by Medford Evans
Reprinted with permission from American Opinion, March 1968
Medford Evans, a former college professor and once Administrative officer on the U.S. atomic energy project (1944-1952), holds his Doctoral degree from Yale University. Dr. Evans’ work has appeared in Harper’s, Sewanee Review, Human Events, National Review, and elsewhere. He has long been an American Opinion Contributing Editor and regular correspondent.It is Rusk’s veiled strength that most impresses the handful of men who deal with him regularly….
—Max Frankel
New York Times Magazine
In April 1962 attorney Clyde Watts and I accompanied Major General Edwin A. Walker (Resigned) as he testified before the Stennis Committee of the United States Senate on “Muzzling of the Military.” It was a year after Walker had been relieved of his command in Germany of the Army’s 24th (“Victory”) Division—an action taken April 17,1961, the same day as the Bay of Pigs (and, like that bloody fiasco, still cloaked in a certain mystery). President Kennedy, Defense Secretary McNamara, and Assistant Defense Secretary Arthur (“Right to Lie”) Sylvester had jumped channels to make sure that Walker was got out of Bavaria, though his operational record there had been distinguished. Oddly involved in the hatchet job on one of America’s finest soldiers was an obscure journalist named John Dornberg, and a well known radio commentator, Daniel Schorr, of the Columbia Broadcasting System.
Before the Stennis Committee (Special Preparedness Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate) General Walker, in a prepared statement, alluded to a “real control apparatus,” a “real decision-making apparatus,” which “through the media of mass communication, the U.S. Department of State, and the information offices of the services” runs the American military.
Explicitly, Walker told the Committee: “There are few more vital questions than: (a) Who controls the Defense Establishment of the United States? (b) How is the control exercised? (c) Toward what end is it directed? The Walker case shows that the apparent controls and the real controls are not the same. [The record reveals that General Walker had received words of praise and admiration for his performance in Germany from every echelon from the Secretary of the Army to enlisted men.] It is evident that the real control apparatus will not tolerate militant anti-Communist leadership by a division commander.”
Senator E. L. Bartlett, Democrat of Alaska, seemed shaken by the foregoing, as well he might have been, and ought to be. All of us ought to be. The Senator slept on it, and next day, Thursday, April 5, 1962, when the Hearing resumed, addressed Walker: “General, may I quote from one sentence of your prepared statement yesterday on page 3. I will quote the entire sentence. You said: ‘It is evident that the real control apparatus will not tolerate militant anti-Communist leadership in a division commander.’ Will you tell us just what you mean by the words ‘real control apparatus'”
Walker: “The ‘real control apparatus’ can be identified by its effects and what it is doing, what it did in Cuba, what it is doing in the Congo, what it did in Korea … the apparatus is those who wanted to see these things happen….”
Bartlett: “. . . there exists in this country in positions of ultimate leadership a group of sinister men, anti-American, willing and wanting even to sell this country out. Is that the correct inference… ?”
Walker: “That is correct; yes, sir.”
To the members of the Senate Committee, sheltered as they were by preconceptions, this thing was beginning to seem uncomfortably incredible. But the man from Juneau mushed doggedly on. “General, I think that the Nation is entitled to know the names of these men, because, according to this statement, they are traitors and ready to let this country go over to our enemies.”
Bardett asked for it, Walker let him have it. The unmuzzled, “Pro-Blue” General named as men whom he would “question…with respect to our constitutional system, our sovereignty, our security, our independence” (ready?) Walt Whitman Rostow and Dean Rusk. There followed a moment of Senatorial consternation. Or perhaps, sitting there at Walker’s side, I only imagined an inward perturbation of the Senators. For they are good men at saving the surface. And perhaps that is really about all there is to save. But think of the implications! A general officer with thirty years’ service in the United States Army, an outstanding if controversial figure in the news for a year, under oath before a Senate Committee identifies as, in effect, enemies of the United States the U.S. Secretary of State and the Chief of the State Department’s Policy Planning Council!*
For the horrified Press there was no recourse but pretense of amused disdain. What’s a reporter to do? Nowadays, attacks on Rusk and Rostow from the Left are treated with respect, but in 1962 an attack from the Right was to be disposed of in the shortest way possible. And the shortest way is laughter. For a time it seemed that supercilious ridicule would do the trick. Rusk himself greeted a staff meeting: “Good morning, comrades!” — a gasser, as Frank Sinatra might say. Yet Rusk didn’t like it a bit when an aide told this to the Press as an example of his boss’s urbane wit. (See Roger Hilsman’s To Move a Nation, Page 42.)
