The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  It was not a position which Kennan had come to easily, but he had been talked into it by a member of his staff at the Policy Planning Council, none other than John Paton Davies, already being hounded for his China prophecies. Kennan, basically a Europeanist like the others, had been against the idea of coming to terms with the Vietminh, but Davies had turned him around. Davies insisted that American policy makers had to get out of the habit of looking at Communism as a moral issue. Rather, he said, when a local indigenous force for a variety of reasons has a chance to form an insurgency, the metropolitan government would not be able to defeat it. Davies was extremely skeptical of the American capacity to put trained people into the field to deal with the complexity of these problems, having seen Americans failing at the same thing in China. Davies convinced Kennan that there was no real future for the West in areas like this, and yet the dangers were not so real as they seemed. The local forces, for example, would have to sell the same raw material to the West that they had in the past. It was, of course, similar to Davies’ thinking on China, which was that the Chiang government was never much of a friend, it was too Chinese; as such it inevitably had built-in conflicts with us, and thus, similarly, the Mao government could never be much of a friend to Moscow. The best thing we could do in situations like this was to deal with the realities and hope for the best; many of these forces were simply outside our control, and by trying to control them we could not affect them but might, in fact, turn them against us.

  Kennan’s brilliantly presented arguments, based on the ideas and evidence of Davies, did not change American thinking on Vietnam. The new Assistant Secretary at FE, Dean Rusk, was too much of a traditionalist, a believer that we had to rally a government and not show faint-heartedness. The Kennan-Davies view remained a minority one, all but ignored in the rising domestic tensions and anti-Communism; Kennan’s ideas would surface again, some sixteen years later, when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee belatedly held hearings trying to trace the course which had brought us that far.

  Since the course was already set, the memo had no effect at the time. We picked up the French war and the French assumptions. We financed the war for the next four years, and considered it part of our great global strategy. The architects of the major change had been the Democrats and Acheson, albeit under pressure from the right. In 1952 the Democratic Administration was defeated and the new Republican Secretary of State would lend his own loftiness and grandeur to that particular French cause. Indeed, as the war progressed and the realities of the paddies came home to Paris, the two countries, America and France, seemed to switch sides. The French, who had been eager for the war and for American support, became increasingly dubious, and the Americans seemed more eager for the war than France. And developments showed what strange paths our own smaller compromises would lead us to. Dean Acheson, who had always thought the French cause a false one and who had once seen Ho as a nationalist, and who had made the decision to give arms more as an afterthought, found himself sucked along by the pull of that which had been let loose. In 1953 and 1954, out of office, he met regularly in Princeton with his former State Department associates, and at the time of Dienbienphu he and his aides (with the exception of Kennan) agreed that the United States was making a great and perhaps fatal mistake if it did not go to the rescue of the French and join in on the war. Soft old Dean Acheson. Soft old Democrats.

  Although Rusk had not changed these policies himself, since it was Acheson who was in command, he certainly acquiesced and had no qualms about it. He became a formidable articulator of the policy. The people who wanted a hard-line China policy, on the Hill and at Time magazine, found in him a more than acceptable advocate, and he was a very able man to have around during a change in policy (though when he first took over the job at FE, he held to the existing line that the fall of Nationalist China was the Kuomintang’s own fault, and in June 1950, just before the Korean War, he had called the rebellion there comparable to “the American revolt against the British”). In fact, it was a speech of Rusk’s on China to the China Institute in May 1951 which seemed to mark the new, harder policy. Chiang, not the Communists, were the legitimate rulers of China; the Mao government represented foreign masters. “Forthright speech,” said Time approvingly; it was a speech which made headlines throughout the country and was reprinted in major news magazines, occasioned a protest from the British, a denial from the State Department that it represented a new policy, and finally a cat-and-mouse press conference by Acheson himself in which he said that it represented nothing new—but it was stronger than the old, wasn’t it?

