Rusk A, Interview with Dean Rusk, circa 1985

RICHARD RUSK: We had one interview already that was not on tape. If you need to know what the contents of that interview involved, you will find it in my notes dealing with the Rockefeller Foundation years. I don't see any point in repeating what has already been said for the benefit of the tape. Basically, what my dad talked about then was just an overview of the Foundation, some of its guiding principles, his appointment to the presidency, a little bit of information of the Cox Committee and Reece Committee hearings in 1952 regarding the assault upon the tax exempt status of philanthropic foundations. But I will have a synopsis of all of that in written note form if you want to see it. My 00:01:00first question is about John D. [Davison Rockefeller], Sr. He has a reputation in the public mind as being a rather ruthless fellow and yet he was obviously, as you heard of him and as has been stated in the books, a very humane fellow who did many great things as well with his foundations. How do you explain this apparent contradiction in these two themes of his life?

DEAN RUSK: He was a man of his own age, which some people call the age of the "robber barons." He was very vigorous in his organization of the Standard Oil Company and moved in many ways to make money. He once said that a man should make all he can, and spend all he can, and give all he can but he should not get the two mixed up. So he, as a businessman, pursued his business with energy. And 00:02:00he had a great capacity for bringing around him people of talent to help him out in his business activities. He used some methods which would not be possible today, would not be accepted today; would not be lawful today, some of them. And he was among those who developed the big, so-called "trusts," an expression that was used in those days, which stimulated an anti-trust movement and gave rise to anti-trust legislation by the government. But from his earliest days, from his childhood, he had had a practice of tithing, of giving something of whatever he earned to the church. And as he made more and more money, he gave more and more money. And his earnings got to a point where they would almost suffocate him, so 00:03:00he turned to major philanthropies rather quickly and rather naturally. It was a simple thing for him to do. He started out with work on public health: some of the Rockefeller boards got involved in the hookworm problems here in the South. He established a General Education Board before he established the Rockefeller Foundation, as a stimulus to the improvement of education in the United States. And that was a major contribution in those early days of education, particularly here in the South.

RICHARD RUSK: Was it a contradiction that ever bothered members of the Rockefeller family to the extent that you came to know them--John D. [Davison 00:04:00Rockefeller], Jr., for example--this business about tainted money?

DEAN RUSK: I don't think so. I think there was the feeling that philanthropic money lost its taint. I never encountered anyone who was reluctant to receive any grants from the Rockefeller Foundation because of some of Mr. Rockefeller Sr.'s business practices. By the way, he organized the General Education Board and the Rockefeller Foundation before there was any income tax, so there was not a strong tax incentive for him to give all this money away. He simply had other motivations for that. It was during the teens when the amendment to the 00:05:00Constitution was passed permitting the Congress to impose income taxes. But that came after the establishment of the General Education Board and the Rockefeller Foundation.

RICHARD RUSK: You made reference to the problem of hookworm in the South. You lived in the South at the time when that was still a problem. It was one area that the Foundation went into with great success according to [Raymond Blaine] Fosdick's book. Would you care to think back and comment upon hookworm and what you remember of the Foundation's work?

DEAN RUSK: When I was a small boy in Cherokee County, things like worms, seven-year itch, typhoid fever, pellagra, things of that sort were looked upon more or less as part of the environment in which the good Lord had put us. And so I can remember some of those earlier efforts at hookworm. The principal 00:06:00answer to hookworm was fifty cents worth of medicine and then wearing shoes. I remember when I went into the sixth grade our teacher told us that we now had gotten old enough to wear shoes; we shouldn't come to school barefooted any more. There is no doubt in my mind as I look back on it that that was a part of the hookworm campaign. And so I went home and reported that to my mother. And my mother wouldn't accept that, so she sent me to school the next day barefooted, which was a little embarrassing. But when some of those teams first came into the South to start the hookworm campaign, they were driven out of some towns and 00:07:00areas with sticks and stones. These Yankees coming in here to get rid of what they call our "lazy worm."

RICHARD RUSK: I read an editorial comment in Fosdick's book to the extent that the editor had asked, "What about this lazy disease in view of the fact that it took five Yankees to defeat one Confederate soldier?"

