The Quiet Man

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As a lower-echelon official in Foggy Bottom a dozen years ago, Secretary of State Dean Rusk used to keep a ruled yellow pad in his desk drawer with a list of 70 or 80 problems. Now, as top man in the State Department, Rusk's list of headaches has grown severalfold. "The pace of events," says he, "is moving so fast that unless we can find some way to keep our sights on tomorrow, we cannot expect to be in touch with today."

Rusk's farsighted approach to foreign policy should now be serving him and his nation well--for in the sudden, shocking transition to a new Administration, the danger inevitably exists that events may outrun men. This is especially true in the fluid field of world affairs, where mistakes are likely to cost lives, not just votes. Well-prepared as he was to assume the presidency, Lyndon B. Johnson was a relative tyro in that field. But he can derive a large measure of confidence from the fact that Rusk, a man whom John F. Kennedy at first wrote off as "disappointing" but ultimately came to esteem in the highest degree, will be his guide.

On Course. As Kennedy's senior Cabinet officer and as the executor of his foreign policy, Rusk is the most solid symbol of continuity in Johnson's new Administration. Last week when 220 Presidents and princes, Premiers and Foreign Ministers from 92 nations attended a candlelit reception at the State Department after paying final homage to Kennedy, they saw Rusk at Johnson's elbow. To many, the presence of the balding, bland-looking Georgian who pokes fun at himself for looking like "the neighborhood bartender" was assurance that the U.S. would hold to the course that Kennedy had charted.

All through the week, Johnson and Rusk played skillfully on this theme: continuity in change. Less than 24 hours after Kennedy's assassination, Rusk fired off cables to all U.S. ambassadors advising them to emphasize the "continuity of American foreign policy." In the blue and gold chamber of the General Assembly, U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson assured his colleagues that "there will be no 'Johnson policy' toward the United Nations any more than there was a 'Kennedy policy.' There was--and is--only a United States policy." In messages to some 60 foreign leaders, including Nikita Khrushchev, as well as in his speech to Congress, Johnson underscored the same theme.

If U.S. officials seemed to be going out of their way to hammer home the idea, that was only because of the current of apprehension that rippled through the world's capitals on the news of Kennedy's murder. European statesmen feared that Johnson, even though he had helped move the U.S. away from isolationism as a fledgling Representative under Franklin D. Roosevelt, would withdraw G.I.s from the Continent and retreat into a Fortress America. Asians worried that Johnson, even though he had been one of F.D.R.'s most ardent New Dealers, would not be "flexible" and "liberal" enough. Africans fretted that Johnson, although he had outraged Southern conservatives in 1960 when he tacked civil rights legislation onto a minor bill and rammed it through the Senate, would torpedo civil rights. And Moscow was alarmed that Johnson, despite the fact that he had argued recently that it "might be possible to relax some points of conflict" with Russia, would scuttle Kennedy's attempts at achieving a detente.

Thin Dossiers. What most worried foreign leaders was the realization that while Johnson could gamble on domestic issues like civil rights and the tax cut at the risk of a temporary setback, to do so in the arena of foreign affairs might prove disastrous. And in that arena, they considered Johnson an unknown quantity. "The dossiers on Johnson," complained one Soviet official, "are thin."

Johnson has traveled widely, but the image he always projected was of a hearty backslapper who stopped to chat with a sidewalk watermelon vendor in Beirut, who invited a Pakistani camel driver to "come and see us, heah?" and who gave out ballpoint pens wherever he went. "He shakes hands with everybody," said a Thai clerk after Johnson stormed Bangkok, "no matter if they are dirty or what." Johnson knows scores of foreign leaders, but their meetings rarely went much beyond the handshaking technique that he calls "pressing the flesh and looking them in the eye."

Outside foreign offices, Dean Rusk is largely an unknown quantity himself. He has met nearly every Foreign Minister on earth. After the U.N. convened in September, he chatted privately with some 70 of them in a hectic nine-day stretch, kept so tight a schedule that one U.S. official compared his outer office to "a dentist's waiting room." Despite his distaste for "personal" diplomacy, he has logged nearly 100,000 miles a year in trips abroad.

But Rusk's concept of his job has kept him out of the headlines. He wholeheartedly agrees with John Marshall, the great 19th century Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, that "the President is the sole organ of the nation in its external relations." As he sees it, his job is to act as adviser, briefing officer and administrator for the President, not as an initiator of policy in the tradition of John Foster Dulles or Dean Acheson. "It is possible," he once said, "for the President to delegate too much power to his Secretary of State." Under Kennedy, there was no such danger--the late President was in some ways his own Secretary of State, and had assembled a "little State Department" in the White House under former Harvard Dean McGeorge Bundy.