  . . . We and the Chinese, for example, have had a vital interest in the peace of the Pacific. Each of us wants security on our Pacific flank and wants to be able to look across those vast waters to find strength, independence and good will in its great neighbor on the other side. It was inevitable that the driving force of Japanese militarism would sooner or later bring China and America together to oppose it, just as we had moved 40 years earlier to support China’s independence and integrity against threats from Europe. The same issues are now posed again—and are made more difficult to deal with because foreign encroachment is now being arranged by Chinese who seem to love China less than they do their foreign masters.

  •••

  The independence of China is gravely threatened. In the Communist world there is room for only one master—a jealous and implacable master, whose price of friendship is complete submission. How many Chinese, in one community after another, are now being destroyed because they love China more than the Soviet Union? How many Chinese will remember in time the fates of Rajk, Kostov, Petkov, Clementis and all those in other satellites who discovered that being Communist is not enough for the conspirators of the Kremlin?

  The freedoms of the Chinese people are disappearing. Trial by mob, mass slaughter, banishment as forced labor to Manchuria, Siberia or Sinkiang, the arbitrary seizure of property, the destruction of loyalties within the family, the suppression of free speech—these are the facts behind the parades and celebrations and the empty promises.

  The territorial integrity of China is now an ironic phrase. The movement of Soviet forces into Sinkiang, the realities of “joint exploitation” of that great province by Moscow and Peiping, the separation of Inner Mongolia from the body politic of China, and the continued inroads of Soviet power into Manchuria under the cloak of the Korean aggression mean in fact that China is losing its great Northern areas to the European empire which has stretched out its greedy hands for them for at least a century.

  •••

  Hundreds of thousands of Chinese youth are being sacrificed in a fiery furnace, pitting their waves of human flesh against the fire power of modern weapons—and without heavy equipment, adequate supply or the most elementary medical attention. Apart from Korea, the Chinese are being pressed to aggressive action in other areas—all calculated to divert the attention and energies of China away from the encroachments of Soviet imperialism upon China itself.

  •••

  Events in China must surely challenge the concern of Chinese everywhere—in Formosa, on the mainland and in overseas communities. There is a job to be done for China which only the Chinese can do—a job which will require sustained energy, continued sacrifice and an abundance of the high courage with which so many Chinese have fought for so long during the struggles of the past decades. The rest of us cannot tell them exactly what is to be done or how. We cannot provide a formula to engage the unity of effort among all Chinese who love their country. But one thing we can say—as the Chinese people move to assert their freedom and to work out their destiny in accordance with their own historical purposes, they can count upon tremendous support from free peoples in other parts of the world. . . .

  It was strong stuff. There was another speech that night, by John Foster Dulles, and it was mild by comparison; but it would not hurt the career of Dean Rusk to have been a little more anti-Mao than Dulles that night. Rusk would
not remain Assistant Secretary very long, however; the Republicans were on their way back, and they would use the charge of State Department softness on Communism as the major weapon in their return to power. Many of the people in State would be badly hurt during this period, but not Rusk, in part because his own views were indeed hard-line, but more than that, because of an almost unique capacity to stay out of trouble. (After MacArthur was fired and returned to give his “Old soldiers never die” speech, State knew there was going to be a congressional inquiry on MacArthur. Yet Rusk did not go with Acheson to the Hill at that time, though he seemed the logical candidate, being the man for Asia; instead it was Adrian Fisher, the Department’s legal counsel, a man who normally would not receive that assignment.) The Republicans, with Dulles leading the way, attacked the policies of the past, the immoral compromises, the weakness of the Democratic no-win containment, policies in which Rusk had been one of the lesser architects. But no matter, Rusk and Dulles got on fine; they had worked well together on the Japanese peace treaty and had kept in touch, and Rusk’s views on China were obviously acceptable.