DEAN RUSK: Well anyhow, there was a little cultural lag there. But you see, when various efforts were made in the field of public health in those early days, they soon learned that you could not get very far with public health without improving education, because people had to understand what the problem was. And so they did a good deal of work. No, that was the only incident that I person ally ran across. One heard about them in other places. But you see when 00:08:00they started to work on public health problems in the South, they soon learned that you couldn't get very far with that without improving education. Then when they got into the business of improving education, they soon discovered that you couldn't do much about education unless there was a steady increase in economic life so that you could pay for education. Well, that powerful combination of education, public health and steadily increasing productivity just transformed the life of Cherokee County in my lifetime. As a matter of fact, many years later when 1 was talking to the foreign ministers of the Western Hemisphere about some of the development problems, I took a little time off and talked about my earliest boyhood and this combination of these three major elements.

RICHARD RUSK: Was that at Punta del Este?

DEAN RUSK: Yeah. And many of them remarked to me about that. Then in the 00:09:00sixties we, out of a reflection upon our own experience in development in this country, turned away from the glittering kind of aid projects that were stylish in some developing countries, like steel mills and football stadiums and things like that. And we began to concentrate more and more on these three fundamental things: education, public health, and increased productivity. Of course, the United States had a lucky accident--I suppose you can call it an accident--when in the [Abraham] Lincoln administration they invented the land grant college system in this country. And there, manpower, teaching, research were mobilized 00:10:00to address themselves to those things which were critically important to economic development: for example, agriculture and engineering. They used to call a lot of those colleges A&M colleges: agriculture and mechanical colleges. And that had an enormous impact upon the economic growth of the United States. Among other things it taught us at a very early stage that it was dignified for an educated person to get his or her hands dirty, to get out and work. This aristocratic view toward work has held back a good many of these developing countries simply as a social factor, directly related to development. When the Rockefeller Foundation would send top scientists, especially south, to developing countries to work, one of the first things that they would do would be to get out in the fields and get their feet and hands dirty and let people see them getting themselves dirty to set an example to their own edcated 00:11:00people. And that has been a very important element which is still a problem in a good many places.

RICHARD RUSK: As a general rule, the Foundation tried to work through third-party agencies and existing governments to go ahead with this work. Were there cases where the Rockefeller Foundation itself staffed and provided the organization and the agency to conduct some of these projects?

DEAN RUSK: Well we had key staff in the early days in public health programs in various countries: for example, during the battle against yellow fever. But when we went into a serious agriculture program, say in Mexico or Colombia, we put a number of our staff in there but we also associated with them, from the very beginning, local people. And we tried to get the local people trained into the 00:12:00job so that if we ever left that effort there would be something left behind. We never completely staffed any particular project of that sort overseas, but the staff that we did send out was generally a very talented staff. The trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation generally took the view that unless you could find really top people to do this work you had better just stay at home.

RICHARD RUSK: Getting back to hookworm for a minute: Were you folks aware of the fact that the Rockefeller Foundation was behind that campaign?

DEAN RUSK: Well, there were various Rockefeller boards that were, at the very beginning, involved with it. I don't recall that we were conscious of the origins of some of this work.

RICHARD RUSK: They tried to keep their name out of the headlines.

DEAN RUSK: That's right. The Rockefeller Foundation has pretty much taken the 00:13:00view that as philanthropy they themselves should not claim credit simply because they put money in behind the brains and capabilities of other people. And so we weren't looking for public applause and things of that sort. As a matter of fact, during my years as president of the Foundation there were various and sundry people who wanted us to go in for much more of a public relations effort, particularly as a result of these congressional investigations. But I took the view that philanthropic money should not be used to generate a public appreciation of the work that we were doing.

RICHARD RUSK: True. Yet it remains a shame that when I go to this local library at the University and try to find material on the Rockefeller Foundation, there is a lot of material written by the Rockefeller Foundation, but only Fosdick's book on the Foundation itself. And isn't it, in retrospect, something of a shame 00:14:00that there hasn't been at least a little bit more public awareness, if not appreciation, for the work the foundations have done?

