Kennedy had initially hoped to put Rostow in the State Department, to convert a stodgy bureaucracy into a more productive center of fresh foreign policy thinking. But Rostow was unwelcome in a department with so many cautious bureaucrats; he was too full of himself and grand theories they thought were probably unworkable and best avoided. Kennedy then decided to bring him to the White House, where Bundy, with Kennedy’s enthusiastic approval, set up a National Security Council, which was more like a college faculty than a government bureaucracy. Bundy was not eager to hear Rostow’s endless sermons on how to combat communism, but if Kennedy wanted him, Bundy thought it best not to resist. After all, Rostow did meet Kennedy’s standard of an independent thinker who had never been a bureaucratic yes-man uncritically endorsing what higher-ups wanted to hear.
Nonetheless, Bundy and Rostow were strikingly different personalities with little affinity for each other: Bundy, the Brahmin with a birthright to dominate and govern other men; Rostow, the ambitious ethnic with the talent to make his way in a competitive world. The self-confident Bundy expected deference but admired intellectual independence and relished the give-and-take of contested ideas. “Goddammit, Mac, I’ve been arguing with you about this all week long,” an exasperated Kennedy would explode at him during a tense period in the White House. But neither Kennedy nor Bundy would really mind. Nor did Rostow’s affinity for theorizing and exuberance for what Bundy sometimes saw as bad ideas greatly trouble the latter. At one level, he was still the dean arguing with the tenured professor whose ego eclipsed his better judgment.
Bundy recruited other smart academics, chiefly from Harvard, who aimed to reorient the country’s external dealings away from Eisenhower’s brinksmanship and massive retaliation to General Maxwell Taylor’s “flexible response.” The premium was on reducing Soviet-American tensions, inhibiting the arms race, and avoiding a blowup over Berlin and Germany and possible brushfire wars in Asia. Carl Kaysen led Bundy’s list of potential NSC colleagues. A professor of economics who had also been a Junior Fellow at Harvard, Kaysen was invited to focus on trade policy but was free to offer advice on arms control discussions and negotiations, as well.
When another colleague wrote Bundy about a successful conference in Geneva, Switzerland, he replied: “Your description of Geneva makes it sound like the opposite of Washington. There you have serious discussions in an atmosphere of unconcern.” That was the exception here, he complained. But “I think perhaps we are moving toward a period in which we shall be able to take serious decisions, some of them even based on thought.” As far as Kennedy was concerned, however, the State Department and Dean Rusk, the man he chose to head it, did little to advance the administration toward fresh, rational foreign policies.
Adlai Stevenson had wanted the job of secretary of state. There was some precedent for a twice-defeated presidential candidate to become the lead cabinet officer: In 1913, Woodrow Wilson had made William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic Party’s three-time losing White House nominee, his secretary of state. But Wilson owed Bryan: He had made the difference in helping Wilson become the Democratic nominee on the convention’s forty-sixth ballot. By contrast, Stevenson had stood in the way of Kennedy’s nomination by allowing supporters to unreservedly contest Kennedy’s candidacy. Neither Jack nor Bobby thought all that well of Stevenson. True, he had managed to excite liberal enthusiasm, but they saw him as rather prissy and ineffective. He never met their standard of tough-mindedness, on which they put a high premium for service in their administration. Also, they worried that he might forget who was president and who was secretary. But more important, they couldn’t forgive his refusal to support Jack for the nomination, even when they had sent word that they were willing to give him the secretary’s post in return for his early backing. “Fuck him,” Kennedy told an all-out Stevenson supporter after he won the presidency. “I’m not going to give him anything.”
Because Kennedy had asked him to write a foreign policy report during the campaign, Stevenson had some expectation that Kennedy would invite him to head the State Department. Stevenson’s hopes also rested on the conviction that Kennedy needed the backing of party liberals, who remained loyal to Stevenson and wanted to see him at the center of a new Democratic administration. In addition, Stevenson believed that his international standing as a prominent exponent of improved relations with Moscow might carry some weight with Kennedy.
In the end, although Jack and Bobby would have been just as happy to freeze Stevenson out of the administration, they felt compelled to offer him something; they could not ignore his continuing influence with party liberals. Kennedy offered him a choice of becoming ambassador to Britain, attorney general (this was before he turned to Bobby), or ambassador to the United Nations. Stevenson was cool to all these proposals. He unequivocally rejected the London assignment and command of the Justice Department. Despite the prospect of limited impact on foreign affairs, the U.N. ambassadorship at least had the appeal of joining a list that included Eleanor Roosevelt, America’s first representative at the United Nations. Stevenson tested the limits of Kennedy’s patience by saying that he would need to see who was secretary of state before he accepted the U.N. appointment.
Bobby Kennedy remembered the process with Stevenson as “so unpleasant. . . . The President really disliked him. He was so concerned about what he was going to do and what his role was going to be and whether he’d take the position or not that the President almost withdrew it.”
Although Kennedy knew that he didn’t want Stevenson as secretary of state, finding a secretary proved to be more of a problem than Kennedy had anticipated. Part of the difficulty was Kennedy’s ambivalence about the department. He considered it something of a dinosaur, a sort of prehistoric beast that lumbered along with no discernible contribution to the national well-being. Kennedy’s consideration of nominees for the department’s leadership revealed how torn he was between trying to find either someone who could turn it into a useful engine of fresh thinking about overseas problems or else a caretaker who would simply keep it in line while the president and his national security advisers managed the serious work of policymaking.
Kennedy’s impulse to give the department new life registered in his arrangement during the campaign to have Stevenson write a foreign policy report in preparation for the day he would become responsible for the country’s external affairs. At the same time, he asked John Sharon, a Stevenson associate who helped him prepare the report, to give him a “shit list,” as Kennedy described it, “of people in the State Department who ought to be fired.” His inclination to place Bundy and Rostow in the department also suggested his leaning toward making it into a more productive source of constructive foreign policy proposals.
Kennedy’s thoughts of reforming the department found fullest expression in his consideration of Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright as secretary. Kennedy had developed a cordial relationship with Fulbright during their service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which Fulbright chaired. Kennedy viewed Fulbright as a match for Bundy and Rostow. A star football player at the University of Arkansas, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and president of the University of Arkansas from 1939 to 1941, Fulbright was a combination of brains and athletic skill that Kennedy admired. He also shared Fulbright’s affinity for internationalism, which had made Fulbright an early supporter of U.S. commitment to the United Nations and a program of international student exchange that, beginning in 1946, enjoyed institutional standing in the United States as the Fulbright Fellowship Program.
When Schlesinger talked to Kennedy on December 1 about the State Department, “it was clear that his thoughts were turning more and more to Fulbright. He liked Fulbright, the play of his civilized mind, the bite of his language and the direction of his thinking on foreign affairs.” Bobby Kennedy had the same impression: “The President was quite taken with having Fulbright. . . . [He] had worked with Fulbright and thought he had some brains and some sense and some judgment. . . . He was the
only person mentioned as Secretary of State whom he knew.”
But Bobby talked Jack out of appointing him, even if it was only after heated arguments. Having signed a southern manifesto opposing the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregating schools, backed a 1957 filibuster against the first major civil rights law since Reconstruction, and signed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Governor Orval Faubus’s opposition to integrating Little Rock’s Central High School, Fulbright had openly identified himself as an unequivocal supporter of segregation. Bobby convinced Jack that Fulbright would be a liability in dealing with Africa and Third World nations generally. It was no small consideration: Winning the contest with the communists for the hearts and minds of Third World peoples was a Kennedy priority. His appointment of Rostow partly rested on Rostow’s identification as an economist aiming to draw developing countries into the Western camp. A secretary of state who rejected equality for people of color would give Moscow and Peking an advantage in emerging nations deciding between East and West. In addition, Fulbright’s opposition to “an all-out anti-Nasser policy,” implying a degree of sympathy for Egypt and other Arab nations, also made Jewish supporters of Israel distrustful of Fulbright and potential vocal opponents of his appointment as secretary of state.
With Fulbright eliminated from the competition, the job fell to Dean Rusk as a kind of consolation prize, though Rusk never saw it that way. Bobby Kennedy may have best captured the spirit in which Rusk won the appointment when he said later, “It finally had come down to where everybody had been eliminated—and Rusk was left. . . . Time was running out. We had to get somebody. . . . So the President—he had never met him—invited him down to Florida and asked him right away. So Rusk was selected, not for any great enthusiasm about him as such, although people spoke highly of him.”
It was not as if Rusk was without credentials. Born in rural Georgia in 1909, the fifty-one-year-old Rusk was a classic example of the self-made man. A graduate of Atlanta’s public schools, Rusk worked his way through Davidson College in North Carolina, where he played basketball, commanded his Reserve Officers’ Training Corps battalion, and graduated at the top of his class. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar in 1931, he spent the next two years at Oxford before studying in Germany during the first year of Hitler’s regime. His exposure to Nazism deepened an affinity for Wilsonian pacifism and moved him to write an essay on British relations with the League of Nations, which won him the Cecil Peace Prize. From 1934 to 1940 he taught at Mills, a women’s college in Oakland, California, while also attending the University of California, Berkeley’s Boalt Hall Law School. In 1940, foreseeing American involvement in World War II, Rusk joined the U.S. Army, where he won the rank of colonel as a staff officer to General Joseph W. Stilwell in the China-Burma-India Theater. Posted to the operations division of the general staff in Washington in 1945, Rusk helped identify the 38th parallel as the dividing line between U.S. and Soviet forces in Korea. At the close of his military service in 1946, Rusk became a State Department official focused on United Nations affairs. Proving himself a master of the department’s bureaucratic ins and outs, he rose to deputy undersecretary of state, becoming a favorite of Secretaries of State George Marshall and Dean Acheson.
Rusk endeared himself to Acheson in 1950 when he accepted appointment as assistant secretary for Far Eastern affairs. The communist victory in China in 1949 had opened the department, especially its Asian specialists, to attacks from right-wing politicians, led by Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, for having “lost” China. Rusk spent the next twenty-one months echoing the Truman administration’s defense of its China policy published in the State Department’s China White Paper; rationalizing the White House decision to expand the fighting in Korea above the 38th parallel, which trapped the United States in a stalemated war; and helping negotiate the 1951 Japanese Peace Treaty. Resigning from the department in December 1951, Rusk became president of the Rockefeller Foundation, where he was serving when Kennedy invited him to become secretary of state.
When Kennedy offered Rusk the job in mid-December, it wasn’t simply that he was the last man standing, though Kennedy had pretty well exhausted the list of candidates. Rusk in fact satisfied Kennedy’s vision of what a secretary of state in his administration should be. After their initial meeting at Kennedy’s Georgetown house, where, according to Rusk, Kennedy never raised the prospect of his becoming secretary, Rusk told a friend, “We couldn’t communicate. If the idea of my being Secretary of State ever entered his mind, it’s dead now. We couldn’t talk to each other. It’s all over.” From Kennedy’s vantage point, however, Rusk’s passive or low-key style was desirable. Kennedy described Rusk after their meeting as “lucid, competent, and self-effacing,” hardly the sort of enthusiastic endorsement a new president usually provides for a high-level appointee.
When Kennedy called the next day to offer him the job, Rusk asked that they meet again before either of them made a final decision. Kennedy agreed and invited him to fly to West Palm Beach, where he had gone for a vacation. As Rusk sat in Kennedy’s living room, waiting to see the president-elect, he noticed a copy of the Washington Post sitting prominently on a coffee table—it announced Rusk as secretary of state. When Kennedy entered and saw the headline, he “blew his top,” asking Rusk if he was the source of the leak. Told no, Kennedy called Post publisher Philip Graham to chide him for printing the story. After Graham explained that Kennedy was the one who had told him, Kennedy said, “But that was off the record.” Hardly, since it was exactly what Kennedy wanted: Kennedy had no interest in giving Rusk a choice of accepting; he was compelling him to take the job, and by forcing the issue, was also making clear that Rusk was now under the president’s command.
As Kennedy already understood, Rusk was the sort of man who would take orders without complaint and do the president’s bidding. Indeed, it was Rusk’s diffidence that especially appealed to Kennedy. With Fulbright, Bundy, and Rostow eliminated from service in the department, Kennedy planned to concentrate control of foreign policy strictly in the White House, specifically with Bundy’s emerging team of high-powered national security advisers. Kennedy had read an article Rusk had published in the journal Foreign Affairs, titled “The President.” It argued for a return to presidential dominance of foreign policy making, a shift away from what had allegedly been the arrangement between Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Moreover, the journalist Walter Lippmann’s description to Kennedy of Rusk as a “profound conformist” who “would never deviate from what he considered the official view” was additional confirmation for Kennedy of what he now wanted in the State Department. As a friend of Schlesinger’s told him, Rusk was “the lowest common denominator,” meaning he would be the least controversial and most compliant of the several men Kennedy had considered.
Once in office, Rusk was promptly seen as the gray eminence in an administration of scintillating figures. Mindful of the image he had taken on at the Kennedy White House, Rusk would jokingly say that in this crowd of dazzling characters “he looked like the friendly neighborhood bartender.” When Warren Christopher, another understated personality, served as secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, critics would joke that Christopher was another Dean Rusk, without his charisma.
Rusk’s caution was the consequence not just of his persona but also of a conviction that a secretary of state is obliged to stand in a president’s shadow. As Rusk’s son, Richard Rusk, said, his father “believed that a secretary of state should never show any blue sky with his president, that policy differences between them must remain confidential, and that failure to do so weakens an administration.” Rusk was obsessed with maintaining confidentiality: He resisted making records of phone conversations with Kennedy or having secretaries prepare memos of conversations. He had regular sweeps of his home and office for “bugs,” lest any government agency be recording his conversations. “His passion for secrecy was so strong,” his son adds, “th
at after leaving office, he went back to the State Department, pulled out his copies of telephone memos of conversations with his two presidents, and threw them away.”
Rusk’s prudence made him the butt of some hostile Washington humor spread by McGeorge Bundy. During a White House meeting in the Oval Office between only Kennedy and Rusk, when the president asked his opinion, Rusk is supposed to have whispered: “There’s still too many people here, Mr. President.” While Rusk compulsively deferred to the president, he was less accommodating toward others in the administration, especially competitors for the president’s ear on foreign policy. He would have his share of differences with Bundy and others in the national security bureaucracy who saw Rusk’s restraint as amounting to a State Department foreign policy vacuum that they had no choice but to fill.
Yet Rusk was never as passive and self-effacing as he pretended to be. He had quietly lobbied for his appointment. The publication of his Foreign Affairs article in the spring of 1960 was no accident. It was meant to send a message to any Democrat who might get the nomination. Moreover, letters to Kennedy recommending Rusk for the post were part of an orchestrated campaign. His silence in the face of the not-so-quiet Washington gossip about his meekness angered him; he once told a colleague that “it isn’t worth being secretary of state” when a president gives so much preference to his White House national security team. But it wasn’t just White House competitors who ignored Rusk; some in the State Department, unhappy with his caution, soon saw fit to bypass him, graphically belittling his habit of protecting his private parts.