The Eagle Has Two Claws

(See Cover)

The afternoon Congressional from Washington bumped to a halt in a gloomy cavern beneath Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station one evening last week. Amid the crowd that surged out onto the platform, indistinguishable from his fellow passengers except for an extra bit of height (6 ft. 1 in.) and an extra gleam in his eye, walked a middle-aged man with a battered suitcase in his hand and his coat collar turned up against the wintry drafts. As he made his way through the station to the snow-blanketed street to hail himself a taxi, nobody recognized him as one of the nation's most important citizens, a man who on Jan. 20 would be assuming a public office with such awesome responsibilities that the virtues or shortcomings of its incumbent could affect the destinies of the world. He was Dean Rusk, 51, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and he was on his way home from Palm Beach, Fla., where, on a sunlit porch two days before, President-elect John F. Kennedy had announced his appointment as the next Secretary of State.

At home and abroad, the appointment of Plain Citizen Dean Rusk to the new Administration's most important Cabinet post set off a puzzled reaching for reference books to find out who Dean Rusk is. To the intimate few who had seen Dean Rusk in action at the War Department or State Department during a decade of solid Government service, the news brought a fraternal glow of delight. "A terrific appointment," said one State Department official. "When I heard about it, I was really overjoyed." The late John Foster Dulles was a longtime Rusk admirer. So was Rusk's old boss at State, Secretary Dean Acheson; an aide reported that Acheson "couldn't be happier" about Kennedy's decision. Said Kennedy, explaining why he picked Rusk: ''He seemed to me to be the best man available."

Respect for Complexity. In part, the State Department's enthusiasm for its new boss-to-be stems from its awareness of the professional seasoning he accumulated in the Truman years. "He'll be able to take up his work the first day here, just as if he were walking from one office into another." predicts an old State Department colleague of Rusk's. But the enthusiasm also reflects a respect for the qualities of mind and character that Dean Rusk showed at State.

His former associates in government service remember Rusk as a quietly dedicated man, a beaver who never tried to promote himself, who combined easygoing geniality with intellectual toughness. His ability to persuade by marshaling facts and arguments in logical array also impressed. "I don't recall that he ever had to say no to anybody," says one former colleague, "because they usually came around to his point of view."

Unlike many logical-minded men, who can pierce to the point but often miss the surrounding nuances, Dean Rusk has an eye for the complexity of things, rejects the notion that diplomacy is simple applied common sense. "A respect for complexity is the beginning of wisdom," he says. He puts little faith in trying to cope with the complexities of foreign relations with either dramatic new policies or coups of face-to-face negotiation. A policy, he says, is "a galaxy of utterly complicated factors," not something that suddenly pops out of somebody's head. As for face-to-face encounters between world statesmen: "Summit diplomacy is to be approached with the wariness with which a prudent physician prescribes a habit-forming drug." He thinks that Presidents should stay away from summits, leave negotiating to the Secretary of State--and that the Secretary should leave it, as much as possible, to ambassadors.

"Tempting Thievery." Instead of bold new ideas and personal diplomacy. Dean Rusk plans to bring to the foreign relations of the U.S. thoroughgoing staff work, precision and forethought. He believes that precision is needed to forestall miscalculation by enemies and friends. While he was a student in Germany in the summer of 1932, he likes to relate, a canoe that he had left unguarded was stolen. Police went after the thief, but a magistrate fined Rusk for "tempting thievery." In its foreign relations, says Rusk, the U.S. must be careful not to "tempt thievery" by failing to let the Communists know precisely where it stands on important issues. "We must not let the other side speculate on how much they can get away with."

As an Assistant Secretary of State he kept in his top drawer a big lined yellow pad on which he listed all the problems that he should be worrying about--"as many as 70 to 80 worries at a time," a friend recalls. Some of the worries went away, some were solved, some blossomed into full-scale crises. But the sum total verified his creed that forethought should be a foundation stone of U.S. foreign policy. In a complex and changing world, he argues, it is not enough to think about problems and challenges as they arise. "We are going to have to aim at the future," he says, "if we expect to come on target in the present. Otherwise, our problems fly by and we just knock off a few tail feathers."

