; t buy enough votes anymore. He' ; ll have to just create votes out of thin air. I don' ; t think he can win by just buying votes, but there hasn' ; t been a real election in the Philippines in a long, long time. The entire government is controlled by his people and unless the organization has fallen apart, he ought to be able to find enough votes to win. We' ; ll see. The thing which is astonishing is what a tremendous ground swell of support Corazon Aquino is provoking. There are obviously, despite my cynicism of standing here and telling you that Marcos can' ; t lose, obviously millions of Filipinos are hoping otherwise because they' ; re coming out in huge numbers for this woman whose appearances are not even announced on television and radio. It' ; s word of mouth. So something is going on. GROUP MEMBER #2: You can find ninety percent or eighty percent chunks will be returned one way or another. We' ; re not talking about a transition, we' ; re talking about a situation of the Marcos power if he lives. What will the United States do? I know that we have a seventeen-member delegation going over there to watch over the election, members of Congress. Even though the Philippines did become independent in ' ; 46, I guess we still feel our Congress needs to go over there. But I mean, they go over there and they watch this election and it' ; s rigged and he gets in by eighty percent, and then what do we do? HOLBROOKE: Well, as I said, then the end game begins. If Marcos wins a rigged election, as I' ; m assuming he will, then the process begins in departing in less (unintelligible) way. And one way or another, I think he' ; s doomed. His kidneys may give out and the problem will solve itself. He may get killed, which is very undesirable but not inconceivable. The army may come to him and say, " ; You' ; ve ruled long enough. And in the name of God, it' ; s time for you to go. And take your wife and your money with you." ; He may just look around like so many other people (unintelligible) and realize the game is up. Men in this situation almost never stay until the end. The Shah [Mohammed Reza Pahlavi] did not. [Anastasio] Somosa did not. [Ngo Dinh] Diem tried to get out, but only in the last minute. [Rafael Leonidas] Trujillo was killed. [Fulgencio y Zaldiver] Batista got out. Most of these people leave, but they don' ; t leave until the very end. I think one way or another he will be--the situation will turn against him so rapidly. GROUP MEMBER #2: And therefore, we ought to just supply (unintelligible) and wait for-- HOLBROOKE: Well, it' ; s a dilemma. The U.S. should position itself so that its departure is understood by everyone to be something we are not opposed to. At the same time, I have great misgivings about the United States being the vehicle which brings him down. I think that potentially puts blood on our hands, as happened in Saigon, November first-- END OF SIDE 1 [SIDE 2 BLANK] Resources may be used under the guidelines described by the U.S. Copyright Office in Section 107, Title 17, United States Code (Fair use). Parties interested in production or commercial use of the resources should contact the Russell Library for a fee schedule. video 0 RBRL214DROH-RuskAAAAAA.xml RBRL214DROH-RuskAAAAAA.xml http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH/findingaid
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
30 minutes
Repository
Name of repository the interview is from
Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Rusk AAAAAA, Richard Holbrooke on the Philippines, February 3, 1986
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RBRL214DROH-RuskAAAAAA
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Richard Holbrooke
Richard Rusk
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio
oral histories
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
United States
Philippines
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Subject
The topic of the resource
Foreign relations
United States--Military relations
Cold War
Description
An account of the resource
Richard Geary Rusk interviews Richard Holbrooke about the Philippines. Topics include economic conditions, U.S. interests and policies in the region, the history of the Philippines, Japanese occupation and the period of 1946-1986, and the 1986 presidential election in the Philippines.<br /><br /><span>Richard Holbrooke served in Vietnam (1963-1966), was a member of White House staff (1966-1967), and was part of the Paris peace talks on Vietnam (1968-1969).</span>
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1986-02-03
OHMS
-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Dean Rusk Oral History Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
United States--Officials and employees
Politics and Public Policy
Description
An account of the resource
The collection consists of 172 oral history interviews with Dean Rusk and his colleagues between 1984-1989. Includes audiotapes and transcriptions documenting Rusk's life from early childhood in the 1910's through his teaching career in the 1980's. The interviews contain information on Rusk's service as U.S. Under Secretary and Secretary of State during the administrations of Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson and his involvement in foreign relations including the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War. The interviews also document his position as president of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950s.<br /><br /><a href="http://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&range=&collection=14&type=&tags=OHMS&featured=&subcollections=0&subcollections=1&submit_search=Search+for+items">View all OHMS indexed interviews in this collection here.</a>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Richard Geary Rusk
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984-1989
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Oral histories
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RBRL214DROH
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
United States
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
OHMS Object
Contains the OHMS link to the XML file within the OHMS viewer.
https://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH-RuskFFFFFF/ohms
OHMS Object Text
Contains OHMS index and/or transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable.
5.3 February 1986 Rusk FFFFFF, Richard Holbrooke, 1986 February RBRL214DROH-RuskFFFFFF RBRL214DROH Dean Rusk Oral History Collection Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Richard Holbrooke Richard Rusk and Thomas Schoenbaum oral history 1:|10(4)|19(2)|29(5)|47(1)|58(7)|70(4)|84(12)|98(1)|107(4)|118(12)|132(12)|144(10)|155(2)|166(12)|177(3)|187(12)|197(3) 0 Kaltura video < ; iframe id=" ; kaltura_player" ; src=" ; https://cdnapisec.kaltura.com/p/1727411/sp/172741100/embedIframeJs/uiconf_id/26879422/partner_id/1727411?iframeembed=true& ; playerId=kaltura_player& ; entry_id=1_h1ulyvy7& ; flashvars[localizationCode]=en& ; flashvars[leadWithHTML5]=true& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.position]=left& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.clickToClose]=true& ; flashvars[chapters.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[chapters.layout]=vertical& ; flashvars[chapters.thumbnailRotator]=false& ; flashvars[streamSelector.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[EmbedPlayer.SpinnerTarget]=videoHolder& ; flashvars[dualScreen.plugin]=true& ; & ; wid=1_94le3ibm" ; width=" ; 400" ; height=" ; 285" ; allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozAllowFullScreen frameborder=" ; 0" ; title=" ; Kaltura Player" ; > ; < ; /iframe> ; English 9 Effects of casualties in Vietnam The question is the effect of the actual deaths on the policymakers. Holbrooke discusses the effects of deaths in Vietnam on Secretary of Defense McNamara and President Johnson. He talks about President Nixon's " ; Vietnamization" ; strategy. Holbrooke considers whether the Vietnam War constituted an obsession that prevented the realization of other political goals. casualties ; Clark Clifford ; Melvin Laird 17 298 Holbrooke's role models / The Pentagon Papers Did he [Dean Rusk] have a fatal flaw as Secretary of State? Holbrooke talks about Dean Rusk's character, including his loyalty, humility, and ability to maintain principles under pressure. He mentions that Rusk encouraged him to become a foreign Service Officer and considers Rusk among other models including Averell Harriman, Cy Vance, and Clark Clifford. Holbrooke says the Pentagon Papers incriminated McNamara and low level officials, but not Dean Rusk or Presidents Johnson and Kennedy. East Asia desk ; FSO ; George Marshall ; Katzenbach ; Kissinger 17 650 Dean Rusk's strong leadership / Characterizing secretaries of state My dad was criticized for not giving adequate leadership to the Department of State in foreign affairs during the sixties. Holbrooke refutes claims that Dean Rusk was a weak leader for the State Department. He comments on Rusk's avoidance of political controversy and his willingness to take heat for President Kennedy. Holbrooke categorizes various secretaries as either loyal, attention-seeking, or passive, and he talks about Bobby Kennedy's view of Dean Rusk. loyalty ; Robert Kennedy 17 HOLBROOKE: The question is the effect of all the deaths on the policymakers. Well, we know that [Robert Strange] McNamara was traumatized by the sight of one man burning himself to death on the Pentagon steps and throwing his baby to safety just before he died. It was an awful scene, but why McNamara chose to be so traumatized by that when several hundred people were dying a week in Vietnam is a legitimate question. That just shows that McNamara' ; s will had been broken. I think it was horrible, a man burning himself to death, but McNamara' ; s policies were putting people at risk and many of those people were dying. Your father says that [Lyndon Baines] Johnson felt those casualties so deeply. The correct answer to the question is very, very difficult to access. A person who assumes one of the highest three or four offices in the land must be prepared to use American power in defense of American interests as he sees fit. He must also be prepared, therefore, to countenance the result that American lives may be lost in defense of national objectives. He must, at the same time, be extremely careful not to send Americans out willy-nilly to their deaths. Jimmy Carter was very proud of the fact that nobody died in combat in his Presidency ; but in the end, eight people did die in Iran during the rescue mission through an airplane accident which could have happened anywhere, but happened to happen at that particular moment. In regard to your specific question, it seems to me that the endless mounting of deaths without clear definable progress toward the political goal of a solution to the Vietnam problem was the central dilemma. After all, what was the issue? The issue was Americans were dying. It was this, by the way, that led [Richard Milhous] Nixon and Melvin Laird, when Laird became Secretary of Defense, to adopt the so-called Vietnamization Strategy in which they would deliberately reduce American casualties by removing Americans from combat even if the military said this wasn' ; t the most effective use of American fire power. Because it was the Nixon-Laird perception that it was the casualties that were the greatest political vulnerability, particularly those of young draftees who were, in their view, much more expensive in political terms to lose than professional Air Force pilots. And they were right. But it would be wrong of any policy maker to be so callous and brutal as not to care about the casualties. And if it weighed heavily on the policymakers, that was all right. There is nothing wrong with that. RICHARD RUSK: How did it affect my father in terms of any influence upon his decision-making? Did that loss of life and that escalation of loss of life help to lock him in, to try and push ahead and make something out of this. Because if he didn' ; t, all those lives were lost in vain. HOLBROOKE: Well, you' ; ve got to ask him that question. I' ; ve never asked him that question, but I think you' ; re probably on the right track. RICHARD RUSK: You think it didn' ; t lock him in? HOLBROOKE: I think it probably locked him in, but I' ; m just guessing, Rich. Next question: Was Vietnam an obsession in the government by 1968? Clark [McAdams] Clifford contends Vietnam had become an obsession by ' ; 68. Rusk contends that other policies went forward and the government was not hamstrung by impassable debate over war. What are my views? My view is that Clifford is probably right that in ' ; 68 there was an obsession, but that Mr. Rusk is right that other things went forward, like U.S. [United States]-Soviet relations, which reached the edge of a summit. But that does not mean that the Administration was not paralyzed, and I think that this is a semantic disagreement here. I' ; m sure that your father would agree completely that Vietnam had become an obsession, but he would demonstrate that other things happened in ' ; 68 and that is correct. I don' ; t think this is a real issue. I think this is just words. The next one: What about the effect of [inaudible] loss of life? We just discussed that. The next one is, did he have a fatal flaw as Secretary of State? To what extent was he as a role model for me as an FSO [Foreign Service Officer] and FSE I ]? RICHARD RUSK: Answer the first one first ; that' ; s two separate questions. HOLBROOKE: Did Dean Rusk have a fatal flaw? Surely, I don' ; t think I can answer that. He is today what he was in 1960 and his strengths are so strong. No person is perfect. Every person' ; s strengths usually leave a corresponding weakness. His strength was his ability to hold clearly the principles in face of tremendous pressure: his total loyalty to the President, his lack of ego, his self-effacing qualities, and that led to corresponding weaknesses. Was he qualified to be Secretary of State? Absolutely. No question. And most people who argue that he shouldn' ; t have been Secretary of State, that there were other people, just missed the point. Everybody who knows him and saw him in action then, or sees him in action now, knows that he was a man of great stature and, in my view, the best qualified man in 1961 to be Secretary of State. RICHARD RUSK: He probably was one of the best qualified we' ; ve ever had. HOLBROOKE: Absolutely. As for his role model for me as an FSO, there' ; s no question that I would not have ever thought of the Foreign Service as a career if it were not for having met Dean Rusk at the most formative point in my life, when I was in high school, and when he was already talking about the Foreign Service, and then while I was in college, at the precise moment I was looking into what career, finding him in Washington as Secretary of State. He was the first person I' ; d ever known personally who became a person of national importance and he encouraged me in joining the Foreign Service. As for the East Asia job, the fact that I followed him in that job with a gap of twenty-seven years or twenty-five years was just a wonderful coincidence. That was a genuine accident, but one which gave me a certain personal pleasure. RICHARD RUSK: He had used George [Catlett] Marshall as a model for himself in the performance of his office and the way he conducted himself. Was that also true in the case of Dick Holbrooke and my father, Dean Rusk? HOLBROOKE: Well, I don' ; t think he was my model by the time I became Assistant Secretary of State. I think he was one of a number of important influences in my life and I admired certain qualities in him immensely, as I still do. But I' ; d also come under the influence of two or three other people who had given me positive models, notably [William Averell] Harriman and Clifford, both of whom I' ; d gotten to know very well and who were very, very different types of people, and there were some important negative models too. Bob [Robert William] Komer was a very strong negative model for me because I did not like what I saw in the way he conducted his business. I thought he showed an unprincipled style. And there were two other important positive models for me: Nick [Nicholas de Belleville] Katzenbach, who had been my direct boss and was one of the most brilliant people I' ; d ever dealt with or worked for, and Cy [Cyrus Roberts] Vance, who, after all, had given me the job and to whom I owed everything. So he was no longer the single model. He was not as clear a symbol to me as George Marshall was to him. But on the other hand, he was more important in the development of my career than Marshall was in his because I would never have joined the government if it weren' ; t for Dean Rusk ; whereas Dean Rusk was already in the government long before he' ; d ever met George Marshall. Next question: Pentagon Papers. I think my letter will suffice for the time being. I haven' ; t read the Pentagon Papers now in a long, long time. But my memory is that as we sat in the back office of Robert McNamara, using all the files available to us, the more we looked at the data, the worse McNamara himself looked, and the more inconsistent McNamara looked. While by contrast, Dean Rusk' ; s role became steadier and steadier. On the other hand, there were very, very few documents with Dean Rusk' ; s own footprint on them. He, because of his unique understanding of his relationship with the President, had left very little personal evidence behind of his views. Whereas he would transmit orally and not reduce them to writing, lower level officials had to put things in writing. And that' ; s why the Pentagon Papers will always be an incomplete, although valuable, testimony. They' ; ll tell you more about [John Theodore] McNaughton and [William Putnam] Bundy and [Paul Culliton] Warnke that they will about Rusk and Johnson and [John Fitzgerald] Kennedy. What' ; s particularly missing from the Pentagon Papers, as I' ; ve pointed out repeatedly, is the Presidents themselves. Presidents do not send memos to people arguing for policy. They make decisions. RICHARD RUSK: My dad was criticized for not giving adequate leadership to the Department of State in foreign affairs during the sixties. Some people saw him as being sort of a weak man, not very strong. And yet, in the way he conceptualized his office, all the advice that both of his Presidents got on foreign affairs, as far as the Secretary of State was concerned, come strictly through him. He didn' ; t go in there with a team of people all advising the President: task forces and stuff like that. He bore the responsibility for advice himself. In that sense, is that weakness or is that strength? It seemed like he, personally, giving the way he conceptualized that office, was bearing that responsibility for advising the President totally upon his own shoulders. Is that a point worth speaking of and making? HOLBROOKE: Well, you see, the words strong and weak are very--by my standards, Dean Rusk was and remains an immensely strong man, the strongest of all the people in the Administration, by far. I don' ; t have any question about that. The word weakness comes from people who do not understand what it required to carry out the kind of role and mission as Secretary of State which Dean Rusk thought was appropriate. Now, he had described the relationship in articles and public speeches for years. It was a relationship which John F. Kennedy had told him he wanted in a Secretary of State. So when Dean Rusk was appointed Secretary of State, John F. Kennedy got exactly what Rusk told him he was going to get. And in that context, it meant total loyalty, an absolute willingness to be a lightning rod and take public pressure away from the President and observe it on yourself, never duck, never blame it on other people the way Kissinger and [Alexander Meigs] Haig [Jr.] always did, never turn the pressure back on the White House. You know, basically it seems to me there have been two types of Secretaries of State. You' ; ve had the loyal subordinates of the President, who conduct themselves impeccably and try to draw heat away from the President, of whom Dean Rusk, Cy Vance, and George [Pratt] Shultz are the epitome. Then there are the politically controversial Secretaries of State who draw attention to themselves, of whom John Foster Dulles, Henry Kissinger and Al Haig are the models. You have a third kind of Secretary of State who are really so passive as to be non-entities, and in that category I would put William [Pierce] Rogers, and maybe Christian [Archibald] Herter--although Herter didn' ; t serve very long--and Ed [Edmund Sixtus] Muskie who, although he was hardly a passive person, served such a short time that he really played no active role. Dean [Gooderham] Acheson is hard to categorize because, while he was immensely loyal, he also became enormously controversial. But the Marshall, Rusk, Vance, Shultz model was the one that Kennedy chose, and he got the ultimate practitioner of that model. That took enormous strength, and anyone who thinks it didn' ; t misunderstands what Dean Rusk stood for. He is an iron man. He never took a vacation. He worked seven days a week, fifty weeks a year or more. He never asked more of his subordinates than he asked of himself. And he distributed the pressures very sparingly on other people. He trusted his deputies, [Chester Bliss] Bowles and [George Wildman] Ball and Katzenbach fully and treated them as almost equals--less so with Chester Bowles, not because he didn' ; t like Bowles, as I understand it, but because Bowles was simply not the right kind of man for that job. But, having done that, it was a very small circle and he was absolutely loyal to that principle. You say that [Robert Francis] Kennedy considered Dean Rusk a weak man. That was clearly wrong, but it' ; s also important to understand why Bobby Kennedy took that view. Bobby Kennedy was an activist who did not understand the Dean Rusk he thrust for the job. And as Kennedy got more aggressive and more interested in foreign policy, he probably wanted to be a kind of a shadow foreign minister himself. But, I speak now as a person who had the highest affection for Bobby Kennedy and the greatest respect for Dean Rusk. I think that that was another one of those dialogues which never took place. They couldn' ; t straighten out their relationships. They were too conflicted. It was probably not the right thing to do to bring Bobby Kennedy into the Cabinet as Attorney General. It would have been better to keep him in the White House as a personal trouble shooter and close confidant of the President. But as it worked out, it came about that this took on a kind of a Grecian--Greek tragic quality. And now, we' ; re talking here about mythological figures who would be analyzed and talked about for the rest of our lives. The important thing is for us to try to separate reality from myth. The reality is simple, to my mind: Dean Rusk was an iron man. And you can argue with his conception of how he would conduct himself, but you cannot argue that he was weak because, as you look back on the R whole saga now, he was the strongest of them all. But Bobby Kennedy couldn' ; t see that in the days when his brother was President. How could he see that? That was a different world. You know, at that time McNamara looked stronger ; Bundy looked stronger. You' ; re talking about 1963 and 1964. Now we have the benefit of hindsight and the breaking up of so many other people. You can see what strength it took for Dean Rusk to stick to what he stood for all these years. END OF SIDE 1 [SIDE 2 BLANK] Resources may be used under the guidelines described by the U.S. Copyright Office in Section 107, Title 17, United States Code (Fair use). Parties interested in production or commercial use of the resources should contact the Russell Library for a fee schedule. video 0 RBRL214DROH-RuskFFFFFF.xml RBRL214DROH-RuskFFFFFF.xml http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH/findingaid
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
18 minutes
Repository
Name of repository the interview is from
Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Rusk FFFFFF, Richard Holbrooke, 1986 February
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RBRL214DROH-RuskFFFFFF
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Richard Holbrooke
Richard Rusk
Thomas Schoenbaum
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio
oral histories
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
United States
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Subject
The topic of the resource
Cold War
Description
An account of the resource
Richard Rusk and Thomas Schoenbaum interview Richard Holbrooke. Topics include the U.S. Department of State, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.<br /><br /><span>Richard Holbrooke served in Vietnam (1963-1966), was a member of White House staff (1966-1967), and was part of the Paris peace talks on Vietnam (1968-1969).</span><br /><br />This interview is a continuation of <a href="http://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/RBRL214DROH/RBRL214DROH-RuskYYYYY">Rusk YYYYY</a> and <a href="http://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/RBRL214DROH/RBRL214DROH-RuskZZZZZ">Rusk ZZZZZ</a>.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1986-02
OHMS
-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Dean Rusk Oral History Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
United States--Officials and employees
Politics and Public Policy
Description
An account of the resource
The collection consists of 172 oral history interviews with Dean Rusk and his colleagues between 1984-1989. Includes audiotapes and transcriptions documenting Rusk's life from early childhood in the 1910's through his teaching career in the 1980's. The interviews contain information on Rusk's service as U.S. Under Secretary and Secretary of State during the administrations of Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson and his involvement in foreign relations including the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War. The interviews also document his position as president of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950s.<br /><br /><a href="http://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&range=&collection=14&type=&tags=OHMS&featured=&subcollections=0&subcollections=1&submit_search=Search+for+items">View all OHMS indexed interviews in this collection here.</a>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Richard Geary Rusk
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984-1989
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Oral histories
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RBRL214DROH
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
United States
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
OHMS Object
Contains the OHMS link to the XML file within the OHMS viewer.
https://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH-RuskVV/ohms
OHMS Object Text
Contains OHMS index and/or transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable.