Dean Who? With his passion for anonymity, Rusk came to be known as "the quiet man" of U.S. diplomacy, the administrator of a policy that bore none of his imprint, and the commander of a bureaucracy that included a slew of men more widely known than he--Adlai Stevenson, Averell Harriman, Chester Bowles, "Soapy" Williams. In Rome, when asked what he thought of the U.S. Secretary of State, Italian Deputy Emilio Pucci (better known as the high-fashion designer of high-priced women's slacks and blouses than as a member of the free-enterprising Liberal Party) began enthusiastically: "He's one of the greatest. He's a man with a keen understanding of European problems. He's . . . Oh, excuse me, you asked about Dean Rusk? I'm sorry. I was thinking of Dean Acheson."

For a time, Rusk's days in the Kennedy Administration seemed numbered. Unlike so many New Frontiersmen, he had no talent for shooting off ideas like a Fourth of July sparkler. He preferred instead to examine each policy as "a galaxy of utterly complicated factors."

"Ideas are not policies," he said. "Besides, ideas have a high infant-mortality rate." Veteran officers complained that he was a sloppy administrator, had failed to galvanize the department's lumbering, 25,000-man bureaucracy.

Soon there was talk that "Rusk is going," and Kennedy was said to have asked one reporter in exasperation, "How do you fire a Secretary of State?"

Besieged by rumors, Rusk remained calm, continued to work twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week (in 34 months, he has had one week off). Eventually, his patience paid off. "I was disappointed in him during the Bay of Pigs," said Kennedy a few months later, "but he's coming back. He's tough now." Though the two were never close (Kennedy always addressed Rusk as "Mr. Secretary"), the President came to hold the highest professional regard for Rusk, declared warmly in the end, "I wouldn't want to make a final decision on a vital matter involving our security until I'd heard his view. He sits on my right."

The Last Half Hour. It was largely thanks to Rusk that Johnson got more of an insight into the mechanics of foreign-policy making than any previous Vice President. To keep Johnson abreast of State Department debates and decisions, Rusk assigned a briefing officer to him fulltime. He recommended that Johnson go abroad often, helped arrange his itineraries. In addition, the Vice President regularly sat in on Cabinet and National Security Council meetings, was a member of the "ExComm" that handled last fall's Cuba crisis. In that capacity he was, in Rusk's words, one of the handful of men involved in "the half hour when we didn't know whether there was going to be another half hour."

Johnson watched Rusk closely during that crisis, admired his forceful argument that the U.S. had no choice but to respond to the challenge of Soviet missiles in Cuba. In the aftermath of Kennedy's slaying, Johnson got further proof of Dean Rusk's mettle.

When Rusk first got the news, he was 35,000 feet over the Pacific, flying to political and economic talks in Tokyo with five other members of Kennedy's Cabinet. For five minutes afterward, there was stunned silence in the cabin. Then Rusk, the ranking officer present, took command. He ordered the plane back to the U.S. and, with cerebral precision, led the others--Treasury's Douglas Dillon, Interior's Stewart Udall, Agriculture's Orville Freeman, Commerce's Luther Hodges, Labor's Willard Wirtz--through a somber colloquy on the problems that Kennedy's successor would face. "There was absolutely no doubt of who was in charge at that tragic moment," said one official who was there.

Georgia Fat Boy. On Johnson's first full day as President, his first official caller at the Executive Office Building was Rusk, who spent 40 minutes with him in a second-floor suite that General "Black Jack" Pershing once used. From then on, Johnson and Rusk were in touch half a dozen times a day, and Rusk sat in when the President held his series of brief private meetings with foreign leaders.

"These are men who understand each other," said an official who watched them operate. "They are relaxed in each other's company." In some ways, they are markedly different. Each has trouble keeping up his staff's morale, but Rusk's trouble grows out of his often icy detachment and Johnson's out of his demands and temper. Johnson has spent most of his life among politicians and Southern tycoons, Rusk among Foggy Bottom types and the sophisticated Easterners of the Rockefeller Foundation, which he directed for 81-years before becoming Kennedy's Secretary of State.