Pursuit of Excellence. David Dean Rusk (he decided early in life to drop the David) has come a long way from his edge-of-poverty beginnings in Georgia, but the qualities that he will bring to his new job trace back to his pinched but nourishing origins.

Rusk's father was an ordained Presbyterian minister who had to give up the pulpit because a throat ailment kept him from preaching. At the time Dean was born, the fourth of five children, the elder Rusk was scratching a living as a rural schoolteacher and a small cotton farmer in Cherokee County. When Dean was four, his father got a job as a mail carrier in Atlanta, and the family moved to a frame house on Whitehall Street, just beyond the edge of the Negro district. The children wore underwear made at home out of flour sacks, often trudged along the nearby railroad tracks in winter to gather stray lumps of coal. But the parents had something more valuable than material advantages to give. "We grew up," recalls Dean's elder brother Roger, a University of Tennessee physics professor, "in a strict atmosphere of moral integrity, imposed by both parents and schoolteachers. We were under constant admonition to excel, to go out in the world and do something. Be different, do your best, they told us. We were always striving for excellence."

Dean achieved distinction of a sort at birth: he weighed an extraordinary 11 lbs.,* and he was delivered into the world by a veterinarian. He started school with the second grade, skipping the first because he had already learned to read by poring over his brothers' schoolbcoks. Term after term, his report cards showed nearly all A's. A Boys' High School teacher recalls him as "one of the few students I came across in 45 years of teaching who seemed to be born mature and adequate to any situation." The 1925 high school yearbook records that 16-year-old Dean ("Rusty") Rusk was president of the senior class, colonel of the school R.O.T.C. regiment, president of the Hi-Y Club, a member of the honor society, the debating council and the track squad, associate editor of the school newspaper--and editor of the yearbook. It did not record that he had started up a class in Greek along the way.

The Great Seal. At age twelve, Dean drafted a clairvoyant document entitled "What I Plan to Do with the Next Twelve Years of My Life." The schedule called for finishing high school, then working for two years to earn money to go to college, then attending North Carolina's Davidson College (where his father had studied), then winning a Rhodes scholarship and studying at Oxford. True to his plan, he worked as a general helper in a small law office for two years after high school, then used his savings to get started at Davidson College (which he calls "the poor man's Princeton"), where he majored in political science. At Davidson, he recalls, he "never stopped running." Between classes, he ran to and from a $50-a-month job in a local bank, waited on boardinghouse tables in exchange for meals, got elected president of the student Y.M.C.A., became captain of the campus R.O.T.C., and won a Phi Beta Kappa key. Mindful that Rhodes scholarship selection committees take athletics into account. Dean Rusk went out for track, tennis, baseball and basketball.

Some members of the Rhodes scholarship selection committee that passed on Dean Rusk were puzzled by an apparent contradiction in him. On his scholarship application he had said, that his main purpose at Oxford would be to study ways of achieving world peace, but all through high school and college he had worked hard at being an R.O.T.C. officer. How did he reconcile these two directions? Replied Rusk: "The eagle on the Great Seal has two claws, one with an olive branch and the other with arrows."

At St. John's College, Oxford, Rusk studied politics, philosophy and economics, played tennis and lacrosse, won Oxford's Cecil Peace Prize of -L-100 (then $400) for a paper on "Relations Between the British Commonwealth and the League of Nations." During the summer vacations he got in extra studies at German universities.

Toward the end of his Oxford days, Rusk got a telegram from the U.S. offering him a job as an assistant professor of political science at Mills College at $2,000 a year. That was his only job prospect in the Depression year 1934, and he cabled an acceptance right away. Then he hurried to the library to look up Mills College, was surprised to learn that it was a school for girls in Oakland, Calif. At Mills, youthful, prematurely bald Professor Rusk found not only an occupation but a wife: he married Virginia Foisie, a former student of his, and, like him, a Phi Beta Kappa ("One takes an interest in one's best students").

