The Best and the Brightest (64 page)

Rusk acquitted himself predictably well. He was questioned about what seemed like a contradiction in his record, his interest in international affairs and the eight years of ROTC, and answered (visions of the Fulbright committee to come) that the American eagle on the Great Seal has arrows in one claw and the olive branch in the other, and the two have to go together. He won the scholarship, and it would be the crucial link, the propellant for him. In a nation so large and so diverse there are few ways of quantifying intelligence or success or ability, so those few that exist are immediately magnified, titles become particularly important; all Rhodes scholars become brilliant, as all ex-Marines are tough. To make it in America, to rise, there has to be some sort of propellant; sheer talent helps, but except in very rare instances, talent is not enough. Money helps, family ties and connections help; for someone without these the way to the power elite can seem too far, too hopeless to challenge. The connection is often a Rhodes scholarship. It is a booster shot that young men are not unaware of, that will make the rest of their lives a good deal easier. Doors will open more readily, invitations will arrive, the phone will ring (thus one young applicant brought before the Rhodes committee was asked at the end of his interview what he would choose for the epitaph on his tombstone. He quickly answered, “Rhodes scholar,” and got his grant).

From then on Rusk would be someone of note; in any application the title would jump out,
Rhodes scholar.
As a staff officer during the war, what he said would have meaning, he was a Rhodes, therefore an intellectual, a soldier-intellectual. Later, to a President of the United States under criticism from the intellectual community for his policies in Vietnam, it would seem very comforting: My Secretary of State is a Rhodes scholar. His accomplishment would make that very genuine modesty and tolerance of others even more becoming: Dean is a Rhodes scholar but he puts on no airs. So the Rhodes, coupled with Rusk’s intelligence, his enormous industry and energy and ambition, would carry him far and open up the great Eastern centers of power for him. Dean Rusk, Rhodes scholar.

These years coincided with the Depression but that seemed to have little effect on Rusk. Other men coming out of the rural South of that period may have been affected by the poverty they saw around them, but Rusk was always interested in international affairs, not domestic ones. In his two years at Oxford, he was even by the standards of those days considered extremely hard-working and diligent; he won coveted awards in England and gained a respect, as many Americans did, for those special qualities of the British, understated humor (in rare moments when he is relaxed and feels himself among real friends, Rusk can be very funny indeed, but it is not a side of himself that he likes to show in public, as though somehow levity detracts from the office. It was only when he was among those who he knew already respected the office that he would let himself go). He also spent a semester in Germany and watched Hitler coming to power. The most lasting memory of those Oxford years was a belief that the best-educated and most elite young men of England with their Oxford Union had given Germany the wrong impression, signaling that England would not fight; it was, he would tell friends later, the worst possible indication, and England might have been better served if the signal had reflected something closer to the heart and determination of the average workingman. The lesson was that the upper class was a little spoiled and faddish, that intellectuals and elites were not entirely to be trusted, that there was often greater shrewdness and wisdom in the mainstream.

He came back to America in 1934 and took a job at Mills College in California teaching political science, wrote a little, and rose quickly, becoming dean at the age of thirty. In 1937 he married one of his students, Virginia Foisie. In 1940, with his ROTC commitments still alive, he was called to active duty as an Army captain in command of an infantry company. Shortly afterward, just before Pearl Harbor, he was put in charge of military intelligence for British Southeast Asia. Captain Rusk, Major Rusk, finally Colonel Rusk. These were good years. Playing on a great team, doing something that mattered and was of value, using all that training, effecting things; above all, being a part of something important. No one who ever knew Dean Rusk doubted that they were satisfying and exciting years. Some men had too much war, a bad war, had left too much of themselves behind and could only hope to shed the uniform the day it was over, if not sooner, but for Rusk it was a fulfilling time, with tasks he was well prepared for and found he did well. He was far from Cherokee County, and it was in a sense liberating; unlike so much of life, what you did had meaning. Studies by Lloyd Warner, the sociologist, showed that Americans had never had such a sense of purpose, usefulness, of being needed, as in the war, and Rusk was a good example.

He served first in Washington and then in the China-Burma-India theater, in the New Delhi section, where he became deputy chief of staff. He was an operations man as well, and his intelligence and extreme diligence put him a notch or two above the men around him. Two qualities emerged for the first time which were to propel him further upward. The first was that he was a very good diplomat, which was particularly important in the tense and often explosive atmosphere of Delhi, where the final days of an empire were flashing by, the final prejudices, the last kicking of the wog. True, the British were our allies and we needed them, but the Americans were idealistic, anti-imperialist, and despised British colonialism. They believed in the new order which they were helping to create, and hated the way the British treated the Indians. If most of the Americans there reacted to it, General Joe Stilwell, the classic American anti-imperialist, the man who was on the side of the little fellow, with his instinctive commitment to the poor and wretched, rebelled the most. He was, in the words of Harold Isaacs, “an impatient and puritanical soul, hating liars and grafters and men in pinstripe suits.” He naturally hated British colonialism, and he broke a lot of crockery and wounded some sensitive feelings at headquarters, he was not a headquarters man. But Rusk was. In the short-tempered world of New Delhi, where we both needed and hated the British, Rusk was the good guy, the man who handled the touchy tempers; he was smooth where Stilwell was abrasive. You talked with Rusk and you knew he was for the same things you were for. He hated the racism of the British, the arrogance of the colonialist, but in a divided atmosphere, he was someone everyone could talk to. He was the good soldier who was also a good diplomat, and these were not qualities which were lost upon that supreme soldier-diplomat George Catlett Marshall, public servant personified.

