The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  The Korean War was to prove a difficult and often painful experience for Rusk; in some ways the frustrations of a limited land war in Asia were as painful for him as they were for the American military. He was part of the civilian decision-making process which had set the particular limits of the war, which had in effect created sanctuaries for the enemy—for good reasons, certainly, but making American boys fight under terrible hardships which seemed very difficult to explain. This meant that Rusk the civilian was limiting Rusk the soldier. Some of those who knew him well in that period felt that the Korean War was perhaps the most painful experience of his career before Vietnam. There were two reasons for this: first, the sense of being at least in part responsible for the limits under which American troops fought, and second, a sense of responsibility because he had not forecast the Chinese entry into the war. He would talk about this a great deal with close friends (finally those who worked with him during the Vietnam war and wanted to push him toward dovishness, wanted to turn him on a specific issue against the military, would know that the only way they could do it was by mentioning China—well, suppose China came in if we escalated beyond a certain point in a certain way—and they played on it very skillfully, using China as a decoy for broader dovishness, since their other reasons were disregarded; later there may have been lingering regrets of Rusk about the escalation, not that we got into it, but perhaps that we did it too slowly, we had felt too many inhibitions. Rusk’s reservations about the use of power in 1965 and 1966 were not those of other civilians who felt we had used too much power; they were almost exactly the same as the senior military, that we had used too little). But Rusk had not warned us about Chinese intervention in Korea, and he felt the burden of the latter stages of that conflict in a particularly personal way.

  If Rusk sometimes seemed to say mea culpa about China, there was good reason. For if Vietnam is a major Greek tragedy, it is compiled of many minor scenes which come together in one great epic. In 1950 one of those scenes was unveiled in the Far Eastern bureau of the Department of State. There Assistant Secretary Rusk prided himself on his knowledge of China (though later when he was Secretary of State an assistant who knew him well described him as a “real Grandma Moses on China,” each year asking the China desk a list of detailed and somewhat archaic questions on China, including, for instance, the chances for secession of various areas, the possibility of the return of war lordism). The head of his China desk was Edmund Clubb, intelligent, dogged, a little heavy-handed in his writing, but he was that rarest of men, a genuine expert—not only on the new China but on the Soviet Union and the Manchurian border area as well. He was, in the view of some of his contemporaries, less graceful as a writer than Service, less sophisticated than Davies. He had made many enemies as a young foreign service officer among the older, more traditional and wealthier American community in China, the upper-class America of those small foreign enclaves. And when he started to study the Chinese Communists in the early thirties, this in itself aroused suspicion—wasn’t he making too much of these people? They were, after all, only bandits. Wasn’t he too sympathetic? When the dark clouds gathered and the China experts were pilloried, Clubb was included. One of the ten charges against him was that he had associated with Communists in Hankow in 1931­34.

  But now he was back in Washington as China desk officer when the Korean War started. Actually, he had been on vacation in late June, but in view of developments in Korea he had cut short his leave. Knowing the Chinese and the intensity of what they considered grave matters of national security, Clubb, between mid-July and early October, submitted three separate official memoranda warning of the danger of Chinese intervention. But though it was his special area of expertise, he was not included among those who attended the critical meetings between Truman and MacArthur at Wake Island, and his warnings went unheeded. Years later he would think that his superiors in the bureaucracy already knew that he was scheduled to undergo a major security investigation by the Department’s Loyalty-Security Board. So instead of concentrating on using his particular knowledge at a time when it was most desperately needed, Clubb was to spend the year 1951 fighting the bitter and painful battles of his security process. Then, early in 1952, he was cleared of the charges against him—but was simultaneously assigned to the Division of Historical Research. Knowing that his career had been effectively savaged, he retired from the foreign service; his very special expertise was lost to the U.S. government, and Dean Rusk proceeded upward at the same time with his career.

  Rusk would turn out to be a hard-liner on the new China, and once the Korean War started he would be at ease; the war and the competition with the Communists was almost a moral thing. The United States obeyed the law; the Communists broke it. We wore white hats and they wore black; our GIs did not rape, they gave away chewing gum. In fact, a speech of his in that period is particularly revealing because the words are real, they are believed:

  Our foreign policy has been reflected in our willingness to submit atomic weapons to international law, in feeding and clothing those stricken by war, in supporting free elections and government by consent, in building factories and dams, power plants, and railways, schools and hospitals, in improving seed and stock and fertilizer, in stimulating markets and improving the skills and techniques of others in a hundred different ways. Let these things stand in contrast to a foreign policy directed towards the extension of tyranny and using the big lie, sabotage, suspicion, riot and assassination as its tools. The great strength of the United States is devoted to the peaceful pursuits of our people and to the decent opinions of mankind. But it is not healthy for any regime or group of regimes to incur, by their lawless and aggressive conduct, the implacable opposition of the American people. The lawbreaker, unfortunately in the nature of things, always has the initiative, but the peacemaking peoples of the world can and will make themselves strong enough to insist upon peace . . .