5.3 March 1985 Rusk VV, Richard Holbrooke, March 1985 RBRL214DROH-RuskVV RBRL214DROH Dean Rusk Oral History Collection Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Richard Holbrooke Richard Rusk 1:|11(12)|26(12)|42(5)|60(5)|71(4)|85(5)|101(5)|114(10)|127(3)|139(16)|163(11)|180(4)|194(11)|211(4)|224(3)|237(9)|258(13)|271(1)|282(1)|298(5)|320(3)|342(6)|355(2)|373(11)|389(15)|415(7)|429(12)|441(9)|453(9)|469(8)|483(5)|504(8)|517(4)|528(10)|540(5)|559(5)|573(11)|597(14)|617(11)|630(7)|646(7)|660(13)|677(8)|695(10)|707(5)|730(8)|741(8)|753(12)|765(9)|782(6)|795(14)|813(9)|827(4)|840(12)|856(13)|872(6)|886(5)|902(4)|916(13)|925(13)|942(13)|967(7) 0 Kaltura video < ; iframe id=" ; kaltura_player" ; src=" ; https://cdnapisec.kaltura.com/p/1727411/sp/172741100/embedIframeJs/uiconf_id/26879422/partner_id/1727411?iframeembed=true& ; playerId=kaltura_player& ; entry_id=1_cc11tyvv& ; flashvars[localizationCode]=en& ; flashvars[leadWithHTML5]=true& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.position]=left& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.clickToClose]=true& ; flashvars[chapters.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[chapters.layout]=vertical& ; flashvars[chapters.thumbnailRotator]=false& ; flashvars[streamSelector.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[EmbedPlayer.SpinnerTarget]=videoHolder& ; flashvars[dualScreen.plugin]=true& ; & ; wid=1_lcl69zsg" ; width=" ; 400" ; height=" ; 285" ; allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozAllowFullScreen frameborder=" ; 0" ; title=" ; Kaltura Player" ; > ; < ; /iframe> ; 44 Education and early experiences with Dean Rusk Why don't we just start at the beginning with your initial contacts with my dad, back in Scarsdale, I presume? Holbrooke shares about going to school in Scarsdale, New York and meeting David Rusk and his family. He then talks about his experiences with the Rusks during his time at Brown University. diplomatic corps ; Foreign Service ; Rockefeller Foundation ; Scarsdale High School Maroon ; Secretary of State ; State Department ; UC Berkeley ; University of California 17 388 Critique of Dean Rusk's character We're both aware the literature that's been written. Holbrooke analyzes Dean Rusk's character, discussing Rusk's critical thinking, oversimplification, and moral principles. Holbrooke uses the story of his acceptance into the Foreign Service to illustrate Rusk's principles. consent of the governed ; FSOT ; Glacier National Park ; influence peddling ; nepotism ; pragmatism ; U.S. Department of State Foreign Service Officer Test 17 627 Dean Rusk's speech to Holbrooke's training class / Experience in Vietnam with the Foreign Service When I passed the oral exam, they took me in, and they gave me the exam, and they told me right afterwards I had passed. Holbrooke shares about Dean Rusk's speech to his Foreign Service training class in 1962 to discuss Berlin and the role of the Secretary of State and Foreign Service officers. Later, he talks about his time in Vietnam with the Foreign Service, sharing about his responsibilities and his views on the situation there. Agency for International Development ; AID ; Ambassador Henry C. Lodge ; Berlin Crisis ; Ernest Mason Swatow ; General Maxwell D. Taylor ; Indochina ; Mekong Delta ; Ngo Dinh Diem ; State Department ; strategic hamlets ; Vietnam pacification program ; Vietnam War 17 1034 Vietnam War assessments How many of you could speak Vietnamese over there at that time? Holbrooke shares about a conversation with Dean Rusk concerning the accuracy of the Vietnam War assessments. He also briefly talks about the way his own opinions of the Vietnam War affected his relationship with Rusk. Bob Carver ; Central Intelligence Agency ; CIA ; favoritism ; Foreign Service ; LBJ ; nepotism ; North Vietnamese infiltration ; President Lyndon B. Johnson ; Robert Strange McNamara ; South Vietnamese pacification 17 1321 Membership in the Non-group When I went to work at the White House we didn't have too much contact. Holbrooke discusses the progression of the Vietnam War and his involvement with an informal wartime policy group: the Non-group. He talks about a Non-group meeting that Dean Rusk attended, analyzing Rusk's views on the group and the Vietnam War. gradualism ; Nicholas Katzenbach ; Paris Peace Accords ; Pentagon Papers ; Robert Strange McNamara ; State Department ; Tet Offensive ; Vietnam War escalation 17 1762 Miscalculations during the Vietnam War I want to make another point. Holbrooke and Richard Rusk discuss the miscalculations that American and North Vietnamese leadership made during the course of the war. They focus, especially, on analyzing the tenacity of the North Vietnamese people. American public opinion ; Cold War ; flexible response ; gradualism ; graduated response ; Hanoi, Vietnam ; JFK ; Johnson Administration ; Kennedy Administration ; LBJ ; patriotism ; President John F. Kennedy ; President Lyndon B. Johnson ; Robert Strange McNamara ; Soviet Union ; The Cuban Missile Crisis 17 2107 Warren Cohen's thesis on Dean Rusk Let me ask you this. Holbrooke and Richard Rusk discuss the plausibility of Warren Cohen's view that Dean Rusk had major doubts about the Vietnam War that affected his policy decisions. Clark Clifford ; diplomatic corps ; Foreign Service ; miscalculation ; State Department ; Vietnam bombings ; Vietnam War escalation 17 2314 The Pentagon Papers Let me tell one more story about the Pentagon Papers because I mentioned them briefly. Holbrooke discusses the Pentagon Papers, including his personal role, the view of Dean Rusk, and the possible motivations of U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Bobby Kennedy ; Cold War ; Foreign Service ; John T. McNaughton ; Leslie Gelb ; Llewellyn E. Thompson ; Richard Neustadt ; Robert F. Kennedy ; Skybolt study ; Soviet Union ; State Department ; the New York Times ; The Skybolt Crisis in Perspective ; Watergate 17 2786 Dean Rusk's relationship with William Harriman Oh, one more thing. Holbrooke talks about Dean Rusk's relationship with William Harriman (Truman's Secretary of Commerce, as well as a foreign policy adviser to other presidents), analyzing their natures and the possible causes for the friction between them. He also shares briefly about Rusk and Harriman's impact on his career and character. Foreign Service ; Hanoi ; Hubert Humphrey ; Paris Negotiations ; Secretary of State ; State Department ; Union Pacific Railroad ; Vietnam War 17 3067 Paris Peace Accords You went to that peace conference without really knowing what was in the mind of the Secretary of State with respect to those negotiations. Holbrooke discusses the tensions that arose during the Paris Peace Accords between upper-level U.S. officials, including Dean Rusk. He talks about the various strategies for handling South Vietnam and the result of the peace talks. Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam ; bombing of Vietnam ; demilitarized zone ; DMZ ; Ellsworth BunkerNguyen Thieu ; George Ball ; Hubert Humphrey ; Johnson Administration ; LBJ ; President Lyndon B. Johnson ; presidential campaigning ; Richard Nixon ; Vietnam War 17 3475 William Harriman and Cyrus Vance's plan to end the Vietnam War Could we have had peace in 1968 Holbrooke discusses the merits of William Harriman and Cyrus Vance's plan for peace with Vietnam in 1968. He compares its potential to the actual events that transpired in the 1970's. Dean Rusk ; Henry Kissinger ; Johnson Administration ; LBJ ; North Vietnam ; POW ; President Ferdinand Marcos ; President Lyndon B. Johnson ; President Richard Nixon ; prisoners of war ; Saigon, Vietnam ; unilateral withdrawal ; Vietnam bombings ; Watergate 17 RICHARD RUSK: We' ; re talking with Richard Holbrooke. Dick joined the Foreign Service in 1962, served in Vietnam from ' ; 63-' ; 66 as a Foreign Service officer, ' ; 66-' ; 67 on the White House staff, ' ; 68-' ; 69 State Department involved in the Paris Peace Talks. Other positions: ' ; 77-' ; 81 Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, plus is a long personal friend of the family back in Scarsdale. Dick, this isn' ; t a finished product. We will edit the hell out of this thing. Why don' ; t we just start at the beginning with your initial contacts with my dad, back in Scarsdale, I presume, and what influence he may have been on your life at that time. HOLBROOKE: I first met Mr. Rusk probably around 1956 or ' ; 57. I was a sophomore-- [break in recording] HOLBROOKE: --And I joined the student newspaper, the Scarsdale High School Maroon, along with David [Patrick] Rusk, who became by best friend in high school. Then when my father died in January of 1967, Mr. and Mrs. Rusk became like my second family. They almost took me in, and I must have spent more time there, including staying the night and sleeping over, than I did in my own house. At that time I didn' ; t know anything about Dean Rusk except that he was one of Scarsdale' ; s prominent citizens involved in the Town Club and school affairs, and president of some foundation. But I was in high school. It didn' ; t mean much. I didn' ; t know he' ; d had a distinguished government career. It never would have occurred to me that someday I would hold the same job which had been his, Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, and that in one of the most proud moments of my life my picture is now on the same wall in the State Department as his: the wall which shows former Assistant Secretaries of State for the Far East. David and I became closer and closer friends, and Mrs. Rusk became a second mother to me. I got to know the other children: the wonderful daughter, [Margaret Elizabeth Rusk] Peggy, and the unbelievably obnoxious second son, Richie [Richard Geary] Rusk, who-- RICHARD RUSK: (laughter) Strike that from the transcript. HOLBROOKE: --Who at the time showed all the early signs of a career that would be misspent in crime, self-abuse and various other things. No, I don' ; t think you should strike that. (laughter) RICHARD RUSK: I came a thousand miles for this! HOLBROOKE: I think it' ; s very important that the family be seen in perspective, (laughter) They lived over in--you lived in Fox Meadow, didn' ; t you? RICHARD RUSK: I lived in Green Acres. HOLBROOKE: Green Acres, right, and I lived in Edgewood. So David and I edited the Maroon together. The first time I ever heard about the Foreign Service was from Dean Rusk. He thought it was the greatest career in the world. I' ; d never wanted to be a newspaper man. But, in our senior year he came to a high school breakfast and he gave a speech. He said, " ; When you' ; re thinking of careers, think of the Foreign Service." ; So that kind of stuck in the back of my mind. Then I went off to Brown in September of 1958. RICHARD RUSK: What year was that? HOLBROOKE: ' ; 58. I graduated in ' ; 58. I went off to Brown in September of ' ; 58 and lo and behold my junior year, ' ; 60-' ; 61, Dean Rusk was appointed Secretary of State. RICHARD RUSK: What were your reactions to the appointment? Now you had some time at Scarsdale to form some kind of an impression about my father. And based on that impression, do you recall what your reaction was? HOLBROOKE: I was nineteen years old when he was appointed Secretary of State. I was enormously excited. It was the first time I had ever met anybody or knew anybody who had become a man of international importance. Since he had been very kind to me personally and enormously generous of his time and advice, since he had been a man of great standing, a kind of man of obvious principle--a very principled person who wasn' ; t sort of one of the boys like some parents are with kids, but rather a man of some greater degree of aloofness--he was a man that we all respected. I don' ; t remember much about that period, but I remember small things which I think your brother will also remember. He used to do the crossword puzzle very, very rapidly--the New York Times crossword puzzle--and we were always very impressed with that. I remember, in the summer of 1959 I went out to Berkeley for the summer and I stayed with Dave and Delcia [Bence Spinosa Rusk] at Berkeley. David and I took courses together and then we hitchhiked back across the country. We got back to Scarsdale and one of the courses we had taken was a course in communications with a lot of academic mumbo jumbo in it. We described it to your father and he listened to it and he laughed and dissected in with very cold--that cold analytical style of his: dispassionate. And it made a great impression on us. RICHARD RUSK: What was the thing on? What was it on? HOLBROOKE: It was some academic mumbo jumbo: a very obvious theory of communications masked in the abstractions of academia. But I do remember this about your father: that he exemplified the dispassionate, lucid mind. He had, and still has to this day, the most extraordinary ability to take a problem and analyze it in a way that clarified issues by cutting away a lot of the complexities and the debris. RICHARD RUSK: Now we' ; re both aware of the literature that' ; s been written. You' ; re talking about your own personal impressions based on your impressions of experiences with my dad. Is that right? HOLBROOKE: That' ; s right. I' ; m not talking at all about the literature. RICHARD RUSK: Certain things, you know, have reappeared in the literature and-- HOLBROOKE: No, I' ; ve seen it time and time again. There are times when his ability to clarify things also verges toward oversimplification, but there are other times where he had the most stunning ability to cut through the complexities and get to the root of the matter. RICHARD RUSK: Why would he engage in oversimplification? Let' ; s follow that up now, without going off on too big a tangent. HOLBROOKE: Why, I don' ; t know. I mean, it' ; s just that he has a mind in which--he operates from principles and he applies principles. I remember him telling me once that you operate the principle of the government from the--that the government derives its power from the just consent of the governed. Then he listed a set of principles, and he said, " ; The complexity for foreign policy is if the principles come in conflict and you have to choose." ; But he is a deeply principled man in an era where pragmatism, which really is often a code word for a kind of rudderless, compass-less foreign policy, has taken over. RICHARD RUSK: More than a technician, a belief in these deep moral principles? HOLBROOKE: Oh, absolutely. The description of Dean Rusk as a technician is a profound misunderstanding of what he is. He is a loyal appointed official and he does not believe that he should make his views take the place of elected officials, but he is not a technician. Now, in 1961 and 1962 I was a senior in college and I didn' ; t exactly know what to do with my life. Because of Dean Rusk, and only because of Dean Rusk, I took the Foreign Service Exam. I took the oral [sic] in December of 1961 and I passed it, so I was invited to come to Washington to take the oral exam. In April of 1962, while still a senior at Brown, I came down to Washington and I stayed with the Rusks out in their house in Spring Valley. You were still there at the time when I stayed there. I went in and took the oral exam. They gave it to me, and they did not know I was staying with Rusk. And in fact, Mr. Rusk told me not to tell them that I knew him, and he was very adamant that I not allow the slightest implication of friendship. And this is so characteristic-- RICHARD RUSK: He told you that? HOLBROOKE: Made it explicit. He said, " ; You stay as a friend. I' ; m not going to lift a finger to help you and you shouldn' ; t tell them we know each other." ; And I think that was an obvious example of his ferocious hostility to anything that smacks of nepotism or favoritism or influence peddling. You know, everyone does that. That' ; s the way a lot of the world has come to work. But Dean Rusk will never do it, as I' ; m sure you know. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. He pulled a string for me one time and Stewart [Lee] Udall got me a job at Glacier National Park as a kitchen porter. HOLBROOKE: I remember that. RICHARD RUSK: That was the only time. HOLBROOKE: And you had to work your butt off for the whole summer and you had to sing in the evenings too, right? RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. Well-- HOLBROOKE: Entertain. RICHARD RUSK: I had a good summer. But that' ; s the only occasion that I recall where he-- HOLBROOKE: When I passed the oral exam they took me in and they gave me the exam and they told me right afterwards I had passed. And I went back that night and I told him and he seemed genuinely pleased. He gave me a book which was [Ernest Mason] Swatow' ; s Guide to Diplomatic Practice--S-W-A-T-O-W [sic]: a famous old book of the practices and principles of diplomacy, basically nineteenth century. And he wrote in it, " ; To Dick Holbrooke as he enters the world' ; s greatest profession." ; I think he really believed that then and believes it today. And I certainly believed it then and I still believe it today even though I' ; m no longer in the Foreign Service. Neither is he. He and I had some similar experiences: we both were career people ; we both got political appointments ; we both left. He returned to the government. Maybe I will someday. RICHARD RUSK: Dick, I' ; m aware of the one article you wrote in Anthony Lake' ; s book. Do you have anything else in writing that I should be reading as background on you, or any other books that you yourself have felt relevant? HOLBROOKE: I don' ; t think I have any writings that are relevant. RICHARD RUSK: Okay. HOLBROOKE: So I entered the Foreign Service in 1962 and I took the entering class: the A-100 course, which is the course for an entering Foreign Service officer. And we graduated in September and we' ; re sworn in. And Mr. Rusk then did one thing, but he did it very slyly. He asked to talk to that entering class of the Foreign Service, which he never did. But he wouldn' ; t let anyone know why. But he actually did it because I was in the class. And we came up to his conference room ; we sat around with him. RICHARD RUSK: How big a class would that have been? HOLBROOKE: About twenty-five or thirty people. You' ; ll find it in a schedule for September of ' ; 62. And he talked to the entering class for about an hour and he told us what he believed in. And if there' ; s a record of that, I' ; m sure there isn' ; t a word he said then that he would change today. I can remember a few of the things he said still to this day, because your father always made such a great impression on me. He was asked about the Berlin crisis, which was then at its height, and he said that his objective would be to pass the Berlin crisis on to a successor. That was typical of him, these very clear-cut, unemotional, unsentimental views. (phone rings) RICHARD RUSK: Go ahead. [break in recording] HOLBROOKE: He talked, as he has so often, about how while we' ; re asleep two-thirds of the world' ; s awake able to make mischief, the number of coups, the flow of cables, that a great success for Secretary of State would be a foreign policy not on the front page of the newspapers. What I' ; m struck with, of course, about Dean Rusk is the continuity of his thinking. I don' ; t think he' ; s changed his views very much in the years I have known him. I' ; ve now known him for twenty-six years or more. Maybe I' ; m wrong. And one of the things I think you should ask him is not specific questions, but ask him where his views have changed over the issues--perhaps China--maybe China, but maybe not even there. I don' ; t know. RICHARD RUSK: Shall we interrupt the chronology for a sort of generalized critique of my dad as you see him? HOLBROOKE: No, let' ; s do the chronology. I then went off to Vietnam and I arrived there after studying Vietnamese--I saw him occasionally--studied Vietnamese, went off and got there in May of 1963. I returned to the United States from that assignment in, I guess, June of ' ; 66, and went to the White House staff. Occasionally I would see him when I came back. I remember coming back in May of ' ; 65 and staying with Dave Rusk and Delcia in their house on MacArthur Boulevard. And at that time I remember one Sunday he called David up and asked if I was there, and I was, and he said, " ; Come on into the Department." ; So here I was a junior officer being summoned out of channels to the Secretary of State. I went into his office and we talked. It was a very discouraging conversation for me because I felt now-- RICHARD RUSK: For you? HOLBROOKE: Yes. I felt now that two years later I, having spent most of those two years on the ground in Indochina, I had learned something. And I also felt that some of the things in Vietnam were not being accurately reported in Washington. I can' ; t reconstruct the whole conversation, but I know I disappointed Mr. Rusk very much because he asked me about the pacification program. RICHARD RUSK: Strategic hamlets, that type of thing? HOLBROOKE: Strategic hamlets, yeah. I had been working the strategic hamlet program in the Mekong Delta. RICHARD RUSK: Stop for a minute and just briefly describe your duties in Vietnam ' ; 63-' ; 65. HOLBROOKE: ' ; 63-' ; 65 I was assigned to A.I.D. [Agency for International Development] as a Vietnamese language officer working in the Mekong Delta as an officer in charge of the civilian part of the pacification program, or as you called it, the strategic hamlet program, which is an earlier name for it. I had been there during the coup against [Ngo Dinh] Diem ; and then after that I was reassigned as staff assistant to General [Maxwell D.] Taylor and Ambassador [Henry Cabot] Lodge [Jr.], who were the two ambassadors. Then I went into the Saigon staff. RICHARD RUSK: So you did have plenty of field experience out there in the Delta? HOLBROOKE: I had a lot of field experience. And by this time, although I was still only twenty-three or twenty-four years old, I felt that the reporting chain of command was distorting the information and I was full of passion about it: full of reckless passion. RICHARD RUSK: How many of you could speak Vietnamese over there at that time? HOLBROOKE: I don' ; t know. Not too many. My Vietnamese wasn' ; t very good. But I knew what was going on and I knew that the situation in the province I was responsible for was more serious than it was being reported to the White House and to the President. I tried to tell this to Mr. Rusk and I could see that he was very disappointed. I remember one part of the exchange vividly. I said to him--he talked about getting the infiltration from North Vietnam stopped, and I hazarded the opinion that even if the infiltration stopped we would not be able to successfully pacify South Vietnam. He was not happy with that. I remember vividly his response. He said to me, " ; Dick, the North Vietnamese are not ten feet tall. They are not men from Mars. They are not supermen." ; And I didn' ; t know what to say. I didn' ; t think I was saying they were supermen, I thought I was just saying that the situation on the ground was not favorable to us. I didn' ; t have any solutions. I didn' ; t know what we should do in Vietnam. That was his job. All I knew was things weren' ; t going well. Policy wasn' ; t working. I don' ; t think he was at all happy with what I said and I-- RICHARD RUSK: Okay, let' ; s differentiate between what you said and what that meant in terms of our policy as opposed to your telling him these things. Was he disappointed in you for saying this? HOLBROOKE: To this day he' ; s never said it and he probably doesn' ; t remember the meeting, but I felt that he got cooler to me after that. RICHARD RUSK: The relationship changed on the basis of-- HOLBROOKE: Well, no. I' ; ll have to be clear on this. Once I entered the Foreign Service he never showed favoritism towards me. He didn' ; t want people to know that I knew him. He did not want that kind of thing. Although everyone else who knows the Secretary of State who' ; s in the government doesn' ; t keep it a secret, as far as Mr. Rusk is concerned it was an accident. I had to make it on my own merits. And that was fine. Mr. Rusk never did me any favors in the government and I never asked for any. But I owe him a great deal. As I said earlier, I owe him the whole idea of going in the Foreign Service, and he gave me a lot of the principles by which I operate in foreign policy. But I think he was very disappointed in what I said. RICHARD RUSK: And your relationship changed to some extent? HOLBROOKE: I don' ; t know if it changed. I think he was disappointed in me. I went back to Vietnam. In ' ; 66 I came back and worked at the White House for Bob Carver on Vietnam. Then I saw him occasionally, but very infrequently. RICHARD RUSK: When you guys had your conversation there at the Department on that Sunday-- HOLBROOKE: It was a Sunday. He was wearing one of those horrible Hawaii shirts that he wore on Sundays. Probably the Truman Wake Island shirt for all I know. RICHARD RUSK: Were you really able to