But if it was, and is, after all a matter of opinion as to whether Rusk and Rostow were, and are, enemies of U.S. Constitutional independence. (And, among the intelligentsia a matter of opinion as to whether they should be — for the view is widespread in intellectual circles that national sovereignty is an evil thing.) There was one issue of simple fact raised in this same connection by General Walker. In naming Rastow he identified that eminent M.I.T. professor as one who had “been in control of the operating arm of the CIA … since 1954.” As the Richmond News Leader observed later, “Few of Mr. Walker’s statements excited higher indignation.” Yet, as the journal from Virginia also pointed out, Walker was right, and testimony, largely ignored by the Press, was subsequently published to the effect that the Center for International Studies at M.I.T. was a C.l.A. operation. At the table with Walker in the Caucus Room of the Old Senate Office Building that morning in April 1962, I knew that the General knew what he was talking about. I knew the source inside the C.I.A. where he got the information.
Intellectual fads change as sharply, and as irrationally, as skirt lengths and hairdo’s. In 1967 Mary McCarthv would write of “the sinister Walt Rostow, said to be closest to the cupped Presidential ear,” would speak matter-of-fact-ly of “the ties that have come to light between the C.I.A. and the intellectual community,” would observe that “the C.I.A. has a special rapport with the traitor (who, if he is not bought, is usually an intellectual)….” You understand, this last concerns C.I.A. operations in Vietnam. But philosophical Mary makes a generalization about it. What Mary McCarthy writes in 1967 is sophisticated. When Edwin Walker (correctly) anticipated her by five years he was derided by the sophisticated. No fool like a sophisticated fool.
If General Walker was right about Rostow’s C.I.A. connection. was he also right about Rostow’s underlying hostility to the continued independence of a Constitutional United States? Actually, Rostow has been rather open about this, having written that it is “an American interest to see an end to nationhood as it has been historically defined.” Fair warning you might say. He is now at Lyndon’s right hand. (That being so, who in Hell is at Lyndon’s left hand?)
Even so, Walt Rostow is not nearly so important a man as Dean Rusk. Rusk was the first man Walker named, though the General disclaimed detailed knowledge: “I cannot identify those that are in complete control of the apparatus. I have identified individuals who appear to think on the same lines as the apparatus, which has been a ‘no win’ policy.” In an epicene age General Walker’s rhetoric is seldom a la mode. As a rule, however, he knows what he is talking about. Now, six years after he pinpointed the Secretary of State as “very influential” in achieving objectives of the “real control apparatus” – now, when we have a different President, but the same Secretary of State-perhaps we are in a better position to judge how close the General was to the mark that day in April 1962.
I
Is Dean Rusk the most powerful man in Washington? A tricky question, since no one can be sure that Rusk will even be in Washington by the time these words appear in print. Yet, it is still a question worth asking. One preliminary matter must be dealt with first. What do we mean bv power in an individual? Not physical strength, obviously. Almost as obviously, not intelligence as such. Neither the circus strong man nor the brilliant mathematician is powerful (unless by accident) in the sense we intend.
Money gets us a little closer to the meaning. The rich man has influence. Yet in Washington individual wealth alone is not of great importance. To be sure, there are enough leeches and to spare, from the Capitol to the Pentagon, to take from the man of wealth all he has, but few to give him what he wants. A billionaire is an exceptional Croesus in our time, but his entire fortune is less than one percent of an annual Federal Budget. What is power?