  It was vintage Rusk, and he believed it. What Rusk said was an expression of his real views. (In 1965 Rusk would meet with a group of high school seniors and discuss the reasons why we were escalating in Vietnam; a member of his staff who was there thought it was a forceful but simplistic presentation of a hands-out-of-the-cookie-jar view. The next day, however, he was stunned when he saw an “Eyes Only” memo on the same subject from Rusk to the President, the highest level of security possible for documents, and it was word for word the exact same presentation.)

  Rusk’s speech gave vital insight into his thinking; here was a man who believed in his origins and experiences—the democracies were ipso facto good and the totalitarians were ipso facto bad, and this helped explain the force of his positions. But it also explained some of the danger of his tenets because they were held by a man so wedded to certain concepts and truths that he did not reckon with the whimsical quality of history, that the forces of history can just as easily make the democracies aggressive, that to some small states, large democracies look tyrannical, that justice and decency have various definitions in different parts of the world. These were the words of a man who advocated his own concepts, whether the world was ready for them or not. The world would have to adapt to him. Yet the steadfastness of his beliefs was also his greatest asset; he believed, he was not ambivalent. He believed in both the might and the decency of America (having never dealt in the domestic processes, he was uncritical of them; he was willing to accept the high school civics class theory of their reality). If America was both honorable and strong, and turned that strength in the right directions—which had been charted in the postwar years as containment of the totalitarians—then our side would triumph. Perhaps not easily, perhaps the struggle would be long, but eventually quality and class would tell. In 1965 and 1966, as the Vietnam war began to look more and more difficult and George Ball and others would tell him of their doubts, that it was a lost cause, Rusk would say, again and again, that when a great nation like the United States of America puts its shoulder to the wheel, something has to give
: Yes, I know that the French were there and the political situation is bad, and it may be worse than you say, but I can’t believe that when a great nation like the United States puts its shoulder to the wheel . . . More than a belief, it was a matter of faith, really.

  He had, he repeated to Vietnam critics, been through the same kind of struggle, heard the same kind of doubts before. It was in December 1950, after the Chinese had entered the Korean War, catching MacArthur unprepared, cutting up an entire division, and then pushing down quickly against disorganized American units. MacArthur panicked and was sending back what Lovett would call “posterity papers” which covered him against all eventualities, saying that he was meeting the entire Chinese nation in battle. His cables were having a shattering effect at the United Nations and on the Joint Chiefs, and there was talk of pulling out of Korea and even of pulling out of Japan. The JCS cabled back to MacArthur that the first order of business was preservation of his troops, if necessary to consolidate them into beachheads, as he had recommended. It was at this point that Rusk steadied everyone. He was very forceful: it just was not that bad, he said; there were limits to what the Chinese could do, and American might was not totally impotent. Perhaps we had been overextended when they came in, but the same thing could happen to them. It was time for everyone to calm down, to pay less attention to the tone of MacArthur’s cables and to try and sense what our possibilities were and their possibilities were. Since General Matthew Ridgway was saying somewhat the same thing, the two were able to steady the Washington hands, and Dean Acheson would later say that this was Rusk’s finest hour.

  Acheson was also impressed with Rusk’s toughness during a great subsequent bureaucratic struggle over the question of releasing prisoners of war in Korea. Thousands of the Chinese and North Korean prisoners did not want to be repatriated; the Pentagon, anxious to get American prisoners back, was willing to accept a simple man-for-man exchange. With the military pushing for this formula, and desperate to get its own men back, the bureaucracy seemed ready to go ahead. But Rusk forcefully and with great passion made them hold the line. To force prisoners back to a country against their will, he argued, was a violation of almost everything this country stood for. It would be inhumane, and immoral. Despite great pressure he stuck to his position and eventually won; voluntary repatriation became the policy.