unload fully the depths of your discouragements: the depths of your insight? HOLBROOKE: No. I wasn' ; t that discouraged. This is ' ; 65 we' ; re talking about. I wasn' ; t saying the war was hopeless. I wasn' ; t saying we should get out. I was telling him only that the assessment was inaccurate. If you' ; ll read that essay in that book, The Legacy of Vietnam, you' ; ll see that I make a distinction between assessments, tactics, strategy, and objectives. The point I' ; m talking about--I' ; m talking only about the assessment. I didn' ; t tell him we should get out. I didn' ; t tell him we should fight differently. I was just telling him it wasn' ; t working. His official reporting from people like George Carver at the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], from the embassy, and from the military command was different. The reporters were saying it wasn' ; t working and he didn' ; t like to hear that: neither did [Robert Strange] McNamara ; neither did [Lyndon Baines] Johnson. RICHARD RUSK: Now, you' ; re talking about the intelligence in general was poor? HOLBROOKE: I' ; m talking about the assessment of how we were doing. Not the intelligence of the enemy. RICHARD RUSK: All right. And are you referring specifically to this period when Diem was in power during the last part of his-- HOLBROOKE: No, this is post-Diem. RICHARD RUSK: Okay. Because I know there was a great deal of concern about him cooking the books on various things. We were relying on Vietnamese intelligence for a while. HOLBROOKE: Absolutely. But Diem' ; s departure didn' ; t change that. When I went to work at the White House we didn' ; t have too much contact: occasionally, very rarely. He' ; d never see me in the office. In 1967 I left the White House and simultaneously began to have a two-hatted job. In the mornings I would spend in room 3E--let' ; s see, what was it? I forget the exact number, but it was the room behind McNamara' ; s office--working on the Pentagon Papers. I was part of the Pentagon Papers task force in ' ; 67. In the afternoons I would work for Nicholas Katzenbach as his special assistant on Vietnam. And then gradually I finished-- RICHARD RUSK: Over at State? You had an office up there right down the hall from my dad as I recall? HOLBROOKE: Yeah. And at that point I would--and then I phased out of the Pentagon Papers and went to work full time for Katzenbach as his assistant on Vietnam. So after finishing my Pentagon Papers project I was full time at State. Now, Katzenbach knew I was working on the Pentagon Papers and Ben [Benjamin Huger] Read, whom I assume you' ; re interviewing. He' ; s very, very important for your story. RICHARD RUSK: We' ; ve got a lot more to go. HOLBROOKE: Ben Read knew I was working on the Pentagon Papers. I had never mentioned it to Mr. Rusk directly. RICHARD RUSK: That you were working on the papers? HOLBROOKE: That I was working on the Pentagon Papers. Now my relationship with Mr. Rusk at that point was interesting. He ran into me in the halls. I said, " ; Hello." ; I said, " ; I' ; m working for Mr. Katzenbach now." ; He seemed sort of both surprised and I don' ; t know whether he was pleased or not. But we had very little contact even though I was just down the hall. He was Secretary of State ; he was very busy. And he didn' ; t use me much at this point: once in a while, once in a while. RICHARD RUSK: This is late ' ; 67, ' ; 68? HOLBROOKE: Early ' ; 68. Then in 1968 the Paris negotiations began. Wait, let me back up. On January 30, 1968 the Tet Offensive exploded. And at that point the government went into a real crisis. Now it was absolute. From the day of the Tet Offensive to the day Johnson decided not to run, those sixty days which have been described by several people in books, were really ones of unspeakable pressure: intense pressure. And in that period we used to have a group meeting in Katzenbach' ; s office every Thursday afternoon called-- RICHARD RUSK: Stop for a minute Dick. We' ; re covering a great deal of ground. Would you rather go ahead with the chronology and then I go back, or whenever something comes up, should I stop you? HOLBROOKE: Let me give the chronology of that period and then you go back. Katzenbach used to have meetings called Non-group Meetings every Thursday afternoon including General [Earle Gilmore] Wheeler, Bill [William Putnam] Bundy, Walt [Whitman] Rostow, Dick [Richard McGarrah] Helms, and I used to sit in as the junior staff person. And then shortly after the Tet Offensive, about a week later, Mr. Rusk showed up in Katzenbach' ; s office one day--first time I' ; d ever seen this happen--and just sat in on the meeting and listened to us talk. RICHARD RUSK: Is this the ad hoc task group on Vietnam that formed in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive? HOLBROOKE: No. RICHARD RUSK: This is a separate group? HOLBROOKE: This is completely separate. You' ; re talking about the group [Clark McAdams] Clifford was chairman of at the-- RICHARD RUSK: That' ; s right. That' ; s right. HOLBROOKE: No. Clifford' ; s group was a short-lived, very important policy group. This was a continuing meeting that had gone on for a year or two, which was supposed to be an informal discussion of Vietnam. RICHARD RUSK: What was the group called? HOLBROOKE: Katzenbach called it the Non-group. The Non-group. In other words it would be the one group in Washington that would have no name. It was kind of a joke: The Non-group. RICHARD RUSK: And you identified the participants. HOLBROOKE: Yes. So Mr. Rusk came down and sat and listened very gravely to these conversations. And I think again he felt that a lot of people were losing heart, that they were switching sides too rapidly. And my impression then, and still today, is that Rusk' ; s reaction to everything was that maybe it was a bad idea and maybe it wasn' ; t, but once the flag and the boys were being shot at and we were beleaguered that the only honorable thing was to stick with it. It was a clear case of honor. And that' ; s why I said earlier that he was a man of tremendous principle. His principle was loyalty to the President, loyalty to the country, loyalty to the flag. And that' ; s why even today he is widely regarded by people as a very strong hawk on Vietnam, when in fact, I don' ; t think that' ; s really true. I think his position on Vietnam was much more complicated. But even today my view--and this may be a total minority view, but I might as well put it out. My view is that deep down inside Dean Rusk has doubts about the commitment and he always had some doubts about the commitment because he was a product of the CBI [China/Burma/India Theatre]. [break in recording] HOLBROOKE: My instinct, and this may be dead wrong, it may be a wild thing, but I might as well put it out so you can test. My instinct is that he had far more doubts--in the early phases he probably had more doubts than McNamara would be my guess. But once it happened, once we were under pressure, he lived by his code and he will always live by his code. If other people wish to write whatever they want to write, fine, but he is not, even in 1985 he is not going to turn tail and try to curry favor with people by showing a break with the two Presidents whom he served, even though they are no longer alive. RICHARD RUSK: Not only because of his code of loyalty and the way he views his relationship with his Presidents, because he still believes in the premises of that policy. He' ; s come to doubt some of the tactical questions, the things--something like gradualism, for example. He thinks that perhaps in retrospect that was a mistake, and, you know, the bombing of Vietnam: tactical questions. But he still believes in the underlying assumptions and premises that went into that policy. HOLBROOKE: Have you ever asked him whether if today was 1965 would he repeat the process the way it was done? RICHARD RUSK: I haven' ; t asked him that question. HOLBROOKE: You ought to ask him. I can' ; t believe that answer is yes, but he may not want to answer. I want to make another point. In this period of time the leaders in the United States government had just come off the single most dangerous and successful piece of crisis management in their history--the Cuban Missile Crisis--which was the ultimate success of the application of what you call gradualism and which other people call graduated response or flexible response. They thought that if they kept applying pressure gradually to Hanoi eventually Hanoi, seeing that the United States could apply limitless pressure, would say," ; uncle." ; This was the fundamental misjudgment of the North Vietnamese. And the mistake that was made by the senior policymakers in the United States was to misjudge Hanoi. Now Mr. Rusk said to me twenty years ago that the North Vietnamese are not ten feet tall. I never forgot it because I never believed they were. I believed that they were, however, more ready to pay the price than he realized or that McNamara realized. It didn' ; t make sense to the Johnson Administration and the Kennedy Administration that anyone would pay the suicidal price that they were willing to pay in Hanoi to achieve their objectives. But the horrible, crazy fact was they were. They were awful ; they were ruthless ; but they were willing to pay the price. RICHARD RUSK: Probably intensely patriotic to their own concept of fatherland, the mother country, or whatever. HOLBROOKE: They were patriotic, but they were also ready to let a generation of young men-- END OF SIDE 1 BEGINNING OF SIDE 2 HOLBROOKE: --Danger for anyone arguing the point about North Vietnamese tenacity was that they sounded pro-Hanoi in the eyes of certain people. It seemed unpatriotic. I think to a certain extent your father tended to regard people who talked about North Vietnamese tenacity as somehow being less enthusiastic about the war. I think that was a profound misjudgment, if it' ; s true. And if it' ; s not true, then I hope to be corrected on it. I do know that he wasn' ; t pleased at the suggestion that the North Vietnamese might be able to accept these preposterously high casualty figures to pursue their objectives because it didn' ; t make any sense to him. How could the will of the United States not prevail when we were engaged? After all, this wasn' ; t China where we hadn' ; t been militarily engaged. And it didn' ; t look like such a big country anyway. And the purpose of our discussion today is not to discuss what went wrong in Vietnam, which is another--which we could take a month on just to get to the heart of--but to discuss his attitudes. RICHARD RUSK: He has said--and I' ; ll inject this Dick--he has said he made two mistakes with respect to that war. One is he overestimated the patience of the American people. The other is he underestimated the tenacity of the North Vietnamese. And I asked him one time, " ; Pop, why were those people so tenacious?" ; And he said he didn' ; t know. And he really didn' ; t have an answer for that. It was almost as if the true answer to that would totally have undermined those same premises with which they approached that policy. HOLBROOKE: Well, that' ; s fascinating. You see, because tenacity of the North Vietnamese is the issue. And I do understand the tenacity of the North Vietnamese. And I wish he had understood it because he was certainly the smartest of the members of the Johnson-Kennedy Administrations, and had he understood it our policy might have been fashioned differently. North Vietnamese tenacity was built out of a combination of genuine nationalistic fervor, which they captured during the fight against the French and maintained for themselves, plus the most ruthless and brutal internal control system which allowed them to make many people who weren' ; t as committed as the inner core fight: a ruthlessness and readiness to sacrifice a generation of young men. These were revolutionary romantics living in a different world than we are living in. Our rational calculations--it didn' ; t seem rational to Walt Rostow and Bob McNamara and Dean Rusk that any leadership would sacrifice an entire generation of men when all we wanted them to do was leave their neighbors alone or sit down and talk with us. That isn' ; t how they saw it. They were deeply ideological, combining the ideologies of communism and nationalism and all the brutal skill of internal control. They had done nothing but fight all of their lives. Look what' ; s happened to them since 1975. They haven' ; t stopped fighting. They are still fighting. The most incredible thing of all, having fought the French, having fought the Americans, they' ; re now ready to fight the Chinese. Now the Chinese are their neighbors and the Chinese have got twenty times their population and they' ; re still sticking it to the Chinese. And the Chinese did very badly comparatively against them. RICHARD RUSK: Let me ask you this. Warren [I.] Cohen wrote a book called Dean Rusk published in 1980. Have you read it? HOLBROOKE: No. RICHARD RUSK: He is not a fan of my father' ; s. It is a critical book. He did study my dad' ; s Vietnam decision-making as best as he could construct it. From 1961 through ' ; 64 he developed the case, based on documents and whatever access he could get to that period, that my father in fact had major doubts about the thing, that he consistently opposed the Americanization of the war, the bombing of North Vietnam, the commitment of land forces--ground forces-- [break in recording] RICHARD RUSK: --That my dad had opposed a lot of the exploratory steps that were made in the early sixties ; however he never gave the President the kind of advice that we should abandon our commitment. Yet when the President signed on or committed forces and introduced the bombing in the spring of 1965, my dad too signed on, and from that point on it was we had to persevere and we had to prevail. And his effort from that time on was to try to cut back on some of the military escalatory steps. HOLBROOKE: Has he confirmed that? RICHARD RUSK: Not entirely. But that was Cohen' ; s thesis and he spent two years studying the problem. That' ; s the way he saw it. HOLBROOKE: I can' ; t comment on what happened between Mr. Rusk and the President. It seems to me it' ; s possible. It certainly seems to me that in that critical spring of 1968 he and not Clark Clifford was the key person in convincing Lyndon Johnson to limit the bombing. I have no question about that. And I think Townsend [Walter] Hoopes' ; book. The Limits of Intervention, is just wrong. RICHARD RUSK: Do you want to talk about that or should we finish the chronology that you started earlier. HOLBROOKE: No, no. We' ; re up to that period. That' ; s exactly where we are. RICHARD RUSK: Okay, let' ; s talk about it. I' ; m fascinated by that. HOLBROOKE: I worked on the March 30, 1968 speech. I worked on the drafts. And I believe that at that point Dean Rusk was looking for ways to find a way to get the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table. And a limited bombing halt would give you a chance of getting them to the bombing table and it would also, perhaps, buy you some public support. Now, I don' ; t know whether your father knew that Johnson wasn' ; t going to run again or not. RICHARD RUSK: He did not. HOLBROOKE: He did not? RICHARD RUSK: He had some advance indication of it, but nothing concrete. HOLBROOKE: It' ; s a kind of critical error, because had we known that Johnson was not going to run again I think there would have been a strong argument for a different speech with a strong message in it to Hanoi. But that' ; s ancient history now. RICHARD RUSK: Now, were you involved with the policy review at an earlier time or-- HOLBROOKE: The Clifford review? RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. HOLBROOKE: Yeah, I was a very junior person involved in the peripheries of that, but not in a central way the way Clifford and Katzenbach and Phil [Philip C.] Habib and others were. RICHARD RUSK: Were you in on the meetings of that ad hoc-- HOLBROOKE: One or two. yeah. Now, let me tell one more story about the Pentagon Papers because I mentioned them briefly. In 1973, more or less, when I was back in Washington as editor of Foreign Policy, Mr. Rusk called me one day from Georgia. He said he was coming up to town and would I like to have dinner with him and Mrs. Rusk. We had a lovely dinner and Jane Thompson came along. This was after Llewellyn [E.] Thompson' ; s [Jr.] death. And I think your father really had an incredibly strong feeling about Llewellyn Thompson. There are several things I remember. That night at dinner--now there' ; s a possibility I' ; m getting two meetings combined in my mind in one. You have to check when Llewellyn Thompson died. But I remember first, in regard to Thompson, that at the end of the dinner, which we ate in the Mayflower Restaurant, you father raised a glass and toasted Tommy Thompson with such affection, saying, " ; This was the greatest civil servant--Foreign Service officer--I' ; ve ever met and we will miss him forever." ; I' ; ve never seen such strong emotion. Have you talked to him about Thompson? RICHARD RUSK: No. HOLBROOKE: Talk to him about Thompson. I think you' ; ll find that he will rank Thompson at the top of the list. And why? Because of the great Foreign Service officers of that generation: George [Frost] Kennan, Charles [Eustis] Bohlen, Llewellyn Thompson. Thompson didn' ; t write his memoirs ; Thompson never spoke to the press at all ; and Thompson was his most esteemed Soviet adviser. Llewellyn Thompson is a man whom history will forget, unlike George Kennan and Charles Bohlen. Kennan is a great author and historian and Bohlen wrote one very fine book. But I think that, in your father' ; s mind, Thompson is the most important and most influential even though history will not be able to trace him. And I think your father loved him and respected him. But at the same time, either on this trip or another trip, he and I went out and had a meal together and he said to me, " ; I understand you worked on the Pentagon Papers." ; And I said, " ; That' ; s right, Mr. Rusk." ; RICHARD RUSK: That' ; s ' ; 67 now? HOLBROOKE: No, no. This is after the New York Times published them. This is at least four or five years later. RICHARD RUSK: ' ; 72, around in there? HOLBROOKE: Well, it can' ; t even be ' ; 72 because I was in Morocco in ' ; 72. It has to be some time later. It can' ; t be any earlier than the fall of ' ; 72. And it could be even later. But he said, " ; I understand you worked on the Pentagon Papers." ; I said, " ; That' ; s right." ; He said, " ; While you were working for me?" ; I said, " ; That' ; s right." ; He said, " ; I didn' ; t know that." ; I said, " ; Well, I was instructed to do this by Ben Read and Nick Katzenbach." ; And he said, " ; They never told me anything about it." ; And I said, " ; Mr. Rusk, I can' ; t believe that because I was assured that what I was doing was correct, and I was being instructed to do it by your deputy and by the executive secretary of the State Department." ; And he said, " ; Why do you think McNamara did this?" ; And I said, " ; I don' ; t know. I was a very junior officer. But he always talked about the Sky Bolt study of Richard [Elliot] Neustadt and he claimed he wanted something similar for decision-making and history books." ; RICHARD RUSK: You' ; re talking about McNamara now. HOLBROOKE: This is my comment to Mr. Rusk about McNamara. And then, Mr. Rusk said, " ; I' ; ll tell you why I think he did it. I think he did it because he was trying to set up Bobby Kennedy for a run at the Presidency in ' ; 68." ; RICHARD RUSK: He said that of Bob McNamara? HOLBROOKE: He said that to me of Bob McNamara, quote, unquote. Absolutely clear. My memory is not playing tricks here. And I said, " ; Well, to tell you the truth, Mr. Rusk, it seems possible to me, but I have no way of knowing." ; But I think that Mr. Rusk was also very unhappy with me that I had been involved in this project and I have tried several times to make clear to him that I did it under instructions and orders from the State Department. RICHARD RUSK: Nick Katzenbach and Ben Read? HOLBROOKE: And I called up Ben afterwards and I went through this with him. And Ben told me that he went to Mr. Rusk and reminded Mr. Rusk that when McNamara started the project he had gotten Rusk' ; s permission through Read. And what I think happened is that Mr. Rusk did not realize the magnitude of this project as McNamara intended it. And probably Ben Read wandered in in the morning with 15 items on a piece of paper and the eighth item was, by the way, Bob McNamara wants to pull together all the papers on Vietnam and he wants our cooperation and Mr. Rusk said, " ; Sure." ; RICHARD RUSK: That' ; s what he recalls. He recalls a request for access to the material. HOLBROOKE: And I think that' ; s what happened. I think McNamara was devious on this. RICHARD RUSK: I' ; ll say it because we' ; ve got our machine going, but Bob McNamara did tell me in an interview in March of 1985 that he had intended only to collect documents for future historians and what happened was after John [T.] McNaughton died the project more or less got away from him. Other people got involved and it became an ongoing, not only collection of material, but a policy analysis, and he hadn' ; t intended anything like that and the whole thing was as much a surprise to him in the way it actually turned out as it was to my father. HOLBROOKE: May I recommend to you that you interview Les [Leslie Howard] Gelb at the New York Times who headed the project. I will call Gelb and tell him, because this is not Gelb' ; s story. Gelb has a different understanding of what happened and Gelb ran the project. Since this is not an unimportant incident anymore. It involves [Daniel] Ellsberg and it lead to Watergate, you might as well get to the bottom of it. RICHARD RUSK: That' ; s right. Okay. In any case, my dad was not aware at the time that he was in office that the Pentagon Papers did, in fact, exist, at least in the form that it eventually emerged. Was he aware of the fact that he knew in ' ; 68 that--weren' ; t you introduced or described to him as being involved in that? HOLBROOKE: No. RICHARD RUSK: That came later? HOLBROOKE: In the time that I saw him, we never discussed the Pentagon Papers because I rarely saw him. If we saw each other we chatted about other things and it was not a big deal. I didn' ; t think anything of it. I was carrying out the instructions of my immediate bosses. Have you talked to Katzenbach about this? RICHARD RUSK: Not the Pentagon Papers. I did about your involvement: your role in this post-Tet Offensive policy review, but not the Pentagon Papers. HOLBROOKE: And what did he say about my role? RICHARD RUSK: That he reported directly to you. No, that you reported directly to him and very little to my dad. That your contact-- HOLBROOKE: That was exactly correct. RICHARD RUSK: And that he used you a great deal and that you were very helpful. HOLBROOKE: That is exactly correct. Oh, one more thing. Now let me give you the Paris 1968 and that will finish the chronology of the period he was Secretary. In May of ' ; 68 the negotiations began in Paris. [William Averell] Harriman asked Katzenbach and Mr. Rusk if I could go over there with them as a part of their team, and they agreed. That was sort of my final and most intense, in a way, insight into the whole situation. Harriman and Rusk had a very odd relationship. Harriman did not like Rusk. He wanted Mr. Rusk' ; s job. He always thought he should be Secretary of State. Mr. Rusk was my oldest mentor in the world as I have made clear already. Harriman was my new boss and another legendary figure for obvious reasons. Harriman was very good to me. They are very different kinds of people. There was tremendous friction between them, with Katzenbach and [Cyrus Roberts] Vance trying to be the interlocutors. RICHARD RUSK: While you' ; re on it, can you elaborate on the degree of friction: anecdotes? HOLBROOKE: Harriman was a much more political animal than Mr. Rusk who wanted to get this war over with because he was desperate to elect Hubert [Horatio] Humphrey: desperate. And Mr. Rusk was loyal to the President in office. At times they came into conflict. There was a personality conflict. You' ; re dealing here with one of the richest men in the United States, whose father had built the Union Pacific Railroad, who had been a dilettante and a playboy until he was over fifty years old, who had then had a very spectacular career as a special envoy to [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt--for Roosevelt to [Iosif " ; Joseph" ; Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili] Stalin and [Winston Leonard Spencer] Churchill: who was already a legendary figure. And you had a poor, up from the wrong side of the tracks, Cherokee County Secretary of State who had achieved the job that Harriman wanted more than any other, except the Presidency, in his career. They had known each other and circled around each other, along with Clark Clifford, since the 1940s and