  After the Republicans were elected in 1952, which meant that Dulles, chairman of the board of the Rockefeller Foundation, had a new job, Secretary of State, he started to look for a staff for State, but he also needed someone he liked and trusted for the important job of President of the Rockefeller Foundation, and he recommended his young friend Dean Rusk. So Dean Rusk was once again promoted (the best people, who had correctly predicted the fall of China, would see their careers destroyed, but Dean Rusk, who had failed to predict the Chinese entry into the Korean War, would see his career accelerate. There had to be a moral for him here: if you are wrong on the hawkish side of an event you are all right; if you are accurate on the dovish side you are in trouble). He would maintain, this man whose surface identity was as a Democrat, a very close friendship with Dulles. Years later, when Dulles’ secretary met Rusk, she said she felt she knew him well. Mr. Dulles had liked him so much, had spoken about him and had told her that any time Mr. Rusk called from New York, she was to put the call through directly because Mr. Rusk was very special, and Mr. Dulles certainly did not do that with many people. Robert Bowie, the head of Policy Planning under Dulles, would confirm this, whenever Rusk was in town Dulles would call him and say—Rusk’s here, I want you to spend the day with Rusk, tell him everything we’re doing.

  So color Rusk neutral, or color him amenable, or hard-line. Who was he, which side was he on? He left State for the next best thing, the head of a great foundation at an unusually early age, only forty-three, and there were to be great things ahead. He had survived the most delicate and politically dangerous period in recent State history, and he had come out stronger than when he went in (with both sides). He was deft enough to retain his friendships with Lovett, Acheson and their friends, to secure new friendships with Dulles and Henry Luce, and yet to send occasional smoke signals to the Democratic liberals that he was on their side. At the same time he was handing out the tax-exempt money of the very wealthy, holding on to a safe and secure base, where risks were minimized. He had a little more interest than in the past in the underdeveloped world, earmarked a little more money for Africa and Asia. So he spent those years of the fifties meeting the wealthy and powerful in New York, making no enemies, waiting for the next phone call from the next President. Making no enemies.

  But the Kennedy years were not particularly easy ones; Rusk found himself surrounded by men he considered amateurs, people playing with the processes, interfering with serious men. Rusk was a man who believed in the processes; in fact, in that 1960 Foreign Affairs essay he had written advertising himself to the next President, he had said that processes were more important than people, but this was an Administration which believed in the importance of people and their attitudes. (In that sense he and Harriman could not have been more opposite. Harriman believed that you changed policies by changing people, that you fought the bureaucracy; Rusk thought the bureaucracy was something you came to terms with, that its attitudes existed for very real reasons.) The Kennedy style upset Rusk, the young men from the White House trying to get their hands into foreign policy, playing at it, looking over at State and finding bright young friends of theirs, bringing them to NSC meetings so that the Secretary, yes, the Secretary of State would be giving advice and have it challenged by some hot young desk officer. This was a recurrent situation, which he found virtually a violation of his office, and it made his natural tendency to speak only to the President even more marked. Faced with a situation like this he became even more tight-lipped, and he would doodle. Those who knew him well could detect from his scribbling the amount of tension and distaste he felt, and they would decide that the younger and more outspoken the desk officer, the greater the doodle index.

  Rusk himself must have sensed the disdain for him around the White House. (He had once scheduled a briefing on nuclear weapons for the high-level officials, believing that they needed to know more about what the weapons would or would not do—and it was a chilling experience. Glenn Seaborg did the briefing on American missile capacity, and afterward, as they were all going back to the White House, Rusk turned to the two high-level White House people with him and said, “It’s all very complicated, isn’t it? You never know when those things will really work when it comes right down to it, do you?” And one of the very senior White House men answered, “Well, if they don’t, you’ll never know, Dean.”)