It is rather self-evident that in an organized society the man of power is an organization man. What confers, or implies, power within an organization? Position, to be sure, but not necessarily the top position. The visible summit may be for show. On the other hand, the indispensable base will be composed of too many individuals for any one of them to be thought powerful. There is no Atlas on whose personal shoulders the world of Washington rests. We should remember, by the way, that dictatorship has not been achieved in the United States, and that even our most powerful man — whoever he may be — is not all-powerful, nor, by himself, preponderantly powerful. He will have, as it were, a plurality, not a majority, of the atoms of power. Men vary in the degrees of influence they wield, and it is natural to conjecture that there is one who is more influential — not more than all the others combined, but more than any other one. Who is the Monsieur X?
Whoever he is, he will be what he is in part as a result of his position, while to be sure he may have attained the position as a result of his earlier power to influence. The key position will not always be the same one, for the man makes the position as well as the position makes the man. It will not necessarily, as we have said, be the theoretically highest position, for in practice the grand vizier may be more powerful than the sultan. It will, however, be as a rule a relatively high position. A powerful man alters the position he holds, but he must hold an intrinsically powerful position in the first place if his personal power is to have a fulcrum.
The positions of power in Washington are the executive command posts of the great agencies — the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Attorney General. If these positions are filled by strong men, then among them we may well find the most powerful man in Washington. Yet they are Presidential appointments. How shall we compare them with the President himself? Or, if the President be personally weak, then what of the White House advisors who are closest to the Presidency, which is undoubtedly the position of greatest power? Clearly there are several variables in the question — too many, indeed, for a fully demonstrable answer to our question, Who is the most powerful man in Washington? Most specifically, is it Dean Rusk?
Despite the difficulties, if we identify the factors of power we may guess better at our answer. One factor is simple endurance, the ability to do what Tallevrand said he did in the French Revolution — to survive. Many things contribute to survival, most of them inexplicable, but one contributing factor seems to be freedom from ultimate responsibility. Talleyrand was not a charismatic leader, was hardly regarded as a man of principle. It was only in the long run that he got his way; got it because he did not prematurely insist upon it, got it through patience and the violent actions of others. He might in 1815 have been fairly regarded as the most powerful man in Europe, though he was, of course, never a Head of State, never leader of a Party.
Often found in pivotal positions in the legal power structure are men who, so far from being original sources of decision, actually have no will of their own, but are instruments of another, are channels through which power from outside the government is brought to bear upon the government, and so upon the nation. For this immorality there is a moral reason. Any man is stronger when he fights for someone else. To suppose that self-preservation is the strongest impulse of man is as fallacious as it is commonplace. If it were so, then no man would fight to the death when by flight or surrender he could live. Yet many men in all ages have done just this. The Spartans at Thermopvlae, the Americans at the Alamo, are examples. But we are not concerned simply with heroism. It is often possible to do for another what one cannot do for oneself, easier to do various things for another than for oneself. The division of labor is not only a matter of using special skills, it is also a matter of dividing the burden of decisive action — of dividing the decision from the action.
I learned this principle in a modest way when I was a personnel officer at Oak Ridge. I had no command authority in my department. I was staff assistant to my department superintendent. Occasionally someone had to be fired. I did not have even an opinion of my own in any such matter. The decision to hire X would be made by the superintendent, perhaps on advice from operating supervisors under him. Once the decision was made, I was the one who had to tell the victim. I will not say that this was never unpleasant, but I will say that it never unduly disturbed me. I could in all sincerity be sympathetic with the careless or incompetent technician who had to go but I was completely implacable in the face of suggestions that the matter be reconsidered, for I had simply no authority to reconsider it. My boss, the superintendent, had told me what to do. If the decision was wrong I was not to blame. The boss himself might have suffered pangs of doubt — perhaps even so great that if he had had to face the doomed employee he would have wavered and changed his mind. But I could not change his mind, and I never wavered. Such is the cruel power of organization. The judge is not the hangman.