here they were in the late 1960s, twenty years later, at the top of the government: Rusk in the State Department, and Harriman in Paris negotiating with Hanoi. It was an extraordinary moment. And Vance was sent to Paris, obviously to kind of keep an eye on Harriman. I remember before we left for Paris, Mr. Rusk said to me that in the next generation of the establishment--the people who would run American foreign policy, the next generation to replace him and [John J.] McCloy and [Robert Abercrombie] Lovett, and [Dean Gooderham] Acheson--that Cy Vance was the man he thought was the most outstanding. RICHARD RUSK: My dad said this? HOLBROOKE: Your father said that, many times. If you haven' ; t interviewed Vance, you surely should. Have you-- RICHARD RUSK: I' ; ll get him next time. HOLBROOKE: He' ; s right next door. So here I was, the very junior officer, but I watched all this. I liked both men. I learned a great deal from Harriman. There are some wonderful things about Harriman. Their styles were too different. Their wealth, their personal background was too different. RICHARD RUSK: Any anecdotes on the degree of friction that may have existed during those negotiations? Anything along those lines? HOLBROOKE: I think that there was a lot of friction. And there were also tremendous difficulties. Mr. Rusk' ; s final instructions to the delegation were that he would not discuss any fall-back positions with us before we left. At the time I couldn' ; t understand his position. But I now understand it completely. He was absolutely afraid of leaks. It' ; s my view that Mr. Rusk wanted a settlement in Vietnam along honorable lines as much as any other person in the government. But unlike Harriman, or McNamara, or Clifford, he never would say so because he wanted to be the President' ; s last line of defense. And you can ask him if I' ; m right or wrong on this. In fact, you can show him everything in this interview as far as I' ; m concerned. RICHARD RUSK: You went to that peace conference without really knowing what was in the mind of the Secretary of State with respect to those negotiations. And this whole problem of reticence that people constantly refer to with my dad was very much something you had to confront, contend with. HOLBROOKE: Reticence? RICHARD RUSK: Reticence, not knowing exactly what was in his mind on major issues. HOLBROOKE: While everyone else would have private discussions about fall-back positions on the bombing, he would refuse to have them. He felt that he was the Secretary of State and if he indicated which way things were going early, he was compromising the President' ; s position. Now, remember what the issue was. We had stopped bombing north of the twentieth parallel, so there were three degrees of latitude from the seventeenth parallel, which was the DMZ [demilitarized zone], up to the twentieth parallel, and then where the neck of North Vietnam spreads out in the river of the delta, where we were still bombing the smithereens out of North Vietnam. That was an option. And the issue was whether we' ; d stop that unilaterally or whether we' ; d bargain for it. There were some people who wanted to bargain for it, some who wanted to stop unilaterally. Mr. Rusk wouldn' ; t commit himself. At the time he wouldn' ; t let us discuss it. At the time I thought, " ; This is a bit odd." ; Now I understand fully. I suspect that if I were in his job I would have done just what he did. I would have kept my counsel. Now, during the summer there were a lot of emissaries traveling back and forth across the Atlantic. Some were from Hubert Humphrey ; some were from George [Wildman] Ball, who had left the government but was the most active supporter of the Humphrey campaign. Ball was desperately trying to get Humphrey to make a public break with Johnson over the war. So here you had Dean Rusk' ; s closest associate, his former Deputy, doing something that Rusk would have totally opposed. Tom Ehrlich carried papers back and forth at one point. And at one point Mr. Rusk called me back to personally carry a message to Harriman and Vance. I came into his office. He and Katzenbach saw me along and he said to me, " ; I want you to go back to Paris and I want you to tell Cy and Averell that if they have any recommendations to make about a change in position they are not to put them in telegrams. They are to get them to me through the secure telephone line to Ben Read. Nothing in the telegrams." ; Now you' ; ll have to ask your father what background in Washington brought him to this position. RICHARD RUSK: Is that not regarded traditionally a privileged, confidential, secure source of communications. HOLBROOKE: I think the reason for it was that he wanted to be able to--my view is that he was trying to be helpful to the negotiators in Paris, and that by telling them not to send in cable suggestions for change he was being helpful. But there was a lot of friction and some of the people in Paris thought he was trying to shut off dissent. Remember, I' ; m giving you interpretations that are fifteen years later. At the time, Richie, I was twenty-seven years old. I' ; d never been in anything like this before in my life. It was very dramatic stuff. And I didn' ; t know the background or history of politics that were going on. RICHARD RUSK: Was it clear that my dad wanted to negotiate a settlement in Vietnam? HOLBROOKE: I think it was. That' ; s my view. You' ; ll have to ask him. Nothing was clear, but that was my view now and then. I don' ; t think he and Harriman were as far apart as it appeared at the time. RICHARD RUSK: Was the major issue in the contention between them whether or not we would sort of force South Vietnam to go to the negotiating table and to take part in this? That' ; s really where the whole thing fell apart, isn' ; t it? HOLBROOKE: That' ; s where it fell apart. That was October. That' ; s the saddest moment of all negotiation. What happened there was that Ellsworth Bunker mishandled, in my view, the negotiations with the South Vietnamese. Now, I know that your father has the highest regard for Ellsworth Bunker. But, in my view. Bunker did not keep the South Vietnamese ready for what was happening in Paris. And at the last minute, [Nguyen Van] Thieu objected. Bunker sent in cables to Washington saying, " ; Let' ; s not push the South Vietnamese. It' ; s not right to do it." ; And Bunker and Harriman got into the most god-awful disagreement imaginable over this situation. RICHARD RUSK: Impasse. HOLBROOKE: Bunker in Saigon ; Harriman in Paris. They got in the most god-awful disagreement over whether to push Saigon hard or not. This was five or six days before the Presidential election of ' ; 68. The deal had been announced and the polls were very close between Humphrey and [Richard Milhous] Nixon. And everything--history hung in the balance at this point. The Presidential election could be determined by this event and Lyndon Johnson was torn between the Harriman-Vance position, which Clifford was supporting, and the Bunker position, which I believe Mr. Rusk was supporting. RICHARD RUSK: I think you' ; re right on that. HOLBROOKE: And Rostow certainly was supporting Bunker. And I think it came down in that last week before the election to one of these great psychological dramas which it' ; s hard for history to fully record. I was in Paris. I only know that we were desperate. Vance was sleeping on the floor of his office at nights because his back was giving way, the tension was so enormous. Vance had been the most loyal of all of that generation of people. He and your father were now completely in disagreement: totally on opposite sides on the issue. Harriman, Vance, and Clifford on one side ; Rusk, Rostow, and Bunker on the other ; and the president of the United States with five days to go before his successor is chosen. And the polls showing Humphrey ahead by about a point or two. In other words it was a dead heat. And we all know what happened. Thieu publicly said he wouldn' ; t go to the talks. Nixon then charged that the deal was a phony deal: political. And Nixon won by less than one percent. RICHARD RUSK: Thieu evidently had thought he could get a better deal out of Richard Nixon and that was-- HOLBROOKE: Absolutely. RICHARD RUSK: Could we have had peace in 1968, at least under terms as good as what Henry [Alfred] Kissinger five, six years later-- HOLBROOKE: Absolutely. No conceivable doubt in my mind but that what Harriman and Vance wanted to do with the Vietnamese was a better deal for us. Look, let' ; s start with the simplest of premises: nothing could have been worse that what actually happened, which was that we withdrew almost five hundred of our five hundred and fifty thousand men, we withdrew unilaterally. Then when we were down to about seventy thousand men, we start a negotiation with no leverage. We pull out the rest of the troops solely in exchange for five hundred POWs [prisoners of war] and we explicitly acknowledge in 1973 that the North Vietnamese can stay in the South, which was the death warrant of Saigon. RICHARD RUSK: That would not have been part of the deal in 1968? HOLBROOKE: Well, Harriman and Vance were talking about a ceasefire in place. That would have permitted North Vietnamese troops to stay, but they were a handful in ' ; 68. They were 135,000 in ' ; 72. Secondly, we just pulled up completely under the worst possible circumstances. Now the Kissinger-Nixon defense is Watergate. Nixon is now saying in his newest book that if it hadn' ; t been for Watergate he would have resumed bombing. We' ; ll never know. The fact is that the Harriman-Vance position was negotiate when you have 550,000 men, and negotiate for their withdrawal. The Nixon position was withdraw almost 500,000 men to stretch out the war and then negotiate. It was a tragic set of circumstances. In my view, the last twenty thousand that died under Nixon died in vain. They didn' ; t have to die. Even if you accept the premises of the war, we could have gotten a decent deal in ' ; 68 or ' ; 69. Now I don' ; t want to leave you with the impression that I' ; m holding Dean Rusk accountable for this. This was Lyndon Johnson' ; s decision, and, furthermore, the first thing that happened when Nixon was President was that he was presented with this situation. And Nixon chose not to negotiate. Remember that we didn' ; t get the real talks going until January 27, 1969, Nixon' ; s first week in office. Up until that point the talks were limited to discussions of the bombing. RICHARD RUSK: Nixon clearly had to option to continue these talks? HOLBROOKE: It was Nixon' ; s--this happened on Nixon' ; s watch, not the Johnson-Rusk era. RICHARD RUSK: Who has written best about these Paris Peace Talks in 1968? I definitely have to read up on them. HOLBROOKE: There are a lot of books. Allen [E.] Goodman wrote one. ' ; 68-' ; 69? RICHARD RUSK: That' ; s right. HOLBROOKE: I' ; m not sure, Richie, let me check. RICHARD RUSK: Okay. HOLBROOKE: Okay, now let me tell you a couple of other stories and them I' ; m going to give you some pre-questions, and then we' ; re going to schedule the second part. RICHARD RUSK: Okay. HOLBROOKE: I' ; ve seen very little of Mr. Rusk since 1970, but I have seen him occasionally. One of my most memorable things was that in 1980 President Carter, at my suggestion, asked Dean Rusk to lead a Presidential Delegation to Hawaii to greet President [Ferdinand Edralin] Marcos. And your mother and father and I traveled out on a Presidential plane to Hawaii. And he represented Carter and Hawaii to greet Marcos and to talk to Marcos seriously about some political issues. So we had a nice trip. And what was interesting to me there was to watch how little he' ; d changed. RICHARD RUSK: How little he had changed? HOLBROOKE: Yeah. How precise he was, how specific, how wonderfully he conducted himself. You understand, in my view, that the principles he stood for were the correct principles. And the fact that they didn' ; t work out in Vietnam does not in any way, shape or form reduce their validity. If we question the principles, we question the roots of our democracy. You father' ; s a man without prejudice and without bias and who' ; s lived by his principles in personal relations, in the explosive domestic issue of civil rights where he' ; s been a symbol of what is right or-- END OF SIDE 2 Resources may be used under the guidelines described by the U.S. Copyright Office in Section 107, Title 17, United States Code (Fair use). Parties interested in production or commercial use of the resources should contact the Russell Library for a fee schedule. video 0 RBRL214DROH-RuskVV.xml RBRL214DROH-RuskVV.xml http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH/findingaid
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
63 minutes
Repository
Name of repository the interview is from
Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Rusk VV, Richard Holbrooke, March 1985
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RBRL214DROH-RuskVV
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Richard Holbrooke
Richard Rusk
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio
oral histories
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
United States
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Subject
The topic of the resource
Vietnam War, 1961-1975
Foreign relations
Description
An account of the resource
Richard Rusk interviews Richard Holbrooke. Topics include the Vietnam War and U.S. foreign relations from 1963-74.<br /><br /><span>Richard Holbrooke served in Vietnam (1963-1966), was a member of White House staff (1966-1967), and was part of the Paris peace talks on Vietnam (1968-1969).</span>
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1985-03
OHMS
-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Dean Rusk Oral History Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
United States--Officials and employees
Politics and Public Policy
Description
An account of the resource
The collection consists of 172 oral history interviews with Dean Rusk and his colleagues between 1984-1989. Includes audiotapes and transcriptions documenting Rusk's life from early childhood in the 1910's through his teaching career in the 1980's. The interviews contain information on Rusk's service as U.S. Under Secretary and Secretary of State during the administrations of Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson and his involvement in foreign relations including the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War. The interviews also document his position as president of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950s.<br /><br /><a href="http://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&range=&collection=14&type=&tags=OHMS&featured=&subcollections=0&subcollections=1&submit_search=Search+for+items">View all OHMS indexed interviews in this collection here.</a>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Richard Geary Rusk
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984-1989
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Oral histories
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RBRL214DROH
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
United States
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
OHMS Object
Contains the OHMS link to the XML file within the OHMS viewer.
https://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH-RuskYYYYY/ohms
OHMS Object Text
Contains OHMS index and/or transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable.
5.3 February 1986 Rusk YYYYY, Richard Holbrooke, Part 1, 1986 February RBRL214DROH-RuskYYYYY RBRL214DROH Dean Rusk Oral History Collection Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Richard Holbrooke Richard Rusk and Thomas Schoenbaum oral history 1:|8(12)|20(8)|29(4)|48(1)|57(7)|69(4)|77(13)|86(10)|95(9)|104(7)|116(9)|129(10)|150(10)|164(7)|175(4)|192(13)|207(1)|217(4)|228(11)|238(14)|251(9)|261(1)|287(3)|298(14)|319(8)|334(11)|343(5)|353(13)|363(14)|387(7)|400(5)|411(6)|425(5)|439(4)|453(2)|464(7)|474(8)|488(4)|498(5)|509(8)|519(6)|533(9)|544(11)|560(12)|571(11)|581(4)|594(5)|608(6)|616(14)|636(8)|653(4)|662(12)|673(2)|686(10)|700(1)|711(9)|737(5)|752(5)|764(6) 0 Kaltura video < ; iframe id=" ; kaltura_player" ; src=" ; https://cdnapisec.kaltura.com/p/1727411/sp/172741100/embedIframeJs/uiconf_id/26879422/partner_id/1727411?iframeembed=true& ; playerId=kaltura_player& ; entry_id=1_l5ewcteh& ; flashvars[localizationCode]=en& ; flashvars[leadWithHTML5]=true& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.position]=left& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.clickToClose]=true& ; flashvars[chapters.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[chapters.layout]=vertical& ; flashvars[chapters.thumbnailRotator]=false& ; flashvars[streamSelector.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[EmbedPlayer.SpinnerTarget]=videoHolder& ; flashvars[dualScreen.plugin]=true& ; & ; wid=1_4hgz2erj" ; width=" ; 400" ; height=" ; 285" ; allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozAllowFullScreen frameborder=" ; 0" ; title=" ; Kaltura Player" ; > ; < ; /iframe> ; English 18 Critical questions for Dean Rusk Dick, maybe we can get you to comment in general, based on your readings of the transcripts we've done for this Dean Rusk oral history, on Vietnam and its emphasis on the events of 1968... Holbrooke contends that Rusk would never criticize the presidents under whom he served. He proposes questions about the Vietnam War and Rusk's actions therein to further explore with Dean Rusk. Johnson ; Kennedy ; Korea ; limited bombing ; Townsend Hoopes 17 657 The limited bombing halt in North Vietnam / Critiquing the Paris Peace Talks and President Johnson ...according to the transcript of the interview he gave to the Johnson Library, Dean Rusk was the proposer of that bombing halt in March of '68... Holbrooke confirms that Rusk proposed the March '68 bombing halt, but questions the prospects for its success. He talks about working on Johnson's March 31st speech, during which he did not know that Johnson would not run for reelection. He explains why the twentieth parallel was chosen for the limited bombing halt demarcation. Holbrooke criticizes the Paris Peace Talks in light of U.S. casualties. Bill Bundy ; Clifford ; Cy Vance ; demilitarized zone ; DMZ ; elections ; Indochina ; McPherson ; negotiations ; southeast Asia ; Tet Offensive ; Townsend Hoopes ; William Bundy 17 1356 Evaluating historical accounts / Lady Bird Johnson / Evaluating Ellsworth Bunker Dick, you've seen the number of accounts written of that period. Holbrooke discusses books written about 1960s and '70s foreign policy development and mentions Lady Bird Johnson's influence on Lyndon Johnson's policy and career. He compares positions between Ellsworth Bunker (U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam) and the diplomat Averell Harriman, with respect to the March 1968 bombing halt in Vietnam. Holbrooke claims that ambassador Ellsworth Bunker did not accurately relay the Paris Peace Talks to President Thieu. Averell Harriman ; biographies ; Clark Clifford ; Cy Vance ; histories ; Walt Whitman Rostow 17 1756 Relationships between Rusk's contemporaries Dick, perhaps you can talk in greater detail about the Paris Peace Talks and Dean Rusk's role as you best perceived it in Paris. Holbrooke explains that it was difficult to agree upon a place to hold negotiations between the U.S. and North Vietnam. He comments on President Johnson, Dean Rusk, and Averell Harriman's opinions on Cy Vance. Holbrooke also discusses how Dean Rusk and Averell Harriman perceived one another, describing a misunderstanding that resulted from the two men's differing value systems. Holbrooke discusses possible roots of Rusk and Harriman's tense relationship, including New York elections and legal philosophy. character ; George Frost Kennan ; international law ; Israel ; legalism ; Llewellyn Thompson ; will to power 17 2473 The Paris Peace Talks: The U.S. delegation and the role of the USSR and South Vietnam Dick, what came next after the issue of where we have the talks? Holbroke describes the Paris delegation, mentioning that Averell Harriman's defense of a full bombing halt was motivated by his desire to get Hubert Humphrey elected as president. Holbrooke explains Rusk's concern over leaks, and he talks about the conditions under which the U.S. would stop bombing North Vietnam. He emphasizes the Soviet interest in the Paris Peace Talks and mentions domestic political effects of South Vietnam's pulling out of the talks. Ben Read ; bombing halt ; cables ; Chenault ; DMZ ; Dobrynin ; Ellsworth Bunker ; Johnson ; Katzenbach ; Philip Habib ; Thieu ; Vance 17 3005 Bunker position on peace negotiations Dick, you blame the responsibility for that breakdown more or less on Bunker's mishandling the negotiations with Thieu. Holbrooke claims that Dean Rusk was not involved in Ellsworth Bunker's mishandling of the information between the U.S. and Saigon. He explains why Rusk allowed South Vietnam to back away from the negotiating table, citing better possible outcomes under the next president. Holbrooke briefly speaks about Soviet involvement and North Vietnam's tenacity. Harriman ; John Negroponte ; Johnson ; Kissinger ; Soviet Union ; Thieu ; USSR ; Vance 17 RICHARD RUSK: Dick, maybe we can get you to comment in general, based on your readings of the transcripts we' ; ve done for this Dean Rusk oral history, on Vietnam and its emphasis on the events of 1968, particularly the Tet Offensive and the post-Tet policy and review period. Maybe we could get you to comment on where you think my dad is with his thinking on Vietnam and what suggestions you might have for us on further interviewing. What are some of the questions we might ask again or rephrase, or questions that we missed altogether? And just comment in general on the project from what you' ; ve read so far. HOLBROOKE: Incidentally, it seems to me, looking at the transcripts you showed me last night, that he is becoming increasingly willing, perhaps under the pressure that you all have put him under, to agree that there were some profound errors in the way the Vietnam War unfolded. I don' ; t think he' ; s ever going to be critical of the two Presidents he served because that would violate the central principle by which he' ; s conducted his public life, and I don' ; t think anyone should expect him to be critical of [John Fitzgerald] Kennedy or [Lyndon Baines] Johnson. I think it' ; s also very difficult for him to criticize directly any of the senior participants he worked with: [Robert Strange] McNamara, [William Childs] Westmoreland, [Walt Whitman] Rostow, [Clark McAdams] Clifford, [William Averell] Harriman, all people with whom he had either explicit or implicit disagreements. But he doesn' ; t want to talk about those. On the other hand, when you detach them from personal comments, it seems to me clear that he is now much more reconciled to the fact that the American public rejected the war in 1968 and that this necessitated a shift in policy. And implicitly, he is admitting that there was something wrong in the way the war was conceived and conducted. Now the transcripts you showed me did not cover, and perhaps this is on other transcripts, the specifics of why the policy was rejected by the American public. Was it a strategic misconception in Vietnam? Was it simply that the war went on too long? Was it that the American public was misled by the press? Was it that Congress wasn' ; t supportive enough? This kind of question ought to be explored with him if he' ; s willing to do so. RICHARD RUSK: Right. He has said that basically the American people are impatient about war and we couldn' ; t tell them when the end was in sight. The influence of all the body bags coming back to the little towns around America, the influence of that war being fought on television, the press coverage of the war, the policy of gradualism-- HOLBROOKE: Of course-- RICHARD RUSK: And the Administration' ; s refusal to beat the drums of patriotism and deliberately try to drum up support for the war. He identifies those as the cause of this lack of support. HOLBROOKE: It would be interesting to know if he thinks that the war could have been won. What would it have taken to win the war and how would he have defined victory? I think that in fact, the American public was quite patient with the war in Vietnam. It lasted twice as long as the Civil War, and given the fact that very, very few Americans ever understood what we were doing there they were quite willing to follow the commander-in-chief for a long, long period of time. So I think that his feeling that the American people were not patient enough may mask a deeper failure in terms of explaining to the American public why we were there. Depending on how you date the start of the war and the end of the war, we were there in a significant way for at least ten years, ' ; 63 to ' ; 73, and centrally involved as a foreign policy crisis issue from at least ' ; 61 to ' ; 75: fourteen years. And that