Meet Dean Rusk, Early Dove

ONE of the most intriguing Viet Nam documents is an as yet unpublished cable that analysts working on the Pentagon papers studied with fascination. It was sent to President John F. Kennedy in 1961 in response to a proposal from General Maxwell Taylor that the U.S. dispatch 8,000 troops to Viet Nam, ostensibly to work on flood relief. Taylor's recommendation included using the troops to commit American prestige in Viet Nam, to shore up morale and provide a back-up for the South Vietnamese army and to serve as an advance force for a wider American involvement. The cable argued against the recommendations, reasoning that the U.S. could still walk away from Viet Nam at this early stage, but should Taylor's proposals be carried out, Washington would be forced to see its commitments through. Such a course, the cable writer warned, would turn a guerrilla struggle into a full-scale war.

The surprising author of that cable was former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, the same Rusk of the hawkish eyeball that never blinked, the Buddha whose monotonously repeated mantra of justification seemingly never changed through the years of escalation. Contrary to his historic image, did he oppose the first loop in the endless spiral into Indochina? In an interview from his home in Athens, Ga., Rusk broke his long silence. He told TIME Correspondent Jess Cook that he had "no present recollection" of the cable, but "I might well have written it."

Rusk continued: "In 1961 we were in the middle of the negotiations on Laos. Our hope then, especially after the apparent agreement Kennedy had with Khrushchev in Vienna, was that everyone would get out of Laos, a major step toward peace in Southeast Asia. So I was very reluctant at that period to see us go gung-ho in the area until we saw how that worked out." Moreover, Rusk said, the level of infiltration was "still very low," and the Berlin crisis made "a number of us reluctant to make additional commitments in South Viet Nam during that episode."*

Commenting publicly for the first time on the Pentagon papers, Rusk observed, "I never saw or heard of the study until I read about it in the New York Times. I don't know the analysts or how they did their writing. I'm amused at some things, a little irritated at others."

On withdrawal: "Throughout this business, up until the day we left office, President Johnson and myself were not unaware of the fact that one of the alternatives was to get out of there. We're not village idiots."

On the effects of the papers on Government officials: "If the courts hold that this kind of material can be taken out of Government on this basis and made public, it will bring about major changes in the conduct of Government. My habit was that I did not go around writing a lot of memoranda. I've been in Government long enough to know it is not a good idea to spread papers all over the landscape. People will just find other ways to proceed. It will be a little less convenient and future historians will pay some cost."

On Daniel Ellsberg: "I never heard of the fellow myself. I would not know Tim Hoopes [Townsend Hoopes, former Pentagon official who criticized Rusk in The Limits of Intervention] if he walked into the room this minute. Some of these fellows putting thoughts into our minds were never informed about what was actually in our minds."

* Some Rusk associates espouse a third theory. Caught in the McCarthy whirlwind following the fall of China and the Korean War, Rusk came to share with his contemporaries at the State Department a deep distaste for Asian ground wars. The apparent contradiction between his early reservations and his later unswerving support of the war, former officials suggest, can be traced to Rusk's belief that once the U.S. was committed to Viet Nam, it should not withdraw until prevention of a Communist takeover was ensured.

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