DEAN RUSK: Well, I suppose we have been moving more and more into periods when everybody seems to think you ought to have a pat on the back. But we made public every dollar we spent so that anybody who wanted to inspect what we were doing had an annual report which reflected everything we spent. And I think it is important that foundations are completely public in how they handle this tax exempt money. But that is quite different from promoting yourself, trying to win a public position, because I think it is much better for foundations to work 00:15:00quietly behind the scenes and get quiet satisfaction from good jobs done by other people with the money you were able to supply. Now I must confess it isn't easy to give away money in a fertile fashion. And as a matter of fact, it is a very difficult thing to know how fairly limited foundation funds can be used to the best advantage in the midst of all of the other resources that are now going into such things as education, public health, and things of that sort.

RICHARD RUSK: What about this phenomenon of "Greeks bearing gifts" and people's natural aversion to that sort of thing? Did you ever encounter that as president of the Foundation, where recipient countries or peoples might be a little suspicious of what you were trying to do?

DEAN RUSK: No, that was a fairly simple thing to deal with because we never 00:16:00pressed ourselves in upon anybody. We were always ready to take the next plane home and everybody knew that. And that relieved us of any sense that somehow we were trying to exploit them in any way, because if they didn't want it we were ready to turn somewhere else. I remember that one of my scientific colleagues was visiting in Europe and he visited a very distinguished scientist over there. And my colleague asked him if he would like some funds to put in some of the most modern equipment in the field in which he was working. This man said, "No, I am not going to become a prisoner of machines. I will just sit here in my study with my mind and ray slide rule and use my brain. Thank you very much but 00:17:00I don't need your help." And we respected that.

RICHARD RUSK: What about when the Foundation went to a country like England or France, societies which have existed well longer than we have? Did you encounter any of this suspicion?

DEAN RUSK: Well, there was in the early days a little tension between what might be called the Anglo-American clinical approach to medicine and the classical attitude of the continent in terms of how you teach doctors. On the continent, traditionally, doctors were trained through purely the lecture method. There was very little laboratory work. A prospective doctor had very little chance to work in directly laboratories with materials that he should be working on. And that established a pattern that we found in many places in the 00:18:00developing world, particularly Latin America. Whereas the British and the Americans had turned to the clinical side with considerable vigor at an early stage. So there has been a kind of contest between those two fundamental approaches to medicine and training of doctors. In one or two cases in Latin America we helped them to create completely new schools of medicine to take this clinical approach, thinking it was easier to do that than try to convert some of the older, traditional medical schools into the new attitude. Ribeirao Preto in Brazil, for example, was a new medical school which was started off for the purpose of putting a much larger increment of clinical work into its training.

RICHARD RUSK: Fosdick, in his book, stated that the Foundation had contacts and relations with 93 countries by 1950. He said for the most part they were good relations. One country that the Foundation was not able to establish good relations with, or any relations with really, was Russia. Now, during the next ten years when you were president, perhaps even in later years as well, has the Foundation been more successful in establishing contacts and getting underway some programs? I imagine it would have been a very difficult thing to do right after the congressional hearings in 1952, in view of the tension that was in the air at that time.