is not a short period of time for any country to be engaged in a war. Very few countries in the history of the world have sustained wars for as long as we sustained that one. And so I wonder about the issue of patience. As for his comment which he makes to you and has made many times before that he underestimated the North Vietnamese, the question then on that issue is: why the underestimation? And here I think that there ought to be more systematic exploration of the information he received from Bill [William Putnam] Bundy and Tom [Thomas Lowe] Hughes and George [A.] Carver and Dick [Richard M.] Helms and the embassy in Saigon. That happens to be the precise issue on which, as I described to you in my earlier interview, he and I had our first substantive discussion ever, in 1965 when I was back and staying with your brother David [Patrick Rusk]. And he called me on that Sunday, which I described, and even on that day which I remember so vividly now over twenty years later, he said with some agitation that the Vietcong were not ten feet tall. So why was he under the impression that they could be bent to our will if we used force? Was it simply that he thought that since we were the most powerful country on earth and the Vietnamese were clearly anything but the most powerful country on earth that our overwhelming firepower, even though not used, would be sufficient? Or was it a miscalculation about the nature of the North Vietnamese? It' ; s a very, very important point. Now let me add another point. He had lived through the involvement in North Korea of the Chinese in November of 1950, and he had known that had the war in Korea been confined only to a battle between the U.S. [United States] and our South Korean allies against the North Koreans that we would have won. In fact, we had won. [Douglas] MacArthur was at the Yalu. And the reason we were pushed back was the involvement of an outside force coming across from sanctuary. In 1965, the same thing began to happen. This is not to say that we had won the war in the south against the indigenous Vietcong, but you could make a case that if the North Vietnamese had not entered the war with main force units, that we could have at least held our own with American support of the South Vietnamese. But in 1965, just as in 1950, a new element entered the equation. Unlike 1950 where it was clear-cut and dramatic and the Chinese Communist Army caught the U.S. Eighth Army in the Chosen river in that disastrous and tragic battle, the North Vietnamese were much subtler. They began simply to infiltrate in small units. They had long been sending political infiltration into the south in the form of individual soldiers or individual cadre. Now they were sending small units. They were darting back and forth across the border into Laos or Cambodia. It was still many years before they began sending regular main line regiments and divisions. But nonetheless, the same general thing seemed to be happening in ' ; 65 as it had in 1950, and you need to explore in your discussions with your father why he thought that under these circumstances the United States could persevere. Now, as I read the transcripts, I get the impression that he wanted a political settlement, but you have not defined what he meant by political settlement. He has said in one of the interviews with you, and I completely agree with him, that the kind of deal [Henry Alfred] Kissinger and [Richard Milhous] Nixon made in ' ; 72 could have been made by Johnson, Harriman and himself in ' ; 68 on better terms because we had five hundred thousand troops in the country then and they were negotiating chips. I agree with that ; but what you haven' ; t asked him yet is why he didn' ; t try to do that kind of deal. Why there wasn' ; t a more serious effort made to negotiate. And this in turn leads backward to the decisions of March of ' ; 68 with an important intermediate stop in October of ' ; 68. In March of ' ; 68, what were they trying to do with the partial bombing? Were they trying to get the Vietnamese to the table? Or were they trying to build up public opinion for a continued war? Or were they not sure? Were they just under the tremendous assault of those sixty days between the Tet Offensive and Johnson' ; s speech? Were they simply trying to find ways to prevent the complete collapse of public opinion? You have to explore what he thought he was doing. SCHOENBAUM: By the way, last night I looked up in the transcript one of the questions we asked him yesterday on that particular point on the origin of that bombing, and according to the transcript of his interview at the Johnson Library, Dean Rusk was the proposer of that bombing in March of ' ; 68 and he was the originator of that. HOLBROOKE: I believe that. And that' ; s why I said to Rich when he was in New York last summer that I didn' ; t accept the Townsend [Walter] Hoopes thesis. I think you' ; ll find in the transcript that I say that although I respect Clark Clifford a great deal, I think the thesis of that book is wrong. I agree that Rusk proposed the limited bombing: that we would stop bombing north of the twentieth parallel. What is still not clear is what he thought he was accomplishing. I have a vague memory of Bill Bundy saying at the time that the chances were less than twenty percent that the North Vietnamese would agree to anything as a result of this. Yet we went ahead and did it. And then the Vietnamese did agree, in return for limited bombing, to limited talks in Paris: talks to be limited only to the issue of stopping the rest of the bombing. Now, I go to a very central point here which connects politics and foreign policy. I want to stress that I worked on the speech with Harry [C.] McPherson [Jr.] and Nick [Nicholas de Belleville] Katzenbach. I was probably the junior member of the group that was involved even peripherally in the speech. I knew that a bombing halt-- RICHARD RUSK: You' ; re talking about your involvement with the non-group in the Department of State? HOLBROOKE: Yes, but also directly with Harry McPherson. SCHOENBAUM: Now what speech specifically? HOLBROOKE: The March 31st speech. SCHOENBAUM: LBJ' ; s HOLBROOKE: Yep. I had worked on drafts. And I saw the evolution of that speech from a more aggressive speech in its early phases to the kind of speech that finally evolved just as it' ; s described in your interviews with Clifford and with Mr. Rusk and I hope with McPherson whom I feel you must go and speak to. However, none of us knew that Johnson was going to withdraw from the Presidency. Now I know that your father says that he had known for a year Johnson might pull out and he knew at the end that there was that extra paragraph. Harry McPherson tells a very similar story. But that begs the point, which is this: Johnson planned to withdraw in the same speech in which he did something dramatic in Vietnam. Had the people arguing over what to say in that speech known this, it would have profoundly affected the substance of the speech. RICHARD RUSK: In what direction? HOLBROOKE: Because the speech was being given on a Sunday night before the Tuesday primary in Wisconsin after the debacle in New Hampshire where McCarthy almost beat Johnson. Now, everyone working on the speech believed that they were working on a scenario for a president running for re-election. Even people like your father who knew he might withdraw did not know for sure that he would withdraw, and on that night. The limited bombing halt which LBJ did announce that night fit the scenario of running again. But had people known that Johnson was ready to sacrifice the remainder of his career in order to, as he put it, walk that extra mile to try to bring peace in Southeast Asia, in that eventuality some senior people would have gone to Lyndon Johnson and said, " ; Look Mr. President, you are going to become a lame duck the minute you make the speech and you will then have less than ten months in office remaining. If you really want to change the situation in Indochina, you can' ; t just stop the bombing north of the twentieth parallel. You' ; ve got to stop it all." ; Instead, Johnson' ; s advisors were operating without the critical fact, which was that they now had only ten months to go instead of ten months plus a possible four years. In that framework, they did not give him the advice he deserved. And he did not get the advice he deserved. This is not yet understood, but I am convinced of it. SCHOENBAUM: You' ; re talking about a total bombing halt, north and south? HOLBROOKE: No, no, no, no. I' ; m not talking about nothing to do with the south. I' ; m talking about North Vietnam. RICHARD RUSK: From the DMZ [Demilitarized Zone] on up. Yeah, okay. HOLBROOKE: Sure. Look, I' ; m not sure I' ; m being clear. Let' ; s be very clear on this. The North Vietnamese had said for years they would not talk about the issues in Vietnam unless we stopped bombing the north. We had said we wouldn' ; t stop bombing the north unless we knew what would happen afterwards. So we went through all these arguments about all these code name processes, the San Antonio formula and stuff like that, all of this. And we' ; d had a thirty-seven day bombing pause which had not resulted in anything because it had been limited. Now we come down to March of ' ; 68. Your father and Clifford, for different reasons, both advocated a limited bombing halt. SCHOENBAUM: The twentieth parallel. HOLBROOKE: From the twentieth--you all understand why the twentieth parallel--because the bulk of the population in North Vietnam lives north of that parallel. And south of it was not as heavily populated--well, not jungle but lowlands. We were still bombing in Laos, in Cambodia. That narrow neck of North Vietnam from the twentieth to the seventeenth parallel had many infiltration routes: central, very important infiltration routes. And we wanted to bomb that area because you would put more pressure on them so they couldn' ; t build up against the American troops at Khesahn and the DMZ and Quang Tri and all these vulnerable forward positions of the Marines which were taking very heavy casualties. So the tactical reasons for continuing to bomb that area were understandable. But my point is this: because Johnson doesn' ; t tell his advisers that he' ; s going to pull out, his advisers are giving him advice based on a fallacious premise. It doesn' ; t matter that your father says now and Westmoreland says and Harry McPherson says that they all knew that Johnson was thinking of resigning and they weren' ; t surprised. It doesn' ; t matter. They spent two months battling over a speech without knowing what the speech' ; s real point was: that Lyndon Johnson was ending a thirty-year public career and over Vietnam. And had they known, there' ; s little doubt in my mind that the Katzenbachs and the McNamaras and the McPhersons and the Cliffords and indeed Mr. Rusk would have pushed for, might have pushed in Rusk' ; s case, certainly would have pushed for in everyone else' ; s, for a full bombing halt. So what happens? March 31, a limited bombing halt. April 3, the North Vietnamese say we' ; ll talk but only about stopping the rest of the bombing. April 4, we accept. Paris in May. Then June, July, August, September: nothing. We sit in Paris. I was part of that delegation. And we exchange public attacks on each other and the election campaign begins. And then finally in the fall of 1968 a negotiation begins with [Cyrus Roberts] Vance conducting most of it in the suburbs of Paris, a very secret negotiation. But it is limited, just as Hanoi had always said it would be, only to the issue of stopping the bombing halt. Therefore, we come down to the week before the election with the Russians now heavily involved and everybody is going crazy. [Ellsworth] Bunker is trying to slow things down at Saigon. Harriman and Vance are desperately trying to speed things up in Paris to help [Hubert Horatio] Humphrey [Jr.] who was closing in very fast on Nixon. And Anna [Chan] Chennault and John [Newton] Mitchell get a hold of Bui Diem, the South Vietnamese ambassador in Washington, and tell him to tell [Nguyen Van] Thieu to stonewall to help Nixon. And as we all know, Nixon wins by a hair. Perhaps this was the decisive issue. But my point is that we wasted the whole summer, never talking about real issues because the limited bombing halt had created this dilemma. It might even have been better in retrospect not to do it. I mean, I would simply say that we got the worst of all worlds. We put ourselves in a negotiation in Paris in which we ended up yielding under the maximum glare of publicity, then arguing publicly with our Saigon allies. We had to give up in the second phase of the negotiation in Paris the thing Hanoi had demanded from the beginning, a full bombing halt. What did we get in return for the full bombing halt? The only thing we got was a meeting in Paris with both Saigon and the NLF [National Liberation Front] present. And that meeting we could have had in May, or anytime once the bombing was stopped. So for that critical summer of ' ; 68, a summer in which Martin Luther King [Jr.] and Bobby [Robert Francis] Kennedy were killed and in which the streets of Chicago went wild during the Democratic convention, we' ; re still bombing. The American public has given Johnson no credit for stopping the bombing of the populated areas north of the twentieth parallel because we' ; re still bombing and Americans are still dying. Indeed, they' ; re dying in the higher numbers than ever because the Vietnamese Communists have launched several offensives which have taken American casualties up even higher. So in retrospect, Johnson should have either, in my view, increased the pressure in Hanoi after the Tet Offensive using more military force--which probably would have been politically impossible--or alternatively, and this would have been my preference, stopped the bombing all at once and got real talks going with ten months left in power. Now either process was a very dangerous one. The Vietcong had been hurt militarily, although helped politically be the Tet Offensive, and they were ready to negotiate under the growing pressure of the Presidential campaign of ' ; 68. But I cannot stress too strongly the complete failure of the sixty days from the Tet Offensive to Johnson' ; s speech. It was total failure and heartbreakingly so. And I don' ; t blame anybody except Lyndon Johnson here. It' ; s certainly not the fault of Mr. Rusk or Clark Clifford or any of the other people who were under enormous pressure to figure out how to move. Mr. Rusk, in fact, was heroic in that period in moving the President inch by inch as far as he thought the President could go under the circumstances. RICHARD RUSK: Dick, you' ; ve seen the number of accounts written of that period. You' ; ve seen Warren [I.] Cohen' ; s Dean Rusk and I believe you' ; re familiar with Herbert [Y.] Schandler' ; s The Unmaking of a President. HOLBROOKE: I never read it but-- RICHARD RUSK: You saw it, huh? HOLBROOKE: Wasn' ; t Schandler about ' ; 65? RICHARD RUSK: He was there. He was working-- HOLBROOKE: I thought Schandler' ; s book was about 1965. But anyway, let' ; s go ahead. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah, you' ; ve read Hoope' ; s account [Townsend Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention]. You' ; ve seen a number of these accounts. HOLBROOKE: I haven' ; t read any of them in a while though. RICHARD RUSK: Okay. Who came closest to best explaining Dean Rusk' ; s role do you think and why? HOLBROOKE: I don' ; t know. I don' ; t think any one book has yet captured it, and you' ; d have to ask him that. But having read Cohen' ; s this morning, I' ; m more familiar with it than with the others and it strikes me as substantially correct. But it' ; s very sketchy and it leaves out a lot of detail. I think the best way to do this, in my view, would be to take out a huge blackboard and write down for every one of these days what each one of the witnesses says: Harry McPherson, Cohen, the oral histories, this book by George Christian which I think you ought to find, The President Steps Down ; and I think you ought to just see what each person says and you will triangulate in on the truth bit by bit. I also think, by the way, I think there are at least three key interviews you' ; ve still got to do: McPherson, George [Wildman] Ball, and Lady Bird Johnson. RICHARD RUSK: Lady Bird? HOLBROOKE: You' ; ve got to see Lady Bird. RICHARD RUSK: Why Lady Bird? HOLBROOKE: She is probably the reason he didn' ; t run again. SCHOENBAUM: She' ; s probably the only person he told before-- HOLBROOKE: She believes that he would not have survived a second term because of his health. And I think that' ; s probably true since he died in ' ; 73, as it turned out. So even without the presidency, he died just after the four years would have ended, and I think she was always against him running again. Secondly, I think she admired your parents very much and she probably understood intuitively, if she' ; s willing to speak, a great deal about it. RICHARD RUSK: Would she have advised Lyndon Johnson on the war in Vietnam? HOLBROOKE: I doubt she' ; d give him specific advice on the tactics but I think her role would be instrumental. I would absolutely go and see her. SCHOENBAUM: Now, there' ; s one thing you said yesterday afternoon that I' ; d like to repeat on the tape and that is the line-up on the March bombing halt. There were certain people in favor of the twentieth parallel. You said there were really three line-ups in the March bombing halt. Did I get that right? HOLBROOKE: Well, I think you' ; re confusing two things. I think I was talking about the line-up for what to do with Thieu in the Paris Peace Talks with the three options we had in March. In March, we could continue the bombing, we could stop it all, or we could do a limited bombing halt. I didn' ; t list the line-up there because I' ; m not quite sure about it. I think it was a shifting thing. But in October there were clear line-ups. And there was an extra-ordinary movement when these four very senior people, Bunker and Rusk and Rostow, clearly supporting the Bunker position ; and Harriman and Clifford, as supported by [Paul H.] Nitze and Katzenbach, supporting what I would call the Harriman position. This group included Cyrus Vance. The Vance-Harriman position was always to get the bombing stopped and get into the negotiations. Katzenbach and Nitze and Clifford supported that. The Bunker position, supported by Rostow and Rusk, was certainly not to do things to Saigon which would unduly create a crisis with them. And I think that Ellsworth Bunker, notwithstanding his very distinguished career and the great respect and deep reverence that a lot of people held him in, did a very poor job in Saigon in 1968. He did not report accurately to Thieu what was going on in Paris even though he had every cable. His conversations with Thieu were one-sided and he failed to find out where Thieu really stood. And he, in the end I think, virtually sabotaged what Vance and Harriman were trying to do in Paris. Now, a kind of a fraternity of good fellowship has sprung up in recent years, but at the time there was great bitterness. Ellsworth Bunker lived until last year. He was ninety years old when he died. He was an extraordinarily gracious gentleman and nobody wanted to criticize him. Averell Harriman is ninety-four now and everyone respects him, and so people have mellowed in their feelings about him. And the same thing is happening finally to Mr. Rusk. I' ; m glad for all that. I don' ; t want to continue forever the bitternesses of the sixties but if you' ; re doing a historical discussion, we might as well try to be relatively honest about it. And the fact is, I remember vividly that in September and October and November and December of 1968, Vance and Harriman were furious with Bunker: specifically, furious at him for his failure to bring Thieu along. I was there with them in Paris and their feelings about what he was doing were unconstrained, particularly Harriman. Harriman and Bunker had gone to Yale together in the nineteen-tens, although Harriman was a little older than Bunker--I think two years older--and they' ; d known each other for a long time, and Acheson had known them both. He' ; d been to Yale too. But the fact is that-- SCHOENBAUM: Do you remember any specific incidents? HOLBROOKE: I don' ; t remember the details. I just remember cables coming in from Saigon and upsetting people very much. RICHARD RUSK: Hold on for a moment. Dick, perhaps you can talk in greater detail about the Paris Peace Talks and Dean Rusk' ; s role as you best perceived it in Paris. HOLBROOKE: Well when the North Vietnamese accepted the idea of a meeting with the United States, the first phase-- END OF SIDE 1 BEGINNING OF SIDE 2 HOLBROOKE: The North Vietnamese and the United States were proposing all sorts of different venues-- RICHARD RUSK: Hang on. Okay. HOLBROOKE: At one point, the North Vietnamese would suggest Warsaw and at another point we' ; d suggest something that they wouldn' ; t accept. But I think everybody knew that the talks had to take place because after all, Lyndon Johnson said many times that he would go anywhere, anytime to talk to the North Vietnamese directly. And now for the very first time in the war, the North Vietnamese were willing to sit down in the same room with us. Harriman was designated as the head of the delegation. Perhaps he wouldn' ; t have been Johnson' ; s real choice. But he had mapped this terrain out for himself some years earlier when people did not think that there was a likelihood of any talks at all. And therefore, he was designated and Vance was sent along as his deputy. Now I saw in one of your transcripts that Llewellyn [E.] Thompson [Jr.] was Mr. Rusk' ; s preference for the deputy. I had never known that before because I thought that everyone involved had the highest regard for Cy Vance, that certainly your father did and Johnson did. And Vance had left the government only because of his back problems and he' ; d been called back to trouble-shoot twice already: the Cyprus crisis and the crisis in Detroit when there were the race riots. So your father had a high opinion of him. I remember your father talking to me once about the " ; establishment" ; which had played such a dominant role in American foreign policy in the forties, fifties, and sixties. And he mentioned [John J.] McCloy and Acheson and [Robert Abercrombie] Lovett and said that their natural successor in the next generation was Cy Vance. So I had little doubt that Vance was somebody he was very fond of. Johnson liked Vance very much. On the other hand, Harriman was a little suspicious of Vance at first. He regarded Vance as Johnson' ; s spy in the delegation. But after a while, they worked their relationship out in a very friendly way. And to this day, their personal relationships are extremely close. RICHARD RUSK: Dick, what about the Rusk-Harriman relationship? HOLBROOKE: Well, I never heard Mr. Rusk say anything about Averell Harriman at all of a negative nature. But Harriman always viewed Rusk with considerable suspicion, perhaps because Rusk held the job he had wanted so much to have himself, perhaps because of other factors. Their relationship had gone back to the forties. Harriman was virtually the only person in the equation who was substantially older than Rusk and came from an earlier generation. Harriman was the only person with direct links to the [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt era and he was of course, as we all know, born to this enormously wealthy family whereas Mr. Rusk came from a very different background. Curiously though, if they had ever gotten to know each other, they would have found that despite the difference between Arden House and Cherokee County they had both been brought up with the same respect for hard work and frugality. Harriman was very frugal with his money. He never--although he had an art collection worth millions and millions of dollars--he watched his pennies like they were going out of style. And if they' ; d gotten to know each other, they might' ; ve realized that there was less difference between them than their backgrounds provided. They both came out of the same value system and-- RICHARD RUSK: What about these other factors you talked about? HOLBROOKE: Well, why talk about other factors? They had worked together in the Truman Administration. And Harriman had wanted to be President of the United States. And I don' ; t think Dean Rusk had supported him even though he was governor of New York state at the time when Rusk was a very prominent Democrat in Scarsdale. I don' ; t remember for sure who your father supported in ' ; 60 but I assume he supported [Adlai Ewing] Stevenson [III]. Yeah. And in ' ; 56 who would he support? Stevenson. And Harriman had sought the Presidential nomination in ' ; 56. RICHARD RUSK: My dad' ; s critics have said that he was kind of weak Secretary of State in terms of leadership, and people really didn' ; t know what he' ; d