But there are many bonds between them. Johnson, 55, was born in a three-room clapboard house on a small farm in Texas. Rusk, 54, was born six months later in a three-room clapboard house on a tenant farm in Georgia. Johnson likes men who get along with Congressmen, and Rusk excels at that, carefully cultivating the Hill's foreign-relations experts. Georgia's late Senator Walter George, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was especially fond of Rusk, affectionately called him "the Georgia fat boy" (at 195 lbs., Rusk actually has little lard on his 6-ft. 1-in. frame, though his moonface makes him look plump).

Both men are "prudent"--one of Johnson's favorite words. To Rusk, "there is a time to act and a time to wait." In more homespun language, Johnson says the same thing: "Let's get our ducks in a row before we move."

A year or so ago, when people were asking, "What ever happened to Dean Rusk?", Vice President Johnson, often the object of the same question, noted how Rusk stuck to his job. "That," he told an aide, "is the mark of a really great man."

Banked Fires. The chief bond between them now is need--for Johnson plainly needs Rusk's savvy. U.S. politicians have proclaimed a month-long "moratorium" until the Johnson Administration gets oriented, and there is similar talk of a "lull" in foreign affairs. Rusk and Johnson ignore the talk, remembering that Kennedy thought he would have six months to get on his feet, but had to cope with Laos, the Bay of Pigs and Khrushchev's Berlin ultimatum before his Administration was five months old.

"The book of world issues is thick," says one State Department man. "They're going to require decisions." Everywhere the new Administration looks, there are banked fires that could crackle into life at any moment. In the Mideast, the Arab states threaten war if Israel goes ahead next spring with its planned diversion of the River Jordan's waters. In Laos, the fighting between the Communist Pathet Lao and the neutralists could flare any time. In Brazil, runaway inflation threatens the nation with chaos. There are incipient crises in Chile and Haiti, Cambodia and Malaysia, and a shooting war in Viet Nam.

Lesson for Lyndon. An immediate problem is the sorry state of the Atlantic Alliance, with all its attendant problems--the survival of NATO, the future of the proposed multilateral nuclear force, the existence of tariff walls between the Common Market and the U.S. Since mid-October, the U.S., Britain, West Germany and Italy have changed their leaders, a point that Charles de Gaulle, now the senior Western statesman in point of tenure, has not overlooked. A cartoon in the satirical French Weekly Le Canard Enchaine shows Pupils Erhard and Douglas-Home seated before Schoolmaster De Gaulle as Johnson, in short pants, enters the classroom. "Sit down, Johnson," says De Gaulle. "I am going to repeat for you the lesson I have been giving to your little comrades."

To repair the damaged Alliance, Johnson hopes to hold bilateral talks in Washington next year with Erhard, Douglas-Home and De Gaulle. But the French are already beginning to hint that since De Gaulle was just in the U.S., Johnson ought to visit Paris--presumably as a pilgrim to the Delphic shrine.

Overshadowing all else is the question of Johnson's approach to the Communist bloc and the related issues of Cuba and Berlin. Moscow's first reaction to Kennedy's death was one of near panic, caused in part by plain ignorance of Johnson's views, in part by fear that the association of Kennedy's accused assassin with far-left causes would touch off a violent reaction in the U.S. and freeze the tentative thaw that Kennedy was encouraging. Anxious to size up Johnson in a face-to-face meeting, the Russians have already begun pressuring for a summit, possibly next spring in Stockholm. For the moment, Johnson wants no part of it. Neither does Rusk, unless some progress is made on such specific items as the opening of consular offices in several U.S. and Soviet cities or the establishment of air routes. But the British, who seem ready to go to the summit every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, are all for it.

The Front Edge of Change. Under Johnson, as one German foreign officer put it, "I don't think there's much question but what the Secretary of State will play a much bigger role than he did under President Kennedy." For one thing, Johnson has no Vice President to act as his emissary abroad, thus is likely to ask Rusk to do so. Even so, Rusk is no more likely to change his way of doing things than Johnson is to drop his drawl. He will be meticulous, even somewhat plodding when necessary. "It can be a tedious job no matter how glamorous it looks," he says. "We don't deal with great issues as drama. We deal with them by quiet, persistent, repetitive effort. If we can make a quiet contribution to the settlement of a dispute, O.K. And if we don't get any credit for it, O.K. too."

Looking ahead, Rusk believes that the world is on "the front edge of change," and that policies, consequently, will be fluid. "Kennedy's foreign policy was not frozen, nor will our policies now be frozen," he says. He maintains that there will be continuity, since "it is important, for example, for Moscow to know that we stand by our commitments just as solidly as before." But "continuity does not rule out fresh approaches to fresh situations," he adds. "The most important thing is to get on with our work. Every piece of unfinished business is potentially dangerous."

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