"We'll Change That Rule." The approach of war found Dean Rusk prepared, as usual: thanks to his R.O.T.C. training, he held a commission as a captain in the Army Reserve. He was called to active duty as an infantry officer, but a War Department punch-card machine snatched him away to noncombatant duty; the Army was looking for an officer who knew something about the British Empire, and the sorting machine noted that Captain Rusk had gone to Oxford. Ordered to Washington to become head of the "British Empire" section of G-2 (military intelligence). Rusk was distressed to find that the files consisted of a couple of drawers of yellowing New York Times clippings, a handbook on India and Ceylon, and a military attache's report filed from London in 1925. With the help of a young second lieutenant named Robert Goheen (now president of Princeton University), Rusk methodically set about building up the files.

Working in the British Empire section of the Office of Strategic Services in those days was Ralph Bunche, later to become a high United Nations official and a winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace (1950). Bunche recalls that one evening when he and Rusk were both working late, Rusk suggested that they eat at the officers' mess in the old Munitions Building. Bunche pointed out that the place had an unwritten ban on Negroes. Georgian Rusk still retains traces of Dixie in his speech and manner (both of his grandfathers served in the Confederate army), but he is free of race prejudice. "Well," said Rusk, as Bunche recalls it, "we'll change that rule right now." Encountering frosty stares, the two marched into the cafeteria. Says Bunche: "That's the kind of man Dean Rusk is." Today Rusk knows that segregation is one of the heaviest burdens U.S. diplomacy has to bear.

Delicate Mission. In 1943 Rusk went to India to serve, as a colonel, on the staff of General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, U.S. commander in the China-Burma-India theater. Operating out of Delhi, Rusk flew the Hump 14 times in his delicate mission of trying to get the British and Chinese forces to step up their efforts, wound up as deputy chief of staff of the C.B.I, theater. After the war he shuttled back and forth between jobs in the State and War Departments, was invited by Secretary of State George Catlett Marshall to head up the Office of Special Political Affairs in 1947 (previous occupant: Alger Hiss).

Rusk was something of an anomaly at State: neither careerman nor political appointee, but a citizen diplomat (he has yet to own a pair of striped pants). In 1949, Secretary Acheson reached over the heads of seasoned careermen and tapped Rusk to take over the newly created post of Deputy Under Secretary in charge of policy coordination, No. 3 job in the department. "It was simple," recalls James Webb, who as Under Secretary was No. 2. "We just decided that Rusk was the best man we had."

In 1950 Dean Acheson's State Department came under a heavy cannonade for its placid tolerance of the Communists' conquest of China and its outright hostility to the beleaguered Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kaishek. During a shake-up in State's Far Eastern division, Rusk went to Webb and volunteered to step down from Deputy Under Secretary and take over direction of Far Eastern affairs. With no responsibility for past China policy, Rusk felt relatively invulnerable to criticism. Webb and Acheson agreed that the shift would make sense.

History-Making Venture. Among the innovations that the State Department introduced at Rusk's urging was a round-the-clock "watch." An Assistant Secretary was always to be on call in case of emergency. On the night of June 25, 1950, when the U.S. ambassador in Seoul cabled that Communist troops had invaded South Korea, State's watch officer was Assistant Secretary Rusk, and the Pentagon's watch officer was Army Secretary Frank Pace (now president of General Dynamics). Rusk saw two facts clearly that very first night: 1) if the U.S. failed to intervene to halt Communist aggression in Korea, the free world's confidence in the U.S. would suffer a smashing blow, and 2) the temporary Russian boycott of the U.N. Security Council gave the U.S. a precious opportunity, unblocked by a Russian veto, to intervene through the United Nations. Rusk telephoned Acheson, got his permission to get U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie started on summoning an emergency meeting of the Security Council. ("Go back to bed," Rusk told Under Secretary Webb, "and show up at 9 o'clock in the morning. By then Pace and I will have been up all night and will be tired.") Tired or not, next morning Rusk bent all his gifts of argument in Administration councils on the side of prompt U.S. military intervention in Korea. His viewpoint prevailed, and the following day the U.N., under U.S. leadership, embarked on a history-making venture in collective security.