DEAN RUSK: The Russians were not on the same wavelength in terms of academic freedom, scientific research, and things of that sort. But even there, there were times when we made some gestures. For example, at one point during the 00:20:001950s a new wheat rust appeared in about four different places in the North American continent simultaneously, and that fact alone suggested that these new varieties of wheat rust had come in from outside the hemisphere because if there was a mutation in one here locally, it would start there and then it would spread like an ink blot from there. And so, we guessed that this new wheat rust had come in by high-altitude, high-velocity winds from the wheat growing areas of the Soviet Union. [We had] no idea at all that they were doing this intentionally. That wasn't the point. So we tried to establish some contacts with the Russians to do some joint work on wheat rust because there is a 00:21:00continuing battle between the wheat breeders and the mutating wheat rust to see who is going to come out on top. But at that time the Russians were not interested, and we understood that it was because they thought that somehow wheat rusts were involved in biological warfare and just didn't want to get into that with us. I was told also during the fifties by the head of the American Red Cross that they had tried to establish contact with the Russians about methods used in preserving blood in blood banks. The Russians, at the beginning, would not cooperate on that because they thought that that was a military problem and that we ourselves would not be open with them about what we knew about preserving blood. It took the head of the American Red Cross quite a while to convince the Russians that whatever we did know on that subject was in the 00:22:00public domain. But in Mexico during the fifties one of our fellows came up with a blight-resistant potato. Now Mexico is one of the ancient homes of the potato and of the potato blight. So if you get a blight resistant potato in Mexico, you've really got something. Well, the Mexicans, with our knowledge and understanding gave a bag of these blight-resistant potatoes to some visiting Russian scientists who happened to be in Mexico. Well, a year or so later one of our own Foundation colleagues was in the Soviet Union and visited the place to which this blight resistant potato had been sent. He asked to see what they had done with it, and he found that they had planted the blight resistant potato alongside of Russian potatoes in sterile hothouses. Under those conditions, the Russians potatoes did just as well as the blight-resistant potato. They wouldn't put them out in the fields where the blights were where they might have gotten a real test on them because, I suppose, for some reason they didn't want to acknowledge that maybe this was in some respects a superior--Well, Soviet agriculture was dominated for many years by a man named [Trofim Denisovich] Lysenko. He had some views which were simply not accepted generally by world agricultural scientists: for example, those environmental factors played the crucial role with the yields of food crops, rather than genetic factors. And so, under his direction, the Soviet agricultural scientists fell maybe twenty-five 00:23:00years behind world agricultural scientists. But with the departure of Mr. [Nikita Sergeevich] Khrushchev, this scientist Lysenko also departed and the Soviet Union since has been catching up very fast with world agricultural science.

RICHARD RUSK: Has there been greater interplay now between the Rockefeller Foundation and groups in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe?

DEAN RUSK: I don't know what the Foundation has done now. I remember when I was at the Rockefeller Foundation, John Foster Dulles, who was then Secretary of State, called me on the phone one day and asked if I thought the Foundation could initiate some scientific exchanges with Poland. He said he thought it would be a very good thing to do, but it was a little premature for the government to get involved. So we sent a couple of our scientists off on a trip to Poland and talked to a number of scientists and tried to locate some of their brightest and ablest younger people who might enjoy some further training or 00:24:00further experience somewhere. And we extended some invitations for several of these Polish young scientists to accept Rockefeller Foundation fellowships. Well when the first group arrived, I myself went out to the airport there in New York to meet them. I had with me a member of our staff who happened to speak Polish. When one of these scientists got off the plane he kneeled down and kissed the runway and broke into tears. He said he never dreamed that such a thing could happen. It was just a tremendously moving thing for these Polish scientists to come out and be fully exposed to scientists in Western Europe and the United States. Of course, we had another activity related to Eastern Europe which was 00:25:00perhaps not politically cooperative. But when the Russians moved their troops into Hungary in the mid-1950s, there was serious fighting in Budapest. The big medical center there was practically destroyed because some of the heaviest fighting went on there. So when the fighting had calmed down, I went to Budapest myself under the auspices of the International Red Cross to see if the Rockefeller Foundation could be of any help in restoring such things as this medical center. Meanwhile, we were giving scholarships and fellowships to many of these young Hungarian students who had been caught up in this fighting and then had had to flee the country and pursue their education elsewhere. One of 00:26:00the most moving evenings I ever had in my life was the evening I spent in Vienna where a group of these Hungarian student refugees who insisted upon meeting with me to express their appreciation for what the Rockefeller Foundation was doing to make it possible for them to pick up their lives and keep them going despite the events in Hungary.

RICHARD RUSK: There is a letter in Fosdick's book from a Hungarian that deals with that. Is this the same meeting where one Hungarian told you he personally knocked out five or six Russian tanks in Budapest?

DEAN RUSK: I don't remember that particular point. But there are so many things in which we and the Russians ought to be cooperating willingly and freely. I 00:27:00have long felt that we and Canada and the Soviet Union ought to be putting in a lot of time, cooperatively, on the problems of the far north, the frozen tundra, what could be done with that. How could people adjust themselves to those circumstances? Can we develop plants that can grow in such areas? All sorts of things can be done on a cooperative basis, but it isn't easy to get them fully cooperative in things like that.