  Yet those years would also see a change in American and State Department attitudes on China and Asia; it was part of a national phenomenon. China, a beloved and somewhat mysterious ally, had gone Communist, and worse, that new regime had engaged us in a brutal land war (smiling, dutiful, loyal Chinese had almost overnight become yellow hordes, mindless functional Communist ants, a shocking new reincarnation). This brought a domestic crisis of sorts, accelerated the coming and the importance of Joseph McCarthy and led to the hardening of political and bureaucratic attitudes on Asia; in particular State and its Asian bureau became militantly anti-Communist. Years later the Democrats would take particular pleasure in blaming Dulles for those policies and for that rigidity; Dulles did make an attractive target, with his righteousness and his tendency to pontificate in public, and with his opening of the doors of State to security people. Although Dulles helped change the personnel by permitting the destruction of the existing men, the policies had nonetheless changed during the latter years of the Acheson Administration, when Rusk was his Assistant Secretary at FE. The young State Department officials trying to make American policy in Indochina less dependent upon the French Foreign Ministry, and more committed to an indigenous nationalism, would find no friend in Rusk (in fact, the day after the United States decided to intervene in Korea, Rusk had made a list of recommendations for new policies in the area, including a vast increase in military aid to the French). Instead they would find less interest than ever in the subtlety of the political problems, less disposition to look for differences in the kind of war taking place in Korea and Indochina. It would be the business-as-usual attitude, which gave the dominant hand to the European desk. In those years, American support for the French would increase considerably, and the French rhetoric about fighting in Vietnam for the free world, which we had always mocked in the past, would become our rhetoric and find its way into the speeches of high officers in the State Department, notably the Assistant Secretary for FE, Dean Rusk, as for instance in a speech on Asia in November 1951; a time when the French were paying only the slightest lip service to the demands of Vietnamese nationalists:

  The real issue in Indochina is whether the peoples of that land will be permitted to work out their future as they see fit or whether they will be subjected to a Communist reign of terror and be absorbed by force into the new colonialism of a Soviet Communist empire. In this situation, it is generally agreed in the United States that we should support and assist the armies of France and of the Associated States in meeting the armed threat in Indochina. . . . We are trying to build, the enemy is trying to tear down. It is hard to organize a constitutional society of free men; it is easy to impose a reign of terror . . .

  For the truth was that despite the Democratic desire to blame Dulles for the commitment to Southeast Asia, the creation of South Vietnam, and the invention of Diem, the roots of the change in American policy actually predated Eisenhower’s coming to power. The really crucial decisions were made at the tail end of the Truman years, with Acheson as Secretary of State and Rusk as his principal deputy for Asia. This was the period when the United States went from a position of neutrality toward both sides in the Indochina war to a position of massive military and economic aid to the French. The real architect of the American commitment to Vietnam, of bringing containment to that area and using Western European perceptions in the underdeveloped world, was not John Foster Dulles, it was Dean Acheson.

  Acheson. A handsome man, the right kind of handsomeness, not matinée-idol handsome, but respectable-handsome. He looked like a Secretary of State; in fact, it was hard to think of him as anything else. Had he been a banker he would have looked too respectable to be simply a financier; he looked more worldly and urbane than a man who simply dealt with money. He became a Democratic icon of the fifties both because he had been viciously attacked by McCarthy and had stood the attack without flinching (personally, if not professionally), and because he would not turn his back on Alger Hiss (who was of course a member of the Establishment in very good standing; a remarkable amount of what Acheson was committed to was at its heart class). His reputation in the fifties because of those McCarthy years, a quirk of history really, was somehow that he was a soft-liner, and that Dulles was the hard-liner. If anything, the reverse was true. It was not so much that Dulles was softer, but for all the bombast of his speeches, the verbal righteousness in public, there was an element of private flexibility (the great corporation lawyer who can make a resounding appeal in the courtroom and then a more subtle private deal in the judge’s chambers), whereas Acheson was the hard-liner who felt that Dulles’ policies were extremely dangerous and that the defense budget was too small. Acheson was always the true interventionist who deeply believed that the totalitarians might exploit the democracies. He was not soft, Acheson, he never was. He was Wilsonian, but new-generation Wilsonian, Wilson flexing old ideals with new industrial and technological might, Wilson with a longer reach.

  He was the son of a British Army officer who went to Canada, fought against a half-breed insurrection in Manitoba, and later became an Anglican minister and eventually bishop of Connecticut. Dean Acheson’s upbringing was stern (in fact, he once wanted to be Solicitor General of the United States, a job for which he had been recommended by the Roosevelt Administration, only to find that he was blocked by Attorney General Homer Cummings, who was from Connecticut, the reason being that the senior Acheson had found Cummings too frequently divorced and had withheld a marital blessing). His background was clerical-military and quite traditional; like other proper young men he went off to Groton (writing of Franklin Roosevelt years later, he would say: “Ten years old
er than I, he had left our school before I got there, but he regarded my having gone to it as a recommendation”). From there he went to Yale, where he received a gentleman C, and then to Harvard Law, where for the first time the excellence of his mind began to flash. He became a favorite of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who got him a clerkship under Louis Brandeis; with that, his career was under way.