Fittingly, it fell to Dean Rusk, in May 1951, to make clear the demise of the old State Department hostility to Chiang Kaishek. The U.S., Rusk flatly declared in a landmark speech in Manhattan, recognized the Chiang government as the true government of the Republic of China, "even though the territory under its control is severely restricted. The Peking regime," he said, "is not the government of China. It does not pass the first test. It is not Chinese." Later Rusk worked closely with John Foster Dulles, who had been brought in to negotiate the Japanese Treaty, then went to Japan himself to work out a separate agreement on stationing U.S. forces in Japan.

When the Rockefeller Foundation set about looking around for a new president, Dulles and Defense Secretary Robert A. Lovett, both trustees of the foundation, convinced their fellow trustees that Dean Rusk was the best man for the job. In mid-1952 Rusk moved his family to suburban Scarsdale, N.Y. (65% for Nixon last November, despite Rusk's efforts as local chairman of the Democratic Party campaign committee). He disappeared from public view into the comparatively calm harbor of the Rockefeller Foundation to preside over the spending of some $250 million in worldwide do-good projects over the course of eight years.

At Home & Abroad. When he emerges from that harbor a month hence, Rusk will be assuming what he himself once called an "almost impossible office." Not all of the problems he faces lie beyond the seas. Morale in the State Department has been badly depressed by the frustrating sense of merely "treading water" since Foster Dulles died and Christian Herter took over as Secretary. And Rusk might well have touchy going with such political headliners as Adlai Stevenson, Chester Bowles and G. Mennen Williams, all of them with vociferous political claques, and better known than Dean Rusk.

Both Stevenson and Bowles cherished hopes of becoming Kennedy's Secretary of State, and over the years both have gone on record with thick sheaves of foreign-policy pronouncements. Stevenson was an early advocate of unilateral suspension of nuclear tests, and the nuclear-test issue is one of the touchiest that the new Administration will have to decide --not necessarily Stevenson's way. Bowles has become identified with the "two Chinas" policy of recognizing the Communist regime as the government of mainland China in return for Communist recognition of Formosa as a separate and independent nation--an even touchier issue, and a proposal that Peking, as well as Taipei, has already spurned.

The Way to Prevail. Rusk himself is unworried about predictions that Stevenson and Bowles will crowd his authority. "Foreign relations are big and complex enough to give everyone more than enough to do," he says serenely. Actually President Kennedy will hold the key to State Department prestige. "Knowing Dean," said a friend, "I expect that he has explored that subject."

Rusk is unconcerned, too, about the prospect that John F. Kennedy will be his own maker of foreign policy. As Rusk sees it, that is just the way it ought to be. "It is possible for the President to delegate too much to his Secretary of State," he says. "The President has great prerogatives, which he must retain in his own hands. The President is in charge of the raw power of the State."

Other Ruskisms:

P: On himself: "I am an optimist."

P: On his methods: "I depend on careful briefings. I don't play hunches."

P: On Stevenson's appointment to the United Nations: "The chief of the U.N. should be comparable in ability and standing to the Secretary of State himself."

P: On Western Europe: "We and they together have a job to do in the underdeveloped world."

P: On Policies: "The effectiveness of a policy is the readiness of the country to sustain it."

P: On Decisions: "Power gravitates to those who are willing to make decisions and live with the results."

P: I On Working with the President: "The Secretary of State cannot get intimate with the President unless they work at it --and unless they're both in town."

P: On Preparedness: "I do not believe that we as a nation have mobilized the capabilities we have to anticipate the problems that exist even on the near horizon."

The greatest problem of all, Rusk believes, will be the continuing conflict with Communism: "I expect the struggle to be dynamic and intense."

To prevail in that struggle, Rusk believes, the U.S. needs only to remember, in effect, that the Eagle has two claws. The U.S., he says, "is not a raft tossed by the winds and waves of historical forces over which it has little control. Its dynamic power, physical and ideological, generates historical forces; what it does or does not do makes a great deal of difference to the history of man in this epoch.

"When the emphasis of discussion falls too heavily on the limitations of policy, I recall from early childhood the admonition of the circuit preacher: 'Pray as if it were up to God; work as if it were up to you.'

*Average weight of U.S. male newborns: 7 lbs. 10 oz. Only about one in 500 weighs 11 lbs.

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