RICHARD RUSK: Ideas are dangerous to that society. They are reluctant to bring people in who are used to freedom of expression.

DEAN RUSK: There are those who think, and I am inclined to be one of them, that on this kind of point the Russians face a real dilemma. Because if they are going to be successful in their sciences, they have got to free people's minds from party control. And if you free people's minds in one field, they are 00:28:00inevitably going to be having thoughts about other matters. Now, in general, I think it is true that they have pretty much liberated their nuclear physicists and their space scientists, and now their agricultural scientists, from close party supervision. I hope that steadily expands because that is all to the good if they will bring themselves to do that.

RICHARD RUSK: You made the point earlier that the Rockefeller Foundation often had better relations with some of these third world countries than our own government did, and you used as an example Dulles 'attempt to get at the memoranda of conversation of the Rockefeller Foundation staffers going overseas'. There has been a shift in attitude between our country and some of these Third World countries since then. Has that affected the work of the 00:29:00Rockefeller Foundation? Some of this might have been going on during the years you were president, but it has probably continued since you left that position. Does the foundation still have these close ties?

DEAN RUSK: I dont know how it is now. You would have to get that from the people at the Foundation now. But throughout my period there at the Foundation we were pretty well accepted for what we were: a private philanthropy with no political fish to fry, with no direction from our government, no reporting back to our own government. And that opened up intimate relations of a sort that sometimes appeared to be more intimate than, say, an American ambassador could achieve. Now, I must say that American ambassadors in these countries welcomed anything that the Rockefeller Foundation would do in their particular countries because there is inevitably a by-product of good will for the United States out 00:30:00of that kind of work of an American foundation. But we tried to protect that relationship by not saying or doing things that might be embarrassing to those with whom we were dealing. We just did not look upon politics as our business. We tried to stay out of it as much a possible.

RICHARD RUSK: When you first took the job as president of the Foundation, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. advised you to head to the wilderness, more or less, and take a fe weeks off and just think about the question of what you could do and what the Foundation could do to best utilize all this money and this potential for the betterment of mankind. You had to immediately jump into this Reece and 00:31:00Cox Committee testimony in Congress, and never had the chance to take that time off and address those questions. Had you had your six or eight weeks in the wilderness and had a chance to think that one over--

DEAN RUSK: Mr. Rockefeller suggested three or four months.

RICHARD RUSK: Would you and the Foundation have done anything different than, in fact, what you ended up doing in the fifties? I suppose a related question to that would be, did the trustees themselves and the executive staff of the Foundation at various times just sit down and ask those big basic questions as to direction and the ultimate goals?

DEAN RUSK: Mr. Rockefeller did not want the Foundation always to be tied to its 00:32:00own past. He did not want it to fall into a rut. He wanted always the possibility of new and fresh ideas to come in. His suggestion on that, I think, was very useful. But the trouble was that because of the Congress and its investigating committees, t had to do just the opposite and go back and become intimately familiar with everything the Rockefeller Foundation had done in the past. But the trustees during that period would occasionally have trustee review committees to give thought to the direction of the Foundation. I also made a point of trying to visit each trustee at his home base about once a year just to talk over that kind of question. Now in the process, we began to pull back from medicine and public health because such enormous resources on a national and international basis were coming into that field that it would seem that the 00:33:00marginal contributions of the Foundation would be relatively slight. On the other hand, as my president's reports will indicate, we became increasingly concerned about what was going to happen in the third world countries. So we stepped up our interest in the third world, particularly in agricultural programs and in education. You see, if you look around the world, in all of Latin America, Africa, Asia, you probably would not find a single university that would be qualified to be admitted to, say, the American Association of Universities, this group of, say, top fifty universities in this country. Now you can well understand that for historical reasons. But my view was that if 00:34:00that should be true in another thirty or forty years that that would be a great shame. And so we tried to encourage the development of first- class capability in some key universities here and there. So that was a rather different swing.

RICHARD RUSK: Incidentally, what happened to Peking U.?

DEAN RUSK: The Peking Union Medical College was set up separately after a time with its own endowment, The China Medical Board.