I think of this when I see men in public life adhering to policies which they would inevitably question themselves if they had the power to do so. But their very lack of power to change their instructions increases their power to dispose of the fate of others. No man could live with the responsibility for the Vietnam War if he had the option of calling it off. No man could both decide on and carry out our policy in Vietnam. Whoever is carrying it out must be the most powerful man in the government, for it takes great power to maintain such a frightful course. At the same time he must be subordinate somehow to someone else somewhere. From which it follows that he is subordinate to someone outside the government while he is superior to everyone inside the government — insofar as the government is a unit, and it has to be some kind of unit to operate.
The most powerful man in an organization is the man who gives the word. On a ship it is the captain, on a football team it is the quarterback. But the captain seldom owns the ship or selects its destination. The quarterback, whom the team on the field must obey, gets his instructions from the coach. Notice that a quarterback without a coach on the bench is at a disadvantage. Tactical power is greatest when free from strategic responsibility. Whoever is quarterback in Washington probably gets his instructions from outside Washington.
I think it likely that Dean Rusk is the most powerful man in Washington. He has shown survival value, and he is undoubtedly an organization man whose organizational ties extend outside the government. His only rival for the quarterback position has been McNamara (we shall see in a moment why L.B.J. himself is not), and McNamara, for all his success in humiliating Generals and Admirals, has never demonstrated as has Dean Rusk the ability to express contempt for the American people as a whole, for the whole American way of life, and get by with it. We shall recur to this point.
But why do I credit Rusk and McNamara (now moving on to head the very important World Bank) with being more powerful than L.B.J.? First, I suppose that all three of them are creatures of the Establishment, but that Rusk and McNamara are more completely so. Lyndon is President because somebody did something about Kennedy. He is, as Robert Sherrill has called him, the “accidental President.” But there is nothing accidental about Rusk and McNamara. Both have remained in key positions throughout both the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. This is actually quite extraordinary.
Nothing is more obvious than that L.B.J. personally would not want the same kind of advisors that J.F.K. had. We are familiar with the differences in “style” between the two Presidents, and it is a matter of record that in spite of talk about continuity — intended no doubt to still suspicions concerning the coup d’etat – L.B.J. has replaced Kennedy’s choices whenever he could. He would not be able to replace either McNamara or Rusk unless he got the word from New York. But it is almost surely Rusk who gets the word, and gives it.
It should be recalled, by the way, that McNamara and Rusk, especially Rusk, were not Kennedy’s personal choices. Both were choices of Establishmentarian Robert A. Lovett. It is widely thought that Kennedy wanted to get rid of Rusk. Then, Kennedy was got rid of. Rusk and McNamara themselves are not sources of power. Both are career employees. But both are such trusted employees that L.B.J. could no more rid himself of their influence than he could fire J. Edgar Hoover, who is also a trusted employee. The difference is that J. Edgar Hoover is trusted by the American people, while we do not know for sure who it is that trusts McNamara and Rusk.
We do know that it is extraordinary for any Secretary of State to endure, as Dean Rusk has done, through the terms of two such very different Presidents as John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Only a few Secretaries of State in U.S. history have served for any length of time under two Presidents. Among the few are Timothy Pickering, who served under Washington and John Adams; John Forsyth, under Jackson and Martin Van Buren; William H. Seward, under Lincoln and Andrew Johnson; John Hay, under McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. In none of these cases was the contrast between Presidents so sharp as with Kennedy and Johnson — except, perhaps, in the case of Lincoln and Andrew Johnson (another of the curious parallels between the two Johnsons). In every case the Secretary of State was an outstanding man. And I think we can say that of Dean Rusk.