  He was a man of the past, not entirely at ease with either the direction or style of the new Administration (this included the President himself, who liked to cut through channels and deal with foreign visitors as informally as possible, just the two of them, with no one else around if possible. Rusk hated this; he always wanted someone there, at least an Undersecretary. He was wary of the dangers of a too-personalized diplomacy; it was the same kind of irritation with violation of processes that Acheson had felt about Roosevelt). Yet for all the stylistic problems, the relationship with the President was not bad. True, the President never called him by his first name, and there were hurts absorbed along the way (before Kennedy met with De Gaulle and Khrushchev, he wanted to take a day off and spend it at Villa Serbelloni, the Rockefeller Foundation study center on Lake Como, which Rusk arranged; then Kennedy failed to invite Rusk for the day, and Rusk was particularly wounded). But in addition to his capacity to get things done, and to get things down on paper with great precision of language (once there was a major conflict between Fred Dutton, who was an Assistant Secretary for Congressional Relations, and Bob Manning, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, and their interests were clearly antagonistic. Rusk listened to each of them state his case; then he called in a stenographer and dictated a perfect memo which satisfied both of them, a remarkable accomplishment), he was very good going up on the Hill for Kennedy, which was what Kennedy wanted most, a lightning rod there; the more Kennedy departed from the past and tried the new, the more valuable Rusk was on the Hill.

  Above all, the Secretary of State deferred to the President (years later, during the Johnson Administration, when Nicholas Katzenbach tried to push Rusk a little on Vietnam, Rusk held back, he was not going to pressure the President on foreign policy, whereupon he gave Katzenbach a long dissertation on the constitutional prerogatives of the President. Katzenbach finally interrupted and said he knew about the Constitution, but a man could be a damn fool and be constitutional). Rusk had a great sense of the function of the office; he believed in people playing their parts, that and no more. He believed that if the Secretary and the President did not agree, it was virtually a constitutional crisis. When Rusk set forth his views forcefully at a National Security Council meeting it was a sure sign that he had already conferred with the President, found that they agreed and thus had been encouraged to speak out within the bureaucracy. But in all of this there was one curious anomaly; Rusk, who had risen to what was the second most powerful position in the nation, did not really covet power. He liked being
Secretary of State, liked the title and the job and the trappings and the opportunity to serve; but at the point where you dominate, force yourself and your ideas forward, he shrank back. He did not like to be out front, to take a position of genuine leadership. He really was a modest man in a job which does not entail modesty but demands that the incumbent fight and dominate an entire area of policy making.

  Those who worked with him in those days thought he was very good and subtle on the parts of the world where the real issues were already settled; it was only when the idea of change, of softening some of the tensions of the Cold War were involved that his conservatism showed, his uneasiness with new direction, his belief that the other side might exploit our overtures. He was no help at all to the young men, who under Harriman were trying to change the China policy in the Kennedy years; indeed when there was finally some pressure at the Policy Planning Council for a re-evaluation of our China policy, it was Rusk’s response that instead of the Department taking the lead, it pass the idea back to the Council on Foreign Relations. Perhaps, he suggested, the Council could undertake a study of Communist China, some books to look at the subject anew (the Council did study the subject, producing a book some four years later). When some people at State wanted to push for recognition of Outer Mongolia as an opening wedge in coming to terms with China, Rusk was no help, indeed he acquiesced to pressure from the Hill and from Nationalist China to shelve the issue. He had been no help in the Kennedy years, but in the Johnson years he became even more of an adversary on a potential new China policy. In fact, in late 1965 McGeorge Bundy, who was relatively open on the issue of coming to terms with China, made an unusually revealing comment about both Rusk and Johnson. Some of Bundy’s White House staff people had just pushed through a policy which would open up the possibilities of limited travel in China. They were congratulating themselves on what they had accomplished, but Bundy added a cautionary note on the lessons learned during the struggle for something as small as this. “This President,” he said, “will never take the steps on China policy that you and I might want him to take unless he is urged to do so by his Secretary of State. And this Secretary of State will never urge him to do so.”