think. Was that also the substance of Harriman' ; s problems with my dad? HOLBROOKE: I don' ; t recall that. I recall only one incident where Harriman claimed with considerable passion that he had had a talk with Dean Rusk prior to a meeting with Lyndon Johnson on some critical issue relating to Vietnam, that Rusk had told him that he would support him on this issue, and that they went in the room and when Rusk saw that Johnson was dug in, Rusk took a different position. And Harriman felt that this was contrary to their understanding and showed weakness. I am sure that both of you, since you' ; re students of Dean Rusk' ; s style and attitudes, would understand exactly what probably happened: that Dean Rusk went into that room, saw that Johnson did not want to be pushed, and just reverted to the first principle of his job as Secretary of State, made an instantaneous decision that he was not going to argue with Lyndon Johnson in front of a third party. And I' ; m sure this was a misunderstanding between Harriman and Rusk of the sort that is easy to talk about today but impossible to deal with at the moment it happens. Dean Rusk couldn' ; t go back to Harriman afterwards and say, " ; I' ; m sorry I didn' ; t support you even though I said I would but I' ; m not going to argue with Lyndon Johnson in front of you." ; And Harriman can' ; t go to Rusk and say, " ; You betrayed me, you misled me." ; Two value systems clash. These are busy men. They rush out the door. Harriman gets on a plane and goes off to Paris or wherever. Rusk goes back to the Department and tries to deal with some other major crisis or get the Soviet Summit going or testify on the Hill. After all, the job of Secretary of State is extraordinarily demanding. And Harriman goes on and says that Rusk is weak, whereas what Dean Rusk did was in fact a function of his value system. I want to stress that I' ; m not going to be judgmental about these things. You know, you and your father asked me to come down here and talk frankly, so I' ; m giving you some vignettes of things that happened a decade and a half ago. These two men, whatever the reasons, these two men did not like each other. They just didn' ; t. It may be that today, fifteen years later, Mr. Rusk has acquired a greater respect for Averell Harriman' ; s tenacity and his longevity and his commitment than he held in 1968. But the fact is, they didn' ; t like each other. And even when they traveled together--I first met Harriman in Vietnam when he came to Vietnam on a trip with Mr. Rusk. You know, there was always a rivalry there. Harriman was an extraordinarily aggressive man. He was, as I said once, the only ambitious seventy-seven year old I ever met. And Mr. Rusk was exactly the opposite: a person who never put himself forward, who was self-effacing, and served the President. RICHARD RUSK: Dick, there must have been a lot of tension between them prior to 1968, and yet Harriman was my dad' ; s choice to head that Paris delegation. Evidently they managed to work things out. HOLBROOKE: They may have worked many things out together and now they may indeed deny there was friction between them. But I' ; m merely telling you what I remember. And you know, I' ; m sort of in an unusual position here. I gather I' ; m the youngest person you' ; re interviewing. I was watching all of this from a very low level. I was in my twenties and watching the most senior men in the United States grappling with these insoluble problems. The tension was enormous. I learned a great deal watching them that shaped my subsequent conduct in public office and I have great sympathy for all of them. SCHOENBAUM: Would it be fair to say that this intense relationship between Harriman and Rusk--and I think you' ; re right--as I perceive it, it wouldn' ; t be totally negative, it would be a complex one. Doesn' ; t this have roots in the forties when Harriman and [George Frost] Kennan of course were advisers and Rusk had his battles with Kennan? Rusk was a proponent of the legalism school of foreign policy, international law school, whereas Harriman and Kennan were components of the more " ; will to power," ; the more pragmatic school of foreign policy. And although they had certain things in common, they had some very fundamental differences in the forties. Is that a fair statement? HOLBROOKE: I think that it' ; s absolutely true that the roots of all this come out of the forties. These men, and you have to add Clifford and Nitze to the equation, had all served [Harry S] Truman ; and now under Johnson their relationships were being tested. I don' ; t think Harriman and Kennan were quite as close as you suggest. Kennan was Harriman' ; s deputy in Moscow and there was a considerable respect between them at one level. At another level, everyone who knew George Kennan though he was a bit odd and that he was particularly uncomfortable in the exercise of power. Kennan, in your father' ; s view, Rich, and certainly in my view, was always ambivalent about the role of the democracy and foreign policy ; and in that sense, he was wrong. Dean Rusk has always stood very strongly for a very democratic approach. But the fact is that in the late forties, on most of these issues there were significant disagreements. The most important disagreement were over the creation of Israel in which you had Clifford on one side and Acheson and [George Catlett] Marshall on the other. And Dean Rusk was a Marshall man from beginning to end. Clifford was anti-Marshall and anti-Acheson. RICHARD RUSK: Dick, what came next after the issue of where we have the talks? HOLBROOKE: Well, after we finally picked Paris as the site, Mr. Rusk met with the delegation in his little conference room behind the Secretary of State' ; s office. Harriman had asked Katzenbach, who was then my boss, if I could be detached to go to work in Paris. I, of course, was delighted. I wanted very much to go to Paris. I didn' ; t know Harriman well at the time, but Harriman wanted me to come and Harriman liked to have small delegations. And that suited Mr. Rusk just fine because he didn' ; t want any leaks. Leaks were absolutely central to his concern. He was very worried when we went off to Paris. He was worried that the delegation would become a pressure point against Lyndon Johnson. His instructions to me, as I' ; ve told you before, not only to me but to the whole delegation, were that we would not discuss fallback positions. Not even internally! We were going to Paris to find out what the Vietnamese in Hanoi were willing to agree to if we stopped the rest of the bombing. There had to be a quid pro quo in Dean Rusk' ; s mind. We were not going to stop the bombing of the rest of North Vietnam unless we got something in return. The North Vietnamese position was that you stop the rest of the bombing and then we' ; ll talk about ending the war. From the beginning a lot of people believed--and I think Vance probably was in this group, Harriman was certainly in this group--that if we wanted to make progress fast, we would have to stop all the bombing. Harriman was the most political animal of the group, and for Harriman the cessation of bombing was important not simply because the war in Vietnam was, in Harriman' ; s view, a hopeless proposition, but because it was the only chance to help Humphrey win the 1968 Presidential election. RICHARD RUSK: Did Harriman bring all these concerns up, and the fact that he really wanted a full bombing halt to my dad, at that first meeting before you went off to Paris? HOLBROOKE: He certainly didn' ; t bring it up in my presence, but this was a formal meeting with the Secretary of State for the whole delegation. Harriman and Vance must have had a lot of private meeting with Dean Rusk and Lyndon Johnson at that time. And they went over to the White House and met with Johnson. I did not go on that meeting. Phil [Philip C.] Habib was at that meeting. I know because there' ; s a photograph of them. Harriman assembled a very small and quite superb delegation including Phil Habib and Marshall Green, Bill [William H.] Sullivan, General [Andrew J.] Goodpaster at first as the military adviser, and later General [George M.] Seignious [II], General [Paul F.] Gorman, General [Fred C.] Weyand, all went on to very senior positions in the U.S. Army. And off we went to Paris. At that point, I commuted occasionally between Washington and Paris carrying messages. I' ; ve already told you about them. The most dramatic moment for me was when Mr. Rusk called me into his office in August or early September, and told me to tell Cy and Governor Harriman that under no circumstances were they to make any further recommendations in normal cables. Any suggestions for instructions should go back through the secure telephone lines to Ben [Benjamin H.] Read and Ben would type them up and hand them directly to Mr. Rusk. Now, what did that instruction really mean? In our last interview, Rich, we didn' ; t get into what it meant, but I think it' ; s very clear. Rusk was hoping to help the delegation in Paris put its positions forward before the President and he knew that if they came back in cable form, they risked leaks and they risked counterattacks from Bunker who would get copies. So once again, I think that Mr. Rusk was being very precise and very careful and a little bit ambivalent. On one hand, he was trying to be helpful to Vance and Harriman. On the other hand, when the chips were down a month or two later, he sided with Bunker. But I want to stress because it' ; s been so obscured by the discussion of these issues that there was a titanic argument developing between Paris and Saigon with Dean Rusk right in the middle of it. And as far as I can tell, he ended up siding with Bunker. And that battle came down to whether we would stop the bombing, how we would stop it, and how we would then treat the Saigon government. In late October, we had in effect decided to find a formula under which we would indeed stop the rest of the bombing unilaterally, but we would state that it was with an understanding that certain things would happen after the bombing stopped. Circumstances that would prevail, a phrase which as my memory has it, Dean Rusk created. This-- RICHARD RUSK: And I believe the circumstances were that there would not be another major attack on South Vietnamese cities-- HOLBROOKE: And they wouldn' ; t fire on our reconnaissance planes, and that the level of violence would correspondingly decline and they would not attack or infiltrate directly across the DMZ. RICHARD RUSK: Right, no major attack across the DMZ. HOLBROOKE: Those were the circumstances that we said would prevail. RICHARD RUSK: And it was your impression that that came from my dad? HOLBROOKE: Yes. I can' ; t prove it but I am fairly sure that that phrasing came from him. But, we had extensive talks in Paris and Washington with the Russians: Mr. Rusk with [Anatoly F.] Dobrynin and Vance with the number two in the Soviet embassy in Paris, a man named Oberemko who was one of the most brilliant Soviet diplomats. He died of a heart attack a few years later. The Russians involved themselves very heavily at this point in the negotiations, putting enormous pressure on Hanoi to at least acknowledge the American position so that Lyndon Johnson would stop the bombing. Bunker' ; s role in this--I' ; d have to review the cables to understand exactly what Bunker did. But my memory is that Bunker' ; s parallel discussions with President Thieu in Saigon mislead Thieu. When we finally decided at the very end of October after around-the-clock sessions in Paris to stop all the bombing, at that point, Thieu told Bunker that he was opposed. And Bunker then came back to Washington with cables supporting Thieu' ; s position. So Johnson announced the bombing halt on October 30 and said talks will begin in Paris on November 6 or thereabouts--I may have the dates wrong by a few days--which will involve the South Vietnamese " ; who are welcome to come if they wish," ; I believe that was the final phrasing. You see, the Vietnamese--we had all along said the South Vietnamese would come. And at the last minute, Bunker sends a cable back saying Thieu says he won' ; t come. Johnson has already told Moscow and Hanoi. He' ; s scheduled a speech. So they rewrite the sentence to say the South Vietnamese are welcome to attend if they want. There are now about four or five days left before the election. Humphrey has caught Nixon in the polls for the first time, closing a huge gap. And suddenly Thieu is going around publicly saying, " ; I' ; m not going to that meeting." ; And so the American public thinks it' ; s a kind of political trick. SCHOENBAUM: And Mitchell was involved in that too-- HOLBROOKE: That' ; s when Mitchell and Anna Chennault made their contacts with the South Vietnamese. RICHARD RUSK: Is that in the record? Has it been written down? HOLBROOKE: It' ; s in Sy [Seymour M.] Hersh' ; s book on Kissinger. Have you read that? You ought to check Seymour Hersh' ; s book-- RICHARD RUSK: Dick, you blame the responsibility for that breakdown more or less on Bunker' ; s mishandling the negotiations with Thieu. To what extent do you think he was following Dean Rusk' ; s instructions and therefore, my dad may have been implicitly involved in this? HOLBROOKE: No, no, no way. Your father would never have wanted it to have happened. It was a catastrophe. For the second time in the year there had been another profound miscalculation, just like the one I mentioned earlier. This time the failure had been in Saigon. Your father was centrally involved in this discussion that was going to stop the bombing just before the elections and suddenly Thieu says I' ; m not part of this deal. And Bunker comes in-- RICHARD RUSK: On what basis do you think my dad was not involved in Bunker' ; s mishandling of the situation? HOLBROOKE: He was receiving these cables from Saigon. The only place where your father might be faulted is the place where everyone ought to be faulted: they didn' ; t understand the Vietnamese well enough to know that Thieu was never on board and that Bunker was doing a rather poor job, a very poor job. I know that this is maligning the memory of someone that everyone holds in highest regard, but that' ; s my view. Bunker didn' ; t do his job. When this exploded, however, Mr. Rusk had to choose between the Harriman position, which was essentially cram it down Thieu' ; s throat, or the Bunker position, which was we can' ; t do that to our ally. And he and LBJ sided with Bunker. Incidentally, this scene was replayed four years later, almost to the week, when Kissinger flew from Paris with an agreement he' ; d made with Hanoi to Saigon to present it to Thieu in the second week of October, 1972 and (unintelligible) well that comes right afterwards--the " ; peace is at hand" ; was his attempt to cover it up. He goes into Saigon on his plane and presents it to Thieu. His plan is that Thieu will sign it and he' ; ll fly to Hanoi. Then a couple of days before the ' ; 72 election, he will emerge in Hanoi with an agreement, just like Johnson had hoped to emerge with an agreement in ' ; 68. He gets to Saigon and Thieu says this is my death warrant and throws him out. It' ; s interesting that on the plane from Paris to Saigon, if you read Kissinger' ; s memoirs, he says that only one person on that plane was prescient enough to see that Thieu was going to reject it, and that person was John [Dimitri] Negroponte. Negroponte, who is now Assistant Secretary for oceans, environment, and science, was my roommate in Saigon and was in Paris with me in ' ; 68. He had lived through the thing in ' ; 68. He saw clearly ; it was identical. No one else saw. But it was exactly the same thing each time and the ambassador in Saigon each time was also with Bunker. RICHARD RUSK: Why do you think my dad sided with Bunker rather than Harriman when it came down to that final decision as to whether we would make South Vietnam show? HOLBROOKE: You' ; ll have to ask him. I think that reason probably was that Johnson and Rostow were there as well, that the election was lost at this point, and he was not going to--or the election was out of hand. Actually, let me rephrase that, because part of this battle preceded the election and it certainly wasn' ; t lost (unintelligible). Why would he side with Bunker? I think probably on the grounds that there was no way to bring Thieu to the table at this point. But you' ; ll have to ask him. RICHARD RUSK: We did, and he said it couldn' ; t be done. You just can' ; t make another government do something that they flatly don' ; t want to do and refuse to do. In other words, he' ; s saying that they weren' ; t our puppet, that there was a legitimate government there and we always maintained that, and we couldn' ; t abandon that position when push really did come to shove. HOLBROOKE: Well, I think they weren' ; t a puppet. I agree with that. But Bunker did not do a good job. See, everyone talks about this as though Bunker was merely a messenger. But Bunker was the American ambassador. We needed a more aggressive and alert ambassador instead of somebody who was already eighty years old, almost eighty. I knew Bunker. He had great bearing and dignity, but he was old. He was tired. He didn' ; t have the muscle or the strength for this. He had immense dignity but he wasn' ; t alert enough for this crisis. I think Bunker is one of the more overrated people in American diplomacy. I know your father won' ; t agree with me. Show me an example of Bunker doing something truly skillful in this area. He might have been skillful earlier in West Irian Jaya. RICHARD RUSK: You saw these cables that Bunker was sending and you were aware that that negotiation was being mishandled. Did you bring this to my dad' ; s attention? And number two, if he was not involved in that particular break-down, should he have been involved as Secretary of State? HOLBROOKE: I didn' ; t bring it to his attention. I was in Paris. I was part of the delegation which was causing the problem as he saw it. RICHARD RUSK: No, I don' ; t mean you personally carried it to him in Washington, but surely your delegation reported-- HOLBROOKE: Harriman and Vance were very, very upset, especially Harriman, who saw this as the probable end of his government service. SCHOENBAUM: And Rusk knew that they were upset? HOLBROOKE: Sure. Ben Read knew. We were on the phone with-- RICHARD RUSK: Could he have gotten involved and tried to straighten out the Bunker-Thieu communication? HOLBROOKE: It' ; s very tough once you' ; ve got your ambassador in place and particularly if you think he' ; s the best diplomat you' ; ve got in the diplomatic corps, which was everyone' ; s view of Ellsworth Bunker, and when Lyndon Johnson has said, " ; This is my favorite diplomat." ; Johnson loved Bunker. And so you can' ; t do anything about it when you reach late October. RICHARD RUSK: In all fairness to Ellsworth Bunker, my dad has always said that realistically, he didn' ; t think the North Vietnamese had any incentive to negotiate. Could the same argument be made for the South Vietnamese? Was there anything that Bunker could have done to deliver Thieu at the conference? HOLBROOKE: Well, the South Vietnamese had decided that they had a better chance of survival if Nixon won than if Humphrey had won. And they were probably right in that at the time. Although, as it turned out, Nixon betrayed them and sent them to their doom with the ' ; 72 agreement four years later. But they got four more years out of it and Humphrey would' ; ve ended the war faster than that. So their judgment was not incorrect, but I think that-- SCHOENBAUM: What were the Russians doing at that time? Were they trying to manipulate the election? HOLBROOKE: Yeah, the Russians, as I' ; ve said earlier, were trying to help Humphrey by pushing Hanoi into an agreement. But Rich, you' ; ve got to remember when you' ; re talking about Hanoi, and it cannot be stressed too highly, that Hanoi' ; s objective never changed from the beginning of the war to the last day of the war. They were going to take over South Vietnam. They were willing to do whatever was necessary. If they could do it with cadre and indigenous Vietcong, fine. If they needed North Vietnamese regular units, fine. If they could do it in ten years, fine, they' ; d take ten years. If it took twenty years, they' ; d take twenty years. But their patience was limitless. Their willingness to fight and pay enormous costs was terrifying. RICHARD RUSK: It exceeded ours. And my dad was aware of all that. And, really, for him to have sided with Harriman and Vance would have admitted, would have really meant the failure of our mission over there. He assumed from the beginning that there was no way to bring North Vietnam to a meaningful negotiation that would at all reflect the objectives of our policy. HOLBROOKE: And I think that when he got down to the crunch at the end, he was more comfortable leaving office and turning the problem over to Nixon than for presiding at the very end of an eight-year period over the dismantling of the entire war effort-- END OF SIDE 2 Resources may be used under the guidelines described by the U.S. Copyright Office in Section 107, Title 17, United States Code (Fair use). Parties interested in production or commercial use of the resources should contact the Russell Library for a fee schedule. video 0 RBRL214DROH-RuskYYYYY.xml RBRL214DROH-RuskYYYYY.xml http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH/findingaid
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
60 minutes
Repository
Name of repository the interview is from
Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Rusk YYYYY, Richard Holbrooke, Part 1, 1986 February
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RBRL214DROH-RuskYYYYY
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Richard Holbrooke
Richard Rusk
Thomas Schoenbaum
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio
oral histories
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
United States
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Subject
The topic of the resource
Vietnam War, 1961-1975
Foreign relations
Description
An account of the resource
Richard Holbrooke interviewed by Richard Rusk and Thomas Schoenbaum. Richard Holbrooke explores U.S. policy in Vietnam and in particular the decisions that led to such long-term U.S. involvement. Holbrooke discusses Johnson's March 31, 1968, speech announcing a limited bombing halt in Vietnam and his decision not to seek re-election. He also focuses on the 1968 efforts to negotiate a peace at the Paris Peace Talks, Rusk's relationship with Averell Harriman, the effectiveness of Ellsworth Bunker in Saigon, and the effect of the 1968 presidential election on the peace process. <br /><br /><span>Richard Holbrooke served in Vietnam (1963-1966), was a member of White House staff (1966-1967), and was part of the Paris peace talks on Vietnam (1968-1969).</span><br /><br />This interview is continued on <a href="http://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/RBRL214DROH/RBRL214DROH-RuskZZZZZ">Rusk ZZZZZ</a> and <a href="http://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/RBRL214DROH/RBRL214DROH-RuskFFFFFF">Rusk FFFFFF</a>.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1986-02
OHMS
-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Dean Rusk Oral History Collection
Subject
The topic of the resource
United States--Officials and employees
Politics and Public Policy
Description
An account of the resource
The collection consists of 172 oral history interviews with Dean Rusk and his colleagues between 1984-1989. Includes audiotapes and transcriptions documenting Rusk's life from early childhood in the 1910's through his teaching career in the 1980's. The interviews contain information on Rusk's service as U.S. Under Secretary and Secretary of State during the administrations of Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson and his involvement in foreign relations including the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War. The interviews also document his position as president of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950s.<br /><br /><a href="http://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&range=&collection=14&type=&tags=OHMS&featured=&subcollections=0&subcollections=1&submit_search=Search+for+items">View all OHMS indexed interviews in this collection here.</a>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Richard Geary Rusk
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984-1989
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Oral histories
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RBRL214DROH
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
United States
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
OHMS Object
Contains the OHMS link to the XML file within the OHMS viewer.
https://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH-RuskZZZZZ/ohms
OHMS Object Text
Contains OHMS index and/or transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable.
5.3 Circa February 1986 Rusk ZZZZZ, Richard Holbrooke, Part 2, Feb 1986 RBRL214DROH-RuskZZZZZ RBRL214DROH Dean Rusk Oral History Collection Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Richard Holbrooke Richard Rusk oral history 1:|10(11)|32(5)|52(5)|66(11)|80(12)|95(13)|116(2)|132(6)|151(7)|161(13)|193(11)|205(6)|220(7)|243(11)|265(6)|285(3)|299(14)|312(3)|329(9)|345(4)|360(13)|372(7)|387(10)|400(10)|411(10)|420(12)|431(9)|444(3)|457(11)|480(13)|496(9)|508(2)|521(12)|532(10)|551(1)|560(3)|571(14)|587(1)|597(2)|604(10)|617(6)|630(6)|641(5)|652(1)|664(9)|673(5)|685(8)|696(7)|709(17)|715(14)|731(4)|743(5)|755(9)|765(6)|779(2)|791(9)|802(11)|813(11)|827(2) 0 Kaltura video < ; iframe id=" ; kaltura_player" ; src=" ; https://cdnapisec.kaltura.com/p/1727411/sp/172741100/embedIframeJs/uiconf_id/26879422/partner_id/1727411?iframeembed=true& ; playerId=kaltura_player& ; entry_id=1_1t8yzts8& ; flashvars[localizationCode]=en& ; flashvars[leadWithHTML5]=true& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.position]=left& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.clickToClose]=true& ; flashvars[chapters.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[chapters.layout]=vertical& ; flashvars[chapters.thumbnailRotator]=false& ; flashvars[streamSelector.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[EmbedPlayer.SpinnerTarget]=videoHolder& ; flashvars[dualScreen.plugin]=true& ; & ; wid=1_ot6einta" ; width=" ; 400" ; height=" ; 285" ; allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozAllowFullScreen frameborder=" ; 0" ; title=" ; Kaltura Player" ; > ; < ; /iframe> ; English 0 Vietnam negotiations during an election year They would rather have--at the end it came down, they had only two choices left. Holbrooke talks about how the end of Johnson's presidency affected the progression of the Vietnam War. He mentions that March of 1968 was a turning point in the war and that the uniterd States might have been able to achieve a better outcome in negotiations that year. Holbrooke claims that neither side was willing to negotiate until after the 1968 Democratic National Convention. bombing halt ; elections ; Eugene McCarthy ; Hubert Humphrey ; limited action ; Richard Nixon 17 412 Half-hearted negotiations Dick, you raised the point that March of 1968 was a turning point, not only in the war but in Dean Rusk's point of view. Holbrooke talks about the toll events like Vietnam, civil rights riots, Bobby Kennedy's assassination, and French political protests took on the Johnson Administration. He mentions that the initial Paris talks and other secret negotiations were unproductive due to fear of press leaks, unwillingness to make unilateral concessions, and loss of leverage. Australia ; Charles de Gaulle ; media ; Nguyen Van Thieu ; private information 17 970 The State Department and Vietnam The second question is what I felt the significance of the seventy-fifth birthday party for Mr. Rusk was in 1984. Holbrooke mentions his assignment to the Foreign Service in Vietnam and Dean Rusk's 75th birthday party. He talks about senior officials' lack of knowledge regarding Vietnam. Holbrooke also discusses the quality of the State Department's and others' intelligence. Bureau of Intelligence and Research ; CBI ; Indochina ; INR ; Jack Foisie ; Vietnam ; William Harriman 17 1416 Marine Strategy in Vietnam / Intelligence failures I visited the Marines up in the Third Marina Amphibious Force Area, south of Danang, for a week in 1966. Holbrooks criticizes the Marine Corps strategy in Vietnam, claiming that the Vietcong often destroyed the Marines' progress. He claims that it was difficult for Dean Rusk and other policy makers to make good decisions in Vietnam because of intelligence failures and information blocks. General Walt ; General Westmoreland ; Henry Cabot Lodge ; Johnson ; McNamara ; politicized intelligence ; Vietcong 17 1817 State Department chain of command Your office was right down the hall from my dad's. Holbrooke justifies Dean Rusk's lack of consultation of junior officers. He also mentions that the Vietnam War divided the State Department. advisers ; chain of command ; Clark Clifford ; Foreign Service ; loyalty 17 2065 Rusk's support for U.S. foreign policy Your next question is... Holbrooke says that although Dean Rusk did not dissociate from harsh realities of the Vietnam War, he chose not to criticize the war because doing so would compromise his loyalty to Kennedy and Johnson. Holbrooke praises Rusk's eloquence and examines Rusk's values with respect to foreign policy. Henry Kissinger ; McNamara ; principles 17 2526 Strategy in Vietnam / Principles of the U.S. government The question is why things went wrong in Vietnam if the principles were the correct principles. Holbrooke talks about flaws in U.S. Army strategy and advising, and he contends that south Vietnam was too weak for containment to work. Holbrooke comments on public opinion as well as the moral dilemmas of government service in the 1960s and 1970s. bombing ; Clifford ; combat ; foreign policy ; Indochina ; Katzenbach ; military ; North Vietnam ; Pentagon Papers ; protection ; strategy ; tactics ; Tet Offensive ; Vietcong ; Westmoreland 17 3029 Ambassador Bunker and President Thieu / Health and decision-making I agree that you can't force a sovereign government to do something against its will. Holbrooke talks about Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker and missed opportunities to exert political leverage over the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu. He mentions Dean Rusk's avoidance of gossip and conflict with other cabinet members. Holbrooke comments on the effects of Rusk's health and fatigue on his decision-making during his later years. negotiations ; Paris ; peace talks ; pressure ; South Vietnam ; sovereignty ; Vance 17 HOLBROOKE: They would rather have--at the end it came down, they had only two choices left. The third choice, which was to turn over a successful effort in Vietnam to the successors, was not available to them. So the only choices they had left were to dismantle the war effort and begin to concede that it was hopeless or to hang tough and turn it over to their successors, whether their successor be [Richard Milhous] Nixon or [Hubert Horatio] Humphrey [Jr.], I think they would have made the same choice, but particularly when they knew it was going to be Nixon. They were going to, rather, turn over to Nixon the effort intact, with the bombing stopped of course, but otherwise intact rather than dismantled. Now if Humphrey had won, as a favor to Humphrey, they might have moved a little further to take some of the heat on themselves so that Humphrey wouldn' ; t have to do it. RICHARD RUSK: My dad has said that he thought that if Hubert Humphrey had won, that he would have moved quickly to an end of the war. HOLBROOKE: That Humphrey would have? RICHARD RUSK: Yes. HOLBROOKE: Yes, and I think it' ; s very possible that Johnson and Mr. Rusk would' ; ve have assisted him in doing that. But under the circumstances, I think that they did the only thing that was left to them which was not to allow their presidency to end with the defeat in Vietnam, but to pass the catastrophe and all its difficulties on to their successor. RICHARD RUSK: From Dean Rusk' ; s point of view, accepting that argument, was he right to take that position in October, November, December of 1968? HOLBROOKE: In October, after the election, there was nothing left to do. That was it. The South Vietnamese were certainly not going to participate in negotiation when they thought Nixon would be nicer to them than Johnson would be. And so we sat around arguing about the shape of the table. SCHOENBAUM: Does this explain something we talked about yesterday? Check me on this Rich. Dean Rusk has told us, and if I haven' ; t misunderstood Dean Rusk, the idea that in March of ' ; 68, basically that is what he identified as the key time as a change of heart-- RICHARD RUSK: A turning point in the war. SCHOENBAUM: Yeah, a turning point, and for him personally. RICHARD RUSK: And for him personally. That' ; s what he says now. That' ; s what he says in 1985. SCHOENBAUM: And this has always puzzled me. Why, if you turn around in March of ' ; 68, why then-- RICHARD RUSK: Why do you maintain the position? Dick, I' ; ll let you comment on this. HOLBROOKE: But my point is that what was too late to be done in October was not too late to be done in March. Had they wished to really turn around in March, instead of take this ambivalent policy, they might have done it. They might have been able to do something. Ten months might be long enough to negotiate an end to something. And we could have negotiated a much better deal in ' ; 68 than Nixon negotiated in ' ; 72. And twenty thousand Americans and an unknown number of Vietnamese would not have died. RICHARD RUSK: Right. HOLBROOKE: Let me make clear Rich, include it on your next point, in regard to Tom' ; s, that there was a prevailing phrase in Washington in the sixties which you hear a lot less of today, which was, " ; You' ; ve got to keep your options open." ; You' ; ve got to keep your options open. The policy which Mr. Rusk supported in March of sixty-eight was one that did keep his options open in his own mind. A limited bombing halt could fit either an attempt to rebuild American support for the war because we were trying or if, in the unlikely event the North Vietnamese responded, it could lead to the beginning of negotiation. As it turned out, we got caught in the middle because the Vietnamese response was calibrated to match the action. That is, our limited action got a limited response. So we then wasted ten months getting to the point which we should have gotten to in March. And I do not understand to this day, why, with all this endless retrospection on this traumatic event of March, people haven' ; t focused in on the simplest point, which was that it was another tragic half-measure. RICHARD RUSK: That' ; s right, that' ; s right. HOLBROOKE: Just like our--we should have either done it or not done it. As it was, we got the worst of all worlds, with a momentary euphoria which cannot be imagined now: the excitement of the opening of those talks in Paris. The world was watching. [Walter] Cronkite was there ; [David] Brinkley was there. The whole world press, thousands of people congregate in Paris, and we walked in the room at the Majestic Hotel on the Avenue Kleber and we and Hanoi read to each other face to face, the same kind of garbage we' ; ve been saying to each other through public statements for years. And then we tried to get secret talks going and the Vietnamese said, " ; Hey, you want to talk in secret? Fine but we' ; re only going to talk about the bombing." ; And we said, " ; No, we want to talk about the infiltration, we want to talk about the government and Saigon." ; Nothing. Mr. Rusk' ; s position in that period was absolutely no movement during the summer. He would not move until after the Democratic convention. Hanoi' ; s position was similar. RICHARD RUSK: You remember him saying that? HOLBROOKE: No, no, no but I do think that was his position. Hanoi' ; s position was also no movement until after the convention because they wanted to see if somebody like Eugene [Joseph] McCarthy might get nominated. They didn' ; t understand as clearly as we did, of course, that Humphrey had to be the nominee. They had no understanding of American politics. To this day, Hanoi doesn' ; t understand American politics. RICHARD RUSK: Dick, you earlier said that my dad' ; s position was to find out from the North Vietnamese what they were willing to agree to, in exchange for a total halt of the bombing. I think it' ; s tied to that. HOLBROOKE: Yes, but they wouldn' ; t agree to anything. RICHARD RUSK: That' ; s right. HOLBROOKE: Your father' ; s position had always been: " ; Tell us. We want to know what you will do if we stop the bombing." ; Hanoi' ; s position had always been, " ; You stop the bombing and then we' ; ll talk about everything else." ; RICHARD RUSK: Dick, you raised the point that March of 1968 was a turning point, not only in the war but in Dean Rusk' ; s point of view. I think it' ; s fair to say that there' ; s a lot of continuity in my dad' ; s thinking. A lot of it has remained constant over forty or fifty years. But there are some differences in his thinking on certain matters, and March 1968 is one of them. What he is saying in 1985 today about March 1968 is really somewhat different than how he believed back at the time. HOLBROOKE: Well, it' ; s the most important month of his public career. RICHARD RUSK: That' ; s right. HOLBROOKE: And he knows it. He knows it is important and he is clearly thinking about it although he doesn' ; t like to. We' ; re forcing him to think about it. I think he realizes more clearly now than he did then what was happening. You have to understand that the people who were trying to make the government work in those months and weeks were operating under tension so enormous that they, no matter how intelligent they were, they were not detached. They were bone tired. They' ; d been in office seven years. They were fighting for their lives and for the Administration' ; s survival. They were deeply--they were under unbelievable siege. It was tough, you know. And the Secretary of State had his son calling him from Cornell. (laughter) RICHARD RUSK: On top of all of it. HOLBROOKE: On top of everything. And the Secretary-- RICHARD RUSK: You' ; re durn right I did. HOLBROOKE: Well you called him after [William Childs] Westmoreland' ; s request for the two hundred, six thousand troops and that story came out in late February. And everything seemed to be coming apart at the seams for these people who had been presiding over America' ; s destiny more or less continuously since the nineteen forties, with some brief exceptions. And everything seemed out of control ; everything. And you' ; ve to to understand that the impact during this period of things, like [Martin Luther] King' ; s [Jr.] death and the riots in Washington and Bobby [Robert Francis] Kennedy' ; s death, were also very great. You can' ; t separate what' ; s happened at Columbia University, and in the streets of Paris, aflame with students seizing power, almost overthrowing [Charles Andre Joseph Mario] de Gaulle, who did in fact leave power within a year in a situation which emanated from this. There are certain years in world history--1848 was one of them, ' ; 68 was another--where things happen. And the revolutionary fervors reach high pitches. They always receive, there' ; s always a reaction. In 1848, there was a well-known reaction. Nineteen sixty-eight had a well-known reaction which is still going on. But before they recede, they leave wreckage. They sweep things away. That' ; s what was happening in ' ; 68. And while the purpose of your study is to focus on Dean Rusk, he has to be understood in that context. The Warren [I.] Cohen thing you showed me this morning hardly mentions that. And yet that is the sea in which he was trying to swim to safety. SCHOENBAUM: Good point Dick. RICHARD RUSK: Right, yeah. Back to the Paris peace talks for a minute. My dad would not discuss the fall-back position. HOLBROOKE: He wouldn' ; t even let on-- RICHARD RUSK: He wouldn' ; t even allow you to have one? HOLBROOKE: He wouldn' ; t allow us to bore him with-- RICHARD RUSK: Discuss it with him or even one with each other in Paris. HOLBROOKE: Or much more, he would not allow us to send cables or suggestions on when to make concessions if at all. He said he would decide on that. RICHARD RUSK: Because of fear of leaks and premature disclosure. HOLBROOKE: And pressure on Johnson which he thought would backfire. RICHARD RUSK: Was he right about the leaks and disclosure? HOLBROOKE: Probably. Although-- RICHARD RUSK: Would they have come from within your delegation? HOLBROOKE: We kept the secret negotiations secret for a long, long time. When the leak finally came on the negotiations, you know where it came? It came in Canberra. [Edward] Gough Whitlam, or [J.G.] Gorton, I can' ; t remember. I think Gorton was the prime minister. You can check. Either Gorton or Whitlam leaked it. We had briefed our ambassador. Canberra briefed him and he leaked it. There was no leak in Paris. There were widespread accusations of leaks. There was one member of the delegation that everyone suspected of being a leak. And as it turned out, he didn' ; t leak. I remember seeing, for example, Rich Smith, Hedrich [Laurence] Smith, who was the New York Times reporter covering the talks early on in the negotiations. Smith was a friend of mine and early on in the negotiations ; he and I went out to dinner in Paris. And I said, " ; Rich, I gotta tell you something. These negotiations are quite different from anything else I' ; ve been involved in the government. And I' ; ve never lied to a reporter, but I just want to tell you now that I' ; m not gonna deal with you if things get tough. And don' ; t expect me to be completely straight with you if you push me because the stakes are much too high." ; RICHARD RUSK: Right. HOLBROOKE: And then in the fall, in September and October when the secret talks began out in the suburbs and we had virtually no contact with reporters, I remember one day passing Smith in a corridor of the Crillon Hotel. And he saw me. I think I was with John [Dimitri] Negroponte. And in mock despair Smith covered himself up with his trench coat to pretend he was hiding from us because he knew we had, by now, stayed away from them. But he didn' ; t get the story. Nobody got the story. Charles Collingwood was there for CBS [Columbia Broadcasting System]: a very close friend of [William Averell] Harriman. He didn' ; t get the story. Stan [Stanley] Karnow was there for the Washington Post, a very close friend of mine, then and now. He didn' ; t get the story. We kept the security end of it. So was your father' ; s fear justified? Well, it' ; s a legitimate fear. It' ; s one that, as you know, your father' ; s had in every aspect of his Secretary of Stateship. The press was a central concern of his. He distrusted not only the press but he distrusted colleagues who had friends in the press like Chester [Bliss] Bowles. But that fear was not the real fear. I think his main purpose in this case went beyond the press. He didn' ; t want pressure to build up on Johnson for unilateral concessions. SCHOENBAUM: What date was that conversation? That was the conversation you had with Rusk? HOLBROOKE: No, he called in the whole delegation. RICHARD RUSK: At the very beginning, before you went to Paris. HOLBROOKE: The very beginning. SCHOENBAUM: So it must have been the beginning of May, because we went to Paris around the seventh of May. So probably--check it. You have his appointment calendar. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. Dick, my dad has a reputation for reticence, for not truly informing his colleagues what was in his mind. To what extent did that quality of his complicate your efforts over there in Paris? HOLBROOKE: Well, you know I was a very junior member of the delegation. So this was below my threshold. RICHARD RUSK: Do you remember Harriman saying-- HOLBROOKE: Have you talked to [Cyrus Roberts] Vance? RICHARD RUSK: No. HOLBROOKE: You' ; ve got to put Vance down on your list. Ask these questions to Vance. That' ; s a very good question. I cannot answer that question. RICHARD RUSK: Had we forced South Vietnam to the negotiating table, just flat out forced them or gone ahead with the negotiations without them if it had come to that, what would the practical consequences of that have been, say, in October 1968 when it became an issue? In other words, had Dean Rusk sided with Harriman and Vance and was able to prevail with that position with Lyndon Johnson, what would have been the consequences? HOLBROOKE: Once we reached the last few days before the election, it was impossible for us to get [Nguyen Van] Thieu explicitly to agree to come to the table prior to the election. We had lost any leverage we had over there. But we' ; re talking about four or five days now. You can always find ways to stall for four or five days. RICHARD RUSK: Right. HOLBROOKE: Had this battle broken out earlier, we would have had plenty of leverage over Thieu, and then he would have had to come to the table. We could have said, " ; You know, we' ; re going to cut down our aid." ; The Vietnamese government held us in sufficient awe for what we were capable of achieving politically just as the Filipinos hold us today. RICHARD RUSK: Turn off the spigot. I mean that was the major point of leverage. HOLBROOKE: Yeah, just the threat. And that could have been--but I want to stress that you can' ; t do things when your messenger is incapable of delivering the message effectively. And my view, which I suspect I' ; m going to be the only person to say this to you, is that [Ellsworth] Bunker wasn' ; t up to it. And that' ; s going to offend people I' ; ve been associated with. But that is my honest feeling. No one is-- [break in recording] [Interview continues with Holbrooke reading Rich' ; s questions, in a car traveling to the Atlanta airport.] HOLBROOKE: The first question was whether I had any connections with Dean Rusk through the Peace Corp service. And the answer is: none. Those are unrelated issues. The second question is what I felt the significance of the seventy-fifth birthday party for Mr. Rusk was in 1984. Had it ever been done before? I' ; m not aware that it' ; d been done before. I felt the significance of it was very symbolic: that you had a Republican administration honoring a Democratic Secretary of State, that you had sort of a reconciliation following the long struggle over Vietnam policy, and that you had people coming together to pay their respects to a person whom they admired for his integrity and sense of honor, even when they didn' ; t agree with everything he had stood for in regard to one issue which had swamped all others. RICHARD RUSK: You don' ; t recall any kind of similar function on that scale for a retired American Secretary of State? HOLBROOKE: I' ; m not aware of any, but you never know. When joining the Foreign Service, why did you choose Vietnam? Well, I didn' ; t choose Vietnam ; Vietnam more or less chose me. I spoke French. They needed to send me to a French-speaking post. I was assigned to Vietnam because I spoke French, because I was unmarried, and because they were looking for people for an experiment of (unintelligible) Foreign Service officers to A.I.D. [Agency for International Development], and I was one of two officers chosen for that experiment in 1962. The third question is about Americans learning to speak Vietnamese and who were the Vietnamese experts in the early sixties. I think that' ; s a very important point. Normally you' ; d expect in the government--that is as people get more senior, they get more expert. For example, in Soviet affairs, the most expert people in U.S.-Soviet relations were also the most senior: [Charles Eustis " ; Chip" ; ] Bohlen and Llewellyn [E.] Thompson [Jr.]. In this case however, in Vietnam, it was exactly the opposite. The more senior, the more ignorant. No senior officer spoke the language, only a few junior officers. And nobody knew anything about the country, the region. There was no tradition of academic studies, maybe no more than one or two people in the whole United States, maybe three--Joseph Butinger, Ellen [Joy] Hammer, and Bernard [B.] Fall--had ever concentrated in the area. A handful of journalists had covered the Indochinese war, but they weren' ; t experts on the region and anyway they were journalists. And so we didn' ; t have any expertise. You mention in your notes here Ed [Edward Geary] Lansdale. He certainly didn' ; t speak Vietnamese. He was not a Vietnamese expert. He had had some experience in the Philippines. RICHARD RUSK: He was considered the expert at the time. HOLBROOKE: He wasn' ; t an expert on the culture or the political situation. He did know some of the leadership quite well. RICHARD RUSK: Dick, was any effort made at any time during the sixties by any high level official, especially my father, to go back and restudy once again, or perhaps even for the first time, the roots of our involvement? Going back into the forties, and the fifties and the Geneva Accords, was that effort ever made? HOLBROOKE: No, I' ; m not aware of any such effort that was made to study the roots of our commitment. That would have been considered by people at the time a diversionary and academic exercise. Any contacts with Dean Rusk when he made his one trip to Vietnam is the next question. Well, he came over with Harriman in early ' ; 66. Is that the trip you' ; re referring to? RICHARD RUSK: No. There was an earlier one in, I think it was ' ; 62. HOLBROOKE: I was not there in ' ; 62. I didn' ; t get there until the spring of ' ; 63. I remember very well the ' ; 66 trip. I remember him and Harriman and [Henry Cabot] Lodge [Jr.]: three legendary senior figures, all had known each other for so many years, discussing the problems. But I don' ; t remember the substance of the discussions and indeed I don' ; t think I was present for any of those. Would more field trips have helped his understanding? Without any question. It is inexplicable that in a period of eight years as Secretary of State, a person would make so few trips to the region which was so central. And you cannot rely under any circumstances on official reporting through the chain of command when so much is at stake. It just can' ; t be done. Despite his experiences in CBI [China-Burma-India Theatre], did Dean Rusk really understand what was going on in Vietnam? Well, I don' ; t know. CBI was not the same situation as Vietnam. I think he understood what was going on through the prism of his values and his experience in Korea. But the central dilemma of building up support for the South Vietnamese government against the Indochinese communist insurgency was very tricky. And if he didn' ; t understand how deep the communists were into the fabric of Vietnamese society, if he didn' ; t understand how fragile the South Vietnamese government was, it' ; s not his fault in a sense because of poor reporting from the field. RICHARD RUSK: You' ; ve referred a couple of times to the bad reporting from the field and the inadequate intelligence my dad was given ; and yet in your article, you thought that INR' ; s [Bureau of Intelligence and Research] intelligence reporting was very good. Can you elaborate on that? Was he truly misinformed? Did he allow himself to become misinformed? HOLBROOKE: Well, INR had better analysis than many other elements of the U.S. government but they were not the primary source of insight or analysis for the Secretary of State and the President. That came from the embassy and from the Pentagon. RICHARD RUSK: Any contact with Jack Foisie? HOLBROOKE: Yes, I saw him once in a while, but Jack was very, very, very careful not to mix up friendships and his professional responsibilities. And I had never known Jack that well. I' ; d known Phil [Philip Manning Foisie] very well, and I really like Phil. But Jack I hardly know. Did my relationship with Dean Rusk ever help or hinder me in any way? Well, I don' ; t think it really hurt me at all, but it never was of any major benefit because Mr. Rusk was determined that it not be. RICHARD RUSK: What kind of job did the Marines do in Vietnam? HOLBROOKE: I visited the Marines up in the Third Marina Amphibious Force Area, south of Danang for a week in 1966. I wrote a report in which I was extremely critical of them, although I was deeply moved by their bravery. I felt that they were following a strategic concept which was completely wrong. They had manuals which they had brought with them, including the Marine manuals of pacification of Nicaragua in the 1930s. I still have one they gave me which simply didn' ; t apply to the Vietnamese situation. They viewed the area south of Danang as a beachhead which they would establish and clear and secure and then move on. The problem was that you couldn' ; t do that because the Vietcong were in among the people. So as you move forward building schools and infirmaries, which the Marines did with great gusto and the best of good intentions, the Vietcong were sitting right in the middle of your position waiting or you either to move on or waiting to ambush somebody behind you. I remember going out on a field trip once with Lieutenant General Lou [Lewis W.] Walt, who was the U.S. commander of the Marines. We went to a little village which was being pacified or developed by a company of the First Battalion of the Ninth Marine division. This was a Ninth Marine regiment, I stand corrected, the first of the Ninth. The Ninth Marine regiment had fought at Iwojima and Tarawa. It had battle streamers from some of America' ; s most glorious days in battle, and here they were in this little village ; doing all these wonderful things. But a day or two before we' ; d gotten there, two Marines had been blown up and severely wounded by a Claymore mine which had been set off electrically, apparently by some kids. And the Marines couldn' ; t understand this. General Walt couldn' ; t understand it. And I remember vividly General Walt squatting down in the sand in the village square and showing how the Marines were going to push the Vietcong out of the area like you push sand in front of your hand. And he pushed the sand in front of his hand. And I found myself unable to explain to him, having been in Vietnam now for two and a half years at the time of this incident, but being still twenty-five years old--I found it impossible to explain to this hero of the Pacific campaign of World War II that this just wouldn' ; t work, that this just wasn' ; t the way things worked. I knew it. I knew he was wrong, but he was a very senior and distinguished person and I was just a kind along for the ride on an embassy field reporting assignment. But I wrote up a long analysis of the Marine strategy which, unfortunately, I have lost. Maybe it' ; s somewhere in the files ; maybe it' ; s disappeared forever. It was both very sympathetic to their motives and admiring of their bravery, but also critical of their chances of success. And I remember calculating that at this rate, the Marines would need half a million men just to pacify the Province of Quinhon. And I gave this report to Lodge, who was still ambassador, and to Westmoreland. And Westmoreland was vastly amused because he didn' ; t like the Marines anyway and he felt that-- RICHARD RUSK: Although he was following the same strategy-- HOLBROOKE: Well, he was following a modification of the same strategy. But he was amused at the rash young kid who was criticizing the Marines. Lodge read the report with astonishment, and it was clear that he didn' ; t think this was the right kind of thing. And Philip [C.] Habib read it. He was the political counselor. And everybody read it in Saigon, but the decided they better not send it to Washington because it would cause problems and wouldn' ; t solve anything. RICHARD RUSK: Was Dean Rusk responsible for this blockage in communications flow, by his own attitudes toward intelligence, toward the way he conducted his office? Where does he figure in on this intelligence failure? HOLBROOKE: Well, I don' ; t think Rusk was responsible for the failure at all, but he was the victim of it. The system was supposed to provide him with information and then he would make policy decisions. The system did not give him good information, so it was harder for him to make policy decisions. It remains for you to establish whether a different information and access system would have resulted in him making different policy recommendations. But I want to stress it was not his fault this thing broke down, but he was the one who was most--he and Lyndon Johnson were the ones who were most hurt by it ; and [Robert Strange] McNamara. McNamara was much more responsible for it than anyone else, except perhaps Westmoreland. Did I or any of my colleagues ever consider confronting Dean Rusk on Vietnam? And the answer is that Nick [Nicholas de Belleville] Katzenbach and George [Wildman] Ball did. And so-- END OF SIDE 1 BEGINNING OF SIDE 2 HOLBROOKE: --that I had any problem in getting my views up to policymakers. I was 24, 25, 26 years old. I was working directly for Ambassador Lodge, or an Assistant to the President, Robert [William] Komer, or Undersecretary of State, Nick Katzenbach. All of those men were gracious and listened to my views. So there never was the slightest problem for me in making my views felt. And therefore, I didn' ; t feel that there was a necessity other than that. The only person I never got a chance to talk to directly who was involved in the process was President Johnson. And that was because Walt [Whitman] Rostow did not want that kind of meeting to take place. RICHARD RUSK: Your office was right down the hall from my dad' ; s. He knew you had been in Vietnam for two or three years and knew as much about it as anybody. And then you tell me that he rarely if ever used you. Why? HOLBROOKE: I think the reason for that was that Mr. Rusk had a very strong sense of what was right and what was wrong and did not want to cross formal chains of command except on the rarest of occasions: to talk to a junior officer even if there' ; d been a personal connection. Next question. By the late nineteen sixties, what were the effects of this war on the State Department and the Foreign Service? Well, the answer to that is that it had the same effect on the State Department and the Foreign Service that it did on the rest of the nation. It split them very badly. And the effects of that exist to this day. Next question. Why did your relationship with Dean Rusk cool after you talked with him on a Sunday in May ' ; 65, etc.? Well, cool might be a misleading word here. I saw him on that Sunday. I described it to you in the earlier interview. I left. I knew he wasn' ; t happy with what I' ; d said, but he didn' ; t change his friendliness toward me. And I went directly back to Saigon where I served another year and then came back and served in the White House. It wasn' ; t so much that his relationship toward me cooled. It seems to me what happened was that he became increasingly pressured by the Vietnam issue and he had never set up a private relationship with me in which we' ; d talk substance. Rich, you' ; ve got to remember that I was twenty-four years old and he was Secretary of State. I was his son' ; s friend. There was no reason that he needed to talk to me, even if it seems to you later that he should have talked with me more than he did. RICHARD RUSK: Let me explain in terms of Johnson and Clark [McAdams] Clifford. They' ; d been life-long friends. But when Clifford came in as the new Secretary of Defense, and then began to get critical about the war and raised some tough questions about Vietnam, Clifford says that, " ; It was almost as if this Judas appeared" ; in between the President and himself, despite their long years of friendship. And he' ; s referring to this impasse that had come between him and Lyndon Johnson because of his pointed questions about Vietnam. I just wonder to what extent my father was also a victim of that same phenomenon. In Johnson' ; s case, it was probably an insistence on personal loyalty and that carried over into official loyalty. But how do you see it in terms of my dad? HOLBROOKE: Well, I think it' ; s true that Mr. Rusk did not welcome advice gratuitously offered from people not directly involved in the issue. That was also true of Cy Vance when he was Secretary of State. For example, in the Iran hostage crisis in 1980, I was very close to Vance but I never talked to him about that issue except once I made a sort of general comment about it to him. He had his circle of advisers in Iran. I was not part of it. I was part of the circle of advisers on China and other Asian matters, and in those matters he had given me full backing. I couldn' ; t ask for stronger support. But on this issue of Iran, he wasn' ; t interested in my views. I can understand that. RICHARD RUSK: It was sort of chain of command. HOLBROOKE: Sure, he has his circle of people. And he trusts Bill [William Putnam] Bundy and he has George Ball, and he has an Undersecretary. He' ; s got a lot of people ready, and everybody is at him the whole time on it. Your next question is, " ; Based on your experiences with Dean Rusk, did he seem to disassociate from certain truths? He claims, for example, that he never heard much dissent from Robert McNamara. He claims that Vietnam did not drive Lyndon Johnson from the White House. He tends to underestimate what Vietnam did to this country. He says that he just doesn' ; t understand the ' ; tenacity' ; of the North Vietnamese. Was he able to honestly face the most painful truths and facts about the Vietnam War?" ; Well, that' ; s a very sort of emotional and emotion-laided question. I guess that my view is that Mr. Rusk has lived with himself and what happened in Indochina, as well as the rest of his career, now for a long, long time. And while it pains him, he is not going through the kind of internal agony that McNamara is. And he' ; s not going to, at this late stage in his life, to have a reversal, a mea-culpa. And above all, he will not be disloyal to the two Presidents he served. He was their first lieutenant, or their first mate, and he will not abandon them now, especially now that they' ; re not alive. It would be, in my view of Mr. Rusk' ; s value system, the ultimate betrayal. And because he is a man who is unconcerned about his own place in history, because he' ; s devoid of personal egotism in that sense, he is willing to accept criticism by outsiders--academics, journalists, facile thinkers on the substance of his Vietnam policy--rather than do something which he would never forgive himself for and repudiate [John Fitzgerald] Kennedy or Johnson, especially Johnson. So I think that' ; s the reason that he takes the position he does vis-a-vis the Presidents. I think in regard to McNamara and other secondary but very important figures, he' ; s showing some willingness to now reconsider what they all did in light of what you' ; re doing. And I think that' ; s healthy. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah, and I meant this question in terms of a trait in him that causes him to disassociate, to just not recognize certain things. And I tend to think it was a problem back then when he was in office, as well as a continuing problem twenty years later as an old man looking back. Would you have an insight on that? HOLBROOKE: These issues which you feel that he refuses to acknowledge-- RICHARD RUSK: And I summarized them in the question. HOLBROOKE: These issues which you feel that he refuses to acknowledge seem to me to be, almost without exception, a function of one factor. And that is, they are issues in which you are presenting to him new evidence which would require him to revise his judgment about people he worked with very closely, like Bob McNamara or Lyndon Johnson. And he won' ; t do that. But it does seem to me that he' ; s beginning to agree to examine some of the secondary figures in a more critical way. Let' ; s clarify one thing, although we' ; ve gone over it before. Dean Rusk is not stupid. He' ; s one of the most intelligent men and one of the clearest thinkers American foreign policy has seen in the last generation. He knows what American foreign policy is. He has clear principles on which he thinks it should be based and he knows exactly how to apply it in specific cases. So when he appears to refuse to come to terms with evidence you are producing in your interviews, it can' ; t be because he' ; s unable to grasp what you' ; re saying. It' ; s because he doesn' ; t wish to change his views based on that evidence when those views relate to the quality of the administration. That is what has happened here. And you have to respect it and allow him to carry this view forward even though there is an internal inconsistency which I' ; m sure he' ; s aware of, or else you have to try to confront him, which may be very painful. The question as to why some people labeled him as a secondary thinker, a view which, by the way I think is fading away, was primarily because of several factors. One is that he always used the same answers for everything, unlike Henry [Alfred] Kissinger or John F. Kennedy or McGeorge Bundy. When he went off the record, he was saying the same things he said on the record. Vance is very similar in my view. There' ; s no difference in on the record and off the record. They don' ; t believe in trying to manipulate their image by showing greater depth at one level than another. Secondly, he used very repetitive phraseology which in the sixties seemed to symbolize a refusal to consider alternatives. And not only did he use repetitious phraseology, but he had the additional burden of a considerable gift for memorable phrases and a certain eloquence. He was the man who coined so many of the most famous phrases of the sixties: " ; Eyeball to eyeball," ; " ; Leave your neighbors alone," ; all sorts of phrases which even today he still used verbatim without changing a word. Now if you compare him to Henry Kissinger, Kissinger is very richly textured in what he says about foreign policy. It has a great deal of nuance and a great deal of qualifications, and it dazzles people when they first hear it. But the problem with Henry Kissinger is that he doesn' ; t say the same thing all the time. He keeps switching his positions around. That makes him a little more interesting perhaps than Dean Rusk because he' ; s more elusive. But make no mistake about it, Mr. Rusk has the clearest vision of what the principles of American foreign policy ought to be and how they' ; re applied. And if it weren' ; t for Vietnam, if you could strip that one overwhelming issue aside, then his views would be very, very widely understood to have been those central values on which American foreign policy should be based still today, as it should have been in the sixties. Your next question is, why did Dean Rusk underestimate the North Vietnamese? I just want to stress that historians are not going to find his mind second rate and I' ; m absolutely convinced that that perception is already fading. It' ; s no accident that almost everyone who watched the PBS [Public Broadcast System] series with the former Secretaries of State regarded him as the most impressive of everybody. Now you want me to square--you say how do I square--I don' ; t understand the next question. The question is why things went wrong in Vietnam if the principles were the correct principles. I guess the answer is very simple: you can' ; t win a war simply with principles. And our strategy, especially our Army' ; s ground strategy, was profoundly flawed. The principles we were fighting for were not flawed: to give support to a country trying to help itself, rescue itself from the communist aggression. That' ; s a valid American objective and it proceeded logically from Mr. Rusk' ; s principles and from those of a whole generation of American policymakers. However, that did not mean that you could apply those principles anywhere in the world with equal effect. Earlier this morning, Dean Rusk said that Henry Kissinger' ; s problem was that he was looking for a global strategy to apply to 160 different nations. Well, in an ironic sense, we applied a strategy to the wrong nation at the wrong place and the wrong time. The South Vietnamese government was too weak. The North Vietnamese were too ruthless and too entrenched and too effective. Our advisory effort was too incompetent and ill-conceived. Our combat effort was even more tragically conceived. Our air efforts were very powerful in terms of tonnage dropped, but was of limited effect except in isolated areas. Domestic support for the war was by necessity limited in duration. And that combined to create a strategic concept for Indochina which couldn' ; t succeed even if the principles it was trying to make effective evolved. That' ; s all that matters. That seems quite clear to me. The next question is whether Mr. Rusk' ; s views were in tune with the world that he faced in the 1960s. Well, they were certainly in tune with the world when he became Secretary of State. The situation changed, and he made his choice. RICHARD RUSK: You' ; ve been impressed with the continuity of my dad' ; s thinking, but his views on a lot of important things have remained unchanged over twenty, thirty or forty years. Is that necessarily a good thing in a world that changes very rapidly? HOLBROOKE: Well, it' ; s tough to say. It' ; s admirable that a man can live for the same principles as the world around him changes. But Dean Rusk is not a closed-minded person. And as I said, the principles themselves strike me as just as valid today as they were twenty-five years ago, so I am not objecting to the principles. The failure is not one over twenty-five years. It was a direct failure that took place in three years: ' ; 61, ' ; 62, ' ; 63. Well, ' ; 64, ' ; 65 also, a five-year period. And it was the failure to understand that the strategy as conceived couldn' ; t work! It' ; s very simple. And I cannot understand why all of this symbolic argument about whether the American public supported us enough, whether the press undermined us. We all failed to admit the central issue. I was on the ground at Indochina. We failed on the ground. Now people who don' ; t know that are still reading the false reporting of General Westmoreland and his command, and of the embassy. Every one of those marginal improvements in the situation was simply temporary. For example, your father said this morning that after the Tet Offensive, they won a political but not a military victory. That' ; s not entirely true. The Vietcong did not achieve their full military objective. They paid an enormous price for that Tet Offensive. But at the end of it, they had done immense damage to the South Vietnamese. They were also spent. They had died in large numbers but they had changed the world forever and furthermore. Upon conclusion of that particular phase of the war they began massive regular force infiltration from the north which could not be stopped either by our bombing or our ground troops or least of all by the South Vietnamese. Next question is how did it feel to be working within the government to turn the Vietnam War around, in violation of Dean Rusk' ; s own personal code? Well, I' ; m not sure again what you mean here. I' ; ve read the rest of the question. This is just for your--I' ; m not sure what you meant by this. To my mind, I was working to give my advice to Nick Katzenbach and Mr. Rusk, and that was that. And I did not resign from the government on an issue of principle. I did not think that my role merited that kind of melodrama. And I think that was correct. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah, but Dick, there are some other things that you and a whole slew of people are doing in government to try to turn that policy around within the government. There was The Pentagon Papers. You were involved with Clifford' ; s group, although on the periphery of that group apparently. And Clifford himself and the people he surrounded himself with were actively trying to turn that policy around. Did this kind of activity carry some kind of moral dilemma for you? Was it a situation where your own principle came into conflict such as a good many of them did with my father? That' ; s the context I meant. HOLBROOKE: Not at all. Let' ; s be clear. I was a very, very junior member of the government almost accidentally thrust close to the seat of decision-making. I was privileged, in my own view at the time, to be that close to the policy makers. I never thought of resigning seriously at any point at all because I felt that I had access to these people and could make my views felt. Now, you mentioned the Pentagon papers. That was never an attempt to change things around. As I' ; ve told your father repeatedly, I was assigned to that project. It was supposed to be a secret study. It was not going to be for policymaking. Now, whatever the actual truth on that turned out to be, I had no idea at the time and I' ; m still a little vague now, although I have my theories. The fact is that I was not part of an organized effort to change things. I was working for Nick Katzenbach. And before that for Bob Komer. I was arguing the issues as I saw them at the time. I was not resigning on principle or part of a cabal. I would never have done anything to embarrass Mr. Rusk personally, in public or in private, for one thing. For another, I thought that I was in the position where I could do the most good from where I was. I was a very junior officer. A resignation might have made me feel good for a moment or two, but it would have proved nothing at all. Your next question is about the Paris peace talks. The Rusk-Harriman relationship I think we discussed this morning. The next question was, could Rusk have effectively taken action to force South Vietnam to the conference table? I think we discussed that this morning. I agree that you can' ; t force a sovereign government to do something against its will. But after you' ; ve made that blanket statement, you then get into the question of what you can encourage a sovereign government to do when you have enormous leverage. By the last five days before the 1968 election, we obviously couldn' ; t force Thieu to do anything because he was playing for a Nixon victory and he was going to wait it out. But had he exerted pressure on Thieu earlier, during the summer of ' ; 68, no question about it. And as I said before, I think the ambassador in Saigon, Ellsworth Bunker, despite the reverence in which he' ; s held by so many people and despite the admitted fact that he was a man of enormous grace and charm and decency and was very nice to me personally, despite all of that, he did not handle those issues well in terms of his relationship with Thieu. RICHARD RUSK: Was there really any possible way that the South Vietnamese and the North Vietnamese could have come to any kind of a negotiated agreement or formed any part of their coalition settlement, in view of the long history of warfare and the bitterness? Thieu said later in 1968 that, " ; You' ; re asking me to sign my own death warrant." ; Was that true even earlier, say in the summer of 1968? HOLBROOKE: October of ' ; 72, not ' ; 68, but I know it was a similar structural situation. No, I' ; m quite satisfied that I' ; ve answered your question already Rich. I think there' ; s not much more I can add. You have to go back and look at the cables and decide for yourself whether you believe that Bunker really pushed as hard as he could' ; ve on behalf of the United States to get Thieu to agree to the deal that was being negotiated in Paris, or whether in fact Bunker was so hostile to the intent of Harriman and Vance that he didn' ; t quite follow instructions. It' ; s a very tricky call. RICHARD RUSK: You definitely fell that there was a potential, there was a way that Thieu and his government could have been delivered at the first peace talks. HOLBROOKE: I believe there was, yes, absolutely. It seems to me possible that Mr. Rusk doesn' ; t want to acknowledge fully the degree to which there were deep splits within the Administration, even though it' ; s been written time and time again. Now, why he takes this position, I' ; m not clear on. But perhaps it' ; s that he didn' ; t want to hear about them at the time because he thought they were silly and petty, and be yielding to gossip in Washington, something which he abhorred and which everyone else participated in. It reminds me quite a bit of the man who preceded him as his role model, George [Catlett] Marshall, and the man who followed him, living up to the same principle, Cy Vance. And what you had there with Vance, I remember vividly, were people like Hodding Carter, [Anthony] Tony Lake, going to Vance and saying, " ; [Zbigniew] Brzezinski is trying to kill you." ; And Vance would say, " ; Don' ; t bring these things up. Don' ; t exaggerate the problem. Don' ; t create them. I can straighten everything out with Zbig." ; And so it took Cy two or three years to realize the facts. Now, in Mr. Rusk' ; s defense, I must note right off the bat that nobody ever tried to do to Dean Rusk what Brzezinski did to Vance. And as Mr. Rusk himself always points out, he had good relations with McNamara and Bundy. In fact, he' ; s quite right in pointing out that the three of them got along better than any subsequent trio in the national security apparatus. However, that does not mean that there weren' ; t serious policy disputes. Now, did these people bring their disagreements to him? I don' ; t know. I really don' ; t know. The next question: Was Dean Rusk healthy in that final year in office? What about the effect of fatigue? Any evidence of drinking or poor health? Dean Rusk was bone-tired in ' ; 68. Drinking, health problems? I wasn' ; t aware of them, or to what extent was it a factor. I was aware that everyone was tired and strung out. I was absolutely unaware of any problems to deal with drinking and health. And I must admit to this day, I' ; m unaware of any specifics in either area. Certainly Nick Katzenbach and Dean Rusk and others had a few drinks at the end of the working day but I have no evidence and have no personal observation that it affected them in any way. To the contrary, I never saw alcohol as affecting any of their decisions or behavior at any time. RICHARD RUSK: What about the effects of just sheer fatigue and pressure and crisis? My dad visited John Foster Dulles ten days before Dulles' ; s death, and Dulles told him on his death bed that had he been in better health, he might have done things differently in Suez than in fact he did. You' ; ve been close enough to this pressure to make a judgment as to whether pressure and crisis and the tense environment in which these guys operate influences their decision-making. HOLBROOKE: Of course health is a factor in everyone' ; s behavior, in the government just as well as in the rest of life. And of course, health can affect people' ; s decisions. But I don' ; t think in the end it' ; s quite that central. You know, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill were both alleged to have suffered from something called at the time " ; melancholia," ; which a lot of doctors today would call a form of manic depressive behavior. That didn' ; t prevent them from being brilliant. And I would not ascribe too much importance to the health problem. In Vance' ; s case, by the summer and fall of 1968, his back was in such pain that he couldn' ; t tie his shoelaces. He ended up sleeping on the floor of his office in Paris because he needed a firm support and no one could find a board for him to put under his bed in the hotel. The tension was unbearable and the pressure in his back, but I never saw it affect his judgment. Harriman, by this time, was seventy-seven years old. You would have thought that age alone--and Harriman was, at this time, the same age your father is today. Harriman was in that office all night long. He' ; d come in the office the first thing in the morning. He was driving everyone else crazy with the force and drive of his physical vigor. I never saw the health or pressure problems affect their decisions except that they were tired. But I don' ; t think it really changed things. It was the situation that made the decisions so difficult, not their fatigue or their health. RICHARD RUSK: What about the effects of what I call " ; combat decision-making?" ; With respect to Vietnam, my dad was making decisions that involved death on a mass scale: a policy that killed a million Vietnamese, eventually fifty-six thousand American soldiers. What about the sheer loss of life that' ; s involved in decision-making like that, and to what extent is that a factor? How would that have affected policy? How would it affect my dad specifically? Would it also have encourage him to lock into the existing policy, perhaps for sheer humanitarian reasons, the fact that, " ; So much life is being lost. Somehow we' ; ve got to make this thing work?" ; As David Halberstam puts it, " ; One dead American begets another dead American begets another dead American." ; It' ; s not the fact that they are indifferent or callous to the loss of life, but that for very humane reasons they have somehow got to make sense of what they' ; re doing. They' ; ve got to make that policy work. END OF SIDE 2 Resources may be used under the guidelines described by the U.S. Copyright Office in Section 107, Title 17, United States Code (Fair use). Parties interested in production or commercial use of the resources should contact the Russell Library for a fee schedule. video 0 RBRL214DROH-RuskZZZZZ.xml RBRL214DROH-RuskZZZZZ.xml http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH/findingaid
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
60 minutes
Repository
Name of repository the interview is from
Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Rusk ZZZZZ, Richard Holbrooke, Part 2, Feb 1986
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RBRL214DROH-RuskZZZZZ
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Richard Holbrooke
Richard Rusk
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio
oral histories
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
United States
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Subject
The topic of the resource
Vietnam War, 1961-1975
United States--Armed Forces
Foreign relations
Description
An account of the resource
Richard Holbrooke interviewed by Richard Rusk and Thomas Schoenbaum. Topics include the Vietnam War, the U.S. Foreign Relations Administration, U.S. diplomatic and consular service, the U.S. Department of State, and U.S. Presidents. <br /><br /><span>Richard Holbrooke served in Vietnam (1963-1966), was a member of White House staff (1966-1967), and was part of the Paris peace talks on Vietnam (1968-1969).</span><br /><br />This interview is a continuation of <a href="http://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/RBRL214DROH/RBRL214DROH-RuskYYYYY">Rusk YYYYY</a> and is continued on <a href="http://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/RBRL214DROH/RBRL214DROH-RuskFFFFFF">Rusk FFFFFF</a>.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1986-02
OHMS