No one grasped like Marshall the vast complexities of the war, and the political problems as well; he was also aware of the coming of the United States as a superpower and of the future decline of the British, aware of the need to harness the British potential and yet to understand their limits without offending them. It was not by chance that he had reached down and chosen Dwight D. Eisenhower, that general who was the most subtle politician, as his Supreme Commander in Europe, a man brilliant at synthesizing the work of others, extracting their best qualities, and controlling his own anger (so good, in fact, at controlling his own rages when need be that years later, when Joe McCarthy slandered George Marshall and called him a traitor, Ike, fine diplomat, good pol, for the good of the party and the Republican crusade, swallowed his pride and loyalty and excised criticism of McCarthy and defense of Marshall from his speech). It was these same qualities which had caught Marshall’s eye about Rusk—intelligent without being egomaniacal, well educated, a good man.

There was one other quality which had begun to surface, Rusk’s writing ability. Is there such a word as “expositor” for a man who writes almost classic expository prose? If so, Rusk was a brilliant expositor; he had a genius for putting down brief, cogent and forceful prose on paper—a rare and much needed quality in government. There was no descriptive, flowery writing, but brief, incisive action cables for men who, already overburdened by words, had too little time. He had been virtually discovered as a writer through the cables he sent back from that theater, and after a while, in the nerve ends of the Pentagon, people began to talk about this young officer out there. General George (Abe) Lincoln, a West Point man who was also a Rhodes scholar and a key man in that special underground world of military intellectuals teaching at the Point, spotting talent, making sure that it was promoted into key slots, had been impressed by the Rusk cables and he asked a friend who this Rusk was, he seemed like a hell of a man. “You don’t know Rusk?” the other officer answered. “I thought you were at Oxford together. Why, Rusk is a Rhodes scholar.” Then Lincoln, who was a talent scout for Marshall, began to pay closer attention and Rusk became singled out. Lincoln soon decided that Rusk’s reports were the best there were, which was quite an accolade, since the competition was very stiff; Bedell Smith, after all, was writing for Ike from Europe.

Toward the end of the war Lincoln decided that they would need Rusk on some of the upcoming political problems, so he persuaded the Delhi headquarters to let Rusk come back to join a very special political-military group which was going to determine the political divisions of the postwar world working directly under Secretary of War Henry Stimson, with Lincoln as the connecting officer. Since the State Department had become moribund during the war, with all the talent having been siphoned off to the military, this was the creation of a new instant State Department, comprising talented young men who were having to make quick decisions on what the postwar map would be, which country should accept surrender, where various countries would be divided. It also had to prepare the Japanese peace terms (which meant getting the right terms, getting Chiang, MacArthur and the British aboard, and doing it quickly, because hundreds of thousands of lives might be lost). It was highly pressurized work, with lives in the balance, but also a sense that a mistake, the wrong line drawn, the wrong island given away, could come back to haunt you years later. The group was in effect the forerunner of the National Security Council, and the problems it faced were very tough: whether or not to let some Dutch marines back into Indonesia; where to divide Korea as the Russians came pouring through—it was Rusk who, checking with old maps, picked the 38th parallel. And deciding, as the war came to a close, to go along with the pressure from the British and French and let the British accept the Japanese surrender in Indochina, a particularly fateful decision as far as Vietnam was concerned.

John McCloy was the head of the group, which also included General Charles Bonesteel, a Rhodes scholar and one of the Pentagon’s intellectuals (who would, like Lincoln, become one of Rusk’s lasting friends—his old friends tended to be from the military); James Pierpont Morgan Hamilton; Andy Goodpaster, a bright up-and-coming officer who was also a Rhodes scholar (later the influence of Lincoln in all this would become so profound that his men would be known as the Lincoln Brigade).

In this high-powered group, Colonel Rusk dealt on an equal level with four-star generals and the great figures of World War II. It was in this period particularly that he caught Marshall’s eye. Rusk intended to stay in the Army; these had been happy years with the military. He liked the atmosphere in which he worked and he thought that there would be a need for men like him in the new Army. His future seemed secure, the first star was on its way, and with Rusk’s special credentials, the intellectual qualities which would now show, the second and third would not be far behind. Not being a West Point man, perhaps he would never be Chief of Staff, but he would certainly be a top staffman and it would be a good and useful career.

It was at this point that Marshall asked him to go to State. Marshall, who had been so brilliant at promoting the bright young men in the Army and speeding their careers in the military, now wanted to redress the balance and move talent back to State. He prevailed upon Rusk, and Rusk somewhat reluctantly agreed; he had worked with the State Department people doing some of the planning for the United Nations and now, with the war over, he went to work for State in the UN bureau, eventually becoming director of Special Political Affairs.

If Marshall wanted him to do something, Rusk did it. Marshall was his hero, the embodiment of all that was desirable, all that a man should be. Twenty years later Rusk would repeatedly quote Marshall—Marshall had said this, Marshall had done that. He would quote Marshall on the military approvingly (always give them half of what they’re asking and double their missions), and he followed Marshall’s mode of operation. Marshall the ex-general was staff-oriented; Rusk would be staff-oriented. Marshall the ex-general was always correct and went through proper channels; Rusk would go through channels and be appalled by anyone who did not. Marshall did not deign to answer criticism; Rusk, proud, would also not deign to answer criticism. As Marshall had admired the sense of service and the intellectual capacity of the best of the military, so would Rusk, and he would quote Marshall approvingly about the modern American army, and particularly those men who had come to the fore because of World War II, a generation which had come to manhood between two great wars, superior men, learned, wise. Having a lot of time on their hands during the war, they went to special schools, read a great deal, traveled a great deal, used that leisure time well, went beyond the parochial bounds of their jobs and their careers. They were superior men, superior to comparable men whom you found in peacetime jobs, who had less sense of service. Thus he shared Marshall’s admiration for the military, without wondering perhaps if it was equally applicable to another time.