RICHARD RUSK: Fosdick left the story in 1950. Now I am not sure that what was done by the Foundation with the Peking Union Medical College was quite the way 00:35:00to do it, because it was done on such a lavish scale and such an almost luxurious standard that it was not easily reproducible in other places in China or in Asia. We probably should have concentrated more on building high quality into something which would be more accessible to others. But anyhow, when the communists came in, they took that over and used that as a part of their attempt to erase all traces of friendly attitudes between the Chinese and the America people when they first came to power in China. They seemed to take the United States as enemy number one in those days. I remember that they charged that the Peking Union Medical College had been established simply to let Americans practice vivisection on the Chinese and things like that. But even during the time that I was president of the Foundation we would occasionally get messages 00:36:00from some of the doctors at the Peking Union Medical College, very indirectly and very discreetly, saying to us, "Don't worry, we are still here. We are going to go ahead with this work."

RICHARD RUSK: They continued to function as a medical college?

DEAN RUSK: Yes, and now they are a very important medical college in Peking. But the Foundation had made contributions to Yale's effort in China, Harvard's effort in China. There had been a lot of interest in China in the early days of the Rockefeller Foundation.

RICHARD RUSK: John D. Rockefeller, Sr., looking back as an old man upon the 00:37:00Foundation, seemed to be rather pleased with what had happened. Fosdick quoted him as saying to [Frederick Taylor] Gates at one point: "We built better than we knew." He was also of the point of view that this was not something that should last forever and that probably by the third generation of Rockefellers it would be well for the thing to go out of existence. My question is, what's going to happen to the Foundation? The third generation of Rockefellers apparently don't express a whole lot of interest in getting in there with that family fortune and making it work.

DEAN RUSK: The third generation are the five Rockefeller brothers. It's the fourth generation which has not pressed itself.

RICHARD RUSK: You're right, with the possible exception of Jay [John Davison Rockefeller ].

DEAN RUSK: You see, it has been traditional for only one member of the Rockefeller Foundation to be a member of the Board of Trustees

RICHARD RUSK: Do they need the personal involvement of the Rockefeller family 00:38:00to continue to make that a going concern?

DEAN RUSK: Well, Grandfather Rockefeller and Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. did not want the Foundation to become a purely bureaucratic organization without any sense of the motivations that had led them to set it up in the first place. And so, they sort of passed along the thought that maybe the Foundation ought to be liquidated at the end of the third generation. Well, our trustees dis- cussed that and came to the conclusion that we should not liquidate just to liquidate, that if something came along where the resources of the Rockefeller Foundation could make a crucial difference to achieve a major purpose, then of course they 00:39:00would throw everything they had into it, such as something that would produce peace in the world. However, the General Education Board, of which I was also president, did in fact liquidate during my period. You see the General Education Board had, in supporting education in the United States, made a considerable number of endowment grants to capital funds of colleges and universities. But when you get in the business of making capital grants you are in a very expensive business. And so the General Education Board decided that rather than just peter out over a period of years with fewer and fewer funds, that we would just go ahead and spend ourselves out of existence. And we did this during my period. But the Rockefeller Foundation has not liquidated. There was first, in 00:40:00terms of active trustees, Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr.; then John D. [Davison] Rockefeller, III; and now Governor Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. And it has sort of been assumed that there would be one member of the Rockefeller family on the Board of Trustees.

RICHARD RUSK: Do they spend funds out of principal as well as income?

DEAN RUSK: Yes, we started that during my period.

RICHARD RUSK: They had not been doing that prior to your years in office?

DEAN RUSK: Very rarely. But we thought the needs were so urgent that if we found good opportunities for using these funds, that we ought to be willing to supplement the annual income with some capital expenditures.

RICHARD RUSK: Did you personally get involved in the investment decisions that were made?

DEAN RUSK: Yes, I was an ex officio member of the Finance Committee. It was an absolutely brilliant Finance Committee in handling the portfolio. It was a 00:41:00committee of trustees and it had on it people like Robert [Abercrombie] Lovett, John Jay McCloy, Lewis [Williams] Douglas, and people like that who any President would be glad to have as his Secretary of the Treasury. I learned a lot as a member ofthe Finance Committee. But again, the Finance Committee took the view that its responsibility as trustees was to invest the funds of the Foundation to the best advantage from an economic point of view. So, they invested primarily in stocks on the big board of the New York Stock Exchange and in government securities. But we never mixed up the business of earning money on the one hand and giving it away on the other. For example, we never made loans for philanthropic purposes. Among other things, we never wanted to have a 00:42:00trustee responsibility for suing anybody to recover loans. So, we would not lend money. If we thought well of something we would give money to it, but we did not lend money. Nor would we accept any gifts from anybody else with any strings tied to it. We took the view that the funds of the Foundation should be fully at the disposal of the Board of Trustees, and so we would not accept any conditional gifts. One very touching thing happened during my tenure there as president. Apparently, during the worst of the [Adolf] Hilter period, there was a German scientist who looked out of his window in Germany, and he saw a group of storm troopers approaching his apartment house. And he hastily scribbled on a little piece of paper, "I bequeath all of my assets to the Rockefeller 00:43:00Foundation." Then the fellow went down and turned himself in. As it turned out, apparently the storm troopers were looking for somebody else. But anyhow he was lost in the concentration camp. And then some years later, his bequest was delivered to the Rockefeller Foundation.

RICHARD RUSK: That's quite a story. I was real impressed with Fosdick's book. He is obviously a real enthusiast and a believer in the Foundation.

DEAN RUSK: Well he had been a great president of the Foundation.

RICHARD RUSK: Obviously there had to have been a pretty strong sense of pride, of common purpose of the esprit de corps among the staff people themselves. Can you give some examples of that?

DEAN RUSK: We had some extraordinarily able staff people during my day. Warren Weaver, head of the scientific program; [Jacob] George Harrar, working under him in the agriculture program; a man named [Joseph H.] Willits, head of the social 00:44:00sciences; and some very experienced doctors like Alan Gregg, who were genuine statesmen in the field of medicine and public health: very competent group. And they were dedicated. Now, I did, in my time, move the Foundation to more interest in the arts. We had been very short in the arts field. There we encountered a not-too-easy question: that is, what can money do to stimulated creative arts? What is the relationship between money and creativity in the arts? That is not as simple a question as it might sound at the beginning. But we got more and more into the arts field, I think with some interesting results. 00:45:00For example, we were told by a good many people we consulted that young artists need to see their product; they need to see their pictures exhibited to the critics; they need to see their dramas performed; they need to hear their musical pieces played. And so we made grants, for example, to the Louisville Symphony Orchestra to allow them to lay on a program of new compositions every year. We did the same thing in the drama field, and that, I think, was quite stimulating and interesting. But we gave a lot of fellowships in the arts, too, just to give artists some time to work at their business. And then we made major grants to the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts when that came along.

RICHARD RUSK: In comparison with other bureaucracies that you have been involved A with there was a strong feeling of mutual purpose and unity among staffers, I would presume.

DEAN RUSK: Yes, we had regular docket conferences among the officers where we would talk over together on an interdisciplinary basis which proposals we would in fact make to the trustees. Of course there were some little jealousies here and there about how many funds would go into particular fields. I think [there was] a certain amount of tension from some of the medical people when we began to draw back on our expenditures in medicine. And so we retired a number of our medical staff during my period.

RICHARD RUSK: Fosdick points out an incident in which the esprit de corps 00:47:00probably suffered and it happened before you got there. But apparently the U.S. government asked the Rockefeller Foundation to put more money, several sizable appropriations, into the cyclotron out at the University of California. And it was a military secret as to what some of the purposes of that thing were for.

DEAN RUSK: Well, during the thirties the Rockefeller Foundation had supported a good deal of work in nuclear physics. Of course, this was a field right on the cutting edge of science. Simply as science, it seemed to be an attractive field to support. And among other things we had put some money into the cyclotron at Berkeley. Then along about 1941, the Foundation was called by the director of the laboratory at Berkeley and told that they needed something like a quarter of a million dollars urgently and that they could not tell us why. And the then 00:48:00trustees of the Foundation decided to go ahead and give them that money. They were somewhat abashed a little bit later, after the war, to discover that what they had done had been an integral part of launching the Manhattan Project.

RICHARD RUSK: