The Best and the Brightest (62 page)

He was in awe of men like these and he judged them by their labels. Other men who had worked for him were just as able, but he knew them all, knew their faults and their weaknesses, and he had put his stamp on them. But these men were different. They were not Johnson men, he had not put his stamp on them, finally broken them, made them his, seen that they too, like everyone else, had their faults. That would be later, and only Rusk would be spared; McNamara would be someone who had “headed Ford for only one week.” Bundy was “just a smart kid. Period.” But now this remarkable team that Jack Kennedy had assembled was working for him, Lyndon Johnson, whom in the old days they would never have even voted for, let alone worked for. Lyndon Johnson, who knew all the faults of some of the great men on the Hill, was markedly uncritical, and accepted judgments from them which he might have questioned from his own men. Years later George Ball, who, having fought with Johnson on the war and lost, retained a considerable affection for him, would say of that period and Johnson’s relationship with the Kennedy luminaries that Johnson did not suffer from a poor education, he suffered from a belief that he had had a poor education.

In 1964 the leadership, confident of itself and its professionalism, held back on making decisions on Vietnam and allowed the bureaucracy to plan for war. There were signs of this in early 1964; indeed, if you put the signs together in retrospect, they were largely negative. However, that all seemed more obvious later; they were well concealed at the time. At the time, the political men around the President were busy planning for his election campaign, and for the Great Society to come, and they were sure that Vietnam was somehow a stumbling block over which they would not stumble, that Johnson, in the words of the speeches being written, wanted no wider war, that he would, as he himself thought, reason with the other side. Yet gradually, even in early 1964, the play was being held closer and closer, and there were fewer and fewer players and decision makers; others, doubters, were slowly being cut out of the play. Those who were running it were running it on a straight nuts-and-bolts basis, and the various forecasts of the intelligence agencies were being brushed aside. These estimates were still very dark, but the attitudes were still very programmatic.

McNamara was learning the hard way about Vietnam; when he went there in December 1963 he had begun to know what to look for in the field. He still did not know how truly resilient the other side was or how weak the fabric of the South was (in discovering that the other side was stronger, he did not realize that the balance was virtually irreversible; he believed that more effort, the right programs, more matériel might turn the tide). He had also learned how to penetrate Harkins’ briefings and he had become angry over what Harkins had told him in the past, and it showed this time. There was one session when he was questioning a junior officer and he sensed that the junior officer was about to be candid, except that Harkins and General Stilwell kept interrupting, trying to intercede and stop the young officer from answering. Suddenly McNamara turned to them, the anger open and visible, his face red—“I asked that Major the question and I want an answer.” It was a very tense and bitter scene. On his return to Washington he got together with McCone, who was also bothered by the reporting from Saigon, feeling that too much had been filtered out in the previous years, and they decided to do a joint CIA-Defense intelligence survey of the situation, which they felt was very bad; at least they ought to serve the President with as honest an evaluation as possible. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff blocked it, they wanted to control their flow of information; reporting and re-evaluation of reporting was a very sensitive subject. The proposed survey might reflect unfavorably on some very important generals, and it might, by its forecasts for the future, take some of the play away from the military (instead of just reporting how bad the situation was, it might predict the likelihood of the other side to reinforce). And it might—which it did—give a far more pessimistic appraisal of the status of the war than MACV was providing.

So the JCS held off, but the CIA decided to go ahead with the study anyway, and sent a team of about twelve men, all experts, all with about five years’ experience in the country. They were billed officially as “joint team,” though the JCS sent back channel messages to MACV saying not to believe it. Once again the military was able to hold on to its version of reality, this time against the best efforts of the Secretary of Defense; the report of the special team was very pessimistic, but it had no effect on the overall evaluation.

Above all, there was no real investigation of what kind of a deal might be worked out with Hanoi and the Vietcong, what neutralization might mean. So a year for political exploration was lost, and the reason for this was to be found in the character and outlook of the Secretary of State of the United States, a man who believed in force, who believed in the commitment, who believed that the proper role for the State Department would come after the military had turned the war around and State was charged with negotiating a sound peace, and who believed that the Secretary should defer to the President, should not be a strong figure in his own right. Where a Harriman or a Ball might have seized the initiative, might have begun his own explorations for peace, might have decided that politically Vietnam was hopeless, and therefore militarily as well, Rusk was content to wait, to let events come to him. He was convinced that the military estimates were accurate, that the generals could achieve what they said they could. He was a forceful, determined, hard-working, intelligent man who was in charge of the political aspects of American policy, and he would have made a very great Secretary of Defense, it was his natural constituency. He did not push negotiations in that period because he did not believe in them, and he feared that the very idea of negotiations would make the weak fabric of Saigon even weaker.

Dean Rusk hated to challenge the military on its needs and its requests because he feared a State-Defense split such as had existed between Dean Acheson and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, and he would do almost anything to avoid it. In particular, he did not like to be out front on a policy, and he was content to let McNamara surge into the vacuum of leadership, poach on his terrain. All of this was the bane of his subordinates at State, who again and again, when they heard of some projected Defense policy for Vietnam, would go to Rusk and protest it, trying to get him to intervene, to limit it all. Very rarely would they succeed even to the extent of getting Rusk to call McNamara and bring the matter up, and when he did even this, he was usually brushed aside by an assertive and confident McNamara. Thus in 1965 when State heard that the military was about to use massive B-52 bombing raids on Vietnam, subordinates went to Rusk and pleaded with him to block the bombing; its effect in Vietnam was dubious and its effect throughout the rest of the world was likely to be disastrous. They had argued forcefully with him and finally Rusk had picked up the phone and called McNamara.

They listened as Rusk relayed their doubts: “Bob, some of the boys here are uneasy about it.” Was it really necessary, he asked, he hated to bother McNamara on a question like this . . . Then Rusk was silent and they could almost visualize McNamara at the other end crisply reassuring Rusk. And then McNamara was finished and Rusk was talking again: “Okay, Bob, in for a dime, in for a dollar.” And he hung up.

Dean Rusk was a man without a shadow. He left no papers behind, few memories, few impressions. Everyone spoke well of him and no one knew him, he was the hidden man; he concealed, above all, himself and his feelings. All sorts of people thought they were good friends of his. They had known him for a long time—Rhodes scholars, old and intimate friends, called by someone wanting to find out about Rusk, said they would be glad, eager to talk, yes, Dean was a very old friend, and then it would always end the same way, the preliminary insights into Dean, that he was a good fellow, responsible, hard-working, intelligent, serious—that and little more. Perhaps a sense finally that he had never been young. And then the faltering admission that on reflection they knew very little about him.

He loved being Secretary of State, the title and the trappings and what it meant. He was aware, to the day, of how long he had held office, and he would say things like “I am now the second oldest foreign minister in the world” . . . “Today I am the second most senior member of NATO.” One record that he wanted and never achieved was that of Cordell Hull for American longevity; Rusk held the office for the second longest period in history. Not bad. A small corner of the history books. Many of his critics, the ones in the Kennedy Administration, talked about his imminent departure and denigrated him, but they left after their two years, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes not so voluntarily, to write their books, while Rusk remained. Always the professional. It was an important part of him, that foreign affairs was a profession and he was a professional, a serious man doing serious things. He had studied at it all those years, apprenticed at it under the great men, Marshall, Acheson, Lovett, worked his way up in State, where his rise was nothing less than meteoric (his detractors forgot that at a time right after World War II when the competition at State was ferocious, Rusk rose more quickly than anyone else in the Department). Then he was briefly out of government, went into the shadow-cabinet world of the foundations, and then back to Washington, back to the beloved profession, a chance to hold the torch passed not so much by Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy as by Marshall, Acheson and Lovett, hold it and pass it on to someone else, eight years later, with the world in the same condition, probably not any better, but hopefully no worse, that was all he asked, he would say. No better, no worse.

He was a modest man in an Administration not known for its modesty, self-effacing in an Administration not known for self-effacement. He hated the amateurs, the meddlers, the intellectuals around him, playing with power, testing their theories on the world. Quick, glib men dancing around Georgetown cocktail parties, Schlesingers, Galbraiths, Goodwins, Kaysens, people of that ilk. Making their direct phone calls to the President, breaking regular channels with their phone calls and shortcuts.

He worried about the liberals, he was one himself, although not too much of one: did they really understand the Communists, weren’t they too likely to come to Washington just long enough to meddle in foreign affairs and fall victim to their own good intentions? Foreign affairs was something special, it was filled with pitfalls for well-meaning idealists. A brief scene: 1962. The Soviets had apparently resumed testing. Kennedy was trying to decide whether to test again. Adlai Stevenson asked what would happen if the United States did not test. Jerome Wiesner answered that American weapons were better, so that if there was a delay in the resumption of testing, what he called a benefit of the doubt delay, it would not make much difference. Then Stevenson (would-be Secretary of State, the man for whom in 1960 Rusk had served as the Scarsdale chairman of “Citizens for Stevenson,” Rusk’s highest political office) said that perhaps the United States ought to take a small risk in the strategic balance on a question like this, that it ought to try for moral leadership. Rusk interjected at this point: “I wouldn’t make the smallest concession for moral leadership. It’s much overrated.” A young White House aide remembered the conversation, which shocked him, and from then on always thought of Rusk in that context; he thought that when Rusk died that should be inscribed on his tombstone, his epitaph.

A proud man. A poor man. Proud of his poverty in a way, sensitive about it, but that sensitivity showed in his pride (who else in that chic egalitarian Kennedy period, when they were pushing so hard to improve public education and get an education bill passed, sent his children to public schools?). He was almost defiantly proud of his lack of wealth, mentioning it often to aides in the Department, that this job had cost him money. When he was first offered State in 1960, he told Harriman that he did not think he could accept it because the job meant a considerable financial sacrifice. Harriman told him not to worry, there would be plenty of job opportunities, lucrative offers after he finished, but Harriman was wrong. Neither could have foreseen Vietnam and what it would do to Rusk, making him virtually unemployable, making him, because of his decision to ride it through, the prime target for its critics, or the second prime target after Johnson. He would be vilified, but he was proud and refused to answer the attacks, the criticism, he was above it. Friends pleaded with him to answer some of the criticism, to fight back, but he deemed it improper, not so much for himself personally, but for the office.

A controlled man. Always patient. An extremely good diplomat in at least the limited sense of the word, that is, being diplomatic with other human beings. He would go up to the United Nations every year to meet the vast hordes of foreign ministers come to the opening session, meeting with each one, handling them well, believing that his aides, who thought that this particularly thankless task should go to an underling, were wrong (just as he thought they were wrong in 1962 when he refused to forgo presiding at one of the two huge diplomatic dinners given by the Secretary of State each year to go to Nassau, where Kennedy was meeting with Harold Macmillan to discuss U.S. and European nuclear defense systems. He sent George Ball in his place, instead of going to Nassau himself and letting Ball handle the dinner, which gave McNamara a chance to play too large—and clumsy—a role at Nassau. Those who knew the role of the Secretary believed, first, that it was all too typical of his deference to Defense, and second, that Rusk, more cautious, more thoughtful and more reflective than McNamara, might have stopped the decisions of Nassau, decisions which encouraged De Gaulle to go it alone in Europe and keep England out of the Common Market). When he met all the foreign ministers, he gave each equal time, showing the physical stamina of an old workhorse, great endurance, and always that control. Never, if possible, public or private nakedness of man or spirit or ideas, even at what many thought his greatest triumph, an appearance before a House committee considering civil rights legislation when he startled everyone by giving very strong testimony (“If I were a Negro I think I might rise up”)—one of his finest moments, the committee applauding, the press applauding, his aides proud, delighted. When he left the committee room he turned to a friend and said, “You don’t think I went too far, do you?” Control was important, it was part of your discipline, of your attitude; it went with the position. If you lacked it, how could the men below you have it? If an aide walked in on Rusk while he was reading a piece of paper, the Secretary would continue to read it, even as the aide was on top of him. It was a highly disconcerting habit, and Rusk would explain simply that years before, he had vowed that when he picked up a piece of paper to read, he would finish it. Nothing swayed him. Sometimes that conscious quality of his control struck some of the men around him as in part at least a protection against insecurity; by holding strictly to the form he was protecting himself, not letting himself go.