Andrew Johnson could not in practice do what any President can do in theory — simply fire one of his Cabinet members. He had no reason to want to fire Seward, who alone stood with him against a hostile Congress. He certainly did, however, want to fire Edwin M. Stanton, his Secretary of War. But Stanton’s support in Congress was so strong that the “Tenure of Office” act was passed, which formalized Congressional pressure to uphold the Cabinet Officer against the Chief Executive. When Johnson proceeded to try to force Stanton’s removal anyhow, he was promptly impeached. Only the Constitutional provision that a two-thirds vote of the Senate is required to convict on impeachment saved Andrew Johnson from being himself removed from office instead of his Secretary of War. Thirty-five Senators voted against the President, nineteen for him. Had it been thirty-six and eighteen. Stanton would have stayed and Johnson would have gone. As it was, the President of the United States in 1868 was demonstrably one of the less powerful figures in Washington- not to be compared with Charles Sumner or Thaddeus Stevens.
There is today no Tenure-of-Office Act, but as a practical matter it seems doubtful that the President of the United States in 1968 could, if he wanted to, fire either “his” Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense. (I should be delighted to be proved wrong.) One of these two, I should say, either Dean Rusk or Robert McNamara, is for the historical moment the most powerful man in Washington. It may be wrong to separate them. Perhaps, like ancient Rome, the Establishment chooses two consuls. But Rusk is clearly more intelligent and better educated than McNamara, far better educated than Lyndon. Is this enough to give him that edge which in any triumvirate, or troika, one man is bound to hold? Of itself, probably not. If Rusk is soft, or if his connections are anywhere weak, then, superior intelligence or not, he could be cut down by a computer (an adder?) like McNamara or a Texas diamondback like Lyndon. On the record, Rusk is not soft, but of an enduring toughness. To appreciate that fact, do this instant replay:
The Korean War and the Vietnam War represent a tremendous turn in the history of nations. They represent, quite possibly, the beginning of the end of nationhood — most notably for the United States, but ultimately for all other nations as well. Since nations must be ended to make way for world government (with its World Bank, and its World everything else) these strange wars represent obscurely the first serious attempts to establish a world order not centering-as did the age of British imperialism – around any national sovereignty. For the nation most heavily committed to both the Korean and Vietnam wars — i.e., the United States — has refused as a major point of policy to make its own national interest the measure of its conduct of either war.
The United States fought in Korea under the banner of the United Nations. The United States in Vietnam, though nosy under its own flag, has an even less clearly defined objective than it had in Korea. In both wars the United States government not only refused to make victory its objective, but took punitive measures against those who sought victory-against General Douglas MacArthur, against General Edwin A. Walker. Since MacArthur was cashiered, no U.S. commander in any field of combat (except Oxford, Mississippi) has been allowed to seek victory. Since the series of persecutions of General Walker, no officer has even spoken in recognizable terms of national victory.
The enormous historical importance of Korea and Vietnam is reflected in the fact that these are the first wars of the nuclear age involving a nuclear power — and in them nuclear weapons have not been used. The United States refused to employ atomic bombs in Korea although by so doing it could quickly and easily have won a victory. Let me confess that I am not sure — arid my uncertainty is based on interior glimpses of the atomic energy project in the years around 1950 — I am not sure that it would have been technically feasible to use atomic weapons in 1950. We were supposed to be manufacturing them, and we were supposed to have them stockpiled. We did have something stockpiled, and in 1951 we started a big testing program in Nevada as well as at Eniwetok. But key men in the whole business were typically opposed to any use of the bomb. Some of these men were philosophical pacifists. Would a pacifist consider himself a traitor if he — as he would see it — spared mankind from nuclear devastation by making sure that any bombs the stupid military tried to use in combat would be duds? Of course it never came to that. Political authority in Washington saw to it that the military never had a chance to find out whether atomic weapons used in battle would go bang or not. In spite of General MacArthur, Washington found a substitute for victory. It was “nuclear stalemate” – which did not require any actual nuclear weapons in a Russian stockpile, but just a flat policy of not using any (in combat) from the American stockpile.
Whatever might have been done in Korea, it is less clear that victory could be won in Vietnam by use of nuclear weapons, for it is not at all clear what would constitute victory in Vietnam. After World War II the United States retreated from victory; in Korea the United States refrained from victory; in Vietnam the United States cannot even define victory. Thus one progresses toward an end of nationhood and — presumably — toward a one-world establishment.
Note, however, that the personal common denominator of the Korean War and the Vietnam War is Dean Rusk.
II
By his role in the Korean War Dean Rusk won a job as head of the Rockefeller Foundation, and by his patience in the Rockefeller Foundation he won the key spot for influence on the Vietnam War. No one has stayed more consistently with the mainline of U.S. foreign policy since World War II than has Dean Rusk, from the time when he was on Vinegar Joe Stilwell’s staff in the C.B.I. theatre, through civilian service in the State and War Departments (apparently a protégé of General George Marshall), through Presidency of the Rockefeller Foundation, through, as Secretary of State, two Administrations – that of Kennedy, that of Johnson.
If Rusk is not the most powerful man in the government (partly because he is not basically dependent on the government), his career has at least coincided with the course of all the consecutive relays of power for twenty-five years. If he has not presided he has been present- in or out of formal government-at sessions of the Establishment where was plotted the course toward an end of nationhood. He is clearly senior to the author of that phrase “end of nationhood” -Walt Rostow, who in his present position as special assistant to Lyndon Johnson “for National Security Affairs” quite possibly has the specific job of acting as the Establishment’s immediate control on the occupant of the White House, while Rusk’s broader responsibility encompasses the entire Administration.
Dean Rusk was Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs in 1950, when the Korean War broke out, and in 1951, when General MacArthur was recalled. The Assistant Secretaryship is, as Roger Hilsman points out, “the first level at which the government of the United States may be committed.” Rusk is said to have been the first man in Washington to whom North Korea’s crossing of the Thirty-Eighth Parallel was reported Saturday night, June 24, 1950 (it was Sunday morning, June twenty-fifth, in Korea) and to have recommended the plausible but fatal action which Truman took. Rusk is thought to have been the key policy advisor in bringing about the removal of MacArthur, an act which more plainly almost than any other marks the Establishment’s determined defiance of the wishes-its exquisite contempt for the sentiments-of the majority of the American people. An act which marks a watershed between the feeling of the people before it that what they knew of patriotic fervor was the spirit of America, and their bewildered apathy after it-a confused sense that patriotic American fervor was increasingly a curious, obsolescent irrelevance, fading away like an old soldier.
Through nine years from 1952 to 1961 Dean Rusk was President of the Rockefeller Foundation, in which position he was at the precise center of those ultra- or supra-governmental activities in which there is so serious an endeavor to anticipate-to control-the future. The President of the Rockefeller Foundation is, as it were, an ex officio member of the shadow world government. The purpose of the Rockefeller Foundation, as stated in its charter, is “to promote the well being of mankind throughout the world” — the ultimate in presumptuous do-goodery, justifying the maximum of self-righteous effrontery.
Shrewdly, the main medium of the Foundation is education. The Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, and other foundations decide what the intellectuals shall think, and from that the consequences are incalculable. From the long-range point of view, Dean Rusk was presumably stepping down when in 1961 he left or was transferred from the Rockefeller Foundation to become Kennedy’s Secretary of State. But no doubt it was felt that in a time of crisis short views are essential. In the long run the Establishment would not have to worry with the nationhood of the United States, but as of the 1960’s U.S. national sovereignty was still extant — to be used by “men of good will” if it could not yet be liquidated by them. What could more surely safeguard “the well being of all mankind throughout the world” than for a man who understood these things, as Dean Rusk undoubtedly does, to assume a position where he might well be able to prevent the United States from inflicting military or other damage on the rest of mankind? Is not the United States, with its enormous nuclear capability and its inveterate racism, of the very greatest danger to “mankind,” while at the same time. with its fantastic productivity and artless generosity it is, if only its foreign relations are expertly controlled, of the greatest hope? The United States must at all costs stand hitched. Dean Rusk accepted the position of Secretary of State.
Of all Cabinet members and other high officials in Washington today, Rusk is the only one who has been continuously in a policy-shaping position since 1950. That does not necessarily mean that he is the most important of policymakers today, or at any one time. For there may well be, undoubtedly are, men out of government who, as he was from 1952 to 1961, are more influential than any governmental official necessarily is. But, as indicated above, the fact that Dean Rusk may now in government represent organized forces outside the government, may only increase his firmness. I feel that he can supervise the liquidation of the United States as unemotionally as I could at Oak Ridge in 1945 process the termination of an employee with whom my superintendent was dissatisfied.
III
After John Kennedy had been elected President by a narrow popular vote over Richard Nixon, but before he knew who his Secretary of State would be, Dean Rusk (then President of the Rockefeller Foundation) gave two lectures in the Claremont Colleges Annual Lecture Series in the Los Angeles area. The precise dates were November 9 and 10, 1960. The President-elect of the country and the President of the Foundation had never met. Indeed they were not to meet until after Kennedy had been so nearly persuaded to offer Rusk the Secretaryship that only one apparently perfunctory interview was required (December 8, 1960) to cement the appointment. The Establishment had its way.
The Claremont lectures are important because they show the way Dean Rusk was thinking at the time he was asked to take the number-one post in the President’s Cabinet. “I sometimes wonder,” said the Secretary of State-soon-to-be, “whether foundations might not consider themselves to have a special parish in what might be called the future.” What odd rhetoric! Wouldn’t you think a man would say “what might be called a parish in the future”? It’s the parish that is figurative, isn’t it? But he says “what might be called the future.” What else would you call the future? But you are not to take it for granted that this sort of transfer is unimportant in the speech of a man like Rusk. If he says “What might be called the future,” it may mean that he has some sophisticated doubt as to whether there will be any future. Or it might mean something you and I would never think of. Or, to be sure, it might mean nothing after all. But the phrase is, as Rusk’s phrases seldom are, arresting- a parish in the future-and it occurs under a heading: “Hard Advance Thinking on World Issues.” One is reminded of John Wesley’s “I look upon the world as my parish.”
That the gospel should be preached throughout the world is not only logical, but also the subject of a Divine command. Now it may be a legitimate extension of this concept to set up charitable or educational foundations of worldwide scope. But that government should aim at universality is to render unto Caesar the things that are God’s. Dean Rusk the Foundation President had a word to the Claremontese which one can recommend to Dean Rusk the Secretary of State: “The standing sin in our foundation business is the human temptation of trying to play God. It takes a good deal of thought and effort and self-criticism and bouncing back and forth with one’s colleagues and people outside to avoid that corrupting influence on which Lord Acton and others have commented.”
Well, if the Rockefeller Foundation, which spends some 30 million dollars a year, can tempt its officials to play God, what shall we think of the federal government, which is spending on the War in Vietnam an estimated 24 billion dollars a year, or eight hundred times as much? In itself, this makes the foundations sound puny. Yet we must reflect that the foundations – Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and others – may succeed in placing their men in government. The thing called the Establishment consists primarily of law firms, foundations, universities and banks (commercial and investment). We are not to suppose, fortunately, that all the people in these interlocking institutions are of one mind; yet obviously you have here a consensus in favor of managerial expertise, you have a discreet but (of necessity) ruthless elitism. The Establishment would not be the Establishment if it did not place its men in government. It is the function of these men to control the government while submitting to the control of the Establishment.
It was Richard Rovere who said that Dean Rusk was the head of the Establishment. Rovere pretends to have tongue in cheek, and in a sense the statement is gravely absurd, but why did the thought occur to him? William Manchester was not writing with tongue in cheek (if he ever does) when in Portrait of a President he referred to Rovere’s article in The American Scholar (I read the one in Esquire), where John Kennedy is placed in the Establishment, but not in “the ‘Inner Circle’ — as, for example, Dean Rusk is.”
Apparently Manchester discussed these subtleties of rank with Kennedy, whom he interviewed in 1961 and 1962 and whom he cites and even quotes directly: “Kennedy himself takes the position that every President is an ex-officio Establishmentarian. The office excepted, however, he doubts his eligibility. Rocking thoughtfully he says. ‘I’m of the Establishment in the sense of where I’ve lived, and my schools, but in the sense of the Anglo-Saxon Establishment-no. When I go to the N.A.M. I get a pretty cold reception; they’re not very sympathetic You really have to be a Republican to be a member. Of course, Nixon doesn’t belong, but Rockefeller is the epitome of it.” (Portrait of a President, Page 102. I have to ask you to take my word for it that I had not read that when I wrote to pretty much the same effect in American Opinion for September 1967.)
“Rockefeller is the epitome of it.” Yes. Well, actually the Rockefeller Foundation more than Rockefeller – much more than poor old Nelson by himself. He’s got brothers, you know. And Dean Rusk was head of the Rockefeller Foundation for nine years. An employee, sure, and nobody is indispensable, but still he staved there nine years, and he didn’t move into the position of Secretary of State against his will. Maybe Rovere himself doesn’t know how much he was kidding and how much he was telling it like it is.
Behind a quiet facade, Dean Rusk is in charge of Vietnam. Roger Hilsman knows a good deal about all this. Hilsman’s book To Move A Nation “had its origins in a Rockefeller Foundation grant” which he got in 1958, when Rusk was still head of the Foundation. Then in the Kennedy Administration Hilsman became Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, which is the job Dean Rusk had at the time of the Korean War. Hilsman thinks of Kennedy as “a hero”; of Rusk it is not so clear what he thinks, but he refers to him once as a man who feels “discomfort in the presence of candor and openness” (Page 41)-which may not itself be such a candid and open way to put something, but if it is meant to imply what it seems to imply….
Hilsman was evidently very conscious of the “veiled strength” attributed to Rusk in that article in the New York Times Magazine quoted at the beginning of this commentary. Probably Hilsman was not surprised when Rusk outlasted McNamara in the Cabinet. To illustrate Rusk’s “wit” Hilsman writes: “When he finally decided to try to get the Vietnamese task force back under the State Department wing, he was able to turn the trick with a phrase. ‘If you want Vietnam,’ he said to McNamara, ‘give me the marines.'” The important thing in that passage is not the wit, but the reminder that Dean Rusk has been at all times senior to the Secretary of Defense in calling the shots on Vietnam. In theory and in fact. To be sure, the two Secretaries were during McNamara’s tenure generally of one mind-both considered “hawks” by Senator Fulbright and the New Left, both considered no-win chickens by many aggressive patriots – but the policy actually followed seems to have been more Rusk’s than McNamara’s, particularly since the latter is no longer at the policy center.
Whether the Secretary of State is in regard to Vietnam more influential than the President is harder to tell. He outlasted Kennedy, whom he criticized after his death for “not putting up more ‘blue chips’ at the very beginning.” (Hilsman, Page 578.) There can be little doubt that he has guided Lyndon Johnson whom he so far excels in knowledge of two fields: (1) the Far East, (2) the American Establishment. So long as the Vietnam War continues, Dean Rusk will have to pass for the most powerful man in Washington until we find out who gives him the word.
*Perhaps the general officer is mad. This possibility, u fate would have ;t, was to be explored some six months later. General Walker was arrested at Oxford Mississippi, in the early fall of 1962 at the time of the military occupation of the University of Mississippi. Flown to Springfield, Missouri, under authority of a virtual letter de cachet issued by Federal Judge Claude Clayton Walker was held in a maximum security cell from which he should most likely never have emerged if he had not had friends and family of considerable wealth and influence, and from which he would have emerged only with the stigma of madness if he had not enjoyed such extraordinarily good mental health —one might say such anti-paranoia — that even the actual persecution to which he had been subjected did not disturb his equanimity, did not prevent ~ liberally qualified Dallas psychiatrist from finding on examination’ char Walker’s mind was functioning at a “superior level.” The General is not mad. He could well say to anxious adherence of the Establishment what Hamlet said to his mother: “Lay not that flattering unction to your soul, That not your trespass but my madness speaks.”