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Dublin Core
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Title
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Dean Rusk Oral History Collection
Subject
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United States--Officials and employees
Politics and Public Policy
Description
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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
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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
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http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Format
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Oral histories
Identifier
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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-RuskLL/ohms
OHMS Object Text
Contains OHMS index and/or transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable.
5.3 Unknown Date Rusk LL, Interview with Dean Rusk, circa 1985 RBRL214DROH-RuskLL RBRL214DROH Dean Rusk Oral History Collection Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Richard Rusk Tapley Bennett Louis Sohn oral history 1:|13(14)|27(6)|37(8)|51(4)|60(9)|76(9)|94(9)|105(4)|115(13)|132(9)|145(4)|158(11)|169(10)|180(3)|191(7)|202(1)|219(11)|230(4)|242(10)|252(2)|264(10)|276(2)|285(8)|296(11)|307(6)|318(5)|328(10)|337(7)|346(15)|360(5)|374(7)|384(14)|397(1)|412(7)|429(6)|441(4)|454(2)|465(13)|475(10)|487(5)|497(15)|505(9)|521(11)|533(1)|544(10)|557(7)|567(12)|587(2)|604(8)|621(11)|635(3)|647(7)|657(6)|669(7)|678(13)|695(11)|705(2)|716(1)|734(7)|747(3)|763(5)|773(4)|791(10)|803(15)|820(4)|834(5)|847(12)|865(2)|873(3)|887(2)|898(4)|912(9)|926(3)|938(4)|950(10)|964(5)|990(2)|1000(11)|1012(5)|1025(12)|1038(12)|1057(13)|1069(7)|1083(7)|1097(16)|1108(11)|1122(10)|1135(10)|1153(8)|1168(4)|1182(10)|1199(3)|1210(12)|1222(14)|1237(6)|1251(1)|1264(4)|1277(7)|1290(14)|1301(10)|1314(2)|1325(3)|1339(5)|1350(2)|1360(10)|1371(4)|1381(10)|1396(3)|1414(1)|1425(10)|1442(9)|1454(12)|1468(1)|1480(11)|1497(14)|1510(6)|1529(8)|1545(7)|1556(15)|1569(3)|1586(9)|1597(5)|1609(11)|1622(15) 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_umfrmvo2& ; 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_ghq86sv8" ; width=" ; 400" ; height=" ; 285" ; allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozAllowFullScreen frameborder=" ; 0" ; title=" ; Kaltura Player" ; > ; < ; /iframe> ; English 0 United Nations military forces We are talking about the United Nations and with us today are former Ambassador W. Tapley Bennett, career Foreign Service Officer and on the way to Athens, I believe, and also Professor Louis Sohn of the Law School Dean Rusk discusses the military forces that are on call by the U.N. Security Council, and describes their responsibilities. Dag Hammarskjöld ; Suez Canal ; Trygve Lie ; U.N. Charter 17 788 Organization of the U.N. / Berlin and Vienna But coming to this particular point, there have been proposals several times in the United Nations, especially by Canada and Norway among others, saying that the United Nations should be better organized. Dean Rusk discusses several proposals that have been made to better organize the United Nations, so that they would be able to react more quickly to situations that arise. He also talks about the differences between Berlin and Vienna, which both had divided city sectors but implemented that policy much differently. Cyprus ; Dag Hammarskjöld ; Franklin Roosevelt ; WWII 17 1303 Issue of Colonialism Let's shift now to perhaps a different subject, again something in which you have been interested from the very beginning: the issue of colonialism and the sudden growth of the independent nations in the United Nations. Dean Rusk discusses the issue of Colonialism and the sudden growth of independent nations in the United Nations. He also talks about the Pentagon, Defense Department, and the State Department and their views on decolonization. British Empire ; Eastern Europe ; Franklin Roosevelt ; NATO ; Soviet Union ; Truman ; Winston Churchill 17 2131 Aiding Greece and Turkey Next question--I am kind of taking things chronologically as they arose during your tenure in the department--was aid to Greece, Truman Doctrine. Dean Rusk discusses the Truman Doctrine, which agreed that the United States would provide assistance to Greece and Turkey, who were under pressure from the Soviet Union. He also talks about how the Untied Nations was involved in Greece. Arthur Vandenberg ; Declartion of Friendly Relations ; General Assembly ; George Marshall ; Joseph Stalin ; NATO ; U.N. Security Council 17 2952 U.N. Security Council problem solving The other thing that happened later with it, in 1950, was the Uniting for Peace resolution which was part of the proposal creating a committee to deal with crisis situations. Dean Rusk talks about a proposal for the United for Peace Resolution which proposed the creation of a committee to deal with crisis situations. He discusses article 33 of the U.N. Charter, which states that going to the U.N. Security Council to solve a problem should be used as a drastic measure after attempting other solutions. Andre Gromyko ; Cuban Missile Crisis ; Dean Acheson ; Uniting for Peace Resolution 17 3504 Regional Organizations / Voting in the U.N. One thing in this connection with Article 33, and related to that, of course, is Article 52 about the regional organizations: one thing that is mentioned in Art. 33 is that you ought to go to a regional organization if available, before you go to the United Nations. Dean Rusk discusses the Organization of American States (OAS) and how they sometimes blocked Security Council action on the grounds that it was more appropriate for the regional organization to solve the issue. He also talks about the vetoing process for allowing countries to be part of the U.N. Article 33 ; Article 51 ; Article 52 ; Chiang Kai-shek ; Mauritania ; NATO ; Outer Mongolia ; People's Republic of China ; SETO ; Soviet Union ; Taiwan ; U.N. Charter 17 4070 Truman's views on Palestine Let's perhaps take another subject. One I was wondering about is Palestine, which is still now on the agenda anyway. Dean Rusk discusses President Truman's strong desire for their to be a Jewish state in Palestine (Israel). He talks about being asked by Truman and Secretary Marshall to negotiate between the Arab delegation and the Zionists at the Savory Plaza Hotel in New York. British Mandate ; Clark Clifford ; League of Nations ; United Nations ; Warren Austin 17 4571 Trusteeship proposal I think something that happened at the time that always fascinated me was suddenly the United States' proposal that Palestine be changed into trusteeship. Dean Rusk discusses the proposal for a U.N. trusteeship in Palestine to replace the partition plan of having two separate states in Palestine. He explains that even though this seemed contradictory to Truman's desire to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, he also wanted to create a solution that would satisfy both the Arabs and the Jews and not start a war. He also discusses the reaction of the General Assembly to the announcement of the Trusteeship Proposal. Clark Clifford ; George Marshall ; Jerusalem ; League of Nations ; Loy Henderson ; Middle East ; Soviet Union ; Warren Austin 17 5785 Amending the U.N. Charter / Expanding the Security Council Let's perhaps go to a few more general questions. I have seen you mention several times the importance of the Charter of the U.N., especially the preamble Article I and II seem to be especially cherished by you. Dean Rusk states that the U.N. Charter is usually amended through practice rather than by a formal amendment. He also discusses his feelings on enlargement of the Security Council. Article 33 ; Brazil ; General Assembly ; Germany ; India ; Japan 17 6173 The Soviet Union and the U.N. Charter How would you distinguish positions of the Soviet Union and the United States to United Nations? Dean Rusk discusses some of the Soviet Union's violations of the U.N. Charter, saying that they have been " ; major, far reaching, and very consequential." ; Hitler-Stalin Treaty ; United Nations ; Walter La Feber 17 6504 United for Peace Resolution Sometimes I disagreed with you on some policy subject. One was United for Peace. I remember having a big fight once with Ernest Gross. Dean Rusk discusses the United for Peace Resolution, which stated that if the Security Council was unable to maintain peace because of a veto, the matter could be referred to the General Assembly. The Russians were very opposed to this resolution because the U.N. charter stated that the Security Council had the primary responsibility for international peace and security. Article 12 ; human rights ; South Africa 17 6895 Budget Issue between Soviet Union and France Louis, can you help me remember the year in which the contributions to the budget issue came up, where the Soviets and France were taking a view? Was that '66? Dean Rusk recalls a time when both the Soviet Union and France were two years behind on their United Nations dues, which meant that they couldn't vote. He also talks about some budget issues in the U.N. Arthur Goldberg ; Lester Pearson ; Lyndon B. Johnson ; Paul Martin ; Security Council ; UNCTAD 17 RICHARD RUSK: We are talking about the United Nations and with us today are former Ambassador [William] Tapley Bennett, career Foreign Service Officer and on the way to Athens, I believe, and also Professor Louis [Bruno] Sohn of the Law School. What we have talked about in previous tapes regarding the United Nations has been the material I gave you, plus some discussion of the Congo situation and the U.N.' ; s role in that, and a little bit of boyhood recollections of my father about the League of Nations: his study of the League at Oxford. But other than that it is a wide-open subject. DEAN RUSK: Well I hope that we will take advantage of the presence of Louis Sohn and Tapley Bennett here and draw them into the discussion. Both of them are authentic experts on the U.N. and it would be a misfortune if they did not participate in the discussion and not just posing questions. Louis, why don' ; t you start off? SOHN: I noticed in one of the speeches you made in the sixties, you said that you were in San Francisco when the conference was being held. Could you explain what you were doing at that time? DEAN RUSK: I was in the San Francisco Bay Area. I had not participated in the preparatory work for the United Nations and was not involved in the San Francisco conference because I was out in the China-Burma-India theatre with General [Joseph W.] Stilwell. But in May 1945, I was sent home for a month of R& ; R [rest and relaxation], and I was in Oakland across the Bay from San Francisco and not at the conference. It was during that period that my son Richard got underway. Then I was, instead of being ordered back to CBI, I was ordered to the Operations Division of the General Staff of the Army, in a section which had to do with political-military questions. And there I found myself very deeply involved in United Nations matters from the very beginning. Then when I was demobilized from the Army in 1946, I became assistant chief of the division of International Security Affairs in what was then called the Office of Special Political Affairs, working on security aspects of the United Nations system. The head of the office under which my division worked was Alger Hiss. Well after having been there for several months, I was asked to come back across the Potomac again to become a special assistant for Secretary of War Robert [Porter] Patterson. There again on that job I had a lot of things to do with United Nations and United Nations policy: the launching of the new U.N. Well, after I had been there George [Catlett] Marshall became Secretary of State. And he asked me once again to cross the Potomac and take Alger Hiss' ; place as director of that office which, in effect, was United Nations Affairs. So that is where I was at the beginning. I was not one of the founders in any sense of the U.N. SOHN: But I noticed in your papers that you got involved very quickly both at the Pentagon and in the State Department in something that always interested me very much, namely, the military forces for the United Nations. And I saw that you wrote one of the best papers on the subject, and I was wondering what the paper was about. DEAN RUSK: In the Charter under Chapter 7 it provides for military forces on call by the U.N. Security Council: forces which were to be under the direction of a military staff committee made up of senior officers from the five permanent members of the Security Council. I was much involved in the initial negotiations with the Soviet Union and others about establishing those U.N. forces. In retrospect I think we overplayed our hand a bit because on the American side we had come out of World War II with disproportionate air force and naval strength compared to the Soviet Union, and we wanted disproportionate naval and air forces in the U.N. force, provided largely by the United States and Britain. The Soviets insisted upon exact equality in all branches, man for man, plane for plane, ship for ship, and therefore these negotiations did not get anywhere. In retrospect, I think perhaps we might have accepted the idea of complete equality in the various forces committed to the U.N. But as a practical matter, had those forces been established, it is very unlikely that the five permanent members of the Security Council would have been in agreement about the employment of those forces. But in any event, ever since then the military staff committee which still exists is simply a pro forma business. For years and years they met, once a month. I don' ; t know if they still do. SOHN: They do. DEAN RUSK: --meet for about two or three minutes and adjourn. BENNETT: We used to have a delegation stationed in New York. We no longer have that. They come up from Washington. DEAN RUSK: But it is useful to have senior military available to our delegate to the United Nations up there. Among other things they usually have a boat that you can use to take other delegates around Manhattan Island for lunch, things like that. BENNETT: That' ; s right. I have availed myself of that privilege. DEAN RUSK: Anyway, that' ; s how I became involved in the U.N. SOHN: What kinds of solutions were you thinking about at the time for the direction of the force? Was it to have a commander-in-chief or something like that, or be only run by that five-member military committee? DEAN RUSK: Well, we thought if such a force were ever used that it would be under the command of a designated commander for that particular operation. We didn' ; t have in mind a supreme commander for U.N. forces on a continuing basis such as we have in NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization]. But there has been one weakness all along when forces have been used under the auspice of the U.N.: that is that there is no effective backup support in terms of logistics, general staff, and things of that sort, intelligence services. During the Congo operation the force in the Congo was being operated by Ralph [J.] Bunche out of his vest pocket. He had no real help or major assistance around him and so--but I suppose that had those forces ever been used, the logistic support would have been planned for. And I suppose the United States would have played a major role in the logistic backup of such a force, as indeed we did in the Congo later on. SOHN: Of course, it could have been done in such a way as it was done in the Suez crisis when the U.N. forces got in somewhere in Italy and then an airline was hired to bring them to Suez. DEAN RUSK: Yes, but you see these things are extraordinarily expensive and I don' ; t think that element was properly taken into account at the time of the early negotiations based on the Charter. The U.N. found, for example, that it had to borrow a hundred million dollars from the United States to help finance the Congo operation. Military operations, when you take into account all the support and supplies they have to have, transportation and the rest of it, are very expensive things, and this was a very serious challenge to the financial capabilities of the U.N. BENNETT: Even today, you have large deficits in your peacekeeping operations, largely because the Soviets have consistently--and I think it probably began with the Congo operations--refused to pay, and the French somewhat less so. And they' ; ve been the two principal ones who haven' ; t contributed. DEAN RUSK: Right. SOHN: One more point I would like to raise about this issue: Remember the Trygve Lie proposal that there should be a United Nations' ; own force, that this contingent business was not really working because he had to go around and beg people for providing some forces, and had to give certain guarantees, not subject them to any fighting and so on, and he felt that there should be a United Nations' ; own force composed of volunteers being servants of the U.N. directly rather than simply contingent. I gather that the State Department did not like that. DEAN RUSK: We didn' ; t like that very much because, although we were in favor of a strong Secretary General, we did not think that there should be U.N. forces that could possibly be employed by the Secretary General on his own authority. We did discuss the matter of substantially enlarging the guard force around the U.N. Headquarters itself so that out of that could be drawn observer missions, things of that sort, for particular disputes. But I think also we were concerned about the cost of such a force ; I think we perhaps knew more about the costs of military units than Trygve Lie did. We were then paying over forty percent of the U.N. budget, and so we took the negative view on that suggestion. BENNETT: It is interesting that even today the Norwegian government keeps an element of its forces earmarked for the United Nations. They really believed in this. And I recall at one time, when I was there in the seventies, we were organizing a force for something in the Middle East and the Norwegians were not chosen to serve because, under the Soviet balancing two sides, there were enough westerners, so they objected to having Norwegians. The Norwegians were very put out that their force could not be used for this. DEAN RUSK: When it became clear that there was not going to be a U.N. force made up by the five permanent members of the Security Council, this role fell onto the shoulders of the middle-sized countries: countries like Canada, Ireland, Sweden, and Norway, and Nigeria, and quite a number of others. Brazil, I think, had some forces in the Congo operation, and some of them--Well Canada has taken a good deal of initiative in trying to stimulate this idea to get forces specially trained for U.N. service. My hunch is that U.N . forces cannot be used to wage war, that they simply do not have that capability. But they can play a very important role in manning truce lines and in watching the situation and reporting back on various things of that sort. But I think we are not yet at the point where the United Nations itself can wage war in the usual sense. BENNETT: Nor do I think you can say that the U.N. can' ; t make peace, that they can keep the peace and help others to come to some truce. SOHN: But coming to this particular point, there have been proposals several times in the United Nations, especially by Canada and Norway among others, saying that the United Nations should be better organized. They should really have at least a planning staff for the purpose and that they should have commitment from governments like the United States that wherever something happens, the logistical facilities would be available to get people there fast. The question people very often mention is related to Cyprus. Everybody agreed that the Cyprus thing would explode, I believe it was 1964, if the United Nations does not step in quickly. And it was agreed by the parties that they should step quickly. But the Secretary General had to negotiate with Norway and other countries for the contingents, etcetera, and that took several weeks. And by that time the Near East started fighting. And by that time people got angry and feelings got high, etcetera. And as a result we have had the mess ever since. I heard people say if they would go there immediately, if they had the facilities and abilities to get there in twenty-four hours, that would make a tremendous difference. DEAN RUSK: Yes. I once talked with Ralph Bunche about the possibility of a skeleton general staff at the U.N. patterned after the usual general staff arrangements of most countries. You have a G-l in charge of personnel, and that person would be in charge of recruiting national contingents for a U.N. force. Then you would have G-2 for intelligence The U.N. has only a limited capacity for intelligence in the usual sense, but yet they ought to have somebody who can receive intelligence from member nations, then a G-3 for operations and a G-4, very important for logistic support. But since we did not have formal troops under Chapter 7 of the Charter, Ralph thought that the Secretary General of that time would not want to proceed. That was when Dag [Hjalmar Agne Carl] Hammarskjöld was still Secretary General. RICHARD RUSK: If I can return to this one question you raised about composition of the military force for the U.N., looking back over the years do you think it really was possible for the United States and the Soviets to have come to an agreement on the composition of that force in view of all the tensions and the rivalries? DEAN RUSK: I think it is possible that we could have agreed on the force, but I doubt that we could have agreed on how, when, and where to use that force which would have been necessary if the U.N. forces were to come into being. Now it is true that later on we and the Soviets agreed to certain U.N. forces here and there. But I think in those early days we would not have agreed on the situations where U.N. forces might be used. RICHARD RUSK: Would the very agreement on those forces have led to a greater spirit of cooperation between us and the Soviets and perhaps made it possible to take a joint approach toward Cyprus? DEAN RUSK: I would suppose perhaps in a marginal way. It at least would have given the military staff committee something to talk about. But I think it would be only marginal in terms of the problems we were having with Joseph Stalin on a wide range of issues at that time. By the way, let me say when I went to the Pentagon in the summer of 1945, it was not just the so-called military aspects of the Charter we were interested in. During World War II Franklin Roosevelt turned to Secretary of War Henry [Lewis] Stimson, who after all had been a former Secretary of State, and to Chief of Staff George Marshall for a wide range of foreign policy matters that were somehow related to the war. And during that period a good deal of the normal responsibility of the State Department seemed to shift over to the Pentagon for a period so that my section of the General Staff was involved in a great many foreign policy issues which normally would have been a State Department function. SOHN: One thing that always fascinated me, and again connected with this subject, is the differences between Berlin and Vienna. In Berlin you divided the city in sectors and each country was in charge of that sector. In Vienna somehow you were able to agree to joint supervision. And I remember being there once, and there was a jeep with four people in different uniforms: one Frenchman, one Russian, one American, and one British. And those jeeps were keeping peace in the city jointly. And I thought that was a much better arrangement and much safer. DEAN RUSK: Well I think, happily for Austria and Vienna, Austria was not caught up in the tremendous sensitivity, bitterness, hatred of the Russians toward the Germans, nearly to the extent we found when we were dealing with German and Berlin questions. The theory in Berlin was that we do just what they were doing in Vienna, but that broke down at a very early stage. And I think the political position of Berlin was much more important to the Russians and much more sensitive for all of us than was the situation in Vienna. Fortunately, during one of the transitions in the Soviet government during the Eisenhower administration, we were able to obtain the Austrian State Treaty after hundreds of negotiating sessions which removed all occupying forces from Austria and let them go forward as independent and neutral. But we have never been able to make any headway on that kind of result as far as Germany is concerned. SOHN: No neutral Berlin? DEAN RUSK: No. You see Berlin is over a hundred kilometers inside the territory of East Germany and it appears to be a tempting target for the East Germans and the Soviets. From a strictly military point of view it is an untenable position militarily because West Berlin is surrounded by East German and Soviet divisions. But the presence of U.S., British, and French forces there, as a token force, represents the presence of these three nations in West Berlin. And so we have had to make it very clear to the Russians that after all, at the end of the day, Berlin is not vulnerable because we are there. And I think also a telling point for the Russians has been that it is in the Russian interest that Germany' ; s armed forces are a part of NATO forces and that the British, the French, and ourselves are present in Berlin as a kind of guarantor of the stability of the situation over against the Germans. I think there were times when the Russians seemed to take that point into consideration. SOHN: Let' ; s shift now to perhaps a different subject, again something in which you have been interested from the very beginning: the issue of colonialism and the sudden growth of the independent nations in the United Nations. I was always wondering what happened in those early years where the State Department--of course the European bureaus of the various desks, the French Desk, British Desk, etc., must have been strongly for keeping the Empire. On the other hand, I believe that the leadership of the State Department accepted very quickly the idea that this is something that the United States should be for. In studying even the San Francisco Conference, where I remember there was a big trouble about this particular issue, and that' ; s how you got this very unclear Article 73 in the Charter, which provides a kind of acceptance by the colonial powers that there would be some slight responsibility to the U.N. but not too much. But the United States seems to have been always pushing that, even at Yalta. DEAN RUSK: Well, during the period when I was head of the U.N. Bureau during the Truman administration, it is true that I had a good many disagreements with my colleagues in the Bureau of European Affairs, for example, about these colonial areas. As you will remember Franklin Roosevelt thought that the great colonial areas of Asia, India, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, Indochina, should come out of World War II as independent nations. But he was strongly opposed on that idea by Winston Churchill. But then Franklin Roosevelt pretty much lost interest in this subject around the first of the year 1945 and did not pursue it any further. Maybe he was getting old and ill ; maybe he was just tired of butting his head up against Winston Churchill. But when President Truman came in he was very much involved with problems of the occupation of Germany and in completing the war against Japan, and he did not, himself, take up this issue. But when President Roosevelt and later Harry Truman more or less withdrew from this policy point, that meant that policy direction in that part of the world fell to the British. The British Chiefs of Staff were the agents, operating agents, for the combined Chiefs of Staff for Southeast Asia, and that in effect meant Churchill. And so it was, in effect, British policy which brought Britain temporarily back into India, Burma, Malaya ; the French back to Indochina ; and the Dutch back to Indonesia. But our own policy has been very sympathetic to the idea of independence to colonial areas. After all we were the first member of the U.N. who achieved independence out of a colonial empire. And so we pretty consistently in this postwar period have thrown our influence behind the decolonization process . Now I must confess that we did not think that the colonial empires would break up into such small pieces. We thought there would be a West Indies confederation, a West African confederation, an East African confederation. But all those schemes fell and they broke up into these tiny fragments, so we now have what, 159 members in the U.N., and there are others coming along. But in some of those situations policy was strongly reinforced by simple fact. The British did not have capability of staying in India against the wishes of the Indians. I remember a conversation which Secretary of State George Marshall had with the Prime Minister of the Netherlands. Marshall said to him, " ; Mr. Prime Minister, you do not have the capacity to stay in Indonesia. The effort would bleed you white and there would be no one to help you, so you simply cannot maintain your control over Indonesia as a practical matter." ; And that made a deep impression, I think, on the Dutch Prime Minister. But when you look at it as a whole, future historians, I think, are going to be somewhat astonished that so much power was laid down with so little conflict. There have been some disturbances in India. There was some fighting in Kenya and some in Indonesia, more in French Indochina. But by and large the decolonization process has moved forward with relatively little violence, as though most people recognized that the time had come for this process to get underway. You see, the British, for example, had developed over a period of centuries the basic notions of political freedom and the structure of constitutional government. Now, when they established the British Empire all over the world, they could not help but take along with them in their knapsacks these simple ideas of freedom. They took with them the seeds of the elimination of their own colonial empire because they could not be free at home and despots abroad. It just wouldn' ; t work. And so I think it was clear that these colonial empires were passing events in long historical terms, and after World War II the time had come to liquidate them. Now I hasten to add that there is another colonial empire in the world today which is there but is not somehow attacked as a colonial empire. I have in mind the empire the Soviet Union has in Eastern Europe. We have never been able to get the Third World countries to take an interest in that problem as a colonial problem, possibly because there were no racial differences ; there were no oceans in between, things of that sort. But we have a strong dose of colonialism with us in the world today. SOHN: Eastern Europe is one question which it is very difficult for the Africans or Asians to be excited about. Twice people had a fight about the Asian republics of the Soviet Union, the Cossacks and [Karnuks?] who are not very happy. And there are Moslem people who didn' ; t like to leave their religion for Bolshevism. DEAN RUSK: I suppose people tend to worry about colonial problems which are nearer home. These are far-off places. There is nothing that these anti- colonial people can do about ousting the Soviet Union from those areas, and so it just isn' ; t taken up as a live issue. We have tried, in the early days of the U.N. to draw attention to the colonial aspect of Soviet policy, but had very little success in getting any interest on that questions with other governments. RICHARD RUSK: With the death of Franklin Roosevelt, was there unanimity among American policy makers that colonialism was indeed nevertheless on its way out? And when policy did shift, was it due more or less to a vacuum in our leadership, an unwillingness to fight for people-- DEAN RUSK: Those differences didn' ; t really disappear within our own government until the colonial powers themselves saw what had to be done and moved toward granting independence to those more important colonial areas. The Bureau of European Affairs, for example, remained touchy about such things as West New Guinea ; the dispute between [Achmed] Sukarno of Indonesia and the Dutch and the Portuguese territories. You see, Portugal was a member of NATO during my time there, and yet they had these African territories that many of us felt were due for independence. And so there was always that pressure from the Bureau of European Affairs not to rock the boat with our NATO allies on such issues. RICHARD RUSK: Was there more of a reason than just our relations with our NATO allies, or did these fellows think that the maintenance of these colonial empires would help stabilize the world? DEAN RUSK: [There m]ight have been, but I think it was basically our relations with our allies. For example, at a time when we were using the Azores, Portuguese territory, as a base, a NATO base, and Portugal was a full member of NATO, we were extracting Angolan and Mozambican dissidents and educating them here, and in Western Europe, and in other places so that when the time came for the Portuguese to get out there would at least be some kind of manpower available to run the country. The Portuguese, I think, knew we were doing that and that sometimes led to a little strain in conversation between myself and the Portuguese Foreign Minister. It is a little hard to reconcile these things. SOHN: To what extent did the change from Churchill to [Clement Richard] Attlee make the big difference in 1945 and immediate succeeding years. DEAN RUSK: I think that was a very important change from the point of view of British policy toward colonial areas. Churchill had said, " ; I did not become His Majesty' ; s First Minister to preside over the death of the British Empire," ; or something like that. RICHARD RUSK: Liquidation. DEAN RUSK: Liquidation of the British Empire. But Attlee, I think, saw the handwriting on the wall, and so he moved rather promptly to bring about the independence of India, Burma. And that started the ball rolling in a big way. I think the Attlee government was basically a decolonization government. RICHARD RUSK: Had the British people voted them in? DEAN RUSK: Yes, during the Potsdam Conference, to the surprise of a lot of people. SOHN: The second point is, apart from the State Department, of course, other departments are interested in our foreign policy. I was wondering how the Pentagon felt, the Defense Department felt about this disintegration of the empires, and whether they had been trying to salvage it as much as possible? DEAN RUSK: I don' ; t know that there was a single, firm Defense Department view on these questions. But it was clear that people in the Pentagon were not as interested in decolonization as was the State Department, and that the Pentagon would have settled, I think, for the status quo if the status quo had proved to be workable. But the simple fact was that the status quo was no longer tenable, could not be maintained. I think there are more British today in an independent India than there were when Britain controlled India. I think there are more Dutch in Indonesia than there were in the days of Dutch colonialism, but these things move along. SOHN: Next question--I am kind of taking things chronologically as they arose during your tenure in the department--was aid to Greece, Truman Doctrine. Could you give us a little more background on what happened there, the problems between the State Department and Congress about it, especially Senator Vandenberg? DEAN RUSK: Well, Joseph Stalin demanded two eastern provinces of Turkey, Kars and Ardahan, and a share in the control of the straits leading to the Black Sea. So he was putting pressure on Turkey. Then came along the guerrilla problem in Greece. I think the thing that caught us a little by surprise was the promptness with which the British decided that they could no longer play a hand in Greece, and they told us that and we had to face the problem as to whether or not we tried in any way to take Britain' ; s place in Greece. The more we looked at it, the more we thought that we ought to try to give the amount of aid to Greece and Turkey which would enable them to take care of the problems largely on their own inside their own countries. Of course, the Turks were all calm and cool about these pressures from the Soviet Union. They had lived next to Russia for a long time and they were pretty calm about it. The situation in Greece threatened a communist takeover of Greece, which would have been a great disadvantage, I think, to NATO and to the Western interests in the Mediterranean. So President Truman decided to ask the Congress for such assistance. In the course of explaining his attitude and his policy and what he wanted from Congress, he used rhetoric which was more far-reaching than anything that he had in mind on a practical plane at that time. And that far-flung rhetoric about giving assistance to any country, anywhere that is threatened by communism came to be known as the Truman Doctrine. My own impression, having been in the Department at the time, was that we were not deliberately taking on the role of the world' ; s policeman, that this was simply a part of the campaign to persuade the Congress to give support to Greece and Turkey, and that the so- called Truman Doctrine in the real world had far more limited purposes than have generally been ascribed to it. But Arthur Vandenberg finally came on board and, of course, at that time the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was a very powerful committee not only in the Senate but in the Congress as a whole. During the 80th Congress which was a Republican Congress Senator Vandenberg insisted that members of the committee come to meetings and take the time necessary to hammer out a committee point of view. And that consensus on that committee put them in a powerful position in the Senate and indeed in the Congress as a whole and put them in position to negotiate effectively with the Executive Branch. With one trivial exception, during that 80th Congress every bill and every report that came out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee came out unanimously because Senator Vandenberg just insisted that the senators do their duty. When you are trying to get appropriations, you tend to make the most of the materials at hand in terms of debate, rhetoric, advocacy, but it was passed in the Congress with reasonable majorities. SOHN: What I was interested in is the United Nations angle of it, to what extent the State Department was itself thinking that the U.N. should be involved in this, not just the United States. And I was fascinated by Senator Vandenberg' ; s insistence that the U.S. should [a] report to the U.N., and [b] if U.N., (unintelligible) both the Security Council and his beautiful statement with / respect to any decision of the Security Council on this issue, the United States would relinquish its veto. And then I wonder even if the General Assembly does it, would we follow the order. DEAN RUSK: Yes. Senator Vandenberg played a major role in involving the U.N. in important legislation and important treaties. He was the one who persisted on a reference to the U.N. in the NATO Treaty, for example. And he wanted it to be made clear that anything the U.S. did would be subject to anything which the U.N. could do with regard to the Greek guerrilla matter. Of course, the Greek question was before the U.N. Security Council. But Senator Vandenberg--One of the prices he required for his support in negotiations with people like George Marshall and Dean [Gooderham] Acheson was to involve the U.N. wherever possible. It was not instinctive, at least for Dean Acheson, to do that. I remember in one matter which came up later, I suggested to Dean Acheson that some inclusion of the U.N. be made in some matter at hand, and he said, " ; Oh yes, very well. Let' ; s don' ; t get kicked by that horse again," ; because he had been forced by Vandenberg to do that in connection with a number of other pieces of legislation and in the NATO Treaty. RICHARD RUSK: Do you recall the incident and policy? DEAN RUSK: No, I don' ; t. SOHN: I gather that between you and Acheson there was always this discrepancy about the role of the U.N. DEAN RUSK: Well you see, I began in the State Department under George Marshall. George Marshall had a genuine, personal interest in the U.N., partly because he took a view of the world as a whole and he attached great importance to the U.N. Furthermore, he, being the man Harry Truman had called " ; the greatest living American," ; he received from Truman a massive delegation of authority in foreign policy matters, and George Marshall himself delegated heavily to those underneath him. If he couldn' ; t delegate, he would get someone else to whom he could delegate. He delegated to me very extensively in U.N. affairs. But when Dean Acheson came in, he was, in effect, a North Atlantic man. He really didn' ; t care personally much about these browns, and blacks, and yellow people all over the world. He was a North Atlantic, NATO man. When I was in India during the war, there was an Indian parliament house already in existence in New Delhi. It was a big round building, and some of the major blimps of the old British colonial attitude used to refer to this building as " ; the monkey house." ; Well, there were times when I felt that Dean Acheson looked upon the U.N. as " ; the monkey house." ; He really didn' ; t have all that much interest in or respect for the UN, although at the time of the adoption of NATO, Arthur Vandenberg tried to make it very clear that NATO was not in any way to be a substitute for the U.N, that it was wholly within the U.N. system. So there were times when Dean Acheson was impatient with me about my interest in the U.N. This has varied with different Secretaries of State over the years. John Foster Dulles was very much interested in the U.N. He had served on the delegations there and was one of our best vote-getters in the U.N. General Assembly. But on the other hand, people like Dean Acheson, Henry Kissinger, and some others just didn' ; t care about the U.N. It was almost a nuisance in their thinking, so that the flavor of American attitudes will vary somewhat depending upon who is the Secretary of State and what his own personal interests are. SOHN: Coming back to the Greek situation, I gather more or less from that time dates your great interest in the question of indirect aggression, subversion, and what you can do about it, and what particular role the U.N. will play in dealing with it. DEAN RUSK: Yes, the primary thought that was in people' ; s minds when the charter was drafted was aggression by organized forces. After all, that had been very much involved in that slippery slope that had led us into World War II. But it soon became apparent after the war that organized divisions were not necessarily the greatest threat to peace, that guerrilla activity, informal bands, assistance to revolutionaries, things of that sort were likely to be even a more common instrument of aggression. And there developed an express which, I think, has been overcome now, " ; direct aggression" ; by organized armed forces and " ; indirect aggression" ; by these more informal means. But that has been largely eliminated now as far as the U.N. Charter is concerned because in 1970 the General Assembly passed, without a dissenting vote, the Declaration on Friendly Relations. And that spelled out in some detail the meaning of Article 2:4 of the U.N. Charter on the use of force for aggression, and included what we used to call indirect aggression. RICHARD RUSK: Did you have a hand in that Declaration? Did you work on it? DEAN RUSK: Yes, during my period about thirty-five nations were in consultations on this Declaration for a period of some years. RICHARD RUSK: Did you personally take an involvement? DEAN RUSK: Yes, sure. And then in 1974 the General Assembly passed again without a dissenting vote, its Definition of Aggression, which again seemed to eliminate this distinction between direct and indirect aggression. And I think that was a very important development, both as a matter of policy and as a matter of law on the subject. SOHN: How were you ever able to sell to the Soviet Union that this should be prohibited? DEAN RUSK: I suppose they might have taken the view that they might need this themselves some day in one or another of the areas of interest to them, but also it would be important to them from a propaganda point of view to assume this air of innocence in this field and in what Khrushchev and others had called the " ; wars of liberation." ; SOHN: They could veto any specific incident? DEAN RUSK: Yes, or violate it. RICHARD RUSK: As could we. BENNETT: In connection with Greece, though, you, in 1947, were on the losing end of that battle to involve the U.N. in Greece. DEAN RUSK: Well, the Greek question was before the U.N. Security Council and was debated several times. And I think there was a U.N. Commission sent out there, wasn' ; t there? SOHN: Yes, the Commission on the Balkans. DEAN RUSK: That' ; s right. SOHN: The other thing that happened later with it, in 1950, was the Uniting for Peace resolution which was part of the proposal creating a committee to deal with crisis situations. And at that time, a subcommittee of that committee was established for the Balkan situation. So at least the United Nations had a watching commission there. I remember someone said at the time, " ; The question is whether the Greek border is being violated, and you can observe it as well from the Greek side. You don' ; t have to be on the Albanian, Bulgarian, or Yugoslav side." ; You can see violations from one side. DEAN RUSK: By the way, Dean Acheson was very interested in the Uniting for Peace Resolution. You see, that resolution basically prepared the basis for the General Assembly acting. If the Security Council is frozen by a veto and the General Assembly then can take up questions that are stymied in the Security Council, and debate them, and pass resolutions on the subject in the General Assembly where there was no veto. And Dean Acheson was very much interested in that. SOHN: Did you think that was a good idea in the long run? DEAN RUSK: I think it is a very useful thing to have there if needed, but we ought to continue to make a serious effort in the Security Council to make the Security Council work. I think over the years, the Security Council has been attenuated somewhat in its response to its charter obligation to assume primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security for a variety of reasons. For example, today, 1985, there is a pretty good- sized war going on between Iraq and Iran. Well the Security Council ought to be meeting at least once a week on that matter, not because by resolution they can end it, but because by continuing probing they might be able to find some way to bring the thing to a conclusion. Let me make one remark here. As Louis Sohn knows, the U.N. Security Council never drops an item from its agenda ; it remains " ; seized," ; as the expression is, of that item forever, as far as I can tell. So every year the Secretary General puts out a list of issues with which the Security Council is seized, and that list is, in effect, a checklist of all items and questions that have come before the Security Council since its beginning. Now if you look over that list and you look at those issues on which the Soviet Union and United States were not directly and harshly opposed, you will find by and large in a fumbling and bumbling kind of way, the Security Council has been able to keep small wars from breaking out into larger wars, to bring about truces and cease fires, negotiations, and things of that sort. And although it has not prevented the use of force in such disputes, it has done a great deal to smother them. Now even on the issues where we and the Soviet Union were at each other' ; s jugular veins: the Cuban missile crisis. It was very important that the U.N. Security Council be there to which this matter could be referred for discussion and debate, and create a period in which it was less likely that one side or the other would lash out in fury at the other, and to gain a little time while Washington and Moscow tried to put their heads together and find some solution to this problem. So, I personally believe that the Security Council has earned its pay many times over in a great variety of circumstances. For example, I have no doubt that the debates in the Security Council had some genuine influence on Joseph Stalin about terminating the Berlin blockade. I think the propaganda aspects of that problem turned against him. And he probably found that he had about milked the Berlin blockade for all he could get out of it and therefore he might as well bring it to an end. And it was at the U.N. Security Council that the contacts were made which in fact ended the Berlin blockade. By the way, I don' ; t think I have put this on the record anywhere, but I was very close to making a mistake about the Greek matter. I was at a dinner in New York where Mr. [Andre Andreevich] Gromyko was present during the Greek affair and I said to him that we ought to sit down and talk about this Greek problem and see if we cannot somehow bring it to an end. And he, somewhat to my surprise, showed great interest in talking further about it. We had a date to sit down and talk further about the Greek question. Well about three days after that dinner, Yugoslavia defected from the Soviet camp and that had a great bearing on the wind-up of the Greek guerrilla problem. Gromyko might well have known something that I did not know: namely, that Yugoslavia was about to defect. And therefore he was interested in seeing whether they could recoup anything out of the Greek problem and that was the wrong time for me to suggest any discussion of the subject. But fortunately, I was saved on that one. BENNETT: Did you end up holding the discussions, or did you cancel them, or were they just held in abeyance? DEAN RUSK: No. No. Simply had to tell him that on instructions from the Department, I had to-- BENNETT: On Greece, what I meant before is that according to Cohen you advocated U.N. involvement and you were somewhat disappointed by the fact that the United States at least went forward unilaterally on Greece. DEAN RUSK: Well, I didn' ; t really think that the U.N. itself could do what the U.S. did with respect to assistance to the Greeks. I did believe that any question which involves the possible use of armed force ought first to be referred to the U.N. That was the attitude we took in Korea, and we immediately referred the Cuban missile crisis to the United Nations. I think there is that obligation under the Charter. But, of course, most people have long since forgotten Article 33 of the Charter, the exhaustion of remedies, makes it clear that those who drafted the Charter, believed that debate in the United Nations was a fairly drastic remedy and ought to be left to the end. Because Article 33 provides that you should first exhaust all the remedies like negotiation, mediation, arbitration, judicial settlement, things like that, before referring matters to the Security Council. Well, we have had a little problem on that because in this country we have had a lot of people who think that if you do not begin by referring the matter to the U.N., you are somehow bypassing the United Nations. They forget Article 33. But then, when you refer something to the United Nations, you just meet yourself coming around the barn United Nations has almost no existence other than through its members. And when you refer something to the U.N. then the U.S., as an important member of the U.N., has still got to decide what it wants the U.N. to do, or anybody else, to do about the issue at hand. So, I personally am inclined to think that although Article 33 has almost been eliminated by disuse, that one of the first things that the United Nations should do when these matters come up is to find out where any of these processes of settlement might be applicable to, available to, or helpful to the parties to the dispute, rather than take it on as a direct United Nations responsibility. SOHN: One thing in this connection with Article 33, and related to that, of course, is Article 52 about the regional organizations: one thing that is mentioned in Art. 33 is that you ought to go to a regional organization if available, before you go to the United Nations. RICHARD RUSK: What is Article 52? SOHN: Article 52 is about " ; regional arrangements." ; It authorizes regional organizations to be established in the first place to deal with regional questions. RICHARD RUSK: Things like NATO, SEATO, that type of thing? SOHN: No, not NATO and SEATO but Organization of American States, which has got two heads. One head is about settling disputes and one is under the RIO Pact dealing with dangerous situations. DEAN RUSK: As a matter of fact, it was the Latin American states of the Western Hemisphere who were primarily responsible for there being that section of the Charter about regional arrangements. At San Francisco they insisted that the affairs of the Western Hemisphere be handled in the Western Hemisphere. They did not want hemispheric affairs to be caught up in the U.N. Security Council with the Soviets sitting there with a veto. Nelson [Aldrich] Rockefeller, who was then working on Latin American matters in connection with the San Francisco conference on the Charter, fought a pretty strong fight within the American delegation, some of whom objected to regional agencies. But it was finally put in, largely on the insistence of the Latin Americans. SOHN: I gather that you distinguish very clearly between Article 51 on collective self-defense, which is like NATO for instance, and regional arrangements under Articles 52 and 53. DEAN RUSK: That is correct. SOHN: And you got into some trouble about those things in later years: Guatemala, Dominican Republic--[Chile?] (unintelligible). DEAN RUSK: Well, once in a while when something was before the Organization of American States, if a particular member of the OAS did not get satisfaction from the point of view of his particular government, then they might themselves take this to the U.N. And sometimes we were able to block Security Council action, even putting it on the agenda, on the grounds that this was before an appropriate regional organization. Let me make a brief comment here about the Soviet use of the veto. I think they probably used the veto about a hundred times before we did. In the early days of the U.N., the Soviet veto was a common practice. Well, that is cheating a little when you chide them for that because in those days with the Security Council membership of eleven, it took seven votes to put an item on the agenda or to pass a resolution. Well, we were always in a position to deny the Soviet Union the seven votes they would need, so we didn' ; t have to use the veto. I remember once chiding Gromyko about the excessive use of the veto during those years at the U.N. during the Truman years. And he said with a little shake of his finger, " ; Mr. Rusk, let me tell you there will come a time when the United States will value the veto as much as we do." ; And he was right. SOHN: And I suppose the other point about the veto has been that many of those vetoes were about the membership issue. Every year--there was a bit debate in the forties about-- END OF SIDE 1 BEGINNING OF SIDE 2 SOHN: Hungary, Bulgaria. And we objected on the grounds they are not violating the human rights provisions of the peace treaties. And so they said, " ; All right. If that' ; s what you do, we are going to veto anybody that you propose." ; We had by that time accumulated quite a list of countries that wanted to come to the United Nations. And every year we went through the rigmarole of the Russians saying, " ; Let' ; s admit everybody." ; And we said, " ; No, let' ; s vote on everybody in particular." ; So we voted first on theirs because they had submitted their applications earlier and they couldn' ; t get the seven necessary votes. We didn' ; t have to veto because, as Secretary Rusk said a minute ago, we had the votes, therefore we didn' ; t have to veto. Then came our countries and they said, " ; All right, we are going to veto theirs." ; So sometime they cast seven vetoes, then later twelve vetoes, fifteen vetoes, just on that particular subject. DEAN RUSK: Then we worked out various block deals along the way several times whereby a block of countries that the Soviets were interested in would be admitted along with a block of countries that we were interested in. SOHN: It has always fascinated me how you worked out Mauritania for Outer Mongolia. DEAN RUSK: Well, there was something behind the scenes on that. When the question of Outer Mongolia' ; s membership in the U.N. came up, we were in favor of it. As a matter of fact many of our people wanted us to establish bilateral relations with Outer Mongolia because we would have liked to have an embassy in that particular part of Central Asia. SOHN: Great listening post. DEAN RUSK: Sure. But we were faced with the fact that the Republic of China, Taiwan, was then sitting in the Security Council and had a veto on the admission of Outer Mongolia. And they were strongly opposed to it because as Chinese they thought that Outer Mongolia was a part of China. So I worked that out personally by striking a deal with Chiang Kai-shek' ; s government that if they would abstain and not veto the membership of Outer Mongolia, we would postpone indefinitely our own consideration of the bilateral recognition of Outer Mongolia. So that is what got over that hump. RICHARD RUSK: Was there ever any debate between us and the Soviets or within the United Nations over exactly what constitutes a country, what criteria a so- called country, or someone who aspires to call themselves a country has to meet to label themselves as such? Were those issues fought over? And I ask that in context with the 160 nations in the U.N. today and all types of little splinter groups. DEAN RUSK: Well, each year there is a vote on credentials where that kind of issue could arise: credentials of delegates. But by and large the United Nations has recognized those countries who have very substantial blocks of recognition from individual nations. And of course there has been the famous debate about the status of the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] at the U.N. But yes, that question does arise from time to time. SOHN: At the very beginning, of course, the Russians had some peculiar ideas about not the word " ; state," ; but what you mean for instance by " ; peacekeeping." ; I remember at some point it said Sweden was not peacekeeping, but peace loving, because they did not participate in the war against Hitler. DEAN RUSK: The Charter seems to suggest a couple of qualifications for membership. They should be peace loving and that you have the ability to carry out your obligations under the Charter. Well both of those qualifications have almost disappeared. It now simply turns on the votes. SOHN: If you have been given independence by the mother country, everybody accepts that you are entitled to be admitted. DEAN RUSK: Right. RICHARD RUSK: If you can find enough countries willing to call you a country and recognize you as such, you can line up enough votes. DEAN RUSK: Now, of course, in the case of the divided countries, Germany, Korea, Vietnam, both halves of these divided countries had a considerable number of recognitions. But it was not until both Germanies agreed that both of them would join the United Nations that that problem was solved. And neither Korea today is a member of the U.N. SOHN: Let' ; s perhaps take another subject. One I was wondering about is Palestine, which is still now on the agenda anyway. But the beginning of the issues in the ' ; 40s, submitting the question to the United Nations, the United Nations adopting the partition resolution and Arabs rejecting it and trying to occupy Israel. What was your feeling about those things at the time? I gather there was some difference between you Truman on some things. DEAN RUSK: I became involved in the Palestine question at a very early stage. Just after the war President Truman felt very strongly that there should be a Jewish state in Palestine. The full impact of the holocaust in Europe hit the United States after the war much more heavily than during the war itself because we had a full exposure of the terrible things that happened during the holocaust. So he was very strongly in favor of that, and he pressed Britain very hard to allow the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine in connection with the eventual termination of the British mandate in Palestine which it had received during League of Nations days. Well, the British were resistant to this and became rather annoyed by President Truman' ; s pressure on the matter. So they themselves decided to put the Palestine question before the U.N. After all, the United Nations was the direct successor to the League of Nations on these mandated territories. So the British put the question before the U.N. There we were, heavily involved as a major member of the U.N., and a permanent member of the Security Council, and the British, in putting it before the U.N., took the position that, " ; We will agree with any solution which is agreeable both to the Jews and to the Arabs:" ; a very comfortable position in which to be. In effect, they abstained on much heavier participation. But in the U.N. a commission was appointed which went out there and came back with a recommendation of the famous partition plan. When that came before the special session of the General Assembly, of course, we were under instruction from President Truman to press for the partition plan with all our might. And we counted noses and realized that if the Arab side introduced a simple motion to adjourn the Assembly, that they had the votes to pass that motion of adjournment. It required only a fifty-one percent vote. Then Mr. [Camille] Chamoun, later president of Lebanon, who was the Arab floor leader at that time, went to the podium and made a motion for adjournment. And our delegation said, " ; Oh boy, now we have had it." ; But then, to our amazement, he added a second paragraph to his motion to appoint a commission to do this, that, or the other. Well, that changed that motion into an important question which required a two-thirds votes and so we were able to defeat him because he couldn' ; t get two-thirds vote for it. Then we went on to pass the partition resolution. RICHARD RUSK: Who was involved in that, Mr. Rusk, you and Clifford or, who are the main players in the delegation at that time? DEAN RUSK: The main players were Warren [R.] Austin, our principal representative, who made history once when talking about the Palestine question by calling upon the Jews and the Arabs to settle their differences in a Christian spirit. (laughter) But it was Secretary Marshall, Under Secretary [Robert A.] Lovett, myself, and Clark [McAdams] Clifford was playing a more or less behind-the-scenes role at the White House on this. He was not carrying the load publicly, was not a member of the delegation or anything of that sort. But those were very tense days in the U.N. General Assembly. The approval of the partition plan was just barely carried the by the necessary two-thirds votes. RICHARD RUSK: There is some indication in Cohen that your personal feeling was not in favor of partition although you, of course, followed Truman' ; s instruction. DEAN RUSK: Well, I' ; m a little skittish about what are called " ; personal views." ; George Marshall was once asked what his personal view was on a particular foreign policy matter was. He said, " ; Personal views? I don' ; t have personal views on matters of public policy. My views are the views of the Secretary of State. And I come to those views through constitutional process." ; RICHARD RUSK: We' ; ve gone over this a few times before. DEAN RUSK: Yes, but let me point out that Harry Truman was somewhat schizophrenic on this Palestine issue. On the one side, he strongly felt there should be a Jewish state in Palestine. But on the other side, he hoped very much to try to find a solution out there with which both the Arabs and the Jews could live. So he gave instructions on both sides to the State Department which may, at times, appear to be contradictory. For example, just before the expiration of the British mandate, Truman and Secretary Marshall asked me to see if I could negotiate a diplomatic and political standstill to take effect at the time of the expiration of the British mandate, through which we could gain more time to try to find a solution that would be agreeable to both sides. Those discussions occurred at the old Savoy Plaza Hotel in New York. The Arab delegation was down at one end of the corridor ; the Zionist down at the other end of the corridor. I had a suite halfway between, and I shuttled back and forth. We worked out almost all the problems connected with the standstill except the rate of Jewish immigration into Palestine during this standstill. Finally the Zionist side came down to 2500 a month, which was just almost nothing compared to the needs and their demands and things like that. So I went down the other end of the corridor with some confidence that this figure might be accepted. I put it to the Arab delegations. Prince Faisal, later King Faisal, heard me out and said, " ; No, we cannot accept that because they would only bring in 2500 pregnant mothers and that would make 5000." ; Had you ever heard that Louis? SOHN: No. DEAN RUSK: During those discussions Secretary George Marshall, down in Washington, with a slip of the tongue referred, in talking with some newspaper reporters, referred to these talks going on in New York. From that moment, the talks were dead because the constituencies on both sides were not willing to have such talks occur. So that closed out that particular attempt to get a standstill on the date of the expiration of the British mandate. RICHARD RUSK: Were you literally the only one passing back and forth between the delegation? DEAN RUSK: Yes. RICHARD RUSK: You were the intermediary? DEAN RUSK: Yes. SOHN: I think something that happened at the time that always fascinated me was suddenly the United States' ; proposal that Palestine be changed into trusteeship. DEAN RUSK: Yes. RICHARD RUSK: I' ; m sorry, I missed that. SOHN: The United States suddenly proposed that instead of ending the mandate and establishing two independent states, a temporary trusteeship would be established for a period of time, under the United Nations direct mandate somehow. DEAN RUSK: That again was a part of--it flowed from President Truman' ; s desire to gain some time to try to find a solution that both sides would accept. This is a kind of interesting story. A telegram had gone to our delegation in New York authorizing them in certain contingencies to move toward trusteeship. And those contingencies seemed to have been realized so the delegation, based upon its instructions, moved toward the trusteeship proposal. That exploded like a bombshell at the U.N. for everybody. I remember meeting the press up there at that moment. You could slice the atmosphere with a knife. I' ; ve never seen such a loaded atmosphere as on that occasion. This horrified the Zionists and many of the Jewish leaders in this country. I came back to the Department and Chip [Charles E.] Bohlen, as Counselor to the Department, was then the Senior Officer in the Department because the Secretary and Under Secretary were out of town somewhere. Clark Clifford called over and said, " ; I want to see you and Rusk immediately about that action we took in the United Nations the other day." ; So Bohlen and I realized that Clark Clifford was looking for somebody' ; s neck to be sliced, but we went over there to see him. He was furious about it. Whereupon Bohlen took out of his briefcase the green, original copy of the outgoing telegram to our delegation authorizing him to take this step. And in George Marshall' ; s own handwriting in the right hand corner was " ; approved by the President. GCM." ; That calmed Clark Clifford down. But again, you see, Truman did a number of things on this issue which appeared to be contradictory because he was moved by these two powerful motives: a Jewish state in Palestine and a solution which would simply not lead to a series of wars. BENNETT: But weren' ; t there, wasn' ; t there also reflected--reflecting that contradictory approach, perhaps, weren' ; t there two factions that were arguing different things? On one hand, there was Clifford who was a pro-Israeli view, and on the other hand, you and some others who were more even-handed looking to-- DEAN RUSK: You see, Clark Clifford was Truman' ; s in-house liaison with the Jewish community, and he was a highly political animal in those days. Whereas our channels ran through George Marshall to President Truman. And these two channels didn' ; t always say the same thing. But the Zionist interests in those days were playing hardball politics. SOHN: Still is. DEAN RUSK: I remember seeing a telegram that a Jewish friend of mine had shown me that she had received from the Zionist group saying, " ; We have sent the following telegram to the President under your signature and have charged it to your telephone number. If you have any objections, you can get in touch with so-and-so." ; Of course, nobody would dare object under those circumstances. They were playing pretty hardball politics. One little instance about George Marshall involved in this: a group of several heads of Jewish organizations came in to call on George Marshall during this period. As he opened up, one of the members banged on the table and really but the " ; bee" ; on George Marshall, whereupon George Marshall-- RICHARD RUSK: Were you in the room? DEAN RUSK: Yes. He turned to his " ; squawk" ; box and pressed the lever for the press office. He said, " ; Would you please send up to my office any reporters who happen to be there at this time." ; The fellow said, " ; Yes." ; He turned back to this gentleman and he said, " ; Now, when the reporters get here I want you to say exactly to them what you' ; ve just said to me." ; And they just beat a retreat. (laughter) Well, I was told that the publisher of the New York Herald Tribune was weighted on by a dozen of his major advertisers, saying that, " ; Unless you change your policy in this direction, we are going to stop advertising." ; RICHARD RUSK: There must have been real blood on the floor just within government, within the Department of State, in your discussions with fellow colleagues. DEAN RUSK: People like Loy [W.] Henderson were, I think, badly abused by the Zionist interests because they singled him out as being disloyal to President Truman in taking the Arab side. Well, Loy Henderson was simply carrying out George Marshall' ; s instructions based upon Truman' ; s efforts to find a solution that people could live with. BENNETT: Why did you escape--you seemed to escape the wrath although you were perhaps working with--you were able to work with both sides really, weren' ; t you? And why were you--were you--you were a kind of unique player in a sense that you were able to keep the goodwill of Dulles and Clifford and you worked to take the issue out of the ' ; 48 campaign. You kept the good will of both sides and didn' ; t, weren' ; t condemned by one side or the other. Can you explain that? RICHARD RUSK: Pop, Cohen refers to this directly. He calls it " ; the ease with which Dean Rusk followed an incredibly sinuating White House course." ; DEAN RUSK: In the first place, it was my duty to do so. I had played a considerable role in helping to get the votes for the partition resolution: without much help from the British, by the way. SOHN: I gather that it was a very difficult point. Again it was one of those things that the procedural thing helped mainly: adjourning the meeting, not having the votes they needed. DEAN RUSK: That' ; s right. I think some people underestimate the importance of procedural matters in these international bodies. BENNETT: And you did it again in Korea, in the Korean--that' ; s off the subject. DEAN RUSK: Well, that' ; s because the Soviet representative walked out of the Security Council. I' ; ve already put that on tape. But it was a very dramatic moment, at the time of the moment of the expiration of the British mandate. First let me say that a critical remark was made by [Arthur] Creech Jones, the British colonial minister, who was in charge of Palestine in their cabinet. He and I and [Moshe] Sharett, later to be Prime Minister of Israel, were standing there in the delegate' ; s lounge, just the three of us talking. Creech Jones turned to Sharett and said, " ; We know you' ; re going to have your Jewish state in Palestine. But of course the Arab legion will move. It has to move because it' ; s Arab. But I can tell you that it will move only into those areas allotted to the Arab state in Palestine." ; This was a very important piece of information because the Arab legion was the principal organized military force in the Arab world at that time, and it was under British command. So Sharett took off for Tel Aviv, or wherever. And I have no doubt that that remark of Creech Jones' ; played an important part in their decision to declare a provisional government the moment the mandate expired. It expired I think at 6:00 our time. The provisional government was declared immediately by the Jewish state. I got a telephone call about a quarter to six--I was in my office at the State Department--from Clark Clifford. He said, " ; The President wants me to inform you that at 6:00 a provisional state of Israel will be declared and the United States will recognize it immediately." ; And I said, " ; But, Clark, this would cut across everything that our delegation has been trying to do up there for the last several weeks on the instruction of President Truman. We have forty-five votes or so for the approach that we' ; ve taken, and this would just cut right across it." ; He said, " ; Nevertheless, that is the instruction of the President, and he wants you to inform our delegation in New York." ; So I called Warren Austin off the floor of the General Assembly and told him about this. Instead of going back to the delegation to tell them, he just went home. (laughter) RICHARD RUSK: Did you ever ask him why he did that? DEAN RUSK: So about three minutes past 6:00, a delegate at the U.N. came shouting down the aisle, waving an Associated Press ticker. He went to the podium and he read this ticker, announcing the declaration of the state of Israel and American recognition. He demanded from the U.S. delegation an explanation. Well, sitting in our delegation at that point were Francis Sayer, a fine old man but not too smart, and Philip Jessup. Well, Philip Jessup immediately left the assembly room to telephone us in Washington to find out what in the hell was going on. But Francis Sayer went to the podium and sort of scratched his head and said, " ; [I' ; ll] be damned if I know!" ; Then, a few minutes later, Phil Jessup came back and went to the podium and read this report, and confirmed that it was, in fact, correct. Well pandemonium reigned in the Security Council at that time: genuine pandemonium! An American staff officer physically sat in the lap of the Cuban delegate to keep him from going to the podium and withdrawing Cuba from the United Nations right then and there! RICHARD RUSK: Did you ever ask Warren Austin why he simply trotted on home, after receiving the news? DEAN RUSK: I have no doubt that he felt it was better for the United States for everybody up there to know that this was a Presidential decision and that the U.S. delegation had not been trying to " ; hoodwink" ; everybody on this. Probably in that respect, he was correct. Then, about 6:20, I got a call from George Marshall saying, " ; Rusk, get up there to New York and keep our delegation from resigning en masse." ; So I jumped in the next plane and got up there. But by the time I had got there, they had more or less cooled off and that didn' ; t occur. BENNETT: At one point, you also--you said a telex saying they should reserve a spot in the mental institution for the U.N. delegation-- DEAN RUSK: (laughter) I don' ; t remember that. RICHARD RUSK: We need a separate tape on the creation of Israel as a state. I think this is quite an area that we have dipped into here. DEAN RUSK: I would point out something and, Louis, if you disagree with this please say so. When the General Assembly passed the Partition Resolution, this was not just a recommendation of the Assembly in the usual sense. The United Nations had inherited from the League of Nations plenary powers with respect to the mandate system. My view had always been that the General Assembly was legislating under its mandate responsibility when it passed the Partition Resolution. It was not just a recommendation in the usual--It was a constitutional act taken by the General Assembly within its powers. SOHN: A similar thing happened about Namibia in Southwest Africa. DEAN RUSK: Yes. Yes. SOHN: The International Court agreed that they have that power. But what bothered me about it, the partition resolution, you remember the Arab countries finally got together on something: Namely, that they asked that an advisory opinion be sent, be requested, from the International Court on the issue whether this was legal, whether the Assembly had the power to do it. That almost passed, and, I guess, probably required quite a lot of effort on the part of the United States not to pass. That would have, of course, delayed the whole business and maybe would have been, in fact, something that the United States might have liked. But we opposed it very strongly. DEAN RUSK: The situation on the ground clearly pointed toward heavy fighting up there. We knew that the court could do nothing about that. But in any event, the momentum of the establishment of the state of Israel meant that our government was not particularly interested in that kind of delay because the situation on the ground would not stand still. So we thought that was not a very good idea. SOHN: Another point, of course, rose at that time very strongly: The question of trusteeship for the state of Jerusalem, an issue that still, in a way, is not completely forgotten. BENNETT: It hasn' ; t been solved yet. SOHN: And have not solved yet. But what do you do with this sacred city for several religions? Is it proper for the Arabs to have it ; Jews to have it? What' ; s the United Nations' ; solution to correct this? DEAN RUSK: Well there' ; s a strange irony about the old city of Jerusalem. To some, it' ; s the city of David ; to others it' ; s the city of Christ. To still others, it' ; s the city that played a special role in the tradition of Mohammed. Here we are, three great religions, all confessedly worshiping the same God: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Yet, when we sit down to talk about Jerusalem, we start balling up our fists and get ready to kill each other. The United States took the view that there should be international arrangements, somehow, for the city of Jerusalem that would respect and protect the interests of three great religions, particularly in the old city. To this day, we have not fully recognized the old city as a part of Israel. We have kept our embassy in Tel Aviv and have not moved it to Jerusalem, for that matter. I think the tradition of the United States has been to insist upon some settlement for Jerusalem that respected and recognized the interest of the three religions. My own personal solution for Jerusalem would be to come up with something that is so complicated, so loused up, that nobody could understand it and wouldn' ; t know what they are fighting about. For example, to allocate the shrines in the old city to three religions, and the supporting facilities, such as hotels, things of that sort, then distribute the other functions of the city: maybe let the Israelis take the police responsibilities, somebody else the utilities, garbage collections, things of that sort. And let the question of sovereignty just float up in the air. It' ; s only a figure of speech anyhow. But get something that is so utterly complicated that there was no issue on which to fight about. But that never got anywhere. RICHARD RUSK: Of all the things you dealt with in the sixties, I think you told me that the Middle East, the question of Israel and the Arabs, probably discouraged you as much as anything else. DEAN RUSK: It' ; s been the most stubborn, impractical, unyielding problem we' ; ve had in this postwar period for all sorts of reasons. Now we were able, in the case of a number of Arab states, to acknowledge that we and they differed on this particular point, this particular set of issues, but that we ought to put those issues over in the corner and get on with working out our relations in every other respect. Most of the time that worked reasonably well. There were times, though, when things came to push and shove with regard to the Arabs in Israel when some of those relationships suffered. The Arabs almost need the Israeli issue. That' ; s about the only issue on which they agree among themselves, Tap, it seems to me. They have an infinite capacity to quarrel with each other. But on this one issue, they seem to be able to come together. SOHN: Isn' ; t it also the issue that the Soviet Union likes to keep open? They wouldn' ; t probably like the issue closed because it gives them a leverage with the Arabs. DEAN RUSK: Yes. At the beginning they were strongly in favor of the establishment of the state of Israel. They voted for the Partition Resolution. That meant several other eastern European votes at that time. But then later on they shifted away from that. I think they feel they have an interest in continuing animosity between Israel and its Arab neighbors because they know that we would be associated with Israel in such situations. That would open the way for them to establish and expand their influence in the Arab world. So I think they do not feel they have an interest in peace between Israel and the Arab states. RICHARD RUSK: Kind of discouraging. SOHN: Let' ; s perhaps go to a few more general questions. I have seen you mention several times the importance of the Charter of the U.N., especially the preamble Article I and II seem to be especially cherished by you. You have also been saying more often that we were lucky to have drafted the Charter like that when we drafted it, and if we had to draft it today, it would be much worse. Nevertheless, the United Nations has a special committee now that has been working for more than ten years trying to say we ought to improve the Charter. Do you think it can be improved? If so, how? DEAN RUSK: We' ; ve only amended the Charter twice, and that was to expand the membership of the Economic and Social Council and of the Security Council to take into account the much larger membership in the U.N. as a whole. I do not, myself, believe that you can amend the Charter in any significant, substantive way because amendments are subject to veto by the five permanent members. So I' ; ve not thrown much of my own time and effort into studying proposals for amending the Charter. We would like to have eliminated the veto under Chapter VI questions, the peaceful settlement of disputes, but the Soviets won' ; t accept that. And there might be some other amendments. I doubt very much if the Charter can be amended in any significant way. SOHN: How about amending it the way the Constitution of the United States is amended all the time, namely by practice. DEAN RUSK: Oh, I think there have been quite a number of amendments to the Charter by practice. For example, under the Charter resolutions in the Security Council require the concurring vote of the five permanent members . But from the very beginning, we established earlier the proposition that if a permanent member abstains, or non participates, or is absent, that that does not constitute a veto. This is on the theory that if a permanent member wanted to vote against, he could be there to vote against it instead of abstain, or non- participate, or be absent. There is one instance where the language of the Charter seems to have been changed in practice. Another one is the Charter refers to certain membership questions, things of that sort, where the Assembly would act on the recommendation of the Security Council. This, in effect, means now following an affirmative decision of the Security Council, so that the General Assembly is not free to admit members just because a Security Council' ; s vote is only a recommendation. So there have been a variety of ways in which the Charter has changed. For all practical purposes, the sections of the Charter about the military staff committee and military forces has withered away. Article 33 has been significantly changed in its application, with exhaustion of other remedies of the provision of the Charter. There have been considerable changes in the U.N. Charter through practice rather than by formal amendment. BENNETT: How would you feel about further enlargement of the Security Council, because the membership has grown greatly since the last change. And there are certain countries, such as Japan, India, Brazil, who feel they deserve to have more frequent representation, and not to mention Germany , except you have the double problem there. DEAN RUSK: There has been a tendency toward electing certain countries more often than is their due because of that element. Japan, for example, comes on more frequently than some other Asian countries. I' ; m not sure that I care very much about expanding it further. I' ; ve no particular objection, but it becomes more unwieldy. And in any event, the ability of the Security Council to act will still turn crucially on the attitudes of the five permanent members. We, States, generally have taken the nominations of the different regional groups of membership in the Security Council. They tend to rotate this among themselves: two from Latin America, there' ; s always an Arab member, eastern European bloc has a piece, another from the Soviet Union. Once in a while we might vote against a regional nominee, but not very often. And the regions tend to put up their better-known members, although often that is violated. BENNETT: I' ; m just going to say that in my time they quite often saw the more radical members assert themselves and use procedures: countries like Algeria, which at the time was so influential and have a representation beyond that. DEAN RUSK: When you have a caucus of the Africans, or the Asians, or the Afro-Asians, it' ; s part of the sociology of such groups that the more radical, more extreme voices tend to predominate because the moderate and conservative people don' ; t speak up and don' ; t use their elbows to make themselves heard. Often the group will adopt a position which many of its member governments would not support when you talked to them bilaterally. Sometimes you can break through those patterns as far as voting in the U.N. is concerned. SOHN: How would you distinguish positions of the Soviet Union and the United States to United Nations? Of course, you said before the Soviet Union would be out-voted by us and the only protection they had was in their veto. Nevertheless, they stayed there and fought. Do you feel that the United States has the same staying power, the more and more the U.N. adopts resolutions toward the United States? DEAN RUSK: You mentioned earlier my own personal respect for the U.N. charter. It is true. I think that it is an extraordinarily important document. It represents the lessons we learned from World War II. We paid fifty million dead for the chance to write that Charter. It is--if you want to look at a succinct statement of the general attitude of the United States and the American people toward the kind of community of nations we should have, you can find that in Articles I and II of the Charter. It' ; s no accident, because we played a major role in drafting that Charter. But it also is a useful expression of aspiration. From a legal point of view, as you know Louis, it' ; s the granddaddy of treaties ; it' ; s the master treaty. Because any treaty in violation of the Charter does not have legal effect. The Hitler-Stalin Treaty, for example, would undoubtedly be invalid as a matter of international law today because it makes provisions that were in violation of the Charter. So I think that it' ; s a very important instrument. If you look back over this postwar period, and take the Charter in your hand as your guide, then you will find, I think without too much American chauvinism, that the Soviet Union in fact has violated the Charter time after time after time. Its attempt to keep its forces in Azerbaijan, the northwest province of Iran: the first case before the U.N. Security Council. If it did not take action to give effect to its demand for the two eastern provinces of Turkey, it' ; s support for the guerrillas in Greece, its blockade of Berlin, support for the Koreans, invading South Korea, all sorts of things. So I think, measured by the standards of the Charter, there' ; s just no way to consider the Soviet Union and the United States sort of equally at fault. It just won' ; t work. Although there are some people who like to play the role of the man from Mars and sort of pretend that we are all the same. Of course we' ; ve made some mistakes on our side, and we have had some disappointments. But by and large in this postwar period, the United States has acted with responsibility, restraint, and even generosity, and largely in conformance with the U.N. Charter. There have been some times when one could argue that point. But the Soviet violations of the Charter have been major, and far- reaching, and very consequential. One small example, for three fiscal years after V-J [Victory in Japan] day, ' ; 47, ' ; 48 and ' ; 49, our own defense budget came down to a little over $11 billion a year, groping for a target of $10 billion. Now if you take that figure as what we thought would be a normal peace time defense budget, and then compute the additions we have had to put on it because of Soviet actions and policy, when your account gets beyond two trillion dollars you might as well stop, because it boggles the mind with what you could have done with the resources which Soviet policy imposed upon us. So I don' ; t -- Now you' ; d think I would be very angry about this. Well, my soul cries out about it. But, anger standing alone has no future. Whatever we think of the Russians or they think of us, we and they have got to find some way to inhabit this speck of dust in the universe at the same time. So you still have got to get on with the main job. RICHARD RUSK: I wonder what Walter La Feber, a revisionist historian, would say to this in response to my father' ; s analysis of Soviet and American joint responsibilities in the breakdown of the U.N. He is not here and I cannot argue on his behalf. Professor Sohn, are you in a position to state the revisionist interpretation of American role with respect to the United Nations to the extent to which we may well indeed be responsible for some of the problems of that organization? SOHN: Not really. Dean, sometimes I disagreed with you on some policy subject. One was United for Peace. I remember having a big fight once with Ernest [Arnold] Gross. DEAN RUSK: Oh, yes. SOHN: At a meeting at the University of Michigan. RICHARD RUSK: Was he a professor? SOHN: Ernest Gross was also our delegate to the United Nations for a long time. First number two, and at one point he was number one. Somehow in Michigan he made the statement saying that the greatest thing that happened to the United Nations was the United for Peace resolution. And I had courage to get up and say, " ; I don' ; t believe so." ; Because I was worried that what we were doing was violating the letter of the Charter, even if you said we did it because of the spirit of the Charter. And I made an argument on that subject. And he got very angry, making some very caustic remarks about me. And then to my pleasant surprise, Jessup got up, who was of course for a long time involved in the U.N. delegation, and said that there was some grain of truth in what I said and someday the United States might regret because the majority in the General Assembly might be in somebody else' ; s hand. DEAN RUSK: As a matter of fact--and Louis, help me remember--the Soviet Union at one stage later on supported the use of the United for Peace resolution. What was that about? SOHN: Egypt. DEAN RUSK: Right. And the Suez Treaty. SOHN: It was used against us, essentially. RICHARD RUSK: For the benefit of this oral history, just a brief summary of this United for Peace something. SOHN: The United for Peace had several parts to it. The main one was if the Security Council is unable to maintain peace because of the use of veto by a member, the matter would be referred to the General Assembly on the request of a majority of members or any, at that time, seven members now nine members of Security Council could meet immediately and discuss the issue, and adopt even a recommendation recommending action by the United Nations members, collective action, if necessary, economic sanctions, and even military sanctions in case of breach of the peace. And the Russians, of course, opposed it very strongly on the grounds that only the Security Council under the Charter is authorized to do things like that, that Article 12 of the Charter expressly provides that the General Assembly may debate issues, but when if action is required, it would refer it to the Security Council. DEAN RUSK: I think part of this debate turned on the meaning of a word in the Charter. The Charter provides that the Security Council shall have primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. We took the position that that word did not mean " ; sole" ; responsibility. The Soviets wanted the Security Council to have a monopoly of this field because there they had a veto. But the United for Peace resolution has not disrupted things as much as it was capable of doing. SOHN: I think it had surprisingly little use. I mean I always was worried that, for instance, the African countries would come to the General Assembly and ask the General Assembly to recommend the use of force against South Africa, and the Soviet Union would say, " ; Of course the General Assembly has authorized it," ; so we comply, and we do it. Actually they have not tried it. DEAN RUSK: By the way, being with the U.N. I' ; ve often wondered why it was that the United States was not hauled in by the ears, into the General Assembly, for strong debate on our own civil rights problems here at home. On another tape I' ; ve outlined what some of those were, even in the early sixties. I' ; ve talked to the foreign ministers of several non-white countries about this, and I got from them almost the same answer. In general they said that, " ; You people in the United States do not have a monopoly on these problems. Wherever you have different races, religions and cultures in direct contact with each other, there are problems, and we all have some of them. But what is very stimulating to us is the fact that it appears that the President, the Congress and the people of the United States are moving to find better answers in this field than you have found before. And that," ; he said, " ; is very exhilarating, not only because of what might happen in the United States, but what light it might throw on some of the problems we have in such matters in other parts of the world." ; So, it was the sense of motion, the sense of trying to do something about it in the United States that, I think, had a lot to do with our not being pounded in the United Nations on these matters. SOHN: I think there was a great difference clearly made between the United States and South Africa. The United States is trying to do something positive about it. South Africa is going backwards, and backwards is not promoting human rights. The basic operating word in the Charter is that you should promote, the United Nations members should promote human rights. And promoting means improving. It doesn' ; t mean going backwards, as South Africa went backwards in the situation of 1955. BENNETT: And that brings in the great importance of the open society, the openness of our public life. And I think a very fundamental issue is that of the free press. With all the problems our press causes, it' ; s a free press and it stimulates, goads-- RICHARD RUSK: It sure is free! DEAN RUSK: Louis, can you help me remember the year in which the contributions to the budget issue came up, where the Soviets and France were taking a view? Was that ' ; 66? SOHN: Yes, it was about that time. DEAN RUSK: An interesting story connected with this: Under the charter, if a member falls more than two years behind in his dues, he loses his vote in the General Assembly, although the General Assembly can take into account special circumstances and waive that if it wishes to. Well, the Soviet Union and France both came up with more than two years behind in their dues because, for different reasons, they wouldn' ; t pay certain parts of the budget . In case of the Soviet Union, in particular, the Congo operations and certain other peace keeping operations. We, at the beginning, felt that we had to insist that the charter be applied. After all, when the U.N. had borrowed 100 million dollars from the U.S. for the Congo operations, one of the points we made in testimony was that the U.N. would be able to pay because they have this sanction on the payment of dues by its members. But that led to a deadlock at the opening of the General Assembly. We would not allow anything to come up that required a vote if the Soviet Union was going to vote, so I don' ; t know how we elected a president of the Assembly that year. SOHN: It was the Nineteenth Assembly. RICHARD RUSK: What year was this? DEAN RUSK: 1966, I think. SOHN: 1964 at that time the crisis arose. DEAN RUSK: Anyhow, the deadlock continued throughout most of the fall. SOHN: That was a beautiful Assembly because they couldn' ; t vote. And how it was beautifully done by the President of the Assembly, who was a Nigerian--No, Ghanaian. The ambassador from Ghana was at that time president. And what he did was very easy. He said, " ; We shall not vote, but on these elections, and so on, there are some candidates. And I would like people to come to my office. There will be a box there, and you can drop a piece of paper saying how, if there were a vote, how you would vote." ; RICHARD RUSK: I' ; ll be darned. SOHN: Then he would announce, from the Assembly, from the chair, saying that, " ; I understand that there is a preponderance of views that Mr. X should be, have such office, or that such and such country should be elected to the Security Council, the Economic or Social Councils," ; and so on. And it was done. DEAN RUSK: I have to step out for a second. I' ; ll be right back. There' ; s a story on this I want to tell. RICHARD RUSK: Keep it going. SOHN: And that went very nicely for a while. And then at the last minute, Albania raised an issue which required a vote. And [Adlai] Stevenson was at that time our delegate: didn' ; t know what to do. Somebody advised him that you just get up there and say that the United States does not object to a vote on this subject because it' ; s a procedural vote, not a substantive vote, and, therefore, the injunction of the charter doesn' ; t apply to it. The charter there must distinguish between the procedural and substantive vote on that issue, but continues to preserve that the country shall not have the right to vote. And by that device we had the one vote in the Assembly. It' ; s amazing because this is also the Assembly that established one of the biggest bodies in the United Nations: the UNCTAD. It just happened too that that was the year just before it, before the Assembly that a conference was held to establish the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, which had, however, to be approved by the Assembly assembled for the (unintelligible) for it. That issue arose, and again it was simply said that, " ; I believe there is now no objection." ; And that' ; s the kind of consensus system developed. I' ; ve been talking about the Nineteenth Assembly and why UNCTAD was established by that Assembly without a vote. And that, in a way, was the beginning of consensus in the General Assembly. DEAN RUSK: Well I want to tell a little story about the way that dues problem was resolved because it throws light on the methods that they use sometimes in making policy decisions. For months we had been in deadlock at the U.N. And there were people in the delegation and our Department who simply wanted it to come to a confrontational vote. But Prime Minister Lester [Bowles] Pearson of Canada and his Foreign Minister Paul [Joseph J.] Martin, came down to the LBJ Ranch to visit with President Johnson, and I was there. And in the usual way, Lyndon Johnson took the four of us out in his car to look at the deer. You always do that when you go to the LBJ Ranch. BENNETT: Did he drive? DEAN RUSK: LBJ was driving, Lester Pearson was sitting in the front seat, Paul Martin and I in the back seat. RICHARD RUSK: (laughter) All of you terrified for you lives. DEAN RUSK: And Lester Pearson talked about his dismay and concern over this deadlock in the United Nations. And LBJ said, " ; Well, we' ; re not going to break up the United Nations just because the Soviet Union won' ; t pay 150 million dollars." ; And I could feel Paul Martin in the seat next to me jump a little, because that was a very significant remark by LBJ. We got back to the Ranch and I said to LBJ, " ; Well, that was a pretty important remark you made. Do you mean it?" ; He said, " ; Dean, how much has the United States contributed to the United Nations system since World War II?" ; I said, " ; Approximately three billion dollars." ; He said, " ; Do you have any doubt about whether I mean it or not?" ; So that led to fresh instructions to Arthur [Joseph] Goldberg, who then allowed the General Assembly to proceed in a normal fashion, but with a statement by Arthur Goldberg that if the Soviet Union and France look upon their payment of dues to the U.N. as a voluntary contribution, so would the United States. And there were some people in the State Department, Richard [N.] Gardner for example, who was furious about this change of direction by LBJ. SOHN: Richard Gardner and Steve [Stephen M.] Schwebel were big fighters for the hard approach. I, again, was on the other side of the case because I agreed with Judge [Gerald] Fitzmaurice in the court, who said, " ; Do you realize what you are doing? You are giving the absolute power of taxation to the United Nations." ; Because the court interpreted this provision in the Charter as saying that General Assembly can [a] decide what the budget of the U.N. is by a two-thirds majority, and can also decide who should pay what proportion of it. By its being done in a gentlemanly way for the moment, there can be negotiations that the United States considers thirty-three percent or twenty-five percent, and so on. And the United States usually won on it. But he pointed out that this is simply the kindness of heart of the majority, but the majority could tomorrow decide that the United States would pay ninety percent of the budget and, theoretically, this will be a binding decision. DEAN RUSK: This is a very interesting point in the Charter because, under the Charter it is clear that two-thirds of the General Assembly can adopt a budget and can assess dues to members in whatever ratio the General Assembly by two- thirds vote decides upon. Now that was in the Charter that was given advice and consent by the Senate of the United States. And over the years since then I' ; ve had more than one senator say, " ; My God! Did we give advice and consent to that?" ; Because you see, that creates a legally, binding obligation upon the United States. It was a major-- RICHARD RUSK: Has it been abused in recent years? DEAN RUSK: In some respects-- SOHN: The budget, yes. There have been now several budgets voted to which we object. RICHARD RUSK: What about the allocation of shares? Allocation of responsibility? BENNETT: We' ; ve gradually whittled that down. SOHN: We whittled it down to twenty-five percent, which is not really exactly the amount of the worth gross product we are responsible for. BENNETT: We' ; re a little bit under, I would say, now. SOHN: Yes, under. DEAN RUSK: At the beginning it was thought that it would be unwholesome for the United Nations for any single country to pay more than twenty-five percent of the budget. 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-RuskLL.xml RBRL214DROH-RuskLL.xml http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH/findingaid
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125 minutes
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Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
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Rusk LL, Interview with Dean Rusk, circa 1985
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RBRL214DROH-RuskLL
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Dean Rusk
Richard Rusk
William Tapley Bennett, Sr.
Louis Sohn
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audio
oral histories
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sound
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United States
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International agencies
Cold War
Arab-Israeli conflict
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Dean Rusk discusses the United Nations, including resolutions, sanctions, and the Security Council. He also discusses Palestine and Jewish-Arab relations in 1949.
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ca. 1985
OHMS
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Dean Rusk Oral History Collection
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United States--Officials and employees
Politics and Public Policy
Description
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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>
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Richard Geary Rusk
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Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
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1984-1989
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Oral histories
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RBRL214DROH
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United States
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
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https://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH-RuskSSSSSS/ohms
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5.3 May 5, 1986 Rusk SSSSSS, Eugene Rostow, 1986 May 5 RBRL214DROH-RuskSSSSSS RBRL214DROH Dean Rusk Oral History Collection Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Eugene Rostow Richard Rusk oral history 1:|12(5)|27(12)|44(4)|54(6)|71(3)|81(1)|91(8)|103(2)|113(9)|128(3)|145(13)|163(3)|173(10)|196(7)|214(7)|244(3)|260(7)|281(1)|292(3)|306(9)|317(13)|335(1)|358(13)|375(10)|389(2)|407(8)|421(5)|432(13)|447(1)|468(12)|479(1)|491(2)|506(2)|525(2)|541(1)|554(8)|570(12)|582(1)|601(1)|617(2)|630(4)|644(13)|666(7)|688(6)|713(5)|737(2)|752(3)|764(4)|785(14)|801(9)|814(12)|833(3)|872(4)|901(17)|926(9)|944(4) 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_6jzo9jbi& ; 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_q6srmbyn" ; width=" ; 400" ; height=" ; 285" ; allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozAllowFullScreen frameborder=" ; 0" ; title=" ; Kaltura Player" ; > ; < ; /iframe> ; English 38 Working in Rusk's State Department In terms of any contacts with Dean Rusk prior to January 1961, what do you have there? Rostow recalls his first contacts, working relationship, and leisure time spent with Rusk. He comments briefly on Arthur Schlesinger's evaluations of Rusk. Chester Bowles ; Rockefeller Foundation ; Undersecretary for political affairs ; WWII ; Yale 17 559 Rostow's Vietnam War initiative / Rusk and the Cuban Missile Crisis Could you comment on that, from what you know of that relationship between Dean Acheson and Dean Rusk? Rostow describes Rusk and Dean Acheson's relationship. He recalls Rusk asking for suggestions on the Vietnam War, at which point Rostow began conversations with Anatoly Dobrynin. Rostow talks about Rusk's reaction to the Cuban Missile Crisis and Dean Acheson's perceptions and critiques of Rusk. Averell Harriman ; Bill Bundy ; Cuban Missile Crisis ; George Kennan ; Korean War ; William Bundy 17 1043 Rusk's instructions / Rusk and Arab-Israeli conflicts Perhaps we can go back for a moment as to Dean Rusk as your boss. Rostow talks about Rusk's reticence, but explains that his policy recommendations were always clear and succinct. He explains why he stopped briefing British and French ambassadors on the Six-Day War. Rostow discusses Rusk's view of Israel and Rusk's involvement with Resolution 242 and the Suez Crisis settlement. Arab League ; Arab-Israeli conflict ; Arthur Goldberg ; Egypt ; Fergus ; foreign policy ; General Assembly ; Golda Meir ; Hammarskjold ; Israel ; Mahoud Riad ; Nasser ; NATO ; Sinai ; Strait of Tehran ; Suez Crisis ; tripartite ; UN 17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_242 UN Security Council Resolution 242 1758 Rusk's involvement in the Six-Day War I understand at one point you had a plan to form an international force to forcefully reopen the Straits [sic] of Tiran. Rostow discusses a British plan to move an Allied naval escort through the Strait of Tiran and claims that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara sabotaged the plan despite Rusk and Johnson supporting it. He talks about Rusk's position on the UN's Six-Day War ceasefire and says that Rusk balanced Arab and Israeli interests well. Rostow considers whether the Six-Day War would have been handled differently under another secretary of state. Eisenhower Doctrine Resolution ; Golan Heights ; Henry Kissinger ; Israel ; Middle East ; Six-Day War ; USSR ; Wally Barber 17 2275 Becoming Under Secretary for Political Affairs I feel obliged to ask you a question, what were some of his problems as secretary? Rostow states that Rusk was not interested in economic problems, and he talks about his own work with the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the IMF, and the OECD. Rostow describes the Task Force on Communications Policy and speaks about the administration's failure in the Vietnam War. Joe Fowler ; McNamara ; Nicholas Katzenbach ; Organization for European Economic Cooperation 17 2739 Rusk's later career Did you notice any real changes in the man from 1968... Rostow describes the tasks he and Rusk worked on in 1968. He talks about Rusk's involvement in negotiating arms control treaties like the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Rostow praises Rusk's dedication to his religion and work even in light of poor health. He briefly comments on the Committee for Present Danger and the books he authored. Fisher ; Foster ; Germany ; nonproliferation ; NPT ; Vietnam 17 RICHARD RUSK: I' ; m talking to Mr. Eugene Rostow. This is May 5, 1986. Mr. Rostow' ; s been an educator, an international lawyer, an economist, an advisor to the State Department during the mid-1940s, worked for the United Nations in the late 1940s. I believe he' ; s been the dean of the Yale Law School. From the fall of 1966 to January 1969, he was undersecretary of state for political affairs during the [Lyndon] Johnson administration, and I guess that' ; ll do for an introduction. In terms of any contacts with Dean Rusk prior to January 1961, what do you have there? ROSTOW: Prior to January 19--well, this is January, September 1966. Well, when I was dean of the Yale Law School, which was the period 1955 to ' ; 65, I think I met Mr. Rusk for the same, for the first time. He was head of the Carnegie Foundation, I think, at that time, or was it the Rockefeller Foundation? RICHARD RUSK: That' ; s right. Right. ROSTOW: And I came down to see him in connection with fund raising activities for the Yale Law School, and we had several chats at that time, but I think that was really the only extended conversation I had with him before I came down to interview him in 1966. RICHARD RUSK: Any subjective impressions from that, from those meetings' ; ? ROSTOW: Well, of course, I knew a great deal about him and his reputation, and I found him in person to be very much what I expected to find, a man of character and ability, who had a, much more of a sense of humor I discovered even in that first interview for, when he was head of the Rockefeller Foundation, than I had expected from hearing about him, reading about him in the newspapers. RICHARD RUSK: What about during the [Harry] Truman administration, any contacts back during that period' ; ? ROSTOW: No, I had no contacts in that period. RICHARD RUSK: Did you know enough about my father to have had a reaction to his appointment as John Kennedy' ; s secretary of state? ROSTOW: Well, I thought it was a fine and logical idea, and I was prepared to be enthusiastic about it. I, at that time, I knew Chester Bowles very well and Chet (unintelligible) came down and I discussed things with him during the period that he was in trouble about, with the administration before he was sent out to India. RICHARD RUSK: As undersecretary for political affairs, perhaps we can get you to comment in general on your relationship with Dean Rusk then. This would' ; ve been from-- ROSTOW: Surely. Well, he was an ideal person to work for. I' ; d had the experience back during the Second World War of working as Dean Acheson' ; s executive assistant for quite a while in that period. I worked on a variety of problems during the Second World War so I was quite familiar with the atmosphere of the State Department and with its procedures and the nature of the work. And when I came back and took on this job, I made it very clear to him against the background of my experience that he, that I was working for him. He was talking to me about [how] this is a job working for the president and the president' ; s choice, and finally I said, " ; Look, I' ; m not going to take this job unless you want me to have it." ; Said, " ; I' ; ll be working for you rather than for the president, and I know a fair amount about what can happen if you' ; re not very clear on that subject because I witnessed some of the troubles that Sumner Welles had had during World War II. RICHARD RUSK: Did you have the feeling or did it occur during that time that, as some people have said, that Kennedy bypassed Rusk and went to you directly on matters of policy? ROSTOW: Never, I never was part of the Kennedy time-- RICHARD RUSK: Oh, I see. I' ; m sorry. ROSTOW: I worked only for Johnson, and never. I worked for him. And, of course, I had contact with the president, and, of course, my brother was the president' ; s special assistant for national security affairs, which was a very easy and comfortable working relationship and environment. There was no bypassing and no temptation to bypass. I made it very clear that I worked for him, and he was a very fine person to work for in that way. I made it a rule when I started out on any particular initiative with the bureaucracy or with a foreign government, I' ; d drop in to see him first because he knew the business of the State Department completely and very thoroughly. I could go in at any time to see him for a moment and our conversations in that form were very- brief. I' ; d just fit it in as I could--(unintelligible)--worked along these lines. He' ; d talk about it for a minute or two, suggest a little more emphasis on this or that, and then I' ; d withdraw, go back to my office, literally, quite often, after one or two minutes and no more. And that was my instruction. I kept him informed, and he remembered. Six months later, he ran into Helmut Schmidt or someone, and he raised an issue on this subject. He remembered and always backed me, and that was the policy line I pursued. And, of course, at the end of the day, he was in the habit, after we became friends and began to work together, he was in the habit a couple of times a week maybe of calling up around 6:30 or so and saying, " ; What are you doing? Are you busy?" ; And, " ; How about coming down and having a drink?" ; And those were the best times of the day, really. Sit around and have a drink, alone or with two or three or four other people from the building he' ; d invite up, and we' ; d talk in a relaxed and leisurely way and explore various issues and what was happening and how things were developing. And they were delightful, those occasions. And-- RICHARD RUSK: Any specific anecdotes about--or jokes or anything, or anything? ROSTOW: Oh, yes. I remember one day, for example, that Arthur Schlesinger had written something particularly outrageous in the newspaper that morning, and Mr. Rusk said--we were discussing it. I think there were a couple (unintelligible) present. He said, " ; You know, it' ; s interesting. How many times did I see President Kennedy while he was in office? A thousand? Two thousand? Something like that, I suppose. I never once remember his stopping and saying, ' ; Wait, Rusk, before we begin this conversation. Let me get Schlesinger in here.' ; " ; (laughter) And he was, there were all sorts of episodes of that sort. He has a dry, sharp sense of humor. RICHARD RUSK: Following that up, I realize you weren' ; t in the State Department at that time, during the Kennedy years, but did you have the impression that Schlesinger' ; s attack on Rusk was unfair and that Rusk was really the major foreign policy advisor for President Kennedy? ROSTOW: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, sure. I did, I do have that impression, and I know, you know, I' ; ve heard a good deal about various episodes in that period, especially the Cuban Missile Crisis and so forth. Remember that I started my life in the State Department with Acheson, and so I saw Acheson regularly all through this period, too, and we were very good friends, so I heard a fair amount about Rusk in that, in the Kennedy period, from Acheson, too. RICHARD RUSK: Could you comment on that, from what you know of that relationship between Dean Acheson and Dean Rusk? Dean Acheson is no longer around to comment on it, and I' ; ve read the brief references to my father in his books. And, uh, could you elaborate upon that? I do believe my dad was Dean Acheson' ; s recommendation, or certainly very high choice, to be secretary of state, and I understand they had some, there was some degree of a falling off later. ROSTOW: Yes, I think there was some falling off. I never had anything from Mr. Rusk critical of Acheson-- RICHARD RUSK: Right. ROSTOW: But in, umm, especially his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, from the beginning, Acheson criticized Rusk and told me that he was quite frightened by it in the start and almost broke down, something of that sort, in the early days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. RICHARD RUSK: Dean Acheson was quite frightened and almost broke down or Dean Rusk? ROSTOW: (unintelligible) Rusk was. RICHARD RUSK: Oh, I see. ROSTOW: And, uh, he had to stiffen him up and keep him going, but I didn' ; t pursue that very much. I know that one of the first things that happened after I took over in September 1966 was that Rusk said, " ; Look, you' ; re fresh from the outside. Maybe you' ; ll have a new point to make about our handling of Vietnam because after you' ; re here for several months you' ; ll be absorbed in it and you won' ; t be able to be detached enough, perhaps, to take a fresh look and come up with some original ideas." ; And so I came back after a day or so, and I said, " ; Well, I' ; ve thought about it and I make one suggestion" ; because Acheson had told me the story about how, the Korean War, they made a breakthrough in the Korean War by approaching the Soviets. So-- RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. ROSTOW: Uh, I went over that story with him, and he said, " ; Well, why don' ; t you try it? Work it out, and then we' ; ll go ahead." ; So I brought in Acheson, and we had several long talks. And then I got hold of [George] Kennan, and he came down, and he got out his notes because Acheson had used Kennan, who was already then at Princeton, to conduct some of the talks with [Yakov] Malik that helped to break the tension in the Korean War. RICHARD RUSK: Yes. Yes. ROSTOW: And, uh, of course, I told him all about our talks and went over the plan with him, and then I started a series of talks with [Anatoly] Dobrynin on the subject so that I worked very closely then with Acheson and with Rusk. We didn' ; t meet together, as I recall it, but we were drawing on Acheson' ; s experience to construct a new approach to or attempt to approach the same sort of a solution for the Vietnamese War we' ; d had in Korea. Nothing came of it for a very interesting reason. There were some conversations that went on. We got [Averell] Harriman into it, too, and it was taken very seriously by Dobrynin and by the Russians, and they never turned it down. On the other hand, they delayed and delayed, and we had some extended conversations (and the net effect?) was that the nuclear balance was different in 1966 and ' ; 67 than it was in Truman' ; s time and, therefore, the same hint and suggestion didn' ; t work. RICHARD RUSK: The Russians didn' ; t have the incentive to do anything, I take it. ROSTOW: That' ; s right. And, of course, they said very frankly that the Chinese are (unintelligible) in it much more and so on. But it was a most interesting effort and a most interesting series of conversations and most depressing (unintelligible), too. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. ROSTOW: But that was the closest I came to having a, to working on anything which involved both Acheson and Rusk. RICHARD RUSK: Right. ROSTOW: That was personally harmonious (unintelligible) on all sides. RICHARD RUSK: Could you elaborate about Dean Rusk and the Cuban Missile Crisis? What specifically did Acheson say, or what, when was-- because Dean Rusk was very active during the meetings. ROSTOW: It was, it' ; s a, of course, it' ; s a secondhand sort of thing, but it may be of some use to you. As I remember, what he said was that there was a meeting early on of that Control Committee that met during the Cuban Missile Crisis in the conference room outside the secretary' ; s office, and that at one point, Rusk went back to his office to take a telephone call or something, and Acheson went in to follow him, and he was almost in tears, he was so appalled by the situation, and Acheson said, " ; Well, you' ; re the only secretary of state we' ; ve got, so pull yourself together and come on and we' ; ll do it," ; you know. RICHARD RUSK: No clue as to what that call might have been all about? ROSTOW: No. RICHARD RUSK: It' ; s not often we hear of situations where Dean Rusk was nearly in tears. ROSTOW: That' ; s right. RICHARD RUSK: As his son, I can' ; t recall him in tears ever except once. Was that call from the president, do you think? ROSTOW: Probably. RICHARD RUSK: Uh-huh. ROSTOW: But it' ; s, uh, you know it' ; s a thing that-- when you asked me the question, it fleeted through my mind, but it' ; s nothing that I went into in any detail. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. Any further (unintelligible)-- ROSTOW: --Long experience with Acheson convinced me that his stories were always the same. He never embellished them. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. ROSTOW: No matter how dramatic they were. RICHARD RUSK: Uh-huh. ROSTOW: So that' ; s there' ; s something there. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. Anything further you might say about the relationship between Dean Acheson and Dean Rusk? ROSTOW: No. I' ; m hesitating only to see if anything floats up into my mind. I' ; m not trying to-- to, uh-- RICHARD RUSK: I asked, I asked William Bundy the same question. He says that it' ; s an unfair question. (laughter) Because of the relationship. He also said that Dean Acheson was a very critical man in general, but he did criticize my dad quite severely, I think, for insufficient leadership. ROSTOW: Yes. I think that' ; s, I think he, I think it' ; s fair to say that he was, that Dean Acheson was a very severe critic. He was that tough on Bill Bundy because after all he was his father- in-law. RICHARD RUSK: Right. Uh-huh. ROSTOW: And, but I think at that period of his life Acheson felt a little acid and out of things. And that neither Kennedy nor Johnson really liked him terribly and treated him with great deference. And I think he had what' ; s a very normal attitude toward the fellow who came after him. (laughter) RICHARD RUSK: That' ; s interesting. ROSTOW: Of course, I think so, too. RICHARD RUSK: Umm hmm. Add the normal level of acidity of any man in his seventies or his eighties. ROSTOW: (laughter)--pretty acid. He thought, remember, that he' ; d known Rusk for a long time as assistant secretary. I suppose he could never really take him quite seriously as the secretary. RICHARD RUSK: (laughter) That interesting. Perhaps we can go back for a moment as to Dean Rusk as your boss. ROSTOW: Yeah. RICHARD RUSK: A number of his colleagues have criticized him for his quality of reticence, for not really knowing where he stood on the issues and not really giving them sufficient guidance. In terms of your own personal experience with my dad, would you agree with that, or did you have, was that not a problem in your relationship? ROSTOW: No, that wasn' ; t a problem because, as I say, I always asked him for guidance before I started out, and he always gave it to me. It was very brief, but I understood him, you see. We were really very much on the same sort of wave length about foreign policy and the positions the United States took and ought to be taking and even on very, very sensitive things, the Middle East, for example, which I suppose was the hottest of the assignments I had during that period. I was chairman of a control group that, interdepartmental group at the undersecretary' ; s level, that prepared policy recommendations for the heads of the department and the president and then carried them out after the meeting. And it couldn' ; t have been, you know, more sensitive stuff and more interesting and demanding professional assignments, (unintelligible) assignments, but he always made his policy positions clear, and when he wanted to modify a line I' ; d be taking, we' ; d discuss it, and he' ; d do it. And it was just a pleasure to work with him that way. RICHARD RUSK: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm. ROSTOW: He would say, he called me in one morning, I remember, and he said, " ; You know, let' ; s try something. I don' ; t know if it' ; ll work or not, but why don' ; t you bring the British and the French ambassadors in every afternoon during this [it was just before the Six-Day War, I think, or just after it, in that period] and just brief them and go over the issues, consult with them every day as to the way the situation is developing." ; And, of course, I was meeting with the NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] ambassadors and the South American ambassadors and all other kinds of groups of ambassadors all the time to keep them consulted, to keep them informed. And it was characteristic of Rusk' ; s handling that he used the entire orchestra. He had everything going. And he would tell me what he wanted in general, and we would pour out a series of telegrams and instructions all over the world. He had the whole (unintelligible) of the U.S. government working on this, and so we tried that little experiment of talking every day with the British and French ambassadors, and I remember I was very good friends with both of them, and after the second or third time we met, the French ambassador took me aside alone and said he was a little bit embarrassed by meeting this way every day ; it had the atmosphere of the tripartite approach to it. (laughter) I said, " ; Well, of course it does. That' ; s exactly what we have in mind." ; And I said, " ; I know that the Suez crisis happened." ; He said, " ; I didn' ; t mention the word ' ; Suez' ; ." ; So we agreed we wouldn' ; t meet every day, and I told Mr. Rusk about it, and he laughed, and we went ahead, and I kept as close as I could to them, you know, without making it overt and formal. But he would explore, he would think of every possible approach and explore them all, all in the interest of building a concert among the nations about the policy to be pursued. And, of course, the essential feature of this, I told him one day, just before the Six-Day War, I said, " ; I don' ; t know if you realize it, but there are an awful lot of people in this building who are just itching for war." ; He said, " ; Oh, but our business is to keep the peace." ; I said, " ; I know, I' ; m just telling you that they' ; re almost exploding with tension." ; (laughter) RICHARD RUSK: Were you one of them? ROSTOW: No, no. (laughter) No, no. RICHARD RUSK: Okay. That' ; s an unfair question. ROSTOW: (unintelligible) they congratulated me once on handling some of this stuff after the Six-Day War broke out. And I said, " ; Oh, but we failed ; the war came." ; No, no, I didn' ; t think it was in the American interest for that war to happen. RICHARD RUSK: Maybe I can get you to comment on Dean Rusk' ; s performance as secretary of state during that Six-Day War and immediately before and in the aftermath. How good a job did he do? I take it you were heavily involved in that and heavily involved with my father on that. ROSTOW: Yes (unintelligible)--huh, you were? RICHARD RUSK: No, I say you were. ROSTOW: Yeah--(unintelligible). RICHARD RUSK: How involved was he? How involved was Dean Rusk specifically in the Six-Day War? ROSTOW: He was very much involved, and he knew all about it. He' ; d been through the background of it earlier, and he was a decisive figure in the evolution of policy there because he was not in the least, you know, sentimental about Israel. RICHARD RUSK: No, no. We know that. ROSTOW: --Personally involved that way, but he was always polite and more than polite to the Israelis, but it was, clearly, it was not an emotional thing as it was for some people. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. ROSTOW: Uh, he never got confused as to what our job was and where our interests lay, but he was the man, really, who was decisive in determining the structure of Resolution 242. RICHARD RUSK: Oh. Mmm hmm. ROSTOW: Because he knew the background of it and the arrangements that were made in bringing the crisis in 1957, the Suez War in 1956, to an end in 1957. And we had intervened, we were the broker between [Gamal Abdel] Nasser and the Israelis along with the British and the, and [Dag] Hammarskjold, to get the settlement made, and the terms of the settlement--they were really quite funny in a way because there was no formal document--Nasser wouldn' ; t deal directly with the Israelis--so the agreement was embodied in a series of statements people would make before the UN General Assembly or to the press and so forth. RICHARD RUSK: Uh-huh. ROSTOW: And I had, I think I still have a copy that was given to me by Don (unintelligible) Fergus at the time of the Six-Day War, Fergus, F-E-R-G-U-S, who was a foreign service officer much involved in these things, and Don gave me this book with a lot of paper clips in it, and those paper clips represented the agreement. Golda Meir would say something, and the Egyptian would say nothing, and so on. And Dean Rusk' ; s view of it was that we made those arrangements for the Egyptians and for the Israelis and got the Israelis out of the Sinai at that time in exchange for a long series of promises. And then the Egyptians broke those promises, and, uh, all of them, including the closing of the straits. And when, Rusk said that when they closed the Strait of Tehran, they cut our throat from ear to ear. And he made that statement several times during the period to, not only to me, but to diplomats. And that' ; s the reason why Resolution 242, which is still the basis for all these negotiations, says the Israelis don' ; t have to retire one quarter of an inch until the Arabs make peace. They double crossed us then, and we' ; re not going to press the Israelis to make any withdrawals whatever until this peace agreement. RICHARD RUSK: Was he involved in the actual drafting of 242 or just the ideas, giving us those ideas? ROSTOW: Well, the ideas, but he had, we passed the draft-- RICHARD RUSK: To him? ROSTOW: Got his approval, oh sure. He was always very active. And then there was one episode I remember when, I' ; ve forgotten what it was about, but Arthur Goldberg got into some sort of trouble in New York, and he was up there and helped straighten it out. Ah, no, no, he was deeply involved and knew all about it. And I remember once he went up--this was in September of ' ; 68--we kept on working at the thing until the very end of the administration. There was a big effort in the fall of ' ; 68 at the time of the General Assembly meeting. And he had a big meeting with Mahoud Riad, who was then, I guess, General Secretary of the Arab League or maybe he was still Egyptian foreign minister--I' ; ve forgotten which. RICHARD RUSK: How do you spell that last name? ROSTOW: Riad. R-I-A-D. And he came back--it was late Saturday afternoon--and he called me up when he got in and I went down there and had a drink and, uh--oh, I remember: he' ; d run out of scotch. (laughter) So I had to produce some scotch in a hurry. My stock was out, too. (laughter) And we sat down, and I asked him how the conversation went up in New York. He tried for, I don' ; t know what, I couple of hours, I guess, and he had a seven-point plan, six-point plan, seven-point plan, something of that sort about the situation in the Sinai. And Riad turned it down flat, and his judgment of it, and you can get some sense of his control of the details of Middle Eastern life and politics, he said, " ; They' ; re out to kill Hussein [Ibn Talal]." ; That was his judgment about the Egyptian position. RICHARD RUSK: Mmm hmm. ROSTOW: And, then, of course, I had to cool off the Israelis about this plan, this initiative that the secretary of state came up to New York. They were a little worried that he' ; d given away the store, but when I got through explaining it, they were very happy (unintelligible). So, uh, no, no, he was deeply involved, and I never had the slightest difficulty with him in terms of instructions. Not at all. RICHARD RUSK: Were you in favor of his influence and his initiatives during that period? Did he do a good job of articulating legitimate American policy interests in that work (war?)? ROSTOW: I thought so, and, of course, you know, I had considerable input, too. It wasn' ; t just taking instruction. We, he was very easy to talk to (unintelligible), and so I guess, I guess I was the fellow who put the word " ; peace" ; into a--in the middle of the night when the Six-Day War broke out, we were all assembled in the Communications Center in the State Department. We were preparing a statement for the president to make the next day at noon, you know, what our position was, and I wrote the draft, and I put in the sentence that our position in this war now would be not to restore the armistice but to move for peace, which in the context of the history of the Arab-Israeli dispute was a very big move indeed, and he was there, and he approved of it, and he never budged from that (unintelligible). RICHARD RUSK: I understand at one point you had a plan to form an international force to forcefully reopen the Straits [sic] of Tiran. ROSTOW: Oh, yeah. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah, I think it' ; s been reported my dad was doubtful of that plan, didn' ; t think it would work or wasn' ; t worth pursuing. Would you care to elaborate on any of that? ROSTOW: Well, he backed it thoroughly. Oh, no, no, I remember--(laughter) no, I remember a lot of funny things about that. He, uh, this was a British plan originally. END OF SIDE 1 BEGINNING OF SIDE 2 ROSTOW: Yeah, well, as the Six-Day War approached, the British raised this idea with us of an Allied naval escort, naval convoy system to take vessels through the Strait of Tiran. And I remember the day the British came in with it, we started to examine it and discuss it a little bit, I got a call on the open line, from Wally Barber, our ambassador in Tel Aviv, and I' ; d never met him at that point, but he, of course, knew who I was and had gotten a sense of my role in the thing from the cable, and he called me on the open line, and he said, " ; Look, unless there' ; s a new idea in this situation, I don' ; t think I can hold it for more than another day or two." ; I said, " ; There is a new idea, and I' ; ll send it to you this afternoon." ; So we wrote up a cable describing this British plan, got it cleared and sent it out to him, flagged, you know, which is a super speedy method of communication, and Wally afterwards said to me, " ; Well, anyway, you postponed the war for a couple of weeks." ; (laughter) So, uh, no, oh, no, Rusk was an enthusiastic believer in it. The president was very hot for it. And we worked up the thing, and it, I' ; ll go to my grave, and Golda Meir told me that she was convinced that the saboteurs, that the president was all for it and wanted to do it and would have done it, and, but it got, my own conviction is that [Robert] McNamara sabotaged it. You know, this was the middle of the Vietnam War (unintelligible) another war, and McNamara was very very much opposed to it. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah, and so Rusk was, was didn' ; t have a firm position on it, then or? ROSTOW: Oh, no, he had a firm position. The president had a firm position, and he had, therefore had a firm position. RICHARD RUSK: Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah. ROSTOW: There was any doubt about it, and he was very active on Thursday of that week, the week before the Six-Day War broke out. The British military attaché came in, an admiral named Henderson, and said this is being sabotaged in the Defense Department. He was very exercised, and he said the people who should have been in the tank working out the details were out playing golf. And he went up the hall to see the secretary, and he jabbed (unintelligible) the phone and called up McNamara and went right after him, and McNamara said, " ; No, no, there' ; s no sabotage." ; (laughter) Nonetheless there was delay, and McNamara didn' ; t want to move until there was a new congressional resolution. And, well, of course, there was a congressional resolution already, one of 1958, the Eisenhower Doctrine Resolution, which would have permitted the use of force if necessary, but somehow or another it got sabotaged. And there was another episode. The press and the books on the subject reported that we really gave the Israelis a green light to go ahead. And Rusk and I have been over that, and neither one of us knew anything about it, if it ever happened. And my brother, too. It may have happened somewhere else (unintelligible). RICHARD RUSK: Do you recall Dean Rusk having any influence in getting the United Nations to delay its call for a cease-fire? SPEAKER: Richard, Mr. Rusk, excuse me, I' ; m going to have to go for just a while because somebody came in my office, but I hope to get on in a little while. ROSTOW: All right. SPEAKER: Thank you very much. (Hangs up) RICHARD RUSK: Do you recall my dad' ; s position on the UN cease fire? In understand it was only declared after the Israelis had consolidated most of their gains. ROSTOW: Oh, yes. Yes, well, there wasn' ; t much delay. It' ; s the usual pattern, the same thing that happened in ' ; 73. When the Russians decided that the jig was up, why they moved for a cease fire, and we held it off until the Golan Heights operation was completed but then put a lot of heat on the Israelis to accept, a lot of heat. RICHARD RUSK: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm. ROSTOW: And, uh, they didn' ; t want that. See there was sensitivity about the, their reaction when the war was suddenly moved up to the Golan Heights and the Israelis attacked the Syrians. The tone of Soviet communications changed. RICHARD RUSK: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm. The Middle East is a difficult area for any American secretary of state. Do you think my dad struck the appropriate balance between our interests over there vis-a-vis the Arabs and Israelis? ROSTOW: Oh, I think so. I think, you know, it would have been, I think, from our point of view perhaps better if the war had never taken place, but it happened, and he made the best of it, and he handled it very well. I think it was a masterly handling of the diplomatic side of it and on a very large scale, a world scale. I remember asking one friend in the State Department when [Henry] Kissinger was secretary whether Kissinger could, was running the whole orchestra of American foreign policy the way Rusk did during the Six-Day War and afterwards, and the fellow smiled and he said, " ; With Henry, it could never be more than a string quartet." ; (laughter) RICHARD RUSK: That' ; s funny. I' ; ll be darned. Umm hmm. Anything further about my dad and you and the Six-Day War that comes to your mind of significance? ROSTOW: Well, it went on, of course, all through the rest of the administration--the struggle first to get Resolution 242 and then the struggle to implement it and carry it out. And he was active and profoundly interested, and he knew that time was not working on our side, and he wanted to get it settled, and, of course, it couldn' ; t be done--(unintelligible). The Arabs didn' ; t want to make peace, that' ; s all. RICHARD RUSK: Mmm hmm. Would our pol[icy]--this is kind of hypothetical--but would our policy in response to that Six-Day War had been any different had Dean Rusk not been the secretary of state? Another way of asking that same question is, did he really put his own personal stamp in a dramatic way on the handling of that conflict? ROSTOW: Yes, I think so. I think both in substance and in method. I think the substance of it was the commitment to peace as a goal rather than another armistice or a renewal of something short of peace. That' ; s the only issue now, and that' ; s what prevents any change in the situation, and I think it' ; s absolutely right from our point of view. And the second thing was that in method his comprehensive and active handling of every strand of diplomacy with our friends, with our allies, with our adversaries, and so on, and with the neutral nations, showed his command of the system and his knowledge of the history of the conflict. He knew it all, you see. And he was very, very good at it. RICHARD RUSK: You' ; ve spoken in very favorable terms about Dean Rusk. That' ; s the kind of book I' ; ll be writing, incidentally, as a member of the family, but I feel obliged to ask you a question, what were some of his problems as secretary? What were his weaknesses? Surely he had his share of problems as does any mortal human being. ROSTOW: Oh, sure. RICHARD RUSK: How would you comment on that? ROSTOW: Well, you see, in the areas where I worked with him closely, the NATO area, the nuclear arms area, the food for, the whole Indian food project, you know, that I worked on quite a lot, all the relationships arising out of the Six-Day War, the monetary stuff, of course, I handled pretty much alone with Joe Fowler [Henry " ; Joe" ; Fowler?] I always informed him about it and he' ; d grin, but he didn' ; t care much about it. (laughter) RICHARD RUSK: Great. That' ; s true. He tried to defer all the economic questions, I think. ROSTOW: He told me in the beginning. I had the title, I could pick under the statute either the title of undersecretary of state for political affairs or economic affairs, and he said that neither he nor [Nicholas] Katzenbach cared a damn about economics, (laughter) and I did, so I would have it. Which title did I want? I said, well, in view of the complexity of the relationships with Europe, that the fellow who dealt with economic problems ought also to have the political problems, and unless I were dealing with NATO and nuclear stuff and so on, I wouldn' ; t have any clout on the economic affairs, and so that' ; s the way it was. RICHARD RUSK: Right. ROSTOW: I was undersecretary for political affairs, but on all the OECD (unintelligible) [OEEC? Organization for European Economic Cooperation] stuff and so on, his, he was, you know, kept informed and supervised and he had opinions, but basically I was on my own there, along with the Treasury people, but, and with the Federal Reserve people, and that was a very active front, all kinds of things. This was the period of the FDI [Federal Deposit Insurance] and the creation of the monetary (unintelligible)--you know, the IMF (unintelligible). And so that that was a pretty busy part of my life, and then I had the, he got me the, he insisted that I take the assignment of chairman of the president' ; s task force on communications policy. RICHARD RUSK: Sir, can I interrupt just for a minute. If there' ; s any way you could raise your voice a slight degree--I think we might have trouble recording some of this. Try it, try it and I' ; ll try to be briefer with my questions. (laughter) ROSTOW: I was, I was chairman of the task force on communications policy, which was a very hot affair, and while he didn' ; t follow it in detail, I kept him informed, and toward the end there was a great deal of pressure on the president to get us to, not to go into the domestic side of the industry. We felt we had to do that, and it was out of all that discussion that the recent turbulence in the communications industry emerged. And at the very end all this pressure on the president to get me to kill the chapter. I went in to see him one afternoon, and I said, " ; This is what' ; s going on. And I don' ; t really want to do it" ; and the position I' ; ve taken with my brother [the president got my brother to call me] always to report very carefully. And I said that I thought it would be a great mistake for the president to kill that chapter at the instance of the industry, and before any such position was made, I' ; d like to discuss it with him. RICHARD RUSK: Right. ROSTOW: And I told Dean Rusk that, and he grinned, and he said, " ; I don' ; t see any reason for you to be the goat in this affair." ; I said, " ; Okay, that' ; s all the instruction I need." ; (laughter) That was that, and I stuck to my guns, and we got the report out. That' ; s how it was. That' ; s exactly how, what working for him was like. I' ; d tell him what had developed and where the crisis was, and he immediately reacted, and this time with a grin, and said, " ; I don' ; t think you ought to be the goat here." ; And that was all, the whole story. RICHARD RUSK: It seems to vary from colleague to colleague, the extent of their relationship, the success of their relationship. Some people found him a very reticent type of man and difficult to follow. Other people did not, and I guess you' ; re one of those. ROSTOW: I certainly did not. I never was in any doubt where I was ; I never had any surprises on that front, and I think I can say that he never had any surprises from me. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. ROSTOW: I hope not anyway. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. In terms of critiquing his overall job as secretary or any specific aspects of it, if he had problems, in what areas would they be? ROSTOW: Well, I think it was the basic problem of the administration, which was not winning the Vietnam War. And whether in that respect his advice to the president on that subject should have been much firmer about firing generals and getting a winning team, I don' ; t know. That wasn' ; t my beat, you know. I worked on some of the peace initiatives, which were pathetic, for him, but I never did-- like the initial one I was talking about where I had all those talks with [Anatoly] Dobrynin. RICHARD RUSK: Right. ROSTOW: But the day to day work of the Vietnam War I did not work with him, and I heard some discussions with the president on that subject, but my critique of the administration on that, and it was fundamental to the history of the tragedy of the administration, really, was that they didn' ; t win. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. ROSTOW: And they didn' ; t go out and fire the generals until they found Sherman and Grant, you know. But that wasn' ; t his primary responsibility. That was McNamara' ; s primary responsibility, but if there were any criticism I' ; d make, he shared in that. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. Mmm hmm. ROSTOW: He talked about it later on. I never, I never tried to intervene there while I was working with him ; he had enough troubles. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. ROSTOW: I mean we' ; d talk about it in the evening when we had a drink, which was, as I say, or on trips and so forth, but it would not be so specifically pointed as that. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. Did you find him approachable regarding your views on Vietnam? ROSTOW: Absolutely. RICHARD RUSK: He did solicit your opinions on various matters relating to that war? ROSTOW: Yes. He, you know, he didn' ; t wear his heart on his sleeve. I remember once a long meeting in this room on some Middle Eastern question, and I' ; d written a memo, and we discussed it, and he reached a conclusion. He said to me in the group, he said, " ; You know, you can always take this higher if you want." ; And I said, " ; No, no. I know I can do that, but I won' ; t." ; I never did. RUSK: Yeah. ROSTOW: (unintelligible) appeals to the president-- RICHARD RUSK: Were you involved-- ROSTOW: But he, uh, as we were going out the door, he sort of gave me a little grin and said, " ; That' ; s a good memo." ; That' ; s the only way you' ; d get a compliment. RICHARD RUSK: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm. ROSTOW: But it was a relationship in which I was entirely comfortable from the working point of view--absolutely no complaints. RICHARD RUSK: Were you involved in the policy review after the Tet offensive? ROSTOW: No. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah, okay. What about that last year, 1968? ROSTOW: Well, uh, of course-- RICHARD RUSK: My, uh, I remember my dad as being pretty tired during that year. Did you notice any real changes in the man from 1968, say, from the time that you first started to work for him, uh, what was he like in that last year of office? That was a hellish year for-- ROSTOW: A hellish year for him. Uh, (sighs)-- his, it was still, I think, the same spirit and atmosphere in the office. I was, I had two ongoing assignments that never flagged. One was that communications policy thing, and the other was the Middle Eastern affair, which kept grinding away, you see, right to the very end, and he participated in the Middle Eastern meetings and was very active, encouraging us to keep pressing the Soviets to get a positive response. Yes, of course he was tired, but he kept his spirits, at least so far as we were concerned. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. Mmm hmm. There were three or four significant arms control treaties negotiated during the Kennedy and Johnson years. From your own experience, did my father play a leading role in those negotiations. What would you say? ROSTOW: His relation to arms control was very important. The only one I got into in any detail was the NPT, the Nonproliferation Treaty. RICHARD RUSK: Right. ROSTOW: And the reason I got into that was that he and Foster wanted some help in persuading the NATO people, and especially the Germans, to go along. It was a big issue for the Germans and the Italians to sign the Nonproliferation Treaty and forgo nuclear status. And so I got to know something of the relationship between Rusk and Foster [ William C. Foster?] in that period and the way he handled it. And it was very much in my mind when I had the active job in the early ' ; 80s. Now, what, uh, your father was very very much interested, as you know, in arms control and in the arms control process, [the] possible potentialities for it. And his work with Foster and Fisher [Adrian Fisher?], who was Foster' ; s deputy and a very close friend of mine, was just perfect, you see. He had a meeting every Saturday morning, I think, when he could, of principals only. I think they met in his office, but Foster presided. And you could not have any deputies, and they, and he told me, both Foster and he told me about that practice, and I tried to get it started and resumed. Haig didn' ; t want to, but finally (unintelligible)-- RICHARD RUSK: And the purpose of that meeting was specifically arms control. ROSTOW: Arms control. RICHARD RUSK: Mmm hmm. ROSTOW: Brainstorming and talking about the issues, not about particular, it had no agenda, you see. RICHARD RUSK: Mmm hmm. ROSTOW: And it was a Saturday morning meeting of principals only, and I never could get it created. Ken Dan (unintelligible) tried to move along those lines, but the center of gravity was in his office and not in the office of the director of (unintelligible). Of course, Rusk never worried about such things, and, uh, and so his relationship with Bill Foster and Butch Fisher was fine, and I was asked to take on the job of persuading the Germans to go along, and I did that at some length, both in Washington and in Europe. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. Mmm hmm. ROSTOW: Working with Foster. Talking to him about it, but working with Foster. RICHARD RUSK: Well, I see on the appointment books that Foster and Fisher [were] in to see him all the time. That was a very close working relationship, I guess. ROSTOW: Yeah. for the purposes of an oral history, anything that we haven' ; t touched upon? ROSTOW: Well, [pauses] I would say, like to convey to you and have your book convey his greatness of heart, the way he handled the work and the way he handled his relationship with us and with the president is entirely compatible with the way I' ; ve seen him during these last years, trudging around the country making speeches to students. I had him up at Yale a couple of times, and he was a little, you know, hesitant about, he didn' ; t want to have a demonstration and all that (laughter), and I, uh, said it would be all right. And it was perfect. RICHARD RUSK: Well, what years would this have been? ROSTOW: Well, in the ' ; 70s. But I used to go around and do the same thing, and, you know, there' ; s a sense of obligation that people who' ; ve had this experience try to convey what it means. And I' ; d meet him, and sometimes we' ; d be on the same program, all over the country. And I know that that' ; s what he was doing, and his health was terrible, and he shouldn' ; t have been doing it, but he did it. And, of course, he spoke very, very well, and you had a sense there of, as I say, the greatness of spirit and the religious conviction. When I took the job, we went over, I had a long talk with him in his office, and he took me over to see the president to get the formal offer, and then I came back with him in his limousine, and I dropped him off at the State Department, and the car took me over to my brother' ; s house, where I was to meet him and talk about it. RICHARD RUSK: Right. ROSTOW: He got out of the car to send me on. He said, " ; You know, Presbyterians and Jews are the same. They' ; re dominated by a sense of duty, and it' ; s your duty to take this job." ; (laughter) RICHARD RUSK: I' ; ll be darned. ROSTOW: And that, there he was, you know, with all that terrible heart trouble he had and other troubles, going around the country to small colleges. (perceived to be?) his duty. RICHARD RUSK: He' ; s doing it now. ROSTOW: He' ; s doing it now. RICHARD RUSK: Still doing it, yeah. They, uh, he' ; s like a folk hero down here in the South. ROSTOW: Well, he should be. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. They all know him. He' ; s been to about every small town in Georgia. ROSTOW: Yeah. RICHARD RUSK: Hmm. I understand you were one of the founders of the Committee for Present Danger (unintelligible). ROSTOW: That' ; s right. RICHARD RUSK: What about my dad' ; s role in that? I understand he was a member at one time. Is there anything there that, uh, worth commenting on? ROSTOW: Well, he gave us every help he could. RICHARD RUSK: Mmm hmm. ROSTOW: To get it started and do it. He said, you know, I don' ; t sign petitions I haven' ; t written and so on, but he signed that one for us. RICHARD RUSK: He did. ROSTOW: He stuck with it for a couple of years and then on grounds of health he couldn' ; t come to the meetings and so on and faded out, but he didn' ; t fade out because of any difference, but he helped us to get started. RICHARD RUSK: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm. ROSTOW: And we, I was on the phone with him a lot about those drafts, and I' ; d send them down to him. RICHARD RUSK: Mmm hmm. He didn' ; t, uh, he told, let' ; s see, he talked to you about why, he alleged to [sic] health problems, he talked about health problems for his noninvolvement with the committee. ROSTOW: Well, he got out after a couple of years. RICHARD RUSK: I see. Mmm hmm. ROSTOW: Yeah. And it was just that, uh, and also his general allergy about signing up on statements that he hadn' ; t written himself or participated [in]. RICHARD RUSK: Right. Right. Yeah, he' ; s very reluctant to, he' ; s not much of a joiner, he' ; s not much of a joiner here. ROSTOW: No. Well, I think that he made an exception, really, for the Committee on the Present Danger. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. ROSTOW: And helped it on its way. RICHARD RUSK: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm. Well, this has been a good interview. Any fleeting comments beyond what you already told me? ROSTOW: No, I don' ; t think so. RICHARD RUSK: Mmm hmm. ROSTOW: If I, if something comes to mind that I ought to add, why, uh-- I' ; ll tell you that comment he made getting out of the limo, I think that says it all. RICHARD RUSK: (laughter) Okay. I understand you' ; ve written quite a number of books. I didn' ; t go through those books prior to calling you, but are there any references or significant comments about my father in any of those? ROSTOW: I, I' ; m sure there must be, but only in terms-- I don' ; t write memoirs and reminiscences and I don' ; t think I ever shall. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. Yeah. Mmm hmm. ROSTOW: So they' ; d be entirely factual or professional. There' ; d be no criticism about the Johnson administration in Vietnam, the general one I' ; ve made that they didn' ; t win I made entirely just for the president. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. Mmm hmm. Uh-- ROSTOW: (unintelligible) remember that-- RICHARD RUSK: They did remember that? ROSTOW: Yeah, and, of course, you know, various people would help keep the memory green. (laughter) But (unintelligible). RICHARD RUSK: You, uh, were they still claiming him as one of their own at that time or was there too much dissatisfaction over this Vietnam War to, uh, poison the well, huh? ROSTOW: They were very polite and punctilious about that, I know. After all, when I came there, I' ; d been appointed to that professorship before I went down to Washington, I guess. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. ROSTOW: And they put it off for a year, and, uh, or so, so that when I came after my period of working in the Johnson administration I was a pretty controversial character as a result of-- -- (laughter) But there were no demo--One of, the master of Balliol (unintelligible), or one of the senior fellows of Balliol, was a little concerned cause he' ; d heard, he wondered if there were any protests outside the lecture hall. (unintelligible) fellow who was a theologian and very much of a dove, but very correct. He certainly didn' ; t want any discourtesy, so that' ; s the way it was handled. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. Mmm hmm. 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-RuskSSSSSS.xml RBRL214DROH-RuskSSSSSS.xml http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH/findingaid
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57 minutes
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Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
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Rusk SSSSSS, Eugene Rostow, 1986 May 5
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RBRL214DROH-RuskSSSSSS
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Eugene Rostow
Richard Rusk
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audio
oral histories
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United States
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Foreign relations
Arab-Israeli conflict
Cold War
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Eugene Rostow interviewed by Richard Rusk. Topics include Rostow’s memories of Dean Rusk, Rusk’s relationship with Rostow and Dean Acheson, the Six-Day War, the Vietnam War, the Nonproliferation Treaty, and Rusk’s greatness of spirit.
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1986-05-05
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Dean Rusk Oral History Collection
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United States--Officials and employees
Politics and Public Policy
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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>
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Richard Geary Rusk
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Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
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1984-1989
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Oral histories
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RBRL214DROH
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United States
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
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5.3 Unknown Date Rusk VVV, Dean Rusk interviewed by Richard Rusk and Thomas Schoenbaum, 1985 April RBRL214DROH-RuskVVV RBRL214DROH Dean Rusk Oral History Collection Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Dean Rusk Richard Rusk and Thomas Schoenbaum oral history 1:|8(13)|17(10)|27(6)|36(12)|47(11)|56(3)|73(10)|84(2)|93(7)|103(10)|116(7)|133(9)|145(7)|164(2)|176(9)|199(4)|219(10)|235(12)|246(1)|255(12)|265(13)|274(8)|299(7)|327(8)|337(3)|359(5)|379(16)|398(4)|419(4)|431(2)|448(11)|472(12)|489(7)|505(13)|519(1)|550(12)|562(9)|572(14)|589(3)|612(9)|626(4)|640(9)|655(8)|683(4)|700(3)|714(10)|729(1)|745(13)|764(13)|780(6)|808(5)|819(1)|826(13)|838(8)|852(7)|869(6)|886(4)|895(3)|906(6)|928(5)|938(3)|956(6)|971(13) 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_2apjy6p7& ; flashvars[localizationCode]=en& ; amp ; flashvars[leadWithHTML5]=true& ; amp ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.plugin]=true& ; amp ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.position]=left& ; amp ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.clickToClose]=true& ; amp ; flashvars[chapters.plugin]=true& ; amp ; flashvars[chapters.layout]=vertical& ; amp ; flashvars[chapters.thumbnailRotator]=false& ; amp ; flashvars[streamSelector.plugin]=true& ; amp ; flashvars[EmbedPlayer.SpinnerTarget]=videoHolder& ; amp ; flashvars[dualScreen.plugin]=true& ; amp ; & ; wid=1_pl32whpr" ; width=" ; 400" ; height=" ; 285" ; allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozAllowFullScreen frameborder=" ; 0" ; title=" ; Kaltura Player" ; > ; < ; /iframe> ; English 6 Palestine and the Truman administration This is an interview with Dean Rusk. We're talking about the Middle East, and this is April 1985. Rich Rusk and Tom Schoenbaum doing the interviewing. Dean Rusk discusses being the head of the Office of United Nations Affairs under the Secretary of State, George Marshall, during the Truman administration. He describes Truman's desire for there to be a Jewish state as a homeland for Jews in Palestine. Balfour Declaration ; General Assembly ; Great Britain ; League of Nations ; United Nations 17 296 The Partition Plan Okay, let me--let's focus first of all on the partition stage because that is a discrete event, and then we'll move into the termination of the mandate phase. Dean Rusk discusses the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, which was a resolution that suggested the creation of independent Arab and Jewish States in Palestine. He also talks about President Truman's decision to support partition as opposed to the British idea that there should be a bi-national state formed instead. Bartley Crumb ; Clark Clifford ; Committee of Inquiry ; David Niles ; George Marshall ; King David Hotel ; Loy Henderson ; President Truman ; State Department office of Near East and African Affairs 17 965 Strategy to move the partition plan through the U.N. / Trusteeship Proposal Now, can you describe the strategy to get partition through the United Nations? Dean Rusk discusses attempting to negotiate the Partition Plan between the Arab delegates and the Zionists at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel in New York. He also talks about a point before these negotiations took place, when the U.S. changed its position and moved toward creating a temporary trusteeship for Palestine. He discusses President Truman's negative reaction to this plan. Chip Bohlen ; Clark Clifford ; George Marshall ; Jewish immigration ; Loy Henderson ; Robert Lovett ; Soviet Union ; U.N. trusteeship ; Warren Austin 17 1704 The British mandate / Reactions to the new Jewish state Now there's another dramatic moment in which I was personally involved, and that had to do with the actual termination of the British mandate and the declaration of the provisional government, and the immediate recognition of that government by the United States. I think the British mandate was to expire at 6:00. Dean Rusk discusses Truman's decision to immediately recognize the new Jewish State (Israel) in Palestine after the expiration of the British mandate. He also discusses the reactions of George Marshall and the U.N. General Assembly to this news. Clark Clifford ; David Niles ; Paris, France ; U.S. Embassy 17 2402 Other possibilities for the Jewish State Pop, let me ask a sort of a general question here, and one of the " ; what if" ; questions of history. Dean Rusk recalls the other possibilities that were considered for the situation of the Jews in Palestine including the U.N. Trusteeship Proposal. He says that he does not think that there was a solution that would have satisfied both the Jews and the Arabs. Adolf Hitler ; British mandate ; Creech Jones ; Joint Chiefs ; U.S. Military 17 2823 Reflections on the Holocaust Pop, I got a--I want to back up just a minute further here, and let's talk for a minute about the Holocaust and the meaning of the Holocaust. Dean Rusk discusses the Holocaust and describes how it lead to the creation of the Jewish State in Palestine. CBI ; Harry Truman ; Nazis 17 3055 Aftermath of the recognition decision I wanted to come back to one more question about the recognition decision. Dean Rusk discusses the effects of the decision to recognize Israel and the wars that broke out between the Arabs and the Jews. Folke Bernadotte ; Soviet Union ; United Nations 17 3418 Role of Dean Rusk during the partition plan Pop, you say the Jewish pressure on this issue was phenomenal, and obviously a lot of it was focused on Harry Truman and the White House people. Dean Rusk discusses his role as the director of the Office of United Nations Affairs under George Marshall when the United Nations passed the Partition Plan. He also talks about the political pressure received from the Jews during this time. Dorothy Fosdick ; Eleanor Roosevelt ; Harry Truman ; John Foster Dulles ; John Hilldring ; The Herald Tribune 17 RICHARD RUSK: This is an interview with Dean Rusk. We' ; re talking about the Middle East, and this is April 1985. Rich Rusk and Tom Schoenbaum doing the interviewing. DEAN RUSK: Let me begin with a little background on how I got into the, what was then called the Palestine Question, during the Truman administration. Palestine was a mandated territory under the mandate system of the old League of Nations with Great Britain as the mandatory power. At the end of World War II there was a sharp upsurge in demands for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and those insisting upon such a homeland reminded the British of the Balfour Declaration issued during World War I, which seemed to promise them a homeland in Palestine. But, in that immediate postwar period, the British were very reluctant to move in that direction, possibly because of the importance of their relations with Arab countries. President Truman became deeply involved in the issue of a Jewish state in Palestine, partly because of the enormous impact upon him personally which had been made by the full story of the holocaust as we came to know it at the end of the war when we were capturing these concentration camps and so forth. That made a deep impression upon Truman. And also, as a matter of domestic politics, he was under very strong pressure from then-called the Zionist groups in this country who were pressing very hard for a Jewish state in Palestine. Well, Truman, therefore, put a good deal of pressure upon the British, in effect, to make good on the Balfour Declaration. The British, however, became both resistant and irritated by this pressure from Truman, and themselves decided simply to toss this question into the United Nations. And when they did so, they announced that they themselves would terminate their mandatory responsibilities on May 15, 1948 and would withdraw. The British also said that they would accept any solution which would be agreeable both to the Jews and to the Arabs, which was a very comfortable position to be in, although not very realistic in terms of the real world. So, when the matter went to the United Nations, I became intimately involved on a daily basis with those problems because I was then the head of the office of United Nations Affairs under Secretary of State George [Catlett] Marshall. And so I was closely involved in the operations of the General Assembly on this matter and the work of the U.N. commission which was established to go out to Palestine and make recommendations: a commission which recommended, in fact, a partition plan which was later adopted by the General Assembly. There is one important point which some Arabs and some Jews would strongly object to. That is, that the United Nations had inherited the mandate responsibilities from the old League of Nations (the World Court has held that on one or two opinions). And so when the General Assembly took up the Palestine question, it was in a much stronger position than normal General Assembly action which usually takes the form of recommendations. It very likely had a legislative power with respect to mandated territories, and could, in fact, take decisive action because of that inherited responsibility for mandated territories. But anyhow, that was the--those were the steps which caused me to be directly and personally heavily involved in the so-called Palestine question. SCHOENBAUM: Okay, let me--let' ; s focus first of all on the partition stage because that is a discreet event, and then we' ; ll move into the termination of the mandate phase. Now the partition phase: there are some very interesting things that came up in the documents. For instance, there is the split in between President Truman' ; s advisors on the one hand, not that--this is perhaps over simplistic, but the--under Loy [W.] Henderson, in the State Department office of Near East and African Affairs, were a group of people who believed, as Henderson did, and I quote Henderson' ; s words in late 1945, that " ; Basically partition would be contrary to the traditional U.S. policy of favoring the, a large majority of the local inhabitants in their choice of government." ; And then on the other side were the people who apparently were centered in the White House and President Truman' ; s political advisors, who were genuinely moved by the refugee problem and the holocaust and also by domestic politics. DEAN RUSK: And domestic politics. SCHOENBAUM: So there--where were you at the time when Loy--well, there was Loy Henderson ; there was Bartley [Cavanaugh] Crumb. Do you remember that name? Bartley Crumb in the White House, who was apparently undermining Loy Henderson and Bartley Crumb was being aided in the White House by David [K.] Niles, who was close to Truman. RICHARD RUSK: Do you recall these names, Pop? DEAN RUSK: Yeah. SCHOENBAUM: Apparently there was a, what people call, fluctuating policy at that--a zig-zag policy, fluctuating policy. Truman was listening to both sides at this time. Do you--where were you? DEAN RUSK: I think this alleged feud between White House staff on the one side and Loy Henderson and his group on the other has been considerably exaggerated. It has to be said that on this subject Harry Truman was almost schizophrenic. On the one side, he was deeply committed to a Jewish homeland in Palestine. But on the other hand, he also wanted a solution with which both Jews and Arabs could live, a solution which would not lead to a succession of wars. Now, these two objectives caused him to give what appeared to be contradictory instructions from time to time. He looked at Secretary of State George Marshall to try to find a solution which could be a permanent solution, and not just an occasion for a series of wars. And yet, the then Zionist group, which had a powerful momentum among the Jewish community of this country, considered anybody who was not 1,000 percent Zionist was betraying President Truman. The Jews had their own pipeline into the White House, through David Niles and through Clark [M.] Clifford. And they kept that, those contacts open and active at all stages. But, the U.N. Commission' ; s report, favoring partition,. SCHOENBAUM: Wasn' ; t that the Committee of Inquiry? Wasn' ; t there a Committee of Inquiry Report that was rejected by [Ernest] Bevin, and also rejected by Truman except for Truman, who did say that 100,000 refugees should be permitted to settle on the-- DEAN RUSK: Yes. Quite frankly I forget the details of those exchanges between Truman and the British before the British moved the question into the U.N., because at that period I was not personally involved as I immediately became when the matter got to be a U.N. question. But, the partition plan was proposed by the U.N. Commission and was submitted to the U.N. General Assembly in a special session, and it was a very, very close thing to pass that partition plan by the necessary two-thirds votes. As a matter of fact, when we were approaching a final vote, we of the American delegation counted noses and estimated that if the Arab side made a simple motion to adjourn, they had the necessary bare majority to adjourn the Assembly without a decision. Well, at that point Mr. Camille Chamoun, later to become-- RICHARD RUSK: How do you spell that? DEAN RUSK: Chamoun, later to become President of Lebanon, was the Arab floor leader in the General Assembly and he went to the podium and made a motion to adjourn. And in our delegation we sort of muttered to ourselves, " ; Oh boy, now we' ; ve had it." ; But then to our amazement, he added a second paragraph to his motion to establish a committee to do this or that or the other, and that translated that motion for adjournment into a substantive question requiring a two-thirds vote. What he couldn' ; t mobilize--He could not get the two-thirds vote to pass his resolution, and so we defeated him on that. SCHOENBAUM: That was during the partition debate? DEAN RUSK: During the partition debate. SCHOENBAUM: Yeah. DEAN RUSK: --and then went ahead and passed the partition resolution. But that took the most strenuous effort on the part of the United States and Jews all over the world to get together the necessary votes of--the pressures applied in capitol after capitol on that vote are hard to describe. SCHOENBAUM: Yeah, he goes into this--what--now, the decision to--for the American decision, Truman' ; s decision, to support partition, was made in the face of the contrary British idea and the idea of some of the people in the State Department including Loy Henderson, that there should be a bi-national state formed instead of partition. DEAN RUSK: Well, Loy Henderson, I' ; m sure, thought that a bi-national state had a better chance for peaceful survival than an Arab and Jewish state within that small area of Palestine confronting each other there. But nevertheless, when Loy Henderson had his directions from Secretary Marshall, he followed them. And he was not a constructionist in a devious kind of way. His views were put on the table as they should have been. They were taken into account. But the partition plan seemed to offer a Jewish state as a homeland for the Jews in Palestine, as well as an Arab state within that mandated territory. SCHOENBAUM: Truman, President Truman, during the campaign of 1946, I think it was in October, made a campaign speech in which he first, as I understand It, in Yom Kippur Speech (so-called) advocated, or made a speech saying that he favored a homeland for the Jews, and people Immediately took this to mean partition. Do you have a sense that he made the decision to support partition in the heat of the campaign or was he, was that just campaign rhetoric that was-- DEAN RUSK: Well, his own campaign did not come until 1948. SCHOENBAUM: Right, this was the congressional campaign, congressional elections. DEAN RUSK: Congressional elections in 1946. SCHOENBAUM: Congressional elections in 1946, yeah. DEAN RUSK: He did not spell out the details of what later came to be the partition plan. He was simply powerfully in support of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine and-- SCHOENBAUM: What went into the decision to support partition? Was there any meeting or series of meetings where that decision was taken? DEAN RUSK: Well, we ourselves did not want to fall heir to this problem as a unilateral problem for the United States. We preferred to see it dealt with in the U.N. And the U.N. had established this committee to work on the matter, and the committee had come back with a report, and it seemed to us to be a reasonable disposition of the various interests that were there. And it also provided a homeland for the Jews in Palestine, so that it was more or less natural for us to support that partition plan. Now, the British had retreated into this position that they would support any solution that was acceptable both to the Jews and to the Arabs. They-- SCHOENBAUM: I get the point. But prior-- DEAN RUSK: They clearly were very reluctant about the partition plan. They rightly believed that this would not be acceptable to both sides. But they did not actively oppose it because of this neutral position they had publicly taken. SCHOENBAUM: Well, there was the King David Hotel explosion and a lot of atrocities that were committed, some by Jewish terrorists-- DEAN RUSK: That' ; s correct and-- SCHOENBAUM: Menachem Begin against the British-- DEAN RUSK: --the British were very resentful of that sort of thing. But nevertheless, they had announced that they were terminating the mandate and getting out. SCHOENBAUM: That occurred--As I understand it, that announcement that they were terminating the mandate occurred after partitioning was voted. Partitioning was voted in November 29, 1947, and their reaction to that was to say that, " ; On May 15, 1948, we are terminating our mandate and getting out." ; DEAN RUSK: And getting out. That' ; s correct. SCHOENBAUM: Now, can you describe the strategy to get partition through the United Nations? Apparently Sumner Welles was a key figure in the--in formulating the strategy to move the partition resolution through the UN? DEAN RUSK: I don' ; t think so, Sumner Wells had already retired. SCHOENBAUM: Okay. DEAN RUSK: He was not active at this particular period. SCHOENBAUM: Was Ambassador--well he was not ambassador--was-- DEAN RUSK: Warren [Robinson] Austin was the American delegate up there. And then you had General [John H.] Hilldring, who was a member of our delegation and strongly in support of the Jewish point of view. [Anna] Eleanor Roosevelt was on our delegation. She was strongly in support of the Jewish point of view. And there were others ; but, our delegation supported the partition plan on direct orders from President Truman, on which General Marshall concurred. But there were other complications. One critical point arrived just a very few weeks before the expiration of the British mandate. I was--I don' ; t think this is part of the official record anywhere. I was standing in the delegates' ; lounge, talking with [Arthur] Creech-Jones, the British colonial minister. RICHARD RUSK: How do you spell his first name, Pop? DEAN RUSK: It' ; s a hyphenated name. SCHOENBAUM: Creech: C-R-E-E-C-H. DEAN RUSK: That' ; s right, Creech-Jones, the colonial minister under whom Palestine fell at that time in the British government, and Mr. Sharett, Moshe Sharett, who later became Prime Minister, well, Foreign Minister and then Prime Minister of Israel. But he was--Sharett was very active in the so-called Zionist delegation at the U.N. in those days. And the three of us were talking, and Creech-Jones looked at Sharett and said, " ; We know you' ; re going to have your Jewish state in Palestine." ; He said, of course the Arab legion would move, but it would move only into those areas designated as the Arab state of Palestine. Well, this was an extraordinarily important piece of information for Sharett because the Arab legion at that time, which was still under British command, was the only effective organized military force in the Arab world. And for Sharett to be told that the legion would move only into those areas allotted to the Arab state was very important. Sharett almost immediately took off for Palestine, and I have no doubt that that piece of information played a considerable part in Israel' ; s declaring a provisional government on the day before the expiration of the British mandate. But, Truman was still wrestling behind the scenes to find some solution that would mean peace in the area. Shortly before, after the partition resolution had been passed and it was clear that the Arabs were going to oppose it very strongly ; President Truman and Secretary Marshall asked me to try to negotiate a military and political standstill to take effect at the expiration of the British mandate. And so I undertook these very quiet negotiations in New York at the old Savoy Plaza Hotel. The Arab delegations were at one end of the hall, and Zionists were at the other end of the hall, and I had a suite halfway between. And I would shuttle back and forth between these two groups. We were trying to work out all the points that needed to be dealt with during a so-called standstill, and we got many of them resolved except for the rate of Jewish immigration into Palestine during the standstill. The Arabs were very opposed to any significant Jewish immigration. Well, finally the Zionist side came down to the figure of 2,500 a month, which was almost nothing given the circumstances of that period. So, I went down to the other end of the hall and presented this figure to then Prince Faisal, later King Faisal who was sort of the head of the Arab delegations there. And he heard me out and then he said, " ; Impossible, impossible. If we agree to 2,500 they will simply bring in 2,500 pregnant women and that will mean 5,000." ; Well, at about that moment Secretary Marshall, through a slip of the tongue down in Washington, referred to these discussions to some reporters. The moment he did that those talks were dead because the constituents on both sides could not even accept the fact that such talks could be taking place. And so, even some of the reporters expressed their regret that Secretary Marshall had had this slip of the tongue. But, anyhow, the--Now there' ; s another episode which is perhaps worth putting on the tape. This comes a little before these negotiations I just discussed. Again, in trying to get some time to try to work out something that both sides could live with, at one point the United States changed its position in New York and moved toward a temporary trusteeship for Palestine. SCHOENBAUM: Yeah, yeah. RICHARD RUSK: I' ; m sorry, the U.S. or the U.N.? DEAN RUSK: U.N. trusteeship. RICHARD RUSK: All right, gotcha. DEAN RUSK: Well, when this idea was made public, it just exploded like a bomb around the U.N., and consternation on the Zionist side, and surprise on almost everybody else' ; s side. Well, it happened that when the U.S. delegation aired this trusteeship proposal, that President Truman, Secretary Marshall, and Under Secretary Robert [Abercrombie] Lovett were all three out of town. SCHOENBAUM: Who first aired the trusteeship proposal? DEAN RUSK: Our delegation in New York. RICHARD RUSK: Our delegation. DEAN RUSK: I happened to be in New York at that moment and I met the press immediately after that. And the atmosphere was so thick you could cut it with a knife. I' ; ve never seen such a charged atmosphere as there was at that particular press conference. Anyhow-- SCHOENBAUM: What did you say to the press? What did they ask you? DEAN RUSK: Well, I forget the details, but, in effect, I repeated what Warren Austin had said. SCHOENBAUM: But that was important, because that represented--correct me if I' ; m wrong--Or it was interpreted as representing a retreat by, a possible retreat by the administration in repudiation away from partition. DEAN RUSK: That' ; s right. And also it-- SCHOENBAUM: So, how did you handle that? DEAN RUSK: It lead to a break between us and the Soviet Union on this subject, because the Soviet Union had been strongly in support of the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. SCHOENBAUM: Yeah. Now that was a--how did you--did that idea then come from Warren Austin? DEAN RUSK: No. No, no, it came out of Washington. Let me finish the story and you will see. SCHOENBAUM: Yeah. DEAN RUSK: Well, while Truman, Marshall, and Lovett were out of town that weekend, Clark [McAdams] Clifford, in high dudgeon, called over to the State Department and he asked Chip Bohlen, Charles [E.] Bohlen, who was then counselor to the department and then, at that moment, the senior officer in the Department, to come over to the White House and bring me with him. And it was clear that Clark Clifford was looking for somebody to hang, because the reaction of the Jewish community was one of complete outrage at this move. So we went over to see Clark Clifford, and shortly into the conversation, Bohlen pulled out of his folder the original green telegram which went to our delegation in New York setting the framework in which this trusteeship plan would be aired. And on that original green of that telegram there was a notation at the top of it " ; Approved by the President, George C. Marshall." ; Well, that immediately cooled off Clark Clifford. SCHOENBAUM: Yeah. DEAN RUSK: But, it was--those were very tense moments. SCHOENBAUM: Yeah. But who had the idea? Who came up with that idea, do you remember? For trusteeship, was that Loy Henderson at that point, or-- DEAN RUSK: It probably came out of my office, quite frankly, because we were, after all, we were the U.N. office, and we were looking for ways to gain time to try to find a solution that would be somehow agreeable to both sides, just as I was trying to do in these negotiations between the two sides up in New York. RICHARD RUSK: Was coming out of your office synonymous with coming out of you? DEAN RUSK: Came out--I was responsible. RICHARD RUSK: All right. DEAN RUSK: However I would say this, when something like that-- SCHOENBAUM: That' ; s never been revealed before, you know. DEAN RUSK: When something like that occurs, it' ; s almost impossible to identify the specific person that might have brought up such an idea. It might have come--it evolved out of group discussion. SCHOENBAUM: Yeah, I understand, but there' ; s still got to be a key spark that someone has. Then--So obviously it was approved by Marshall and then Marshall went to the President. DEAN RUSK: It was approved by Marshall and Truman. SCHOENBAUM: And Truman, yeah, but--and Truman, though.. . I' ; ll give a quote from [Mary] Margaret Truman' ; s memoirs--did Truman really understand what he was approving? Because this is what Margaret Truman says that President Truman said on, well, this was the 19th of March--apparently after this--it happened around the time--it says--this is Truman: " ; This morning I find that the State Department has reversed my Palestine policy. The first I know about it is what I see in the papers. Isn' ; t that hell? I am now in the position of a liar and a double-crosser. I' ; ve never felt so in my life." ; RICHARD RUSK: That' ; s what happens when family members write biographies. DEAN RUSK: That' ; s Harry Truman. He, in effect, tried to disclaim this move politically. RICHARD RUSK: And he himself could not see a way through to a solution to that dilemma. DEAN RUSK: No, but he was constantly grasping for one. But I said earlier, that effort to find a peaceful solution caused him to do things that seemed to be quite contradictory to what he was telling the Zionists he was going to do, and that caused--that contributed to this sense of feuding between the White House staff and the-- SCHOENBAUM: Yeah. And he called Clifford in to investigate the State Department. That' ; s the story of Clifford, calling you up on the carpet. Those must have been quite some times. RICHARD RUSK: Did Clifford' ; s interrogatories and his investigation go any further than that conversation and this green telegram that you found? DEAN RUSK: No, when the green telegram-- SCHOENBAUM: That cooled it off. DEAN RUSK: It was put before him with the notation at the top: " ; Approved by the President, signed George Marshall." ; That-- RICHARD RUSK: Took the wind out of his sails. Just a minute here. DEAN RUSK: Now there' ; s another dramatic moment in which I was personally involved, and that had to do with the actual termination of the British mandate and the declaration of the provisional government, and the immediate recognition of that government by the United States. I think the British mandate was to expire at 6:00. SCHOENBAUM: Yeah, on May--it was May 14. DEAN RUSK: May 14, six o' ; clock. Well, about, quarter to six, I was in my office in the State Department, and I got a telephone call from Clark Clifford. He said, " ; The President wants you to know that a Jewish state will be declared at six o' ; clock" ; --that was fifteen minutes from then--" ; --and that the United States would recognize it immediately." ; And I said, " ; Clark, but this would cut right across what our delegation has been working for up there in New York for several weeks, and for which we have about forty votes already." ; He said, " ; Nevertheless, that is the President' ; s instruction, and he wants you to get in immediate touch with our delegation in New York and inform them." ; So I called Senator Warren Austin, our chief delegate to the U.N., got him off the floor of the Assembly and told him what was about to happen. Well, he just then went home. He didn' ; t go back to the Assembly and tell the rest of our delegation. He just went home. SCHOENBAUM: Do you remember what he told you on the phone in response to your statement? DEAN RUSK: No, I was--he was-- SCHOENBAUM: Printable? DEAN RUSK: He was too loyal a man to be indiscreet in that way, but--well, then about five minutes past six, one of the delegates to the U.N., came rushing down the aisle screaming, waving an Associated Press ticker. SCHOENBAUM: The Cuban delegate. DEAN RUSK: And he went to the podium and read this Associated Press ticker that the provisional government of Israel had just been declared and that the United States had given it immediate recognition. And he called on the United States delegation for an explanation. Well, sitting in the U.S. delegation at that point was Francis [B.] Sayre, a lovely older man, but not all that smart, and Phillip [C.] Jessup, a very intelligent fellow. Well, Philip Jessup immediately left the assembly to find out what in the hell was going on. But Francis Sayre went to the platform and in effect scratched his head and said, " ; Damned if I know." ; Well, as soon as Philip Jessup got the-- RICHARD RUSK: Well, did he call you back in Washington? DEAN RUSK: He called me or my deputy, I forget now which one it was. But he--I thought he called me, but he remembers that he called somebody else. But anyhow, as soon as he learned that this press ticker was, in fact, true, he went back to the podium, read the press ticker and confirmed-- END OF SIDE 1 BEGINNING OF SIDE 2 RICHARD RUSK: Pandemonium broke loose in the General Assembly. DEAN RUSK: In the General Assembly. It' ; s hard to imagine the turmoil that occurred over that announcement. RICHARD RUSK: Describe it. Describe the scene. DEAN RUSK: Well, delegates shouting at each other, an American staff officer physically sat in the lap of the Cuban delegate to keep him from going to the platform and withdrawing Cuba from the United Nations. SCHOENBAUM: Cuban delegate went crazy apparently. DEAN RUSK: Oh yeah. But about fifteen minutes past six, the intercommunications box, that we called the squawk box, that was on my desk buzzed, and it was George Marshall. And he said, " ; Rusk, get up there to New York immediately and keep the United States delegation from resigning en masse." ; So I hopped on the first plane I could get and went up there. But by the time I got there, they had more or less cooled off and there was no problem of their all resigning. But it was a very tumultuous scene. RICHARD RUSK: Do you recall the reactions of any of the individuals on that staff when you went up there? DEAN RUSK: Well, I can' ; t put names to reactions, but there was--you see--let me put it this way, when Warren Austin simply went home instead of going back to the General Assembly, he clearly made the judgment that it was better for the United States and its delegation in New York, for the delegations to know that this was a Presidential decision, a Presidential action, and that the U.S. delegation had not been up there hoodwinking everybody for several weeks. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. And that' ; s a good decision on his part. DEAN RUSK: And I think, probably he made the right decision on that because it was clear at the U.N. that this action caught our own delegation completely by surprise. RICHARD RUSK: To what extent did Truman' ; s decision catch George Marshall by surprise, and to what extent did Truman make up his mind on this thing at the very last minute himself? DEAN RUSK: Well, George Mar--This issue caused George Marshall to make a rather classic statement. Because on a couple of occasions--and I won' ; t try to specify which ones because I' ; ve sort of forgotten, but this was one of them--Truman seemed to pull the rug out from under George Marshall. And some of Marshall' ; s friends told him that they thought he ought to resign. And he said, " ; No gentlemen, you do not take a post of this sort and then resign when the man who has the constitutional responsibility for making a decision, makes one. You can resign at any other time for any other reason, or for no reason at all, but not for that one." ; Well, that' ; s a rather extreme view of the constitutional situation, because there have been occasions in which the Secretaries of State have resigned, in fact. But-- SCHOENBAUM: Well, Marshall was quoted as saying before, in a confrontation, or in a talk, I should say conversation--But in a talk with Clifford, he was quoted as saying that, " ; If President Truman does decide in favor of immediate recognition, I will be forced not to vote for President Truman in the next election." ; (laughter) DEAN RUSK: He did tell Truman that he would not vote for him in the next election under such circumstances. RICHARD RUSK: Did he tell him directly? DEAN RUSK: Yeah. RICHARD RUSK: Were you there for that? DEAN RUSK: Nope. SCHOENBAUM: He would not resign, but he would not vote for him-- DEAN RUSK: That' ; s right. (laughter) RICHARD RUSK: So George Marshall himself was a little worked up about that? DEAN RUSK: Oh, of course, of course. Well, among other things, this was a hell of a way to run a railroad. RICHARD RUSK: And I--do you--are you clear in your own mind as to, at what point Truman made this decision to recognize the state of Israel? Obviously this was kept from your-- DEAN RUSK: My guess is that he was informed through his White House staff channels that the Jews were going to proclaim their provisional government in the State of Israel. RICHARD RUSK: Would the Jews have taken that action without some guarantee in advance that the Americans would recognize the state? DEAN RUSK: That' ; s a speculative question. My guess is that both Truman and the leaders of the provisional government of Israel knew at least a few hours in advance as to what would happen. But-- SCHOENBAUM: Did you feel resentment, a little bit of resentment at least, or did anyone feel a little bit of resentment against what David Niles, these people in the White House that were obviously-- DEAN RUSK: Well, there were times when you had to bite your tongue on the back end through those, because of those private contacts, because they were contradictory. They did produce results contradictory to the instructions that Truman was giving Marshall. But, to show you how these contacts operated, when the U.N. met in Paris in 1948, while they were building the new headquarters in New York, Marshall was heading our delegation. And I got a call from our code room about three o' ; clock in the morning saying that there was an urgent, eyes- only message to Marshall from President Truman, and that I probably better get it to him. So I went on over to the Embassy that was across the street from the hotel where we were living, and sure enough, it was urgent and it did call for an immediate reply. So I took a few moments to draft a proposed reply for Secretary Marshall and waked him up in his own apartment. That was about three thirty in the morning. And he looked at the incoming, and made one or two little changes in the outgoing, and sent me off to get it back to the code room and get it back to Truman. Well, by the time I got all that done, it was about five thirty or six. So I went on over to where the U.N. General Assembly meeting hall was to have breakfast at a little cafe over there nearby-- SCHOENBAUM: Do you remember where that was? DEAN RUSK: No. It was near the Eiffel Tower. I forget now the name of it ; we could check it. But, at that early hour of the morning I ran across a Jewish reporter, and he started asking me about that telegram Marshall had received from Truman. RICHARD RUSK: Good grief. DEAN RUSK: Now, clearly what happened was that somebody in the White House, Niles or Clifford or somebody, had told their Jewish contacts about this telegram. And they, in turn, had telephoned their people in Paris, and this reporter picked it up. RICHARD RUSK: Jesus Christ! DEAN RUSK: And here he was, talking about this eyes-only exchange between Truman and Marshall. SCHOENBAUM: Amazing. DEAN RUSK: Incidentally, when I left Marshall' ; s apartment with that telegram to send back to Truman, as I was about to leave, Marshall looked at me and said, " ; Rusk, there are times when I think you earn your pay." ; Well, that was the closest he ever came to complimenting me while I was working for him. He never complimented people who, with whom he had an official relationship. When that relationship no longer obtained, no one could be more generous, warm, or kind than George Marshall. But, see, his view was that it might be his duty to fire me the next day. SCHOENBAUM: Yeah. DEAN RUSK: He had had to fire some of his closest friends during World War II who simply couldn' ; t cut the mustard under the conditions of combat. RICHARD RUSK: Pop, let me ask a sort of a general question here, and one of the " ; what if" ; questions of history. Looking back at everything that has happened and looking, remembering back to the possibilities for a solution that may have existed in the late forties in respect to Palestine and the need for a Jewish homeland, was there a solution, did we lose an opportunity, what might have happened had we proceeded with the-- DEAN RUSK: Well, we certainly searched the underbrush for every possibility that we could think of. But I think the actual creation of a Jewish state in Palestine at the expense of Arabs who had been living there for centuries, was something that the Arabs simply could not take. I remember on the day that the partition resolution passed the General Assembly, then Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia took the podium, and he stood there--tall, erect, wounded pride, insulted honor and he spoke with great passion, with great clarity about this great injury that had been done to the Arab people. And I' ; ve never forgotten that, because it isn' ; t easy for us at a distance to understand what the creation of a state of--Jewish state in Palestine meant to those Arabs who had been there for centuries. SCHOENBAUM: No. DEAN RUSK: Who felt that they were, in effect, as some of them put it, were being forced to pay for the crimes of Adolf Hitler. But those deep feelings have persisted in many quarters ever since. RICHARD RUSK: And we' ; ve had four decades of war since then. And you fellows did foresee-- DEAN RUSK: Well, we tried to box the compass of every possibility we could think of. RICHARD RUSK: Was the--I know you boxed-- DEAN RUSK: But inherently, inherently, I suppose that there was no solution with which both sides could live. It was one of those--I' ; ve never--indeed, this problem of the relations between Israel and Its Arab neighbors has been the most stubborn, intractable, unyielding set of issues that we have had throughout this postwar period. I personally bear a good many scars from it. SCHOENBAUM: But your efforts toward a U.N. trusteeship, as I understand them, should be viewed as continual efforts to get these two sides together, and the-- DEAN RUSK: Well, the purpose of that move was to try to gain some time in which perhaps one could work out a solution that both sides could accept. We were trying to because the British were adamant about getting out on May 14. RICHARD RUSK: Did you try to persuade the British into extending their stay there? DEAN RUSK: They wouldn' ; t touch it. RICHARD RUSK: Wouldn' ; t consider -- DEAN RUSK: No. We tried to, but we scolded them pretty hard about lack of responsibility on their part. RICHARD RUSK: Were you involved with those negotiations? DEAN RUSK: I had some discussion with British members of their delegation at the U.N. about it. SCHOENBAUM: Creech-Jones especially. DEAN RUSK: Yeah, but also some of his staff people. RICHARD RUSK: Do you recall any of the specifics or anecdotes that may have derived from that? DEAN RUSK: No. You see, we had already experienced the sudden British decision to get out of Greece and turn that problem over to us on the grounds that they could no longer carry that responsibility. And we had to improvise for the Greek-Turkish aid program and things of that sort, and we just didn' ; t like the idea that the British would just leave the field. But, see, they were being subjected to enormous political harassment, and also vicious acts of terrorism against them in Palestine by the most extreme Jews. And so they had had it, they--and our problem was to try to find a solution which would not simply dump their problems onto us. SCHOENBAUM: And weren' ; t the British also concerned about the rise of anti-Semitic feeling in Britain itself, because the Jewish terrorists murdering British soldiers and that' ; s what' ; s hap--yeah--that was motivation for the British, too, wasn' ; t it? DEAN RUSK: Yes, I think so. I think so. SCHOENBAUM: And this trusteeship idea--you -- well, it would have involved U.N. troops, would it not? RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. DEAN RUSK: Well,-- SCHOENBAUM: Would it have involved American troops? DEAN RUSK: The trusteeship, a U.N. trusteeship of Palestine under those circumstances was no simple thing. To begin with it would have required a very substantial budget from the U.N., and the United States would have had to be in the position of picking up most of that budget. It would have been a several- hundred-million-dollar-a-year trusteeship. It also would have required the necessary police forces and the--We pretty well knew that the Russians would oppose any significant participation by U.S. forces in a trusteeship force. [As a] matter of fact, they were opposed to trusteeship. SCHOENBAUM: In this book it quotes you as trying to sell this plan to the Joint Chiefs and saying that the Joint Chiefs would get, I think they call it, strategic bomber fields in the Mideast. Do you remember that in a meeting with the Joint Chiefs? DEAN RUSK: I don' ; t remember that, but that was a phony argument if I made it because you could not have U.S. bomber bases under a U.N. trusteeship. SCHOENBAUM: Well, that should be elaborated, because I think this book may be misleading on that point. Would you explain the role you envisioned for U.S. military forces at that time under the trusteeship? What role did you have in mind? DEAN RUSK: When we looked around the world to see who might contribute to a trusteeship force, the possibilities were rather meager. As a matter of fact, the possibilities of getting a trusteeship adopted by the U.N. were almost zero. But again, this was simply a, almost a desperate effort to buy some more time. But, it didn' ; t pan out. RICHARD RUSK: Pop, I got a--I want to back up just a minute further here, and let' ; s talk for a minute about the holocaust and the meaning of the holocaust. It obviously had a big impression upon Harry Truman. To what extent were his concerns for the Jewish people and the refugees shared by the American public at large? To what extent were you personally-- DEAN RUSK: Oh, I think that when the real-- RICHARD RUSK: --affected by the holocaust? DEAN RUSK: When the real facts of the holocaust became evident, a wave of horror swept through American people. I mean it' ; s just almost indescribable to see what emerged from those death camps that the Nazis had built in which they had exterminated so many people: not just Jews, most of them were Jews, but other, what the Nazis called, inferior races, like Poles and other peoples. And that had a profound effect upon the American people. It went far beyond the Jewish community. Everybody was horrified by what they learned. RICHARD RUSK: Did any of your official duties back in those years involve you with the holocaust question other than this thing with the Palestine question? DEAN RUSK: No. You see, I went off to China, Burma, India. RICHARD RUSK: That' ; s right. DEAN RUSK: And didn' ; t go back. RICHARD RUSK: What were your first inklings? You were in government and you were back in Washington that spring of ' ; 45, what--were the facts of the holocaust pretty well evident at that time? DEAN RUSK: Well, we--the true facts didn' ; t really come to light until we and the Russians actually occupied these death camps, and then the full facts became available and they were so inhuman as to make a deep impression upon everybody. Now, the holocaust, however, was against the background of a resistant Jewish persecution in many countries in many different times. It was not until the nineteenth century that the Jews were permitted to vote in Britain, for example. And we' ; ve had a good deal of Jewish discrimination in our own country here, as late as the time we lived in Scarsdale, my boy. RICHARD RUSK: Sure. DEAN RUSK: And there had been Jewish persecution in Poland, in Russia, Hungary, and other countries. And so there was a strong feeling that at long last the Jews ought to have some place where they, where those who wanted to, could live together as Jews and not be subject to that kind of persecution. And that sense was very strong. RICHARD RUSK: Was there any serious question of sending them or trying to create a homeland in any place other than Palestine? DEAN RUSK: Well, there had been a little discussion about United States, Brazil, Australia, some place like that. But that got nowhere because the Jews were utterly committed to the idea of a homeland in Palestine, their historic homeland. And nothing, no other place, I think, would have worked. SCHOENBAUM: Coming back to the recognition-- RICHARD RUSK: One more question, Tom. SCHOENBAUM: Yeah, excuse me. RICHARD RUSK: While you were in CBI [China-Burma-India theatre], [was there] any inkling at all of the holocaust or what was happening? DEAN RUSK: Not really. RICHARD RUSK: Nothing. DEAN RUSK: Well, before I left the CBI, we began to get reports, of course, on what our forces in Europe and the Russians had found when they occupied these camps. At that point we began to get it, but that was, as far as I was concerned, it was May and early June of 1945. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. SCHOENBAUM: I wanted to come back to one more question about the recognition decision. Were you conscious then--Of course, there were many, we' ; ve described some, the astounding effect it had, but were you conscious then that this would definitely mean war? Basically, the provisional government of Israel being recognized by the United States in effect made war inevitable, did it not? DEAN RUSK: Well, war was made inevitable when the Arab side decided that they would not accept any part of the partition plan and would take up arms to try to prevent the state of Israel from coming into being. You see, this is rather ironic, because not too many years later the Arabs began to insist upon an Arab state in Palestine. Well, they could have had their Arab state in Palestine if they had accepted the partition resolution in 1947, but they went to war to try to oppose it. But the Jewish side fought with great effect, great valor, and they were opposed by rather disorganized Arab forces, and so the Israeli forces were then able to drive any hostile Arabs out of what came to be Israel. And that created an enormous Arab refugee, Palestine refugee problem for which the United States accepted a heavy responsibility in the ensuing years because we came up with most of the money that the U.N. put into the Palestine refugee organization. SCHOENBAUM: Maybe we can move on to Suez unless you had some questions about.. RICHARD RUSK: Pop, your involvement did not stop with the creation of the State of Israel and American recognition. I presume you remained involved with it. Briefly sum up your activities, the thrust of your involvement in that point. DEAN RUSK: Well, we went to work to encourage other governments to recognize Israel, and many of them did fairly promptly. None of the Arabs did. [The] Soviet Union did, and the countries of Eastern Europe. It was not until later that the Soviets had a basic change of attitude on this when they discovered that since the Arabs were holding us responsible for the creation of the State of Israel that if the Soviets swung to the Arab side, they would pick up a lot of brownie points and increase their ability to have influence in the Arab world. And they' ; ve made pretty good use of it over the years. But there were [sic] a lot of things that had to be done to help Israel get established as an independent nation in terms of aid and training people, technical assistance, all sorts of things. RICHARD RUSK: Were the Arabs right when they say that we were responsible for the creation of the State of Israel? Would that state have come into being without American involvement? DEAN RUSK: There is some question as to whether there would have been a state of Israel had it not been for the United States. I think, probably, our support was crucial. SCHOENBAUM: Did your office, U.N. Affairs, have--were you preoccupied with efforts to try to stop the fighting in 1948, or was that at that point--the U.N. was not really that much involved, was it? DEAN RUSK: Well, we had U.N. efforts to obtain a cease-fire. As a matter of fact, Ralph Bunche won his Nobel Peace Prize by the work he did in getting a ceasefire, stabilizing the lines between Israel and its Arab neighbors. SCHOENBAUM: He succeeded [Folke] Bernadotte after Bernadotte was killed. DEAN RUSK: No, he was working--that' ; s right. SCHOENBAUM: Did he-- DEAN RUSK: He succeeded Count Bernadotte in that negotiation, and handled it beautifully--extraordinary negotiating job which he did to work out that cease-fire. SCHOENBAUM: But your office had no formal connections with the U.N. mediation team, did it? What were your responsibilities? DEAN RUSK: No, we kept in close touch, but at no time did we try and give any instructions to Ralph Bunche. He was an international civil servant working directly under the Secretary General of the U.N. To begin with, he would not have accepted instructions from us. It would have been, in his view and ours at that time, contrary to the Charter for us to try to give him instructions. He would listen to what we had to say, but he would do his duty as he saw it as an official of the U.N. Secretariat. SCHOENBAUM: Were you worried about the danger of a wider war involving the superpowers in 1948? DEAN RUSK: Not particularly, because the Soviet Union supported the creation of the State of Israel, and so there was a time when we and they were on the same side of the thing. RICHARD RUSK: Pop, you say the Jewish pressure on this issue was phenomenal, and obviously a lot of it was focused on Harry Truman and the White House people, (unintelligible) What about yourself, were you a visible enough critter back in those days to be personally subjected to Jewish pressure? Can you describe that? DEAN RUSK: I did not feel that kind of political pressure personally myself, partly because I was not a political figure and I was not the person calling the shots. They played hardball politics in support of Israel in those days. There are many stories reflecting that. In his book, James Forrestal says that a group of Jewish leaders went to Harry Truman in an early stage of the election in 1948, handed him a list of points, and said, " ; Mr. President, here is what we want with respect to Israel. If we get these points, you' ; ll get your campaign money." ; And Forrestal says Truman said yes. I have no proof of that myself, but Forrestal at least mentions that in his diary, which is an instance of hardball politics. I was told that the publisher of The New York Herald Tribune was waited upon by a dozen of his principal advertisers. They said to him, " ; Unless you change your attitude toward Israel, we' ; ll stop advertising." ; The publisher rejected their pressure, but, of course, it wasn' ; t too long after that that The Herald Tribune went broke. RICHARD RUSK: Is that right! (laughter) SCHOENBAUM: Well, that' ; s one alternative. In connection with the partition RICHARD RUSK: Got any more of those? SCHOENBAUM: Yeah, I' ; m sorry. DEAN RUSK: Oh, I probably could think of some others, but this is one of those unpleasant things that I try not to-- RICHARD RUSK: Unpleasant, but illuminating. It does help explain why things turned out the way they did. DEAN RUSK: Well, the pressures on senators and congressmen also were strong, and senators and congressmen took a very active part in this whole business, in turn putting pressure on the administration. And we could feel that everywhere we turned. RICHARD RUSK: Were you involved in congressional testimony on this issue? DEAN RUSK: I don' ; t recall, I might have testified on this matter before the Congress. But there was one little incident that might be noted: At one point when the U.N. was meeting in Paris, George Marshall had already returned to Washington because of health, leaving John Foster Dulles in charge of the delegation, and we had a late-night telecommunications conference between Marshall and the delegation. And the official members of the delegation were people like John Foster Dulles, [Anna] Eleanor Roosevelt, General [John H.] Hilldring, the pretty much red-hot pro-Zionist group. And they discussed certain questions back and forth and then on the teletype from the other end came a word from Secretary Marshall: " ; I would like to know Dean Rusk' ; s view of this mat ter." ; I was then simply the chief of staff to the delegation, I wasn' ; t even a member of the delegation, you see. And I remember these other people, including Eleanor Roosevelt, got very sour that Marshall would have asked for my view, because my views moderated theirs to some extent. I didn' ; t go all the way with the views they were expressing. They didn' ; t like that very much. SCHOENBAUM: The partition apparently--the writing of the--the accounts at that time say it was just like the World Series in New York, or even more tense, more so than the World Series, and the Jewish side was the home team. Is that true? You must have been even--what was your exact--you were the chief of the staff of the delegation then? DEAN RUSK: Yeah. SCHOENBAUM: During partition? DEAN RUSK: I was director of the office of United Nations Affairs under George Marshall. I later became Assistant Secretary, but at that time I was director of the Office of U.N. Affairs. SCHOENBAUM: What did that translate into in New York as a practical matter in connection with partition? Were you floor manager for the partition resolution? DEAN RUSK: Sure. Our delegation was. SCHOENBAUM: Gathering the votes? I mean, you personally? DEAN RUSK: Sure, we--see, we were under instructions from the President. We were trying to carry out the President' ; s instructions. That was our duty. And so we worked--it was a prodigious effort, took an awful lot. SCHOENBAUM: You counting noses and trying to convince people-- DEAN RUSK: Sure, every hour. Every hour we had a--we kept the nose count up to date. I remember, I think it was the Foreign Minister of Norway, we were coming up on a critical vote and he got up to leave the room, and Dorothy Fosdick, who was on our staff then, who was also our liaison to the European delegations-- 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-RuskVVV.xml RBRL214DROH-RuskVVV.xml http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH/findingaid
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67 minutes
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Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
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Rusk VVV, Dean Rusk interviewed by Richard Rusk and Thomas Schoenbaum, 1985 April
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RBRL214DROH-RuskVVV
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Richard Rusk
Thomas Schoenbaum
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oral histories
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United States
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Arab-Israeli conflict
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Dean Rusk discusses Israel, including the Suez Campaign and Israel-Arab conflicts.
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1985-04
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Dean Rusk Oral History Collection
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United States--Officials and employees
Politics and Public Policy
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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>
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Richard Geary Rusk
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Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
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1984-1989
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RBRL214DROH
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United States
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5.3 May 1985 Rusk WWW, Dean Rusk interviewed by Richard Rusk and Thomas Schoenbaum, Part 1, May 1985 RBRL214DROH-RuskWWW RBRL214DROH Dean Rusk Oral History Collection Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Dean Rusk Richard Rusk Thomas Schoenbaum oral history 1:|9(3)|18(1)|29(4)|35(12)|44(1)|53(7)|70(9)|83(8)|93(6)|107(1)|115(10)|133(11)|143(10)|152(5)|160(1)|173(4)|179(14)|189(2)|199(10)|222(4)|237(11)|246(3)|258(13)|269(10)|280(9)|288(4)|301(9)|317(7)|326(13)|336(12)|347(12)|376(2)|386(12)|398(2)|408(11)|420(2)|430(13)|443(6)|456(15)|473(8)|481(9)|494(14)|504(3)|521(7)|536(6)|545(6)|566(6)|587(4)|599(11)|620(2)|629(14)|655(8)|667(11)|678(12)|692(13)|716(7)|728(1)|737(12)|748(3)|758(8)|768(8)|779(9)|789(8) 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_2040wgwu& ; flashvars[localizationCode]=en& ; amp ; flashvars[leadWithHTML5]=true& ; amp ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.plugin]=true& ; amp ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.position]=left& ; amp ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.clickToClose]=true& ; amp ; flashvars[chapters.plugin]=true& ; amp ; flashvars[chapters.layout]=vertical& ; amp ; flashvars[chapters.thumbnailRotator]=false& ; amp ; flashvars[streamSelector.plugin]=true& ; amp ; flashvars[EmbedPlayer.SpinnerTarget]=videoHolder& ; amp ; flashvars[dualScreen.plugin]=true& ; amp ; & ; wid=1_qoxxvl1a" ; width=" ; 400" ; height=" ; 285" ; allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozAllowFullScreen frameborder=" ; 0" ; title=" ; Kaltura Player" ; > ; < ; /iframe> ; English 9 Suez Crisis of 1956 This is May 1985, and we're interviewing Dean Rusk. Schoenbaum gives a synopsis of the Suez Crisis, in which Egypt's President Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal which was an important trade route for European oil supply. Schoenbaum also discusses the international reaction to this event. Rusk analyzes President Eisenhower's strong-handed response to the crisis and the criticism he received. Rusk also briefly discusses a proposed study to examine the relationship between illness and political decision-making. Article 51 ; Egypt ; England ; France ; Israeli commerce ; John Foster Dulles ; Jordan ; NATO ; North Atlantic Treaty Organization ; Operation Kadesh ; resolution 377 A ; Sinai War ; Syria ; UAR ; United Arab Republic ; United Nations ; United Nations Charter ; Uniting for Peace resolution 17 433 John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State Do you think he regretted--he must've regretted the weakening of the NATO alliance. Rusk discusses Dulles's approach to carrying out the office of Secretary of State and its effect on his relationship with British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, and thus, on the Suez Crisis. common law adversarial system ; Japanese Peace Treaty ; NATO ; North Atlantic Treaty Organization ; Sir Oliver Franks ; Suez Canal ; Yoshida Letter 17 737 Middle East foreign policy during the Kennedy Administration Moving on to the Kennedy administration. Dean Rusk discusses U.S. relations with Middle Eastern countries during Kennedy's presidency, focusing largely on Israel and Egypt. Abba Eban ; deterrence ; Food for Peace program ; Gamal Abdel Nasser ; Hawk missiles ; Imperialism ; Israeli territorial expansion ; Middle East foreign policy ; Near East ; Near East foreign policy ; neutrality ; United Nations ; United States foreign policy 17 1182 U.S. relations with Israel Pop, did John Kennedy agree with your concept that neutrality was, I guess, maybe something in our interest? Dean Rusk analyzes U.S. relations with Israel, discussing U.S. weapon sales to Israel, military cooperation, and Israeli political and military decision-making. anti-Semitism ; foreign affairs ; joint strategic planning ; June War ; Middle East ; Near East ; retaliatory strike ; SEATO ; Six-Day War ; Southeast Asia Treaty Organization ; Third World ; UN ; United Nations ; United States foreign affairs 17 1645 Palestinian refugees Now, another policy initiative that turned out again not to be successful, unfortunately, was the refugee issue in the United Nations in 1961. Dean Rusk talks about the problem of the Palestinian refugees and a failed 1961 Carnegie Foundation initiative to identify areas for refugee relocation and to work out their acceptance by Israel. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace ; displacement ; Joseph Esrey Johnson ; Palestine War ; refugee camps ; resettlement ; Six-Day War ; United Nations 17 1907 North Yemen Civil War At this time too, you testified in Congress numerous times about the Near East, and you opposed the cut-off of aid to Nasser's Egypt. Rusk discusses popular support versus government animosity for the United States in Egypt. He talks about regional alliances and security concerns during the royalist war in Yemen. Egypt ; foreign policy ; Nasser ; Saudi Arabia 17 2182 The Six-Day War Now, coming up to the months preceding the June '67 war, on the Arab side they stepped up their Holy War propaganda against Israel. Rusk chronicles events leading up to and during the Six-Day War, including Nasser's movement of troops in the Sinai, the closure of the Strait of Tiran, and the removal of UN troops, which United States Secretary General Thant did unilaterally, according to Rusk. He explains that these actions threatened the U.S. commitment to Israel and led to a security dilemma. Arab ; Arab-Israeli War ; joint Arab command ; Soviet Union ; United Nations 17 2499 U.S. foreign policy and Arab-Israeli tensions Did Suez play a role? Rusk talks about several factors that made it difficult for the U.S. to consider intervening and reopening the Strait of Tiran. He describes how the Six-Day War began, and mentions the first use of the U.S.-U.S.S.R. hotline as well as the devolution of U.S. relations with Arab states. Abba Eban ; Arab ; Bobby Kennedy ; Egypt ; Israel ; LBJ ; Lyndon Johnson ; McNamara ; Nasser ; Soviet Union 17 2995 Israel's advance / Preventive self-defense / The " ; hotline" ; On the first day of the Israeli operations, Prime Minister [Levi] Eshkol went on Israeli radio and said that Israel had no territorial ambitions. Rusk says that Soviet conditions delayed a ceasefire, contributing to the successful Israeli advance against Arab interests including the Suez Canal, Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. Rusk talks about the legality, utility, and doctrine of preventive first-strikes, and he discusses proxy action and hotline conversations between the US and USSR. Article 51 ; Egypt ; Jordan ; King Hussein ; Middle East ; Nasser ; Syria 17 3363 Resolution 242 Pop, to what extent did American policy, perhaps in unintentional ways, exacerbate and otherwise encourage this period of escalation on the Arab side? Rusk talks about Arab feelings toward the creation of Israel. He discusses the United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which laid groundwork for a permanent peace in Israel. He mentions purposeful inclusion of ambiguities to leave space for later negotiations, but says these could lead to difficult decisions for future policymakers. Rusk comments on religious tensions in Jerusalem. Arthur Goldberg ; Jerusalem ; religion ; territories ; West Bank 17 RICHARD RUSK: This is May 1985 and we' ; re interviewing Dean Rusk on the Middle East and the Six Day War, beginning with the Suez Crisis of 1956 and his years as Secretary of State. Tom Schoenbaum and Rich are doing the interviewing. SCHOENBAUM: The first part of this interview was about a month earlier. The first question, just one question on Suez. Let me resume basically what happened. In 1956 Eygpt seized in full the Suez Canal, excluding Israeli ships. On October 23rd, there was a joint command formed of Jordan, UAR [United Arab Republic], and Syria. There were various raids into Israel and a buildup, but Israel struck first against the Arabs, and struck successfully against the Arabs. Great Britain and France gave the fighting parties an ultimatum to stop. Israel agreed and the Arabs said no. Great Britain and France intervened. Later on, Great Britain and France were humiliated when the U.S. [United States] and the U.S.S.R. [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics], using the Uniting for Peace Resolution of the U.N [United Nations] Assembly, basically compelled Britain and France to cease their intervention and required the parties to disengage, and U.N. forces were stationed on the border. At that time, [Dwight David] Eisenhower made some statements that Dean [Gooderham] Acheson voiced disapproval of. He said that there was no right of self-defense on Israel' ; s part as a result of Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, and that basically Israel, Great Britain, and France were acting illegally and they had no right to engage in military action. This whole action also exposed certain weaknesses in NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] and the United Nations. Although you, Mr. Rusk, were not, of course, involved in the decision making, you must have kept close contact. What was your reaction to Acheson' ; s criticism of Eisenhower and Eisenhower' ; s conduct during that time? DEAN RUSK: I think Acheson was a man who would instinctively support Britain and France as our North Atlantic Allies. He was upset. My impression of that whole episode was that Britain and France, at some point, refused to keep in close touch with the U.S. government, they did not take Washington fully into the proceedings, and that the actual invasion by Britain and France, more or less caught Eisenhower by surprise. And this rather angered Eisenhower because he and John Foster Dulles had been very busy working on this Suez problem at the time. The element of surprise caught Eisenhower flat-footed. Added to that was, the judgment I would make, that Britain and France did not present a theory of the case which people could support. They did not come up with a strong case rooted in international law around which people could rally. Now, looking back on it, it seems to me that if Britain and France had come to the United States and said to Eisenhower and Dulles, " ; Now, we' ; re not consulting you and asking for your agreement, we' ; re simply telling you what we think we have to do. Now, let' ; s put our heads together and see if we can work out a theory of the case on which we can get strong international support." ; They did not even give Washington that chance. There were a number of factors in it. This is something that is nowhere on the public record. I visited John Foster Dulles about ten days before his death in the hospital. He knew at that time that he was dying and we talked about his papers and various things that had been on his mind. At one point he said, " ; You know Dean, I would not have made certain decisions that I made about Suez had I not been sick at the time." ; Well, he didn' ; t elaborate, and under those circumstances I was not going to say, " ; Well, gee Foster, which ones were those?" ; because here was a dying man. But I have always been intrigued by that remark. Indeed, I went back to the Rockefeller Foundation and we gave some thought as to how we could study the connection between ill health and top responsibility among high officials, study that connection. After all, there was [Thomas] Woodrow Wilson, and maybe Adolf Hitler would have fallen into that category. There was [Winston Leonard Spencer] Churchill, [Robert] Anthony Eden, [John] Foster Dulles, Eisenhower, and others. And we got a group together to see if this factor could be studied. And the group looked at it pretty carefully and decided that there was no way to single out that element of health from all the other factors going into decisions, and therefore any such study would be speculation. It would not be worthwhile. RICHARD RUSK: Did you keep notes of the--or did you produce anything at all from those discussions within the foundation? DEAN RUSK: I don' ; t know whether any pieces of paper--probably not. RICHARD RUSK: Do you remember who was involved in that? DEAN RUSK: No, I forget the details now. But anyhow, it is just possible that John Foster Dulles' ; aching gut might have had something to do with the way we acted in that situation. SCHOENBAUM: Do you think he regretted--He must have regretted the weakening of the NATO Alliance? DEAN RUSK: Well you see, Foster Dulles had a problem that I' ; m not sure he himself was fully aware of. All but about nine of our Secretaries of State have been lawyers, out of the sixty. Now, the lawyer trained in the Anglo-American system is used to the adversary system. An American lawyer will leave it up to the lawyer on the other side to take care of himself in regard to the fine print. Now, Dulles was very adept at working out various formulae to try to bridge over a problem and find some subtle way out of it. But he had been a long time corporate lawyer at Wall Street and he more or less left it up to the other side to understand the fine print and take care of their own interest. Well, in diplomacy you have got to be very sure that the other side understands the fine print exactly as you do, otherwise there is no meeting of the minds. So that led to a few cases where John Foster Dulles was accused of deviousness, a trickery of some sort, and that fouled up his relations with Anthony Eden. And I think Foster Dulles never bridged that gap completely between the common law adversary system and the need of the diplomat to guarantee a meeting of the minds. SCHOENBAUM: So he should have--you think what he regretted is not making an approach to Britain and France in that situation? DEAN RUSK: No, I think there developed a lack of trust between Anthony Eden and John Foster Dulles. It had a bearing on the attitude in London and Paris as to whether they would take us into their confidence. RICHARD RUSK: Did you ever talk to Eden? DEAN RUSK: No, never did. You see, one example--and I think you should be a little careful about this because one of the principals is still alive. Anthony Eden was in Washington on a visit and we were coming upon the Japanese Peace Treaty, and John Foster Dulles had worked out a letter from Prime Minister [Shigeru] Yoshida stating that he would--that the independent Japan would recognize the Republic of China on Taiwan, rather than the People' ; s Republic of China. Well, one night Foster Dulles went over this letter with Sir Oliver [Shewell] Franks, the able and distinguished British ambassador. Then we met the next morning with Anthony Eden, and we on the American side just assumed, took for granted that Anthony Eden knew about this Yoshida letter. But when Anthony Eden got back to England from that trip, he apparently first heard of the Yoshida letter in the newspapers, and he was furious at Dulles for not having told him. What happened apparently was that Sir Oliver Franks, the British Ambassador, did not report to Eden on that Yoshida letter. But that was an incident where Dulles got the reputation for deviousness, which he had not earned, because we had in fact gone over this letter with the British ambassador. SCHOENBAUM: Were you called at all for your advice on Suez? DEAN RUSK: No. SCHOENBAUM: Is there anything else you wanted to say on Suez before we go to-- DEAN RUSK: I don' ; t think so. SCHOENBAUM: Then turning to the period-- RICHARD RUSK: There is one follow up--did Suez ever enter into any of the considerations that were faced, at least with policy? DEAN RUSK: Well, there was [sic] strained relations between London and Washington and Paris and Washington for a time after Suez, but that had pretty well worn off by the time the Kennedy administration came in. At least London and Paris did not hold the Kennedy administration responsible for whatever irritations there might have been over Suez. SCHOENBAUM: Moving on to the Kennedy administration. There were some new--at least the perception is that there were some new departures with respect to the Near East Policy shortly after Kennedy took office. One of those was that in 1962, the commentators say, a new era began with Israel, with the sale of Hawk missiles to Israel at that time: the first significant advance weapon purchase that the U.S. allowed Israel. Also, there were some decisions to try to open a dialogue with [Gamal Abdel] Nasser' ; s Eygpt. These seem to be two twin prongs of Kennedy policy on the Middle East. What was your role in these two decisions? DEAN RUSK: Well first, we felt that Israel ought to be strong enough to fend off an attack from the Arabs, who had never accepted the very existence of the State of Israel, and that deterrence of an Arab attack was a very important thing. There is another reason why we gave strong political support to Israel. That is that if we appeared to be weakening in our support for Israel then the Arab price would go up. They would take advantage of that, and unless there was assured U.S. support of Israel the Arabs would demand the very extinction of the State of Israel, going back to the bitter feelings of 1948. But we never gave Israel all that Israel wanted by any means. We felt that Israel had a military superiority over its neighbors, and our Joint Chiefs were of that view, and therefore we did not want to help build Israel up into the kind of an armed camp that would threaten the entire area. Another thing that was involved here, the Arab side expressed to us continuously their fear of Israeli territorial expansion. And with a full knowledge of successive governments in Israel, we did our best to persuade the Arabs that their fear of Israeli territorial ambitions was illusory. There was nothing in it. This was not true. This came to be a rather bitter point later on because after the June War, I reminded Abba Eban of this and he shrugged his shoulders and said, " ; Well, we' ; ve changed our minds." ; And by that one remark, he turned us into a twenty-year liar, because for twenty years we had been trying to persuade the Arabs that they need not fear Israeli territorial expansion. RICHARD RUSK: Pop, can you set the circumstances of that remark? DEAN RUSK: That was in the late summer of 1967 following the Six Day War. RICHARD RUSK: In Washington? DEAN RUSK: In Washington, yes. Now, the other point you raised was, the Nasser side--Well, when President Kennedy took office we deliberately tried to improve relations with Nassar in Egypt, [Ahmed] Ben Bella in Algeria, [Kwame] Nkrumah in Ghana, [Achmed] Sukarno in Indonesia, and some others, Sekou Toure in Guinea. We made a real effort because we felt that wherever there was country which was secure, independent, concerned about the needs of its own people, reasonably cooperative in world affairs in places like the United Nations, that there was a situation in the interest of the United States, that we didn' ; t need a world filled with allies. We could live with neutrality on the part of most of these smaller countries. Well, we didn' ; t succeed because some of these fellows just turned out to be rascals. But in the case of Nasser, we made what, for us, was a major effort. I remember we had a three year, several hundred million dollar food aid program for Egypt during the Kennedy years. At one point, I remember, we--I was told that we were feeding forty percent of the Egyptian people during that period. Now, we didn' ; t want Nasser to get up before those big crowds and bow and scrape and lick our boots and say, thank you, thank you, but he wouldn' ; t even be silent about it. He would get up before those big crowds and get carried away and blast us right off the face of the earth. He would shout such things as, " ; Throw your aid into the Red Sea." ; And he did this so much that he persuaded Congress to do just that. And our food aid program came to an end. So, our interest in improving relations with Nasser came not just from a Middle East policy, but from a general attitude from the Third World. Now, I have to say that when you had a private talk with Nasser, either through our ambassador or with private citizens who might be going by, such as John J. McCloy or Eugene [Robert] Black and people like that, you' ; d find yourself talking to a reasonable man. Well, then when he would get up in front of those crowds he would lose his head and would say the most outrageous things, swept by the emotions of the crowd. So, he was a pretty difficult fellow to deal with. RICHARD RUSK: Did you ever meet or deal with him? DEAN RUSK: I never met him personally. SCHOENBAUM: Did you travel to the Near East at that time? DEAN RUSK: Let' ; s see, while I was Secretary I went to Turkey, stopped briefly once in Saudi Arabia, but I didn' ; t really visit the principal Middle Eastern countries. RICHARD RUSK: Pop, did John Kennedy agree with your concept that neutrality was, I guess, maybe something in our interest? DEAN RUSK: Yes, that was very much in line with his own thinking. RICHARD RUSK: Did you encounter any real pocket of resistance to that, either then or-- DEAN RUSK: Well, there was some who were worried about the impact of this approach upon our allies. For example, an even-handed policy between India and Pakistan very much annoyed Pakistan, who was a member of the SEATO [Southeast Asia Treaty Organization]--not a very good member, but they were members. So a few of our so-called allies rather resented this approach to the Third World because they wanted to play upon the Alliance for special considerations and special favors to them as allies over against these neutrals, you see. RICHARD RUSK: Did you encounter any resistance within the American domestic-- DEAN RUSK: I don' ; t remember any particular resistance on that. SCHOENBAUM: Do you remember your specific role. Do you remember any meetings where you and Kennedy discussed this? This was definitely a new initiative ; there must have been some discussion. DEAN RUSK: By and large, during the Kennedy Administration, the relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors were relatively quiet compared to other periods. We weren' ; t looking for trouble. We did not go out there with an American peace plan, for example, try and sell it to all sides, and get ourselves kicked in the shanks by both sides. I had a good deal of experience with that in earlier years. But it was relatively quiet up until the months just preceding the June ' ; 67 War. Now, we always had a money debate with the Israelis, at least every second year, meaning an American election year. Their price would go up and we had to bargain with them pretty hard at times on their demands, because they simply looked upon us as having the residual responsibility for whatever Israel needed. So the pressure on that was pretty hard at times. SCHOENBAUM: In April of 1962, the U.S. voted in the U.N. Security Council to condemn Israel because of a retaliatory raid against Syria. A book that I was reading on the Middle East says that you, [Adlai Ewing] Stevenson, and [McGeorge] Bundy convinced JEK to cast this vote. Is that true? DEAN RUSK: It may well have been true. Certainly we recommended it, but that was because the Israeli retaliation was so disproportionate to the original offense against which they retaliated. We felt that that was a way to start things down the road to a general war out there. You see, Israel by and large has not consulted the United States very much on questions of Israeli policy. They seem to have thought, maybe still think so, that they can go their own way and whatever they do, somehow, at the end of the day, the United States is going to follow along. They were relying too heavily on the maybe pro-Israeli lobbying in the United States. SCHOENBAUM: At one point that leads us into another question. Didn' ; t we move... is it too strong to say that, especially under LBJ [Lyndon Baines Johnson], growing out of the first Kennedy decision to sell Hawk missiles, then there was a very interesting LBJ treatment to [Ludwig] Erhard to get Erhard to deliver German tanks to Israel? And then when that was discovered and there was a furor, then we sold Patton tanks and Sky hawks to Israel. Was this not a move toward an informal alliance with Israel? DEAN RUSK: Well, I have never used the word alliance as a kind of figure of speech as far as Israel is concerned. Every President, beginning with Harry Truman, has affirmed our support for the independence and territorial integrity of Israel, and it' ; s clear that those affirmations have had full support in the Congress. But an alliance canes about through a Treaty of Alliance and it is my impression that the Israelis have never been much interested in a Treaty of Alliance because that would imply an obligation upon Israel to try to coordinate its policy with us. I think they rather--that they were willing to gamble on their doing it their own way, and that we, of necessity, would have to follow along. Now later we discovered during the Begin period that that was simply not true, and that those Israelis and supporters of Israel in this country who thought that the United States was a satellite of Israel were bound to be disappointed. (unintelligible) mentioned in passing--that is that every President and every Secretary of State, beginning with Truman, have dreaded a great debate in this country on the issue of as to whether the U.S. is a satellite of Israel. They' ; ve done so because they' ; ve known that in such a debate all sorts of mean, dirty things would cane out from under the rocks that ought to be left lying there: anti-Semitism. And it would be a very ugly and divisive debate. And so the United States government has shown, at least publicly, a fair amount of patience with Israel, at times when behind the scenes we were objecting to them very strongly because we did not want this to become an eye-gouging debate here in the U.S. RICHARD RUSK: That potential is always here? DEAN RUSK: Always there. It' ; s always there just under the rocks. It would be a very serious thing if it should ever develop. SCHOENBAUM: But wasn' ; t there at this time, at least in the military sense, a kind of strategic approach to strategic planning? Wasn' ; t this the beginning of a kind of military cooperation between the U.S. and Israel: joint strategic planning in any way against the Soviet Union? DEAN RUSK: There might have been some discussions here and there, but nothing very serious, because in that kind of a situation Israel would play a very minor role. I mean it was not a major factor. SCHOENBAUM: Now, another policy initiative that turned out again not to be successful, unfortunately, was the refugee issue in the United Nations. In 1961, there was a new initiative with Joseph [Esrey] Johnson, the President of the Carnegie Foundation, who was to-- DEAN RUSK: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. SCHOENBAUM: That' ; s right, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And as I understand it, he was to undertake negotiations with Israel with the view toward perhaps allowing or resettling the Palestinian refugees, or a certain number of Palestinian refugees, and terminating the refugee camps, which of course still exist. What was your role in that, particularly initiatives? DEAN RUSK: I was fully involved with it. And Joseph Johnson was a very able fellow and he gave it a good college try, but he ran into a complete blockage on the Arab side politically, so that that did not leave us with much leverage on Israel. I had a thought about the Palestine refugees that I discussed with two or three Arab foreign ministers ; that is that you let the Palestine refugees in these various camps be interviewed completely confidentially by some international authority, under the conditions of the confessional booth. You would put to them the question, " ; Where would you like to be living ten years from now?" ; Now there is no Palestine ; there' ; s Israel, there' ; s Jordan. And on the list you' ; d put Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Brazil, the United States, Australia, whatever, and let these refugees on an individual basis indicate where they would like to be living. And my hunch was that the Palestine refugees who would elect to live in Israel would be in such small numbers that Israel could readily accept them. See, we knew that Israel would accept a certain number. We didn' ; t know exactly. We never worked out the final number, but two or three hundred thousand anyhow. And you might be able to resolve the problem by letting the Palestine refugees individually make such choices. And you could have mobilized enormous amounts of money to assist in their resettlement in the places that they had chosen. Well, that did not get anywhere because I was told by my Arab friends that if that were the choice, these Palestine refugees would simply be told in their camps that if they elected to go anywhere except to Palestine, that is to their homes in Israel, that they would have their throats cut. And such consultation simply would not work. But that was another initiative, if you like, that did not get anywhere. SCHOENBAUM: So Johnson' ; s mission basically failed, as you see it, primarily because of the Arab requirement to return to Israel? DEAN RUSK: Well, the Arabs were unwilling to accept any figure for a return to Israel that was within the reach of Israel and Israel' ; s willingness or capacity to accept. SCHOENBAUM: Did you find Israel fairly cooperative? DEAN RUSK: They might have been if the figures had gotten down to-- END OF SIDE 1 BEGINNING OF SIDE 2 RICHARD RUSK: They might have been if the figures had gotten down to two or three hundred thousand? DEAN RUSK: Yes, I think so. I think Israel might have been willing to accept that many. SCHOENBAUM: At this time too, you testified in Congress numerous times about the Near East and you opposed the cut-off of aid to Nasser' ; s Egypt. Can you cast some light as to why you opposed it? DEAN RUSK: Well, I thought that it was a useful thing for us to have a friendly presence in Egypt, that even though Nasser might shout these crazy things from rooftops, the Egyptian people would understand and would have a more favorable attitude toward the United States than would otherwise be the case. I remember once talking to one Arab foreign minister who said, " ; You know, as far as the Arab government is concerned we have very strong and almost violent views about this Israeli question. But if you want to know what the ordinary people, grass roots in the Arab world, think of the United States, think of those schools, think of those hospitals, think of that American university in Beirut, it' ; s that kind of thing, that sort of people-to-people relationship between Arabs and the American people which are very strong. And we should not suppose that every Arab hates the United States." ; SCHOENBAUM: At this time too there was the Yemen War. And the books say that, and they mention you specifically, " ; at Rusk' ; s urging that the United States supported Egypt and the Republicans in the Yemen war against the Royalists." ; And this led to a complicated problem of a fear of war between Nasser and Saudi Arabia, Saudi a Arabia being royalist and supporting the royalists in Yemen. The war dragged on despite a mediation effort by the United States and by Ambassador [Ellsworth] Bunker. Is your role correctly portrayed in the history books on that? You supported--the United States supported Nasser. And if so do you regard this-- DEAN RUSK: Well, publicly we tried to put the brakes on Saudi Arabia and Egypt a bit, which meant that we would not bang the table and demand that Egypt get out. But privately we urged the Egyptians to get out. What we did not want was a war between Egypt and Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia was so fragile. They did not have the capacity to defend themselves against a concerted Egyptian effort. We knew that the Saudis were giving under the rug support to the royalist factions in the Yemen and so forth. There was no way we could have prevented that in any event. But our principal concern in there was to try not to let the Yemen problem result in a war between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. SCHOENBAUM: Was it--you regarded it as mistake, in hindsight, to have recognized the Nasser faction in Yemen so quickly? DEAN RUSK: Well, in general it is a pretty good idea for your recognition policy to stick to the facts. And we violated that for many years in connections with the People' ; s Republic of China, and we are still violating that in the case of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia in the Soviet Union. But, we thought that at least that might result in a stabilizing factor there, and would also assist Egypt in withdrawing its own forces. We wanted to get the Egyptian forces out of there privately. We did not bang the table publicly on that. But the Egyptians suffered a good many casualties down there and they were not all that enthusiastic about that adventure themselves. So we were, as part of the process of weakening the Egyptians out of the Yemen-- SCHOENBAUM: The war dragged on, though. There was nothing that-- DEAN RUSK: Yes. No, it was a painful business. Now, coming up to the months preceding the June ' ; 67 war, on the Arab side they stepped up their Holy War propaganda against Israel. They were encouraged to do so by the Soviet Union. They organized a joint command among the Arab armies. An Egyptian general came to Jordan, for example, to take command of that sector of the joint Arab command. Nasser moved forces into the Sinai, substantial forces into the Sinai, and called upon U Thant, the U.N. Secretary General, to withdraw U.N. forces along a certain sector of the Sinai border. U Thant made a very great mistake at that point. He made two decisions on his own without reference to the Security Council or to the General Assembly, both of which had authorized the presence of these U.N. forces. His first decision was that the U.N. could not have its forces in any country against the objections of the government of that country, and secondly, that if he withdrew a portion of these U.N. forces he would have to withdraw all of them. And so he did. RICHARD RUSK: He did this unilaterally? DEAN RUSK: He did this without any reference to the Security Council or the General Assembly. RICHARD RUSK: He had that constitutional authority in the U.N.? DEAN RUSK: He claimed he had, and his own legal advisors supported him. But he--You see, if that had gone into the U.N. Security Council, at least you' ; d have had several weeks of palaver and you might have been able to stabilize the situation and work something out. I mentioned this business about withdrawing all of them if you withdrew any of them as far as the U.N. forces were concerned because later on Nasser told us privately--who knows what to believe?--that he didn' ; t have in mind the withdrawal of all the U.N. forces, that he just wanted them withdrawn along that common border along the Sinai there. But he said when the U.N. units left Sharm el Sheikh there, at the tail of the Gulf, then he had Egyptian forces there. He said, " ; What could I do? There were Israeli ships passing through that Strait. I couldn' ; t let them pass by. There I was." ; RICHARD RUSK: How did you come to know Nasser' ; s views on that? DEAN RUSK: Well, there was a private talk with him, and I forget now just who our representative was, but-- RICHARD RUSK: Is this in the public record? DEAN RUSK: I think you might find it if you dig deeply enough. But anyhow, he closed the Strait of Tiran. Well, when he did that, that put him head on against what Israel had declared would be a casus belli. And also it ran into a commitment made by President Eisenhower at the time of the Suez affair back in the fifties--the commitment to Israel about keeping the Strait of Tiran open if Israel would withdraw its forces from the Sinai. So it was also a U.S. commitment involved there, not just an Israeli casus belli. Then the Soviets began circulating false rumors about Israeli mobilization among the Arabs and the situation got to be very tense indeed. We, in trying to defuse the situation, first took on the question of the passage of the Strait of Tiran. We consulted with fifteen or so of the principal maritime powers to ask if they would all join in a joint declaration that the Strait of Tiran was an international strait through which international shipping could move. A good many of them said they would, although some of them were quite lukewarm about it. We realized that such a declaration standing alone would not mean very much to Mr. Nasser. So we looked at the question of forcing the Strait of Tiran by putting our own naval and other forces through there. So we consulted some of the maritime powers about who would be a member of that party if we had to force the Strait of Tiran. The volunteers were very few. Maybe the British might have. The Dutch might have. But there was very great reluctance on the part of the maritime powers to join in any such activity. RICHARD RUSK: Did Suez play a role? DEAN RUSK: This would have been a major military problem because it was on the wrong side of Suez. We couldn' ; t bring the sixth fleet in the Mediterranean directly to bear on it very well because they were in the Mediterranean and we couldn' ; t expect Nasser to let them pass through the Suez Canal for that purpose. So we were faced with going all the way around Africa and coming up through the Indian Ocean. Then a naval task force trying to do something of that sort against land-based aircraft would present a terrible military problem and probably mean that you would have to do a lot of bombing of air fields and things of that sort to insure the safety of your naval force. Now, in the middle of these discussions, Bob [Robert Strange] McNamara and I went down to meet with eighty or ninety senators and congressmen. Mostly senators were at that meeting. Somewhat to our surprise, they were unanimously and strongly opposed to any effort to open the Strait of Tiran by force. They said this ought to be left to the United Nations. Well, the U.N. didn' ; t have any force. Indeed, then Senator Bobby [Robert Francis] Kennedy came to Bob McNamara and me at the end of that meeting and said, " ; I don' ; t know what you fellows in Washington think about the attitude of my Jewish friends in New York, but they don' ; t want any part of this." ; SCHOENBAUM: They didn' ; t want U.S.-- DEAN RUSK: They didn' ; t want any part of a U.S. effort to force the Strait of Tiran. RICHARD RUSK: Do you think Bobby Kennedy was accurate in presenting the opinions of his Jewish friends--? DEAN RUSK: I don' ; t know. I know he was very clear about it in his own mind. My guess is he was more right than wrong. But I mention this because one thing that the Israelis have is good intelligence. There is no question that they knew all about the fact that there was almost no response among the maritime powers to the matter of forcing the Strait of Tiran. They also, I am sure, had immediate and direct information about the general attitude among that congressional group that Bob McNamara and I met with. So this, I suspect, helped to convince the Israelis that they were on their own ; they were alone. RICHARD RUSK: Ever wonder who the Israeli mole might have been, Pop, that penetrated the--? DEAN RUSK: Oh, there are several of them. They get--if any other government had us penetrated like they did we would break relations with them. SCHOENBAUM: So we never seriously considered unilateral U.S. action in that instance? DEAN RUSK: No. No. Because it didn' ; t get to that point. We saw these rapidly mounting tensions there in the Middle East and we knew that the Soviets had been egging on the Arab side. Then about two or three weeks before the June ' ; 67 war the Russians became greatly concerned about the outbreak of major fighting there. It may well be that their own professional military had given them the same military advice that our Joint Chiefs of Staff were giving us. Namely, that if there were war, Israeli forces would prevail over the Arab forces. So the Soviets and we began to discuss the business of how to cool off this tension that was developing there. The Soviets thought that they had a commitment from the Arab side not to make the first move and we thought we had a commitment from the Israeli side, at least for some time to cane, not to make the first move. And we and the Soviets exchanged these assurances with each other. Just before the outbreak of the war, Abba Eban was in Washington. SCHOENBAUM: It was May 25th. DEAN RUSK: Lyndon Johnson told him Israel would not be alone unless it goes alone, and urged restraint upon Israel. Well, Abba Eban went on back to Jerusalem and, by divided vote in the Israeli cabinet, they decided to launch these military operations of June ' ; 67. Those caught us by surprise because we thought we had had assurances from the Israeli side that we had more time to try to work out this Strait of Tiran thing. RICHARD RUSK: What were the nature of those assurances, Pop? DEAN RUSK: That Israel would not move for a period of time and that they would consult with us about it. RICHARD RUSK: Who gave you those assurances? In what form? SCHOENBAUM: Did Abba Eban give LBJ directly those assurances? It was May 25, not 26. DEAN RUSK: I think probably it was Abba Eban, but it might have been also our own ambassador in Tel Aviv that talked over these things with the Israelis. We were caught by surprise by the sudden Israeli move just as the Arabs were. Immediately the Soviets lighted up the hotline. This was the first use of the hotline between our two capitols. It took a little doing for us to persuade the Soviets that we were as surprised as they were. SCHOENBAUM: The Soviets initiated the hotline. DEAN RUSK: Yeah. TS - Who talked on the hotline? Was it-- DEAN RUSK: Well, when the hotline is there, our President and the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense are on the Washington end of the hotline and their top people are on the other end. SCHOENBAUM: [Aleksei Nikolaevich] Kosygin and--? DEAN RUSK: [Nikita Sergeevich] Khrushchev was-- SCHOENBAUM: Was Khrushchev still there? RICHARD RUSK: ' ; 67? Good God, Pop! SCHOENBAUM: He was gone. DEAN RUSK: Well, then it must have been [Leonid I.] Brezhnev. Check that point in your--and [Andrei Andreevich] Gromyko, of course. Anyhow, I think the Russians came to believe that we actually were surprised and did not hold us directly responsible to than for the outbreak of the June ' ; 67 war. But President Nasser then accused the United States of participation in these air attacks against Egypt by our forces in the Mediterranean and broke relations with us. And many other Arab states followed suit in breaking relations with us. I think the explanation to that was that the Israeli planes were flying four and five sorties a day and Nasser had never seen so many planes. I' ; m quite sure the Russians told Egypt that they had their own vessels alongside of our aircraft carriers and in fact our aircraft carriers were not launching planes in this episode. But it took quite a few years to get over that particular point. SCHOENBAUM: Do you remember the circumstances when you first heard that the Israelis had attacked the planes on the ground, and then they moved their troops? DEAN RUSK: Well, the Israeli air force knocked out the Egyptian air force in the first twenty-four hours. SCHOENBAUM: How did you first get the word and what was your reaction? Do you remember having--that must have been a shock? DEAN RUSK: Oh, a combination of diplomatic traffic and news reports. Sometimes the news reports were a little ahead of diplomatic traffic. SCHOENBAUM: Were they in this instance, do you think? DEAN RUSK: Oh, I think so. Another important item that surfaced there: on the first day of the Israeli operations, Prime Minister [Levi] Eshkol went on Israeli radio and said that Israel had no territorial ambitions. Later in the summer when I reminded Abba Eban of that, he simply shrugged his shoulders and said, " ; We' ; ve changed our minds." ; But when this fighting started we started immediately to try to get an immediate cease-fire. We tried to persuade King Hussein of Jordan not to become embroiled in the fighting, but he said, " ; I am an Arab and I have to take part." ; Now had we gotten a cease-fire on that first day, the Egyptian air force would have been destroyed and the Israeli forces might have been forty or fifty miles into the Sinai, but there would have been no fighting with Jordan, no fighting over the old city of Jerusalem, nothing in the Golan Heights. But for some strange reason the Arab side and the Soviet Union wanted to attach a lot of conditions to a cease-fire: in effect, to settle the Middle Eastern problem along with the cease-fire, you see? And that was wholly unacceptable to Israel. So they stalled a cease-fire for about eight days. SCHOENBAUM: The Arabs and the Soviet Union? RICHARD RUSK: Do you think a cease-fire would have been possible from the Israeli point of view that first day? DEAN RUSK: The Israelis were willing to accept one. RICHARD RUSK: Really? SCHOENBAUM: Even without taking over the old city of Jerusalem? DEAN RUSK: Yeah. SCHOENBAUM: They were? DEAN RUSK: But, when the Arab and Soviet side delayed this cease-fire for eight days or so, then the Israeli forces were at the Suez ; they had the old city of Jerusalem ; they had the West Bank ; they were into the Golan Heights. The Arabs badly served their own cause by complicating an immediate cease-fire issue. SCHOENBAUM: There' ; s this famous--do you remember that famous telephone call from Nasser to King Hussein that the Israelis monitored and they have it on tape today. Nasser, in effect, lied to King Hussein and said they were winning ; jump in--" ; We' ; re winning the battles in the Sinai. You do your part now." ; Do you remember that? DEAN RUSK: Yes. I remember there was such a message. But Nasser was in a state of shock at that point. His whole air force had been wiped out on the first day. Now one thing that Israel taught the Arab world was the value of a first- strike with conventional forces. And given Israel' ; s geographical situation they are more vulnerable to a first strike than the Arab side is. So I don' ; t know where those lessons are lurking in Arab minds these days. SCHOENBAUM: What is your view as to whether, under international law, that is justified under Article 51--a first-strike of that sort in the face of the. DEAN RUSK: I have used the situation in which Israel found itself in June ' ; 67 as a test case with respect to preventive self-defense. Because there was a major Arab mobilization, movement of major Egyptian forces into the Sinai, formation of an Arab high command, a great stepping-up of the Holy War psychology, and that sort of a thing. If Israel had waited for a first strike, then Israel' ; s situation could have been very tough indeed. So I think that that is a--I don' ; t think much of preventive self-defense as a doctrine because it' ; s too dangerous. It can be used for aggression too easily. But there' ; s a pretty good case where if there ever is any justification for preventive action, this might have been a case for it. RICHARD RUSK: I guess it was of some reassurance to you that the Americans and the Soviets had a decent relationship in that part of the world and were talking to each other, and in that sense were confident in the Middle East-- DEAN RUSK: Well, there was still some tension. After all, at this time when the Israeli forces were moving into Syria the Soviets warned Israel and us that if Israeli forces attacked Damascus that this could lead to direct Soviet intervention and LBJ had to tell the Soviets that this was a very bad idea and he moved the Sixth Fleet closer into the area where they would be in a position to help meet any such effort. So it was touch and go there for a time. RICHARD RUSK: Who gave you that word? Was it [Anatoly F.] Dobrynin? DEAN RUSK: No, I think it was on the hotline. SCHOENBAUM: The idea to keep the Israelis short of Damascus was on the hotline? DEAN RUSK: Yeah. RICHARD RUSK: What was your impression of the hotline during this crisis? How' ; d it work out? DEAN RUSK: Well, one change we made was to put a clock on each end of the hotlines showing what time of day it was in the other fellow' ; s capital. Because the Russians would wake us at three o' ; clock in the morning. They did it on two or three occasions there. That was something of a bore. ( laughter) RICHARD RUSK: And you' ; d do the same for them, I hope. DEAN RUSK: So we put a clock on the hotline showing the other fellow' ; s time. SCHOENBAUM: That' ; s great. You have the same problem as you do when you' ; d call your grandma or something--you' ; d call Alaska or something. DEAN RUSK: But the hotline worked. Technically, it worked very well during this period. It was in effect a teletype conference kind of thing. RICHARD RUSK: Pop, to what extent did American policy, perhaps in unintentional ways, exacerbate and otherwise encourage this period of escalation on the Arab side? Did we somehow-- DEAN RUSK: Well, that was inherent in the support we gave to the very creation of the State of Israel. You see, one must not underestimate in any way the deep sense of injury which the Arabs felt about the very creation of the State of Israel. They said, " ; The West has made us pay for the crimes of Adolf Hitler." ; They were very bitter about it. Because, after all, Arabs have been living there for centuries. This territory that we think of as Israel had been overrun historically by many people: the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Ottoman Turks, the British. So the idea of going back two thousand years to find a land title for a State of Israel in the modern world was just too much for the Arabs to swallow. So they were extremely bitter about it. It has not been until the last ten or fifteen years that some on the Arab side have reconciled themselves that there will be an Israel there in the Middle East and that somehow one has to deal with it or take it into account. SCHOENBAUM: Turning to the Six-Day War, there is a Resolution 242, which is a landmark of diplomacy, still the basis today of some efforts toward settlement. How was Resolution 242 evolved, and who--? DEAN RUSK: Well this was negotiated during the summer and early fall of 1967. Arthur [Joseph] Goldberg was our representative at the U.N. at that time and handled the negotiations on that with great skill. Resolution 242 is not a settlement of all the issues, but it is an agenda for negotiation for a permanent peace. That is, the elements of a permanent peace are to be found in Resolution 242. Now there were some elements in it that seemed to favor the Arab side, some elements that seemed to favor the Israeli side. But it seemed to be a good balance at the time. When we finally negotiated 242 there was a reluctant acceptance of it by both Israelis and Arabs on the whole. The trouble is that the two sides have departed from Resolution 242 in important ways. On the Israeli side this has to do with territories. Resolution 242 stated that Israeli forces would withdraw from territories seized in the recent fighting. Now there' ; s a lot of negotiation over whether that Resolution should say from " ; the" ; territories or from " ; all" ; territories. We wanted that to be left a little vague, subject to negotiation, because we thought that we ought to leave the way open for some rationalization of a west frontier of the West Bank where there were certain anomalies that could easily be straightened out with some exchanges of territories. RICHARD RUSK: Incidentally, did you identify Resolution 242? DEAN RUSK: Yeah. And we wanted a fresh look at the old city of Jerusalem. We wanted to leave open demilitarization measures in the Sinai and in the Golan Heights. So we said " ; withdrawal from territories." ; Not " ; all" ; territories or " ; the" ; territories. Now, there' ; s been some dispute about that because when in the French version, which is equally authentic, it says withdrawal " ; de" ; territory--from the, " ; de," ; or from " ; the" ; territories. So that deliberate ambiguity was obscured in translation into other languages. Anyhow, we never contemplated that there would be any significant move of territory to Israel as a result of the June ' ; 67 War. There we and the Israelis have, to this day, very far-reaching differences of view. And that could lead to some real trouble between us and Israel because, although every president since Truman has committed the United States to the security and independence of Israel, I don' ; t know of any commitment that the United States has ever made to assist Israel in retaining the territory seized in June ' ; 67. So if another war breaks out over the territorial issue, then people in Washington are going to have to come to some very hard decision because we do not--and we have supported a special regime for the old city of Jerusalem since the creation of the State of Israel. As you know, we still have our embassy in Tel Aviv and not in Jerusalem because we have not accepted Jerusalem, theoretically, as a unified city and the capital of Israel. We felt all along that some settlement there in Jerusalem ought to reflect the interests of the great religions that have a stake there. It' ; s ironic to realize that the Muslims, the Christians, and the Jews all look upon Jerusalem as a very special city to them and their traditions. Yet they all confess that they worship the same God--the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob Yet when we sit down to talk about the city of Jerusalem we start balling up our fists and get ready to kill each other. My own suggestion for Jerusalem, which I talked to a few people about in those days, was to create a situation in the old city which is so complicated, so loused up, that no one could understand it and know what to fight about ; allocate the areas of the old city to the three religions on a general scale, including the support-- 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-RuskWWW.xml RBRL214DROH-RuskWWW.xml http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH/findingaid
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64 minutes
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Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
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Rusk WWW, Dean Rusk interviewed by Richard Rusk and Thomas Schoenbaum, Part 1, May 1985
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RBRL214DROH-RuskWWW
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Richard Rusk
Thomas Schoenbaum
Dean Rusk
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audio
oral histories
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sound
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United States
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http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
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Arab-Israeli conflict
Foreign relations
Description
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Dean Rusk discusses Israel, including the Suez Campaign and Israel-Arab Conflicts. <br /><br />This interview is continued on <a href="http://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/RBRL214DROH/RBRL214DROH-Ruskxxx">Rusk XXX</a>.
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1985-05
OHMS
-
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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/.
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Dean Rusk Oral History Collection
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United States--Officials and employees
Politics and Public Policy
Description
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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>
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Richard Geary Rusk
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Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
Date
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1984-1989
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http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
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Oral histories
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RBRL214DROH
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United States
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
OHMS Object
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https://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH-RuskXXX/ohms
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5.3 Unknown Date Rusk XXX, Dean Rusk interviewed by Richard Rusk and Thomas Schoenbaum, Part 2, 1985 May RBRL214DROH-Ruskxxx RBRL214DROH Dean Rusk Oral History Collection Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Dean Rusk Richard Rusk and Thomas Schoenbaum 1:|15(15)|32(6)|42(3)|55(11)|74(4)|84(14)|99(14)|113(13)|130(13)|151(9)|163(12)|178(8)|192(2)|202(4)|213(2)|236(3)|259(1)|273(2)|292(5)|307(1)|318(6)|332(10)|352(16)|369(8)|392(17)|408(3)|420(5)|434(9)|452(11) 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_sy3uz8kq& ; 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_kvmw3uis" ; width=" ; 400" ; height=" ; 285" ; allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozAllowFullScreen frameborder=" ; 0" ; title=" ; Kaltura Player" ; > ; < ; /iframe> ; 0 The Six Day War / Rivalries and the Arab world Okay, go ahead. Rusk discusses U.S. intelligence and Joint Chiefs of Staff risk assessments regarding the Six Day War and explains that Israel prevailed because of its superior military training and morale. Rusk criticizes an Israeli attack that he claims prevented Egypt from reopening the Strait of Tiran in June of 1967. He talks about U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia, conflicts within the Arab world, and Arab disdain toward Israel. Arab ; Arab-Israeli conflict ; Arab-Israeli War ; Israel ; June War ; Lyndon Johnson ; Nasser ; sectarianism ; Soviet ; USSR 17 409 U.S. oil imports in the sixties and seventies Is that true? What about the Saudis... Rusk discusses Eisenhower's oil import restrictions and the oil embargo during the Yom Kippur War. He discusses Congress's preference for domestic production in the sixties and tension with ARAMCO over import limitations. Egypt ; Martin Hillenbrand ; Nasser ; national security ; oil crisis ; Saudi Arabia ; Yemen 17 664 United Nations Resolution 242 / U.S. goals for the Middle East ...near the end I'd like to ask about the mechanics of forming Resolution 242. Rusk talks about UN Resolution 242 and its binding counterpart, UNSCR 353, both of which addressed peace in the Middle East and called for Jordan's ownership of the West Bank. He claims that the UN partition plan in 1948 would have created a Palestinian state. Rusk refutes claims that U.S. policy toward the Middle East was disjointed. Arab ; Arthur Goldberg ; Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs ; Chapter 7 ; Israel ; LBJ ; Lyndon Johnson ; Resolution 353 ; Security Council ; Strait of Tiran ; UNSC 17 951 The Liberty / UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg We had a very painful incident with the--that ship that was attacked. Rusk discusses Israel's attack on a U.S. naval intelligence ship, the USS Liberty, during the Six Day War. He praises Arthur Goldberg's negotiating prowess, contrasting Goldberg with his predecessor, Adlai Stevenson. Lyndon Johnson ; military ; National Security Agency ; NSA ; Resolution 242 ; U.S. Navy ; United Nations 17 1226 Continuity in Kennedy and Johnson's Middle Eastern foreign policy The historians, the experts, say they perceived a change in Middle Eastern policy just looking at the Kennedy-Johnson years. Rusk argues that there was continuity in U.S. policy toward Israel and the Middle under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He claims that the U.S. sought peace for the region rather than political influence. Rusk mentions his rejected eight point peace plan for Egypt. Christianity ; Egypt ; foreign policy ; Judaism ; Lyndon Jhonson ; religion 17 1486 Jordan's involvement in the Six Day War / The future of Arab-Israeli relations To me, one of the sad things was that we were not able to keep Jordan out of that war... Rusk recalls Jordan's involvement in the Six Day War, stating that although the war was not in Jordan's national interest, King Hussein participated to maintain honor. He mentions the Rockefeller Foundation's goal of establishing an institute of Semitic studies, which was rejected by Jordanian political leaders. Rusk says another large Arab-Israeli war is unlikely due to the Camp David Accords. ceasefire ; Egypt ; Hussein bin Talal ; Israel ; Jerusalem ; Mount Scopus ; territorial dispute ; West Bank ; Yom Kippur War 17 RICHARD RUSK: Okay, go ahead. DEAN RUSK: --allocate the old city of Jerusalem to the three religions with their shrines and hotel facilities and things of that sort. And then you' ; d have certain necessary facilities to be taken of [sic]. The police might be turned over to Israel, the public utilities might be turned over to Jordan, that sort of thing, but to have a situation so complicated that nobody could understand what to fight about. Leaving this concept of sovereignty--which is after all, only a necessary legal fiction--leave that just floating up in the clouds, don' ; t try to deal with it. But the feelings were so strong, particularly on the Jewish and Muslim side, that nothing like that ever had a chance to swim. RICHARD RUSK: Did you talk to both sides, Pop? DEAN RUSK: Well, I' ; ve talked to some Arabs about it because they would be the least likely to agree to anything like that, but didn' ; t get anywhere with it. RICHARD RUSK: Pop, what was your own intelligence seeing prior to the outbreak of the Six Day War and during this time of Arab mobilization? DEAN RUSK: Well-- RICHARD RUSK: Did Israel--was Israel facing war? Was it clear to the Americans that this was a genuine war threat? DEAN RUSK: Well, we thought that there was a fair prospect that the Arabs would, the Arab side would open up against Israel--given all of the things that they were saying and doing--until our talks with the Soviets seemed to indicate that they had assurances from the Arab side that the Arabs would not move at least during a period when we could have more time to try to find a solution. But, we also knew that the Israeli forces were in first-class shape over against the Arab forces. Our own Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated that in case of war, the Israelis would prevail within ten days. Well, they missed it by two days. The Israelis prevailed in eight days because the Israeli armed forces were well-trained, well-equipped, well-led, and had a high motivation. Their morale was extraordinarily high over against the Arab side which were not well-led, not well-trained, not well-equipped, and so we promptly estimated that in the event of war, the Israelis would prevail very quickly. I must say that the problems for us were somewhat easier with the Israeli victory than they would have been had there been an Arab victory and the Israelis driven onto the beaches. That' ; s the nightmare which we and others in the West have to keep in mind, because that' ; s the thing that will be very difficult to take, to accept. Intervention will almost certainly be necessary. But, nevertheless, we were pretty close to being angry when the Israelis moved to launch those June ' ; 67 operations. You see, they moved on a Monday, knowing that on the following Wednesday the Vice President of Egypt was expected in Washington to talk about the reopening of the Strait of Tiran. RICHARD RUSK: I' ; ll be durned. DEAN RUSK: And the Israelis knew that he was expected in Washington on the Wednesday and-- now, no one can predict what might have happened, whether or not we could have, would have succeeded in getting Egypt to reopen the Strait of Tiran, but there was a real possibility, and we didn' ; t get a chance to try. Later in the summer, Nasser told one of our representatives informally that there' ; d be no problem about opening the Strait of Tiran. That wasn' ; t a big deal. Had he told us that on June first, there would not have been a war. SCHOENBAUM: Yeah. DEAN RUSK: You see? But again, he needed a good lawyer. He needed advice to move in a timely fashion to take care of his own interests. SCHOENBAUM: Yeah. Do you remember what--did LBJ--do you remember anything LBJ said when he heard about the Israeli move? Was he--he must have been pleased. DEAN RUSK: He didn' ; t--he was upset. I don' ; t remember his using dramatic four-letter words or anything like that, because when you have a serious problem, you don' ; t fall into four-letter words very quickly. But-- RICHARD RUSK: That wasn' ; t true during the Nixon years. DEAN RUSK: But anyhow, that was--and that was the only time during my period--that is the June ' ; 67 war and Resolution 242 and the consequences of that war--that was the only period when the Middle East situation was really active. It had been relatively quiet from ' ; 61 to ' ; 67. Relatively quiet. Now, during that period, we tried to work out reasonable relations with various Arab countries. The Saudis probably feel the most strongly about the existence of the State of Israel. But even there we were able to, in effect, say to the Saudis, " ; We know that you and we disagree on this particular point. Well, let' ; s recognize that and then put this problem over into a corner, and then work on the rest of our relationship." ; And we did pretty well with working out a relationship with the Saudis because they also needed us. They had some enemies in the Arab world. See, one thing that has complicated the movement toward peace out there is that the Arabs have enormous differences among themselves. The only thing they can agree on is Israel. They almost would have to create Israel to have some point at which there could be a common Arab concern, but the rivalries and the bitterness within the Arab world were always very striking. And yet, one interesting thing from the point of view of diplomacy, I never had an Arab leader speak to me ill about another Arab leader. In the presence of the foreigner, they would always refer to " ; my Arab brother" ; even though they knew " ; my Arab brother" ; was trying to assassinate them. They did not get into vitriolic rhetoric about fellow Arabs to me, with the outsiders. SCHOENBAUM: Is that true? What about the Saudis, were--must have been very disappointed that we were supporting [Gamal Abdel] Nasser in the Yemen war. Was that true even there, even Yemen? DEAN RUSK: Well, you see, we didn' ; t support Nasser to that extent. I think that what we were trying to do was work privately with Nasser to get his forces out of Yemen. Because what we were trying to do there was simply to prevent a war between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. SCHOENBAUM: Yeah, yeah. Did you at all foresee or have even just a glimmer pass through your mind someday about the oil crisis and about the American dependency really, especially in early 1970s, on Saudi Arabian oil, and what that was going to mean politically? DEAN RUSK: Well, that is a factor you have to take fully into account. To some people oil is simply greasy, dirty stuff. It' ; s sort of unseemly to even talk about oil as an interest. That' ; s particularly true among some of those who support Israel. But in fact, oil plays a major role in the economy of Western Europe and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the economy of the United States, so that oil was important. But we did have a year, I forget now the actual years, an oil embargo by the Arab oil-producing countries, and that caused some problems. SCHOENBAUM: That was in ' ; 73, ' ; 74. DEAN RUSK: That' ; s right. The time of the Yom Kippur War. SCHOENBAUM: Yeah, after ' ; 73. But in your years,--I remember [Martin Joseph] Marty Hillenbrand was the first person to tell me about that. He was Ambassador in Germany ; I was a Fulbright Scholar ; and I just put this--and he hit me like a ton of bricks when he told me in a group of about twenty people that he said--in early ' ; 72, he said, " ; You watch," ; he said. " ; The United States is running out of oil and pretty soon, and the only place in the world that has oil now is the Arab countries, and it' ; s going to be a very difficult few years." ; And that just hit me like a ton of bricks. Did you realize that earlier in the-- DEAN RUSK: Well, you see, in the sixties we had a little bit of a problem the other way around. During the Eisenhower administration, in the name of national security, we put sharp restrictions on imported oil. SCHOENBAUM: Yeah. DEAN RUSK: The idea was that imported oil had to come across oceans, and oceans had submarines in them, and this was a fragile source of supply, and we ought to develop our own oil and make ourselves immune from that kind of damage. SCHOENBAUM: Yeah. DEAN RUSK: Well, that was one of those things where worries got out of hand, because if you' ; re thinking about national security, surely you' ; d use up other people' ; s oil first and keep your own oil in the ground. SCHOENBAUM: Yeah. DEAN RUSK: But when I was--In the early sixties there, it was just like pulling teeth for me to get a little extra oil quota for Venezuela or Saudi Arabia or somebody like that, you see, because there was [sic] very sharp restrictions on it. And I had some difficulty with the Department of Interior in making a little more room for foreign oil. So that-- RICHARD RUSK: Oil, itself, is an issue of its own. I' ; m sure you have some stories about oil. DEAN RUSK: So you see, foreign oil was sort of suspect in the early sixties, and the local oil people with powerful support in the Congress were keeping very close reins on the importation of oil. We had some problems with Saudi Arabia because they did not feel that we were giving ARAMCO [Arabian-American Oil Company] and other Saudi producers enough access to world markets in oil and we had to--that was always a source of friction. But most of those negotiations were handled directly by the oil companies with us in the background. SCHOENBAUM: One more--getting near the end I' ; d like to ask about the mechanics of forming Resolution 242. Where was the cooperation, or how did the cooperation--where were the channels of cooperation between state and-- DEAN RUSK: We kept in very close touch with Arthur Goldberg up at the United Nations. He was the negotiator, and he was in direct touch with the various parties. But nevertheless, we followed those negotiations in great detail, and approved the actual formulation of the language of Resolution 242 and watched it. SCHOENBAUM: Did you personally? DEAN RUSK: Oh, yes. Now Resolution 242, at the time, was a resolution adopted under Chapter 6 of the U.N. Charter. It was not in itself legally binding. But then at the time of the Yom Kippur War, the Security Council passed a Chapter 7 resolution which transformed Resolution 242 into a binding resolution under Resolution, I think 353, isn' ; t it? SCHOENBAUM: Yeah, 353, that' ; s right. DEAN RUSK: Yeah, so I still believe that Resolution 242, as originally negotiated, provides the agenda for a possible peace in the Middle East, but both parties have tried to pull away from it, as I' ; ve indicated earlier, pull away from the Resolution. On the Arab side--by the way, I mentioned the Israeli problem as far as territory was concerned. On the Arab side, they are now calling for an Arab state in Palestine. Resolution 242 did not anticipate an Arab state. It anticipated that Jordan would return to the West Bank, for example. But it' ; s ironic for the Arabs now to call for an Arab state in Palestine, because they could have had an Arab state in Palestine if they had accepted the partition plan in 1948. Instead they went to war to try to prevent it. So, it' ; s full of lost opportunities, ironies. SCHOENBAUM: Again, to repeat this, because the history books--I think this is a different view than is found in the history books. The history books portray the events leading up to the Six Day War--and this is just a couple of books that I read--and they portray the United States policy as being divided and uncertain. And you were talking to LBJ and at least in the top levels of government, it does not sound like the United States policy was divided. It sounds as if you were caught by, you were in the process of working things out as best you could and trying to prevent war, and that the Israeli attack was precipitous in--well, the Arabs, of course, did some foolish things as well. But, did you have a sense that our policy was at all frozen or divided or-- DEAN RUSK: I don' ; t remember much in-house controversy at that time. See, we really were trying to get the Strait of Tiran reopened, because we thought that that would ease the problem considerably. And if that could be done, then maybe we could find ways to reduce this sense of confrontation. You see, on the-- this attitude of holy war on the Arab side is matched by a kind of apocalyptic view on the Israeli side, and so any spark could set off a conflagration. And so we were trying to reopen the Strait of Tiran as a first step toward defusing this situation. And LBJ was very clear in urging the Israelis to hold their hand. Any idea that somehow under the rug we connived or approved of a June attack is just not true. SCHOENBAUM: Well, it' ; s good to have that on the record. DEAN RUSK: Yeah. SCHOENBAUM: How would you assess the performance of the Middle East Bureau, Lucius [Durham] Battle, at that time? DEAN RUSK: I think the Bureau at that time was working very effectively, and there was no confrontation between anybody at the White House and the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. SCHOENBAUM: Was there any major confrontation between the Department of Defense or State or any other-- DEAN RUSK: No. We had a very painful incident with the--that ship that was attacked. SCHOENBAUM: Right in the Mediterranean? Yeah, the-- DEAN RUSK: Yeah the-- RICHARD RUSK: American ship? SCHOENBAUM: Yeah, American ship. DEAN RUSK: Oh, what' ; s the name of it? SCHOENBAUM: It wasn' ; t the Nirnitz? DEAN RUSK: No, the Liberty. SCHOENBAUM: The Liberty, you' ; re right. That' ; s right. DEAN RUSK: Well, there was an intelligence-type ship in the area, and we were appalled when we learned that it was under attack. We were meeting in the situation room in the White House [the president and several of us] to consider what this attack meant, because at that time we didn' ; t know who had attacked it. It would have been a very serious problem if either the Egyptians or the Russians had attacked it. In the middle of our meeting came a flash in from the Israeli government that Israeli forces had attacked the ship. Well, that didn' ; t please us very much, but on the other hand it was somewhat easier to deal with. But I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanations about that attack on the Liberty. Whether they--I mean, I just don' ; t believe that it was an accident or trigger-happy local commanders. There was just too much of a sustained effort to disable and sink the Liberty to warrant that. And I don' ; t think we' ; ve had full satisfaction on that from the Israelis to this day. I think they did pay some reparations to the families of the crew, but I don' ; t think they' ; ve paid intergovernmental reparations on the Liberty. So, I didn' ; t believe the Israelis at that time, and I still don' ; t believe their explanation. SCHOENBAUM: Would they have a motive for attacking the Liberty? Did they just want the United States not to know what' ; s going on out there? DEAN RUSK: I think that' ; s it possibly, that they did not want us to monitor carefully what was being done on both sides, particularly on their side. But, they claimed that they could not identify the ship. Well, I have doubt about that. But for them to attack an unidentified ship, not knowing whether it might be Russian or something else was itself pretty reckless, you see. So, I was very unhappy about that whole episode. SCHOENBAUM: Did you express this to-- DEAN RUSK: Oh yeah, sure. Matter of fact, I wrote--we sent a note to them in which we refused to accept their explanation. RICHARD RUSK: Pop, when I interviewed Arthur [Joseph] Goldberg in New York, he spoke in considerable length on his influence on American policy here. And he had more or less said that you and the Johnson administration delegated it happily to him. Is this more or less Arthur Goldberg and his-- DEAN RUSK: No, we did delegate very heavily to Arthur Goldberg in, for example, negotiating this Resolution 242. By the way, I just say in passing that there were some people on our own side who expressed some doubts about Arthur Goldberg' ; s going to the U.N. as our representative. RICHARD RUSK: As a Jewish-- DEAN RUSK: Fearful that he would not be able to establish good relations with the Arabs. But that turned out to be of no consequence. He did have good negotiating relationships with his Arab counterparts at the U.N. and that never got to be a problem. But he was a very able negotiator. I don' ; t know whether I' ; ve put this on tape or not, but there' ; s a sharp contrast between an Adlai [Ewing] Stevenson at the U.N. and an Arthur Goldberg. Adlai Stevenson can make brilliant speeches, but he was a very poor negotiator. If you gave him a fallback position, he' ; d be at the fallback position in five minutes, so, you' ; d have to withhold your fallback position from Adlai. But in the case of Arthur Goldberg, he could make some pretty dull speeches compared to Adlai Stevenson, but he was a brilliant negotiator. He' ; d had all those years as a labor negotiator. You give him a position and a fallback position, he' ; d take the opening position and he' ; d gnaw and he' ; d struggle and he' ; d fuss and he' ; d do everything he could to get the maximum of his opening position before he' ; d begin to think about a fallback position. He was a very good negotiator. SCHOENBAUM: Another question that--Maybe this is about the last question I have. This is again an historical history-book interpretation for you to comment on. These are important to get down. The historians, the experts, say they perceived a change in Middle Eastern policy just looking at the Kennedy-Johnson years. They say that there was a change with LBJ over Kennedy, and they say that change was that LBJ was less tolerant of nationals like Nasser than Kennedy was and that LBJ was more pro-Israel than--And LBJ personally identified with the Israelis because of his love of the Bible and because of his admiration for the Israelis as pioneers. And he also, LBJ, the historians say, was more cooperative with the royalists because they were more pro-American and that--One historian said that, speculates that, LBJ regarded the Israeli Arabs as kind of like the Texans against the Mexicans. Would you comment on this? DEAN RUSK: I think that' ; s all--There' ; s a good deal of hogwash in that. LBJ had some very serious, tough negotiations with Israeli representatives. Golda Meir was a tough negotiator from the Israeli point of view and LBJ had to take her on a couple of times, Abba Eban, and people like that. No, LBJ' ; s approach to this problem did not come out of the Bible. RICHARD RUSK: Did you notice a shift in policy over the years? DEAN RUSK: No, not really. Not really. Of course the June ' ; 67 war brought about some new situations that Kennedy had not had to wrestle with. SCHOENBAUM: That' ; s true. RICHARD RUSK: So the policy stayed the same through the transition and into a new administration. DEAN RUSK: Pretty much so. SCHOENBAUM: It was more a change in circumstances. DEAN RUSK: You see, it' ; s important to bear in mind that the United States itself has never had a plan for the Middle East. Now when the British put the matter before the United Nations back in ' ; 46, they took the view then that they would accept any solution that was agreeable both to the Jews and to the Arabs. And so they sort of stood aside during all those U.N. discussions. Well, in a sense, that is the American view. We don' ; t have an American plan which we are trying to sell both sides or which we think is designed for our interests. We would accept any solution that Israel and the Arab side could agree on. We don' ; t--we' ; re not selling anything, we' ; re just trying to prevent war out there and find a way, find a little peace in the area. I' ; m not sure you' ; ll find in the record a something like an eight point program that I put through to the Egyptian Foreign Minister before the June ' ; 67 war. I think you may find it in a document. RICHARD RUSK: Is this a written document? DEAN RUSK: I think it' ; s in a reporting cable from New York. I was up there at the U.N. and put to him an eight point program, and the Egyptians turned it down. But later on they would have looked upon my eight point program with considerable favor. I mean, I don' ; t really know why they turned these eight points down. But you' ; ll find that somewhere. I don' ; t have the eight points exactly in mind at the moment, but-- RICHARD RUSK: Who is it, just the ambassador? DEAN RUSK: This was pretty much on my own. This was not on the basis of instructions from President Johnson, but it was simply an effort of my own to find some sort of basis for further negotiation. And I took the initiative on that personally hoping to stir up some real basis for negotiation for a peace out there, but the Egyptians turned it down. SCHOENBAUM: Do you know when--when was that, May of ' ; 67? DEAN RUSK: Oh I would think it might be maybe even ' ; 66. SCHOENBAUM: Sixty-six, oh, okay. DEAN RUSK: It was--but-- RICHARD RUSK: Who was the Egyptian Ambassador at that time? It would be nice to read that cable. DEAN RUSK: The Egyptian Foreign Minister, I think I was talking to. Oh, I forget now. I' ; m sorry. These names tend to elude me. RICHARD RUSK: Pop, this has been a good interview. You want to finish up with any particular war stories about any Egyptian, Israeli, Arab leaders? DEAN RUSK: No. To me, one of the sad things was that we were not able to keep Jordan out of that war, because it certainly was not in the interest of Hussein to get involved. And yet, he felt that as an Arab he had a commitment of honor, particularly since the Israelis had launched the attack against Egypt. And so he would not accept an immediate cease-fire, and lost the West Bank in the old city of Jerusalem as a result. SCHOENBAUM: Did we make some special approaches to him personally? DEAN RUSK: Oh yeah, immediately. We talked to him immediately after the out break of the June' ; 67 war, trying to keep Jordan out of it. And I think we could have succeeded on the Israeli side to stay their hand had Jordan stayed out of it, but he insisted on getting into it. RICHARD RUSK: The whole map sure got rewritten over that. DEAN RUSK: Yeah. You know, I' ; m not sure that I' ; ve put on tape when I was at the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950' ; s, we talked to Jewish and Arab scholars about establishing a joint institute of Semitic studies [because, after all, both were Semites ; both were interested in Semitic studies] maybe located on Mount Scopus, which was a point of controversy at that time, and the Rockefeller Foundation would put up the money for it. And among the scholars we found very considerable enthusiasm for it on the Arab side as well as on the Israeli side, on the Jewish side. And it was our impression at the time that the Israeli government would have accepted it. But when we got up to the political level on the Arab side, it was just turned down flat as not being acceptable. But you see, this Arab-Israeli problem has been the most stubborn, intractable, unyielding problem that we' ; ve had in this postwar period, and part of it is the depth and strength of the emotions on both sides. RICHARD RUSK: As difficult today as 1949? DEAN RUSK: Yeah. Just about, except for the Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt ; that helped a good deal in a major aspect of it. So, it' ; s still a part of the unfinished business. I think it' ; s somewhat less likely that another major round of fighting will occur, but if the Arabs ever get themselves a military leader of the quality of a General [Yitzhak] Rabin and they ever develop a well-trained, well-led fighting force, then Israel could be in great trouble because of the sheer numbers of the situation. RICHARD RUSK: Don' ; t forget the nukes. DEAN RUSK: And then in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, in relation to population, Israel' ; s casualties were greater than ours in Vietnam, in relation to population. So Israel simply cannot stand war every ten years on a major scale. RICHARD RUSK: It' ; s been a good interview, Pop. SCHOENBAUM: Well, thank you very much, it certainly has. DEAN RUSK: Good to talk to you. I bear many scars from this Middle Eastern question. RICHARD RUSK: Got anything further on your page, there? SCHOENBAUM: No, I think we' ; ve covered my questions. So, you turn it off and-- DEAN RUSK: --And you' ; ll find different ones writing quite different things about these things. I read, for example, that the Israelis had some undercover encouragement from Washington to launch their war in June ' ; 67. Well, that just isn' ; t true, just isn' ; t true. SCHOENBAUM: It' ; s good to have these things. It' ; s good to have a public record of these things. It' ; s very, very valuable. This is something for future, but this is an article from the New York Times about the-- 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-RuskXXX.xml RBRL214DROH-RuskXXX.xml http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH/findingaid
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30 minutes
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Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
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Rusk XXX, Dean Rusk interviewed by Richard Rusk and Thomas Schoenbaum, Part 2, 1985 May
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RBRL214DROH-Ruskxxx
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Dean Rusk
Richard Rusk
Thomas Schoenbaum
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audio
oral histories
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sound
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United States
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http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
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Arab-Israeli conflict
Foreign relations
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Dean Rusk discusses Israel and Israel-Arab Conflicts. <br /><br />This interview is a continuation of <a href="http://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/RBRL214DROH/RBRL214DROH-RuskWWW">Rusk WWW</a>.
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1985-05
OHMS
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Richard B. Russell, Jr. Oral History Project
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United States--Officials and employees
State governments--Officials and employees
Politics and Public Policy
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The Richard B. Russell, Jr. Oral History Project consists of 175 oral history interviews relating to the personal and political life of Richard B. Russell. Interviewees include members of the Russell family, his staff and interns, other senators and public figures, and friends. The primary interviewer was Hugh Cates, a public relations manager at Southern Bell and secretary of the Russell Foundation (1977-1981). Most of the interviews were recorded between 1971 and 1979, but the majority during 1971 after Senator Russell's death. Other interviewers include: William Stueck, Karen Kelly, Barboura Raesly, Robert G. Stephens, Jr., Dwight L. Freshley, Tom Jackson, Angus Hepburn, and Russell Library staff. Interviews provide insight into Senator Russell's political career as State Representative, Governor, and U.S. Senator, his views on various topics such as civil rights and Vietnam, and his personality and family life.<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=23&type=&tags=OHMS&featured=&subcollections=0&subcollections=1&submit_search=Search+for+items">View all OHMS indexed interviews in this collection here.</a>
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Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
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Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
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1971-2002
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http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
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Oral histories
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RBRL216RBROH
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Georgia
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
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https://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL216RBROH-109/ohms
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5.4 Interview with Abe Goldstein, February 17, 1971 RBRL216RBROH-109 RBRL216RBROH Richard B. Russell, Jr. Oral History Project Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Abe Goldstein Hugh Cates oral history 1:|8(11)|15(5)|21(8)|35(6)|43(2)|51(3)|58(3)|68(3)|77(15)|89(1)|103(11)|112(2)|121(4)|128(2)|139(14)|151(4)|160(8)|170(2)|177(5)|184(4)|193(10)|204(7)|210(12)|222(5)|233(8)|249(8)|268(1)|281(5)|292(15)|303(15)|317(11)|335(2)|345(10)|379(9)|393(7)|400(7)|411(14)|419(5)|430(6)|436(7)|445(8)|456(8)|468(8)|481(8)|491(6)|502(2)|517(2)|523(17)|534(5)|545(1)|560(6)|571(11)|580(11)|592(6)|606(13)|622(13)|641(1)|651(11)|665(7)|676(7)|692(5)|714(13)|723(9)|738(11) 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_3cdrf8qc& ; 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_iey75tlt" ; width=" ; 400" ; height=" ; 285" ; allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozAllowFullScreen allow=" ; autoplay * ; fullscreen * ; encrypted-media *" ; frameborder=" ; 0" ; title=" ; Kaltura Player" ; > ; < ; /iframe> ; 11 Senator Russell's impressions of Israel Mr. Goldstein, would you mind telling me how you first met the Senator? Golda Meir ; Israel ; Middle East ; Six Day War ; Suez 17 631 Russell's support for defense of Israel Going back in time a little bit, I believe you indicated that you met the Senator in 1948, is that correct? Coca-Cola boycott ; equipment ; petition ; Phantom jets ; treaties ; Truman ; World Bank 17 1456 Senator Russell's dedication / Russell's personality Ah, now you've stated that you knew the Senator beginning in 1948, did you visit him often in Washington or Winder? Bill Jordan ; family ; frugality ; memory ; reading ; respectability ; stocks 17 2064 Russell's lifetime goals / Seeking nomination as VP How do you think the Senator regarded the world situation at the time of his death? 1952 ; crises ; defense ; Democratic Party ; Israel ; Kennedy 17 2639 Influences on Russell / Civil Rights Did he ever talk to you about his relationship with other world leaders? Christianity ; family ; filibuster ; LBJ ; parents ; President Johnson ; race ; religion 17 3034 Social and professional plans during Russell's later life Getting back to the times that you visited socially with the Senator. alcohol ; campaigns ; cocktail parties ; drinking ; emphysema ; food ; health ; humor ; independence ; personality ; sincerity ; social habits 17 3667 Cates reads letters from Russell to Goldstein I do want to record one thing in connection with my interview with Abe Goldstein. correspondence ; Golda Meir ; health 17 CATES: February 17, 1971. I' ; m in the office of Abe Goldstein in Atlanta. Mr. Goldstein is a longtime friend of the late Senator Richard Russell. Mr. Goldstein, would you mind telling me how you first met the Senator? GOLDSTEIN: My first meeting with Senator Russell was in the presence of a longtime friend of mine, Mr. Wiley Moore, together with Ambassador (Abba) Eban, and Senator Walter George. I found Senator Russell to be a plain man back in 1948 when I had a dinner meeting with the--with Senator Russell. From that time he has been a personal friend and confidant. For more than twenty-five years he has been a man of integrity, respected and loved, not only by his native Georgians, but by people throughout the nation who knew of his outstanding contributions. Senator Russell was a friend to all people as he will be sorely missed. His more than fifty years of dedicated public service to this state and to this nation and, as a matter of fact, through the world--throughout the world will long be remembered. We join the nation in extending our heartfelt sympathies to the Russell family. One of the last communications that I received from Senator Russell was a letter dated September 22, that was of great significance. He was a man that realized the tension that existed in the Middle East and was always ready and willing to help the little democracy of the state of Israel and had made many trips to the state to personally become knowledgeable. He wrote me on September 22, 1970, and I will quote a last paragraph of his letter, quote: " ; You will be interested to know, that I attended a most informative meeting Friday with Prime Minister (Golda) Meir and Ambassador (Yitzhak) Rabin. I particularly enjoyed talking with Mrs. Meir and she was a very impressive leader." ; (Long pause) CATES: Mr. Goldstein, did you ever accompany the Senator on any of his trips to Israel? GOLDSTEIN: No. You--that' ; s going in, you didn' ; t put that in there, did you? If I did you mean? CATES: Oh yes, the tape is going now, right. GOLDSTEIN: No, I never attended--never visited Israel at the time that the Senator was there, but only recently--but recently, but a short time before his death I visited with him in the office of Appropriations Committee together with several Georgians, and he displayed full knowledge of the problems existing at that time in the Middle East. I have--on many other occasions visited with Senator Russell and have always found him to be, not only knowledgeable as stated above, of the state of Israel, but he was most knowledgeable about all matters in the--in the Senate. CATES: Specifically, Mr. Goldstein, did he tell you anything about his trips to Israel? Did he report back to you as a close friend what he found and his impressions? And also, specifically when was his last trip to Israel? GOLDSTEIN: His last trip to Israel was about a year ago, and at that time (tape stops and starts) he was so impressed that he phoned me to tell me that he had just returned, and not like the United States, the little nation where the majority of the population are Jewish, he found Jews on the telephone poles repairing telephone lines and electric lines ; he found them sweeping the streets ; he found them working on garbage trucks ; and he found them in the army. And he found them digging ditches and laying brick and mortar and he was very much impressed not to think that the only people there were the people of the books. He found them in all fields of endeavor and he found that the housing in Israel was well and the refugees who were coming in were immediately sent to apartments that were laid out for them. At one time he saw more than one thousand refugees come in from--at at Haifa where they were sick, blind, but they were moved into their residence with their families. And the social worker would call back at a later date after supplying them with food and lodging to find out what type of work they had ever done so that they could get them placed in employment. And found that the employment--unemployed people in this nation were very, very few, if any. CATES: What most impressed him about his trip or trips to Israel? GOLDSTEIN: Well, what most impressed him, of course, was the fact that the nation was such a d--democratic nation and that they--and that they--how well they respected all of the people in the West and his association and knowledge of the Israelis was clearly understood and respected at all times. CATES: Did he comment about the spirit of the nation to you? GOLDSTEIN: The spirit of the nation was one of peace and they wanted to follow peace and that found them to be a very peaceful nation, but they were a fighting group to see to it that the boundaries were not infringed upon. He admired them for the fact that they wanted to complete use--the wanted use of the Suez Canal along with all nations. And he fought for that privilege, that the Suez Canal should remain closed until it is opened up for all nations alike. And that is the position that it is in even at this time. CATES: What were his views concerning the territory that was taken by Israel during and after the Six Day War in 1967? GOLDSTEIN: His feeling about the territory was taken--that had been taken, was similar to that of other nations that had gained territory due to a--due to battle. Even the United States has territory that they took and still have and still nourishes it. And he felt like that, yes, part of this territory should be moved, but he was--he felt like the, the Golan Heights is something that should never be relinquished back to any nation and he felt like the city of Jerusalem should be a--a city for all nations and all people--the Jew alike, and not be held only by one nation. CATES: Going back in time a little bit, I believe you indicated that you met the Senator in 1948, is that correct? GOLDSTEIN: Correct, yes. CATES: And Wiley Moore was a mutual friend, if my memory serves me correctly this was the year of the creation of Israel, is that not true? GOLDSTEIN: This was in 1948, shortly after President Truman had declared the state of Israel a nation, and it was at a time when the people there needed a grant and aid from the United States and he agreed and did support this grant and aid. He commented at a later date, however, that no nation has ever met their obligation to the United States or to the World Bank as Senator Russell stated that they were--their credit was good, and they are managing to keep it good, and of course, that is the situation as it rests today. No obligation has ever gone in default, and the World Bank has been paid every obligation upon the date it is due and he always felt that they would always take care of their obligations. CATES: Did-- GOLDSTEIN: One of my latest experiences with the Senator was when the Senator--when I talked to the Senator by phone when the petition was being signed by seventy-two senators, at that time, to the State Department asking the State Department to give Israel additional Phantom jets that they needed very badly at that time. And he supported that and told me that this is the first time in the history of his service as a senator that he ever signed a petition. And this is the only petition that he has ever signed and he felt like that he could do even more good if he didn' ; t sign it ; however, that if I wanted him to sign it, he would and he did. And I think that is something deep to his credit of his feeling towards this nation by signing a petition that seventy-two other senators had signed and after it got into the State Department and he felt like that it was going to mean a great deal. And I' ; m sure the results of this petition that was signed and sent to the State Department the state of Israel has been granted a five hundred million dollar credit in order to obtain additional Phantoms, Mirages, and other sophisticated army material. And they have--and this is being done and being taken care of now, even after his passing that it might take about two more years or three in order for the state of Israel to get the final count of what has been--that they have agreed to supply in this five hundred million dollar credit. CATES: Was Senator Russell among the first senators to sign this petition, or do you know? GOLDSTEIN: No, Senator Russell was the last man to sign this petition, the very last, because he felt like he could do more good by not signing it because he felt that the State Department would come down and ask him of his advice and what he thought they ought to do. However, if we wanted signed, he would sign it. And I might add, that I said to him, that your name on this petition as a senator, in my opinion, is worth more than twenty-five other names that are on there--that were part of that was on there at the time. And--and of course, the petition was signed. It was quite a story appeared in the Atlanta newspapers concerning his signing of the petition and this was released to the, what do you call it, the UPI (United Press International)-- CATES: UPI or AP (Associated Press). GOLDSTEIN: This was released to the UPI and this message of his was carried all over the United States, and, no doubt, in certain parts of Europe. CATES: To your knowledge, when was the--what was the first time or circumstance in which the Senator visited Israel? What was the year? GOLDSTEIN: He visited the state of Israel in 1961, again in 1963, and again in 1966. And he went there to personally observe what was taking place in this small country and what they needed in order to--carry--in order not to be annihilated. It was the feeling of the Arab nations that they could drive the Jews into the Mediterranean and forget about them entirely, but they were not about to do that. And he told me at the time, in his last visit, he has never in his life came across such brave people. He also stated that--over and over again, that the leaders of this nation had stated that they never want to see a citizen of the United States ever fight in their battle. They do not want any manpower, all they want is equipment that they can defend themselves, and they can do that without soldiers or army of the United States for any help, and they will never need any help from that source. CATES: What were his comments to you about the apparent singleness of purpose in Israel from its first days of conception up to the present time? GOLDSTEIN: Well, as you well know, there is--since the conception of Israel, they refer to different wars. One in 1956, and another one, of course, in 1969. And--and as it now stands, the Six Day War we, not a six-day war, because the fighting kept going on and has gone on until now. So it' ; s not six days, but it' ; s more like three years plus six days that the war has been going on even though Israel was able to overpower the country-- overpower the Arab countries. He took note of the fact, on many occasions, of the Arab boycotts against Israel--talked about that over and over again. And he was impressed with the fact that, even though they had boycotts, they never yielded and went on about their business without that kind of help. As a matter of fact, we talked about the boycott of the Arab countries, composing of about a hundred million people. They boycotted Coca-Cola in the state of Israel and finally Coca-Cola--it would not yield to the boycott any further and established Coca-Cola in this small nation of three million and passed up the business of a hundred million elsewhere. They are to be commended, of course, for their stand but he was very proud of the fact that when the boycott was lifted that the boycott was lifted on the state of Israel, that the Arab countries then boycotted Coca-Cola. You cannot today buy a Coca-Cola in any of the Arab countries. All of the plants have been shut down, the bottling plants, but Israel has now started off with one plant in Tel Aviv and today they have three plants in the state of Israel and flourishing. CATES: Did he contrast the singleness of purpose in Israel with the apparent lack of singleness of purpose in the United States? GOLDSTEIN: No, specifically, I don' ; t believe there' ; s been any discussion along that line, not directly affecting the state of Israel. But, to his mind, it was the most unusual thing that a nation as large as the Arab nations are that they could have been whipped so badly in the Six Day War, or so called Six Day War that has continued on since then, as far as the Israelis are concerned. CATES: How did he view the Communist influence in the Middle East? GOLDSTEIN: Of course, the--he realized only after the CIA advised him definitely that the Russians were manning equipment and teaching Arabs how to fly the planes and the sophisticated weapons that Russia was supplying this country--this country of Israel. At the same time, he realized that no at--no United States men were ever sent to Israel. However, at one time, the United States government invited some large group--not a--probably small group, I should say, of Israelis to learn how to operate the Phantom jets and be able to get back to the state and show them--show their men and teach their men how to properly operate the Phantoms. As you know, the Phantom jets were first released to the state of Israel by Senator--I meant, President (John Fitzgerald) Kennedy. CATES: You mentioned this petition that Senator Russell and seventy one other senators signed, would you view this as the greatest contribution that the senator made towards Israel and Jewish people? GOLDSTEIN: I wouldn' ; t say that because he made so many. And he was so fond of the Israelis that I think he--everyone of his moves were courageous moves and moves that he felt like needed to be had in order that this little nation could take care of the democracy in that part of the world, and fight for a democracy. He' ; s had so many things that he has intervened on, that it would be impossible to pick out one that was most meaningful. CATES: Ah, now you' ; ve stated that you knew the Senator beginning in 1948, did you visit him often in Washington or Winder? GOLDSTEIN: I' ; ve oft visited him in Winder on many occasions. I' ; ve visited him--visited him in--in Washington and have--have discussed a good deal of the problems existing with one of his top aides, Mr. Bill Jordan, who heads up now the appropriations department for the Senator and who was a very close friend of the Senator' ; s and a man who the Senator talked to every day for a few hours. CATES: I spoke to Bill Jordan just before coming over here and he told me to be sure and tell you hello for him. GOLDSTEIN: Fine. Glad to hear it--he' ; s a wonderful person. CATES: Fine. I' ; m looking forward to meeting him. GOLDSTEIN: Yes, he' ; s a wonderful person, he' ; s a man that the Senator had put in a tremendous amount of faith and confidence in him and Bill is a remarkable individual doing a most remarkable job. I sincerely hope and trust that he will remain in the appropriations department or in the Armed Services Division or one of the important positions in the--in the Capitol. CATES: Being a close friend to the Senator, I' ; m sure that you had knowledge if the Senator had any special hobbies or things that he really liked to do in his leisure hours. GOLDSTEIN: You know, the Senator was a man--was a plain man, as stated before. He was not a socializer. He didn' ; t care for social life. He worked hard at what he was doing. He was a man that probably got into his office long before other senators had come in an--each morning. And he was a man that spent his leisure time in reading and becoming conversed in matters pertaining to the United States Senate so that when he voted, he knew what he was voting for and why. CATES: You' ; d say his hobby then was reading and becoming-- GOLDSTEIN: His hobby was reading and working. CATES: --working and reading and becoming well versed in the business at hand. GOLDSTEIN: That' ; s correct. CATES: Right. Who were some of his favorite authors, would you have any knowledge of this? GOLDSTEIN: No, I haven' ; t. I don' ; t know who his favorite authors were. Of course he was a man that could quote everything that ever appeared in a newspaper and had a good recollection of them. CATES: Would you say that he had total recall when he came to reading something and then pretty much remembering everything that he had read? GOLDSTEIN: He certainly had a magnetic memory and a--and at all times was able to picture and realize when he read a book or when he read a bill exactly what it means and to what direction it' ; ll go and which way it would be--it could be made favorable and favorable to the United States. He was a dedicated Senator. He was a senator' ; s senator, and he had the respect and the love of all departments in the Pentagon, as well as the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) and other divisions of government. CATES: What would you say was his temperament? GOLDSTEIN: His temperament was one that I have never seen him angry. He may disagree with you on a matter but not in anger. Only in words of the--and why--and was willing to explain his way through as the reasons why he might disagree, but never in anger. He was a quiet man and a man that took his position in the Senate seriously and that' ; s the reason why he was so well loved by Georgians that he seldom had any opposition and when he did it was only token opposition ; the type of opposition that he didn' ; t have to come to Georgia and make a single speech ; the type of opposition that he never ran a newspaper ad asking people to vote for him ; and he went strictly on the merits of what he' ; s done and what good he can be to the nation. He was a senator that represented the nation, not just Georgia. CATES: Did you ever see him, at any time, under any particular stress or strain? GOLDSTEIN: No, I couldn' ; t say that I have. I have seen him concerned about matters pertaining to the affairs of the United States and the government, of course, but never--never to have to get under a strain. He was so well respected by other senators, that when they found out that Senator Russell was for something, they were too. He had--he was a tremendous leader in that fight. CATES: I guess, you know other members of his family, do you not? GOLDSTEIN: Vaguely. I have met his sisters and I have met a brother and so forth, but I never had the association with all of his family as I did with him. CATES: Did he talk about his family? If so, how did he regard his brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews? GOLDSTEIN: Well, he had a love for his family and for all of his--all of his nieces and nephews and brothers and sisters and family alike. That was most paramount with him as far as love and respect is concerned. If there was ever a man that at any time that didn' ; t feel close and ready to serve, not only his family, but also his friends, and he had a vast number of friends. And I don' ; t believe that any friends would ever take care--would ever take advantage of Senator Russell because they know that--that he would be BEGIN CASSETTE #150, SIDE 2 --that that he would be able to realize that somebody' ; s trying to take advantage of him. He was so intellectual and so-- had such a clear understanding of the purpose that nobody would ever attempt to take any kind of an advantage over him. CATES: Uh--I started to say much, but that' ; s not the correct word. Some mention has been made in the press about his frugality-- GOLDSTEIN: His what? CATES: --his frugality. He was a very frugal man ; would you like to comment about that? GOLDSTEIN: Well, as many times as I have talked to Senator Russell, he has never talked about his personal views or per--or rather of his wealth or his position or his finances. I know the last time I was with the Senator and there was a telegram crusade going on to send telegrams to your senator. And I told him what was about to happen and I said I think this is a good time to buy some Western Union stock. And he said then, Genuine Parts is much better. And since he made that statement I' ; ve had an occasion to watch Genuine Parts and over a period of about seven or eight months ago, when he made that statement, it has just about doubled in price and I still didn' ; t buy any. (laughs) CATES: My goodness. Do you know of any other holdings that he might have had in the stock market? GOLDSTEIN: No. I know nothing about his personal wealth-- CATES: I see. GOLDSTEIN: --or any of his holdings. And we frankly never discussed things of that kind, and I don' ; t suppose he discussed things of that kind with many people other than his auditor. CATES: Would-- GOLDSTEIN: He wouldn' ; t need a lawyer. He was a good lawyer himself. CATES: Well, for that matter, you don' ; t even really know that he had Genuine Parts stock-- GOLDSTEIN: No sir, I do not-- CATES: --he was just saying it was a good stock as opposed to Western Union. GOLDSTEIN: --I don' ; t know that he had any at all-- CATES: Right. GOLDSTEIN: --but he said Genuine Parts would be better than Western Union, and you couldn' ; t help but agree with him if you watched the trend of the two. CATES: How would you describe the Senator? Was he a meticulous man? GOLDSTEIN: No, he--he wasn' ; t a meticulous man because he would sit down and talk things over with you and discuss them at length and you could-- you could--and if he felt like that he was wrong, he would admit, " ; probably, I' ; m wrong about that." ; And change his viewpoint while in discussion about a matter that he may not have been completely adverse [sic] on. CATES: How do you think the Senator regarded the world situation at the time of his death? I know this might be a-- GOLDSTEIN: Well, yes-- CATES: --tremendous question. GOLDSTEIN: --I--I feel that the Senator' ; s wishes were carried on just as he would like for them to have been. I think that the--his body lying in state in the Capitol was one of his wishes. To some of his dedicated friends and associates that--that he felt like that after spending more than fifty years of his life in public service that he owed it to the public to view his body as their last memory of Senator Russell. And it showed up by the numbers of people that attended the funeral, and the way, and the fact that it was nationally televised, I presume. And that the--and that the number of senators and President of the United States and others came down to pay their last tribute to him as a senator, as a gentleman, and as a man. CATES: I believe President (Richard Milhous) Nixon had stated that his last words to him were over the--his concern of the defense of this country. How do you feel, or did he ever say to you how he felt about the defense of this country--our ability to defend ourselves in the event of a world war or any kind of confrontation? GOLDSTEIN: Senator Russell was always an advocate of seeing that the United States was militarily strong and that he didn' ; t mind any amount of appropriations necessary to keep the United States strong and viable and--and put in a position that they--that at all times be able to defend themselves. He was for all kinds of sophisticated weapons. He was a man who felt that if we were properly--we were in a good position to defend our nation that we will not have to defend it, because we would be in such a position that our enemies would know that the--that the Pentagon and that the--and that the defense department was strong and in financial ways so that they could buy any kind of equipment and be prepared for anything that might arise against the United States. He did not like appropriations of many things that went on in the United States, but never opposed one that for--that would help the defense of this nation and help us--and be able to defend ourselves at all times. CATES: Since you met the Senator some twenty--twenty five years ago, this country has been faced with several crises, did the Senator ever confide in you or seek out your advice concerning such things as, well--I call to mind the (Harry) Truman--(Douglas) MacArthur hearing, the Korean War, the Cuban Crisis, the assassination of President Kennedy and the Warren Commission, just to name a few. Did he discuss matters of this nature with his close friends such as yourself? GOLDSTEIN: Well, I think everyone knew his position when he served on the Warren Commission ; that he was not completely satisfied in his own mind that the report was a complete report. He never felt that all of the factors had come to light. I remember after having a conference at one time with President Kennedy and his top aide Meyer Feldman in the White House and when the President then stated that they were prepared to see to it that the Phantom jets were supplied to Israel along with--they were arranging along with that the Mirages and the Bloodhounds and other types of weapons and equipment that he felt like that the President--he endorsed what the President of the United States was doing at that time. And he felt like that if Israel was militarily strong that there may not be a war there. And if the--he felt even now that after the--the cease-fire that if Israel could be put in a good position militarily that that would keep the United--keep the state of Israel from having to fight another war ; and whether or not they are getting this done now while there' ; s a cease-fire, I don' ; t know. CATES: Changing the subject just a little bit, did you ever actively help him in any way be elected to any office? Did you serve as any--in any official capacity? GOLDSTEIN: Well, when he was supposed to--well, not supposed to when he was seeking the nomination as Vice President [sic] of the United States-- CATES: 1952, I believe. GOLDSTEIN: --1952, we talked quite a great deal. He was traveling all over the nation. And, naturally, a campaign of that kind was costly. And his friends came to him with--even feeling that he was not going to be able to get the vice presidency on account of the fact that he lived in the South ; that they were still willing to help him to finance a campaign that he was putting on, on the basis of the fact that he has led them--his efforts for the betterment of the United States by entering into the field of the possibility of being a vice president. And I also firmly believe that if Senator Russell lived elsewhere other than in the South he would have been one of our presidents before now. CATES: Do you think the Senator considered that there was a remote possibility that he might get the Democratic nomination in 1952? GOLDSTEIN: Well, it' ; s difficult to say that any man that seeks an office seeks it without any idea in mind of obtaining it. So I' ; m sure that he felt like that if he went out and could--and could get the certain parts of the country to go along with him he would have--he would have had a good chance. CATES: Were you with him at the convention? GOLDSTEIN: Yes ' ; sir. I kept in pretty, very close touch with him. I did not attend the convention itself, no. But he was in and out of Washington and on several occasions we talked--talked things over. But he was a--he was not a man who would by any means mislead people into believing that he--he would be the next President of the United States. He didn' ; t--he wouldn' ; t--he wouldn' ; t make a statement of that kind unless he was absolutely sure and no one could be sure of anything in those days. CATES: Did he ever talk to you about his relationship with other world leaders? Let' ; s look at Lyndon B. Johnson, for example. They were very close friends. You were a very close friend of his. Did he ever talk to you about his relationship with President Johnson? GOLDSTEIN: Well, everyone that knew President Johnson and knew Dick Russell knew the friendship existed there way back. And the--and the--we all know that the Johnson children always referred to him as Uncle Dick. And they always called him Uncle. He was very close to the Johnsons and he was very close to the children. And Johnson always respected him and many times he couldn' ; t go along with President Johnson, but the respect was there, and anytime the President felt like he needed some advice, that' ; s where he went to first to get it. CATES: Would you say that Senator Russell was a religious man? GOLDSTEIN: Yes, I do. I think he was a very religious man. And I happen to be one that feels that a person doesn' ; t have to go to church everyday and every Sunday in order to be a religious man. I think that the deeds that they do indicates whether they are a religious man or not. A person may not ever go to a church or a synagogue and don' ; t attend the services, but in life what they practice and what they preach is--makes them a religious man more so than going to church end doing otherwise when you leave there. CATES: I' ; ve been told that the Senator would often times refer to a Biblical quotation in his speeches on the Senate floor. I understand also that his mother was very religious-- GOLDSTEIN: That' ; s right. CATES: --would you like to comment if you have any personal knowledge as to the influence that the Senator' ; s parents had upon him? GOLDSTEIN: You know, Senator Russell was not an opinionated individual. (Coughs) He had a love as I' ; ve said before for his family and brothers and sisters, and close love to his mother, but the--(coughs) but the amount of--of--of knowledge that he might have had about the Bible he only talked about it as he saw it in the state of Israel and Jerusalem and how impressed he was with the country and Bethlehem ; and the religious objects that is--is there. So, I couldn' ; t--I would not say that I know anything about his religious affiliations or to what extent he supported the church. And he was not always for separation of church and state. He felt like that the church and state was something that should be held together as individual items. So, not always did he take the kind of stand that a lot of his friends would like for him to take. But whenever he took a stand, he did it in the most conscientious way and everyone knew that when he took a stand that it was after study and exactly how he felt about them. CATES: Of course, he was the leader of the filibuster on--in a number of instances in the Senate, especially concerning Civil Rights legislation. How would you view his opinions and his regard of the black man? GOLDSTEIN: Well, when civil rights first started in existence, naturally, a Georgian representing his constituents at home, and knowing that the--the tension that existed in that respect ; he was a--he was at that time, I would say, a segregationist--not a member of the White Citizens Council, not a member of the Ku Klux Klan, not a member of offensive organizations. It was a sincere feeling on his part. And as times went on, I think he began to review in his own mind that civil rights were here to stay, and it was on the books of the nation, and it would remain on the books of the nation, and he was a man whether he--if he did not support it, but it became law, he backed up his position of the law. He followed in the--in that respect of the law. CATES: How did he regard the colored people, would you say? GOLDSTEIN: At the end of his years, Dick Russell had warmed up considerably towards black people. He began to realize that they have--that they have been a people that have been deprived of rights and privileges more than a hundred years and that he felt like that they had a perfect right to exist and that he led his best efforts for supporting the civil rights movements in the latter years of his life. CATES: Getting back to the times that you visited socially with the Senator. Were you ever an overnight guest in Winder? GOLDSTEIN: No. CATES: No. GOLDSTEIN: --no, I have never been an overnight guest in Winder. Winder being only less than an hour from here from Atlanta and you--we could go there and sit on the porch. We' ; d slip through his office, and where he had his roll top desk and his straw chairs and visit and then leave and have plenty of time to get back in time for dinner. CATES: What I was leading up to is--I thought it might be helpful to these future historians and researchers if someone who had personal knowledge could maybe describe a typical get-together with the Senator in a social type environment. As you' ; ve stated, he didn' ; t like to go to social functions as such--parties, cocktail parties, but perhaps you could describe what he enjoyed in the way of, say, social intercourse with his friends, you know. GOLDSTEIN: Well, it certainly could be said that a sociable drink was always in order for Senator Russell. He would not inhibit (?) a great deal, but a sociable drink was always in order and I' ; ve had them with him. But the--he never took one that he would make--that it would disagree with him in any way. And as I' ; ve said before, he was a real man and a sincere individual and a plain individual. I think we' ; ve got to think about this over and over again, that he was a plain man and did not let his position in government sway him in a direction of being independent or not wanting to talk to people properly. CATES: Were you and his other friends, his close friends, concerned about his emphysema and his condition and what it was doing to him? GOLDSTEIN: Yes, but never talked about it to him, never talked to him about it. He would bring it up occasionally. I know that six months before his passing he said to me, he says, " ; I' ; ve never felt better in my life than I' ; m feeling now." ; And he said, " ; Abe, I' ; m going to run for office again in 1972. I don' ; t believe that I' ; ll have opposition. If I do I think it' ; ll be some token opposition. And I--the way I feel now, I' ; m going to run for office again in 1972." ; That was just about six or seven months ago, that that statement was made. CATES: Would you say that he made this statement to anyone else? This is the first time I' ; ve heard this statement. GOLDSTEIN: Well, he might--I' ; m sure he made it to other people-- CATES: Uh huh. GOLDSTEIN: --because I said to him, " ; Senator, I see that you-- I see in the paper that you are contemplating running for Senate again." ; He said, " ; Well," ; he said, " ; some reporter pushed me up against the wall and the first thing you know, I made that statement, and it appeared in the paper. However, I feel that way now more so than the day I told him that. That I' ; m feeling well enough now. I think I' ; ve got my problem licked and that I will enter the race in 1972." ; And he, as I stated before, he felt like that he would not have any real opposition. CATES: Did you have any advice to him at this time about running or not running? GOLDSTEIN: No. You know, at that time we were talking about maybe two and a half, three years later and the only thing that you could say to him at that point was," ; I agree with you." ; CATES: Uh huh. GOLDSTEIN: " ; --I don' ; t think you' ; ll have any opposition. If it would be, it would be like the man that ran against you last time from Marietta, Georgia. You didn' ; t have to come to Atlanta to be seen. You paid your entrance fee and you carried every county in the state at that time, all hundred and fifty nine counties. I think if you run you' ; ll count then again--we got--carry them again regardless of who runs against you." ; CATES: Did Senator Russell have any favorite stories or--that he liked to tell? Was he a man that would tell a joke, did he like humor? GOLDSTEIN: He liked humor because he liked to joke. But he was not a joke teller, in my opinion. But he always liked to hear a good joke and a good story and, I know many that I told him. CATES: Do you happen to know or remember a favorite one of his? GOLDSTEIN: A favorite story? CATES: Favorite story or joke that either you told him or maybe that he had told you? GOLDSTEIN: I' ; ll probably remember a lot of them on my way home tonight but right now, they just--they don' ; t come to my mind. CATES: You may have mentioned this. What would you say was his most outstanding personality trait? Looking at him as a friend now? GOLDSTEIN: The most outstanding trait of Senator Russell was that of his seriousness towards any problem and his--and his time that he would give you if you came in to see him. Regardless of how many people were outside waiting in the waiting room to see him, he never rushed you through an interview, and always thanked you for coming and asked you to come back again. He made you feel absolutely at home at all times. CATES: Did he ever discuss with you or did you ever ask him why he did not marry? GOLDSTEIN: No, you just don' ; t ask people like that personal problems of that kind. I--at least I never have been able to do it--delve into somebody unless it was a joking matter. But on a serious note we--you just don' ; t ask people that kind of a question because that' ; s their personal life and they have to live it their way, and not the way of others. CATES: Can you recall any favorite foods that the Senator had? I' ; m sure you must have eaten with him on numerous occasions. Did he have any special dishes that he liked better than others? GOLDSTEIN: Well, if he was like me, he was a steak lover. (chuckles) But, I' ; ve never seen him where he was in any way touchy about the food, or what it was going to consist of or anything of that kind. I think he was just a man of--of courage and of dedication and only had good will for people. CATES: Mr. Goldstein, I certainly don' ; t want to impose upon your time but at the same time I don' ; t want to look--overlook anything that you might be able to contribute to this taped interview. Can you think of anything else that might be of significance that should be mentioned for these historians and researchers about Senator Russell? GOLDSTEIN: Well, I would say as final, that he was a man that if he felt like the United States had made an error, he would let you know. He would not cover up for anybody. He wouldn' ; t cover up for his friend Lyndon Johnson and I know he wouldn' ; t cover up for anybody else, and he was always sincere and his--and his point of view and his statements and I--everybody commended him for it. CATES: At one time you were reaching for your billfold there as if you were going to pull out something to read, and I think I may have asked you a question at that time, did you have anything that you would-- GOLDSTEIN: No, I had some papers in here, but I sent him a copy. I wish that it was possible that I could get through my letter file and find some of the letters that I have received from him over the years. I had one that I showed you about his--one of the last letters that I received. He was a--I--I felt like that I would have gone into some of these files and maybe had other things to talk about, but I believe we' ; ve pretty well covered my association with him. CATES: Well, Mr. Goldstein, I want to thank you again for your time and your interest in this project and I want to assure you that if you think of anything in the future that you feel like ought to be added to this, I' ; ll be glad to come over and record it. GOLDSTEIN: Thank you very much-- CATES: Thank you, sir. GOLDSTEIN: --I enjoyed being with you. (Tape stops and starts again) CATES: This is Hugh Cates ; I' ; m back in my office. I do want to record one thing in connection with my interview with Abe Goldstein. He was kind enough to give to me and I in turn will give to Dr. Fred Davison a letter, which is dated January 13, 1971. It' ; s from Richard Russell. The letter says, Dear Abe, Thank you so much for the handsome tie. You may be sure that I shall wear it with a great deal of pleasure and pride, and I' ; m grateful to be one of those in your thoughts. I hope that you and yours had a good holiday season and that 1971 will be a banner year for you. With personal regards, I am, Sincerely, Richard B. Russell The thing that makes this letter of a large significance is the fact that it is probably one of the last letters or any correspondence or paper that Richard Russell signed. Over the years Mr. Goldstein said that he had received a number of letters and correspondence from the Senator and that he is certain without a doubt that the Senator personally signed this letter that he mailed to him just eight days before he passed away. Another letter, which Mr. Goldstein was kind enough to give to me and I in turn will give to the University, is one dated December 22, 1970, and it too was signed by hand--by Richard Russell. I quote " ; Let me thank you for your thoughtful message. I am undergoing treatment for my respiratory problem and believe I am making some progress. I am grateful indeed for your kind concern. BEGIN CASSETTE #151, SIDE 3 For the holiday season, I am, sincerely, Richard B. Russell." ; Another letter which Mr. Goldstein wants the University to have is one dated September 22, 1970, from Richard Russell and I quote: " ; Permit me to acknowledge and thank you for your letter which I have read with interest. The recent developments in the Middle East concern me greatly and I, of course, welcome your views and comments. Although as you know I have no direct control over the conduct of our foreign policy, I assure you this situation is receiving my close attention and I am contributing in every way open to me to a relaxation of tension in this troubled area of the world. You will be interested to know that I attended a most informative meeting Friday with Prime Minister Meir and Ambassador Rabin. I particularly enjoyed talking with Mrs. Meir ; she is a very impressive leader. With best wishes and personal regards, I am, sincerely, Richard B. Russell." ; Unquote. 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 RBRL216RBROH-109.xml RBRL216RBROH-109.xml http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL216RBROH/findingaid
Location
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Atlanta, Georgia
Duration
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65 minutes
Repository
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Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Abe Goldstein, February 17, 1971
Identifier
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RBRL216RBROH-109
Creator
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Abe Goldstein
Hugh Cates
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http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Format
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audio
oral histories
Type
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sound
Subject
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Foreign relations
Civil rights
Arab-Israeli conflict
United States--Civil rights
Date
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1971-02-17
Coverage
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United States
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
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First Person Project
Subject
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Georgia--History, Local
Georgia--Communities
Description
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The First Person Project was launched by the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies in 2012 to record and preserve stories of life in post-twentieth century Georgia. Modeled roughly on StoryCorps, the First Person Project is smaller in scale but similar in concept--an oral history program designed to capture the stories of everyday Georgians. Interviewees are self-selecting. Pairs of friends or loved ones register to participate in the First Person Project on a designated day, and the conversation (up to forty minutes) is facilitated and recorded by Russell archivists. <br /><br />The First Person Project collects personal narratives and oral histories documenting life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Interviews are usually between two friends or family members and typically focus on personal stories such as relationships and family histories. Interviews also touch on larger historical and cultural themes such as racial identity, religion, environmental history, gay rights, the death penalty, and life in Athens and in Georgia.<br /><br />The First Person is divided into five series. <br /><a href="https://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=58&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=I.+Georgia+Narratives">I. Georgia Narratives</a><br /><a href="https://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=58&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=II.+Americus,+Georgia">II. Americus, Georgia </a><br />
<div style="margin-left:2em;">Americus, Georgia, interviews were recorded in Americus, Ga., at the Lee Council House in December 2013. Interviews were made possible through a partnership between the Russell Library, the UGA Archway Partnership, and the Americus Downtown Development Authority.</div>
<a href="https://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=58&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=III.+Hawkinsville,+Georgia">III. Hawkinsville, Georgia</a><br />
<div style="margin-left:2em;">Hawkinsville, Georgia, interviews were recorded in Hawkinsville, Ga., at the Hawkinsville Dispatch & News building in February 2014. Interviews were made possible through a partnership between the Russell Library and the UGA Archway Partnership.</div>
<a href="https://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=58&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=IV.+Plains,+Georgia">IV. Plains, Georgia</a><br />
<div style="margin-left:2em;">Plains, Georgia, interviews were recorded in Plains, Ga., at the Plains Historic Inn in February 2014. Interviews were made possible through a partnership between the Russell Library, the UGA Archway Partnership, and the Americus Downtown Development Authority.</div>
<a href="https://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=58&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=V.+Beech+Haven,+Athens,+Georgia">V. Beech Haven, Athens, Georgia</a><br />
<div style="margin-left:2em;">Beech Haven, Athens, Georgia, interviews were recorded in Athens, Ga., through a partnership between the Russell Library and Dr. Cari Goetcheus, College of Environment and Design, UGA.
<div></div>
</div>
<br /><br /><a href="https://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=12&type=&tags=OHMS&featured=&exhibit=&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 B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
Publisher
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Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
Date
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2012-2018
Rights
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http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Format
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Oral histories
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RBRL324FPP
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Georgia
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
OHMS Object
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https://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL324FPP-0042/ohms
OHMS Object Text
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4 2014-21 Interview with Jimmy Carter, February 21, 2014 RBRL324FPP_0042 RBRL324FPP First Person Project Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Jimmy Carter Sybil Carter video 0 Introduction I'm Sybil Carter and today I'm talking with President Jimmy Carter. Sybil Carter introduces Jimmy Carter. Plains Historic Inn 32 History of Plains, GA I just have a few questions I'd like to ask and hope that, um, we can get some good answers that are going to be interesting, so dig deep and think hard about some of these questions, okay? Carter discusses the renovation of the Plains Historic Inn & ; Antique Mall and other historic buildings in his hometown of Plains, Georgia. He talks about the consolidation of several communities into the town of Plains in the 1880s. 1800s ; 1900s ; Antiques ; Better Hometown Association ; Billy Carter Service Station ; Cotton ; Fertilizer ; Peanuts ; Plains Depot ; Plains Historic Inn ; Presidential campaign ; Undertaker 310 Childhood on the farm Let's look at, uh, you as a young man or a young boy. What did you do for fun growing up on the farm? Carter describes his early life on his family's farm outside of Plains. He discusses growing up during the Depression and his mother's efforts to help itinerant workers. African American ; Agriculture ; Archery, Georgia ; Crops ; Fishing ; Great Depression ; Hobos ; Hunting ; Race ; Religion ; Rural ; Seaboard Airline Railroad ; Sports ; U.S. 280 658 Memories of mother and father Speaking of your mama, can you tell me what you admired most about Miss Lillian? And then your dad. Carter talks about his mother's work as a registered nurse. He describes his parents' views on race. He discusses his relationship with his father. African American ; Archery, Georgia ; Hunting ; James Carter Sr. ; Lillian Carter ; Nursing ; Poverty ; Religion ; Rural healthcare ; Segregationist ; Tennis ; Wise Sanitarium 898 Relationships with siblings Speaking of, uh, your sisters and your brother--was there ever a sense of competitiveness amongst you growing up? Carter comments on his relationship with his siblings, particularly his sister, Gloria. He describes his family as close-knit. Billy Carter ; Competition ; Gloria Carter ; Ruth Carter 1024 Carter's family today Speaking of children, I know you have a lot of grandchildren. What's your, what's your favorite way to spend time with them? Carter discusses his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. He talks about taking vacations with his entire family after Christmas every year. Atlanta, Georgia ; Family ; Farm life ; Plains, Georgia ; Rosalynn Carter 1183 Relationship with Rosalynn Now, this is a question about you and Rosalynn. Carter talks about his life with his wife, Rosalynn. Bible ; Hobbies ; Marriage ; Rosalynn Carter ; Sharing Good Times 1301 Advice for aspiring politicians Turning to, um, your years as president, what advice would you give young people today, uh, that would aspire to be president? Carter explains the importance of being involved in various communities and organizations for anyone interested in public office. Boy Scouts ; Lyons Club ; Politics ; Public office 1414 Relationship with Billy I, I can't leave here today without asking you to give me your fondest memory of, of my favorite Carter, Billy. Carter describes his personal and work relationship with his younger brother, Billy. Betting ; Billy Carter ; Brother ; Carter's Warehouse ; Competition ; Farm ; Navy ; Softball ; U.S. Marine Corps 1599 Habitat for Humanity I know that, that you have worked with Habitat for Humanity for 30 years now. Carter talks about Habitat for Humanity and a particular build for a family in the Philippines. Philippines ; Presidents ; Volunteers 1724 Inauguration and Egypt-Israel Treaty Can you tell me what you were thinking when you walked down Pennsylvania Avenue the day of the inauguration? Carter describes his memories from his Inauguration Day. He explains that his success in negotiating the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel was one of his biggest achievements while in office. 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty ; Assassinations ; Billy Carter ; Camp David Accords ; Georgia Tech ; Jody Powell ; Lillian Carter ; Limousine ; Vietnam War 1937 Plains as historic site This has been a good visit today. I've enjoyed it so much. Can--you think of anything else that you would like to add? Carter talks about the historic preservation of Plains and his childhood home and encourages tourists to visit. Interview concludes. Archery, Georgia ; Hospitality ; National Historic Site ; National Park Service Oral History video 0 RBRL324FPP_0042.xml RBRL324FPP_0042.xml http://russelldoc.galib.uga.edu/russell/view?docId=ead/RBRL324FPP-ead.xml
Location
The location of the interview
Plains, Georgia
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
34 minutes
Repository
Name of repository the interview is from
Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
Subcollection/Series
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IV. Plains, Georgia
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
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Interview with Jimmy Carter, February 21, 2014
Identifier
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RBRL324FPP-0042
Creator
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Jimmy Carter
Sybil Carter
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2014-02-21
Format
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video
oral histories
Rights
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http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Subject
The topic of the resource
United States--Officials and employees
Nonprofit organizations
Arab-Israeli conflict
Politics and Public Policy
Depressions--1929
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Georgia
United States
Description
An account of the resource
Former President of the United States Jimmy Carter was born in Plains, Georgia. In this interview, Carter talks about historic preservation in Plains, his childhood during the Great Depression, his grandchildren and family events, and reflections on his presidency. <br /><br /><br />This interview is part of the <a href="https://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=58&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=IV.+Plains,+Georgia">Plains, Georgia</a> series.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
moving image
OHMS