The Best and the Brightest (63 page)

He was a modest man: a symbol, in personal style, with the control and the sense of the adversity of life, the discipline needed to meet that adversity, of a passing era. You played by the rules of the game and the rules were very strict, you did not indulge the whim of your own personality, you served at the whim and will of those above you. Dean Rusk did not, so to speak, do his thing. He was the product of an era, and a particularly poor area and harsh culture where exactly the opposite behavior was respected and cherished: the compromising and sacrificing of your own will and desire and prejudices for the good of others, the good of a larger force. Sacrifice was important, and the very act of sacrifice was its own reward. All this was a part of him; he was, the men around him thought, a true Calvinist. Indeed, years later when Senator Eugene McCarthy wondered if Rusk’s views on China were real, a friend assured him that they were, that Rusk was very much in the tradition of Dulles, a Calvin come to set policy, but McCarthy, who loved to mix theology and politics, shook his head and said no, not Calvin; Calvin had only written down his philosophy, he had not inflicted it on others. Rusk, McCarthy said, was Cromwell to Dulles’ Calvin. He was Rusk, the poor Georgia boy to whom the Good Lord had given a good mind and a strong body and a great capacity for work, and it was his obligation to use those qualities. This was something that Lyndon Johnson, who had that same sense and came from similar origins, understood completely. Rusk was, in his way, something of a hired hand to these great institutions. His upbringing had taught him to serve, not to question (which immediately set him apart from many of the Kennedy people who had been propelled by their propensity to question everything around them). Once, in an interview in Georgia, Rusk talked of the traits instilled in him by a Calvinist father. He defined it as a “sense of the importance of right and wrong which was something that was before us all the time. I think there was a sense of propriety, a sense of constitutional order, a sense of each playing his part in the general scheme of things, with a good deal of faith and confidence, with a passionate interest in education . . .” He did not question these institutions; they had become what they were not by happenstance but because wise men who had thought a long time had deliberately fashioned them that way; nor did he severely question their current attitudes, which again had not arisen by happenstance; indeed he found American and Western institutions admirable in contrast to the disorder which existed in the rest of the world.

He was part of that generation which felt gratitude for what was offered him. It was in that sense generational; his attitudes were close to those of a previous generation, while in the Dean Rusk family the values would change, would be less conservative: a son would work for the Urban League and would be part of the antiWhitney Young movement because Young was too moderate; a daughter would marry a Negro. In this family, as in many others, children were more confident, more willing to challenge the existing order. “Rusk,” said someone at the White House who knew him well and liked and respected him, “was different from the rest of us. He was poor and we had not been, but he really was more of my father’s generation. You don’t show feelings, you don’t complain, you work very hard and you get ahead, and there was a sense that his mind was not his own property, that he was not allowed to let it take him where it wanted to go; there were instead limits to what you could think. Strict confines.”

The land was hard and unfertile and taught its own lessons, stern lessons. The virtues were the old ones and the sins were the old ones, and the Bible still lived. No one ever expected life to be easy, and forgiveness was not the dominating trait. It was not a land which produced indulgence of any sort, and people who grew up there did not talk about life styles. They talked about God, about serving, about doing what He wanted. It was much admired to make use of what God had given you and to obey authority. If you didn’t, dark prophecies were offered and you were considered, at the least, wayward. One kept emotions inside. Rusk himself on the subject: “We were rather a quiet family about expressing our emotions under any circumstances. I think this was part of the reticence. Perhaps it goes with the Calvinism. Perhaps it comes from the Scotch-Irish. Perhaps it comes from the tough battle with the soil in the family that has to wrest a living out of not too productive soil in Cherokee County.” Rusk remembered going to the funeral of his grandmother as a little boy. Funerals for some families in those days were noisy affairs, the deceased mourned loudly, the love and loss measured by the amount of weeping and moaning. The Rusk family was different; it asked the mourners not to cry, and the neighbors, puzzled, asked why and a member of the Rusk family answered, “We feel it inside.” We feel it inside. Some fifty years later Dean Rusk would, perhaps not surprisingly, cable his ambassadors to stop using the word
feel
in their cables; he was not interested in what they felt. When he was assaulted by the Kennedy people, by the liberals, by the intelligentsia, pilloried, he always turned the other cheek. We feel it inside. Endure pain, endure insult, it is right to do so: if you have been faithful to your beliefs and your heritage, then all will right itself. Rusk and Dulles, both moralists; Dulles spouting his moralism publicly, almost flagrantly, preaching it from his international rostrum; Rusk feeling it perhaps even more deeply, keeping it inside.

His father was a preacher in a culture which produced and respected preachers, as New York City would later produce and respect psychiatrists. Stern upbringing, hard work and reverence. Other children coming to the Rusk house on Sunday mornings were allowed to look at the funny papers, but not the Rusk children, they were denied this touch of levity. The Lord’s will. Later the parents softened a bit and allowed the children to read them once in a while. Though Robert Hugh Rusk was a poor white, he was not trash; though they were of modest means, there was a sense of tradition in their house and a belief in what education could do, a passion, Dean would call it. Farther west, in Texas, in almost similar circumstances a young Lyndon Johnson would grow up with the same almost mystical belief in education and what it could do.

One of twelve children, Robert Rusk had put himself through Davidson, one of the South’s best schools; from there he went on to Louisville Seminary, where he became an ordained minister. Eventually he had to leave the ministry because of a throat ailment; thus perhaps the house became even more Calvinist than a preacher’s house, as a kind of atonement for the failure of the vocal cords. His wife, Frances Elizabeth Clotfelter, was “the best-looking girl in Rockdale County, I believe,” Rusk would say of her, the serious ambitious young preacher getting the prettiest girl. “She was a very hard-working woman, as any wife of a family in poor circumstances in those days, or modest circumstances, would be. She made most of our clothes. We did our own washing of course. I have on my front porch now the black wash pot under which I had to build hundreds of fires to fire up the family wash. She herself had gone to normal school and had done some teaching and strongly reinforced my father’s interest in books and learning. And also a devout worshiper at the Presbyterian church.” All three sons would do well. One rose high in government, very high indeed; Roger became a professor of physics at the University of Tennessee; and the oldest, Parks, who had less schooling because he had to do more physical work, became a successful journalist. In 1912, when Dean was three years old, heavy floods cost the Rusks their crops, and they moved to Atlanta, where the children were raised. “The land didn’t want us,” said Roger.

Young Dean was very church-oriented. A sister would remember him walking around the house reading the Bible aloud. The family committed the Bible to memory, and one of the best ways to learn was to read it aloud. He was active in Christian Endeavour, a sort of after-hours group of young people who put extra time and effort into the study of the Christian life. He attended church twice a week regularly, and at least until he was midway through high school he intended to become a minister, but about that time broader horizons began to open up.

It was a good boyhood, so simple and basic that Rusk believed (inaccurately) for much of his life that he was delivered by a veterinarian. There were always difficulties and hardships, but they were the kind that could be dealt with, so that there would develop in the grown man a belief that any obstacle could be overcome, that hard work made no challenge insurmountable. He got his first schooling in a simple Atlanta schoolhouse, half of which was uncovered, with canvas screens pulled over part of the building when it rained. So he went to school in the open air, carrying woolen sacks in the winter, bringing hot bricks to school in the morning and putting them in the bottom of the sack to keep it warm. In the sixth grade young Dean was told by his teacher on the first day of school that he must wear shoes the next day, they were trying to stop hookworm. Dean went home with the message to his mother. Since shoes were scarce in the Rusk family, Mrs. Rusk wrote a note saying that the teacher ought to look after her end of the job, which was educating, and Mrs. Rusk would look after her end, which was feeding and dressing the children; Dean returned the next day barefoot, and proud of it.

He would regard his own rise as a personification of the American possibilities, and he would see in the American-Rusk story a moral for other people. Cherokee County, he would later point out, was an underdeveloped area, with typhoid and other problems, but it had all changed and become modernized. “I’ve been able to see in my lifetime how that boyhood environment has been revolutionized with education, with technology, with county agents, and with electricity—all that helping to take the load off the backs of the people who live there. Now I can see that this can happen in one lifetime, I disregard those who say that underdeveloped countries still need two or three hundred years to develop because I know it isn’t true. Because I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

Dean was very good in school, though once he lost in a spelling bee because when he came to the word “girl,” he spelled it “gal.” Could there have been a Secretary of State with origins, with traditions more perfectly attuned to Lyndon B. Johnson? It was not surprising that their relationship was different from almost any other in that period of 1964. They felt so comfortable in each other’s company that if they were on a plane, they would fall into conversation that was almost giddy, like two schoolboys back together after a summer vacation. And was it not true, thought the men around Rusk, that his accent, which under Kennedy had been somewhat Scarsdale, became more Georgia again? Once Lyndon and Dean were walking around the Ranch, followed by a group of high Washington aides, Johnson taking great pride in showing all the artifacts. One in particular delighted him, an antique piece which he pointed out to the somewhat bewildered Easterners. “You and I know what this is, don’t we, Dean?” There was a smile of acknowledgment from Dean of a memory which took him back many years. It was an old indoor potty.

As a young boy he had dreams that took him beyond Cherokee County; even then he was fascinated by the military. During World War I Dean, not yet ten years old, and Roger would cut out pictures of soldiers from newspapers and paste them on cardboard. Thousands of them, Roger would recall. Roger and Dean would dig thirty-foot trenches and follow all the battle plans. “There wasn’t a rich kid in town who had as many soldiers as we did,” said Roger Rusk, adding, “What people don’t understand about Dean is how deep are his military inclinations. It’s part of our Anglo-Saxon heritage. The South always had a military disposition.” That tradition is very real. The South is filled with minor and major military academies, and produces an abnormally high percentage of career officers and Medal of Honor winners. This was also part of Rusk’s life (both his grandfathers had fought in the Civil War, though on the Confederate side, and later when he had to fill in his security forms and was asked to list any relatives who had tried to overthrow the government of the United States, he would put down both their names).

He was a rare person in that era, a young man who went through high school and yet graduated from college with
eight
years of ROTC training, for besides his religious instruction he had come across something else which fascinated him, military training. He spent four years at Atlanta Boys High in ROTC, rising to command all ROTC units in Atlanta, student colonel. “Well, of course, in the South, most of us as we were growing up just took for granted that if there was to be trouble, if the nation was at war, that we would be in it. The tradition of the Civil War was still with us very strongly . . . We assumed there was a military duty to perform . . . We took that as a perfectly natural part of being an American.” The blending of the religion and the sense of military duty, a belief in it as the most natural kind of thing, was not by any means a contradiction. The values of the region were still very close to the frontier, a hard land, with many enemies, a code which taught that if evil stalked, you did not turn the other cheek; if you were soft or tolerant of evil, it would devour you.

Rusk had been encouraged to seek a Rhodes scholarship by a high school teacher who had been to Oxford. Here was this promising young man of truly uncommon industry and discipline, the brightest boy in the school, who spoke well on his feet—why shouldn’t he do well before the Rhodes interviewing board? And it was typical of Rusk, serious and single-minded, that in high school he had already set out a goal like this. He worked for two years as a clerk in a law office to earn the money to go to Davidson, where he once again excelled in his studies, his ROTC and his YMCA work, and where he compiled a sufficiently good record to become a likely candidate for a Rhodes. He was Phi Beta Kappa and captain of the ROTC, and he played on the basketball and tennis teams, which was all very good for the Rhodes, Cecil Rhodes having preferred to advance sound minds in sound Caucasian bodies. The Rhodes committees are local blue-chip Establishment groups with a strong scent for the future good citizen. Rhodes scholars as a group tend to be intelligent but more respectable than restless, more builders than critics, and the personal interview is highly important. Those who show indications of doing good are lauded, and such qualities are respected and encouraged, but there is doubt about someone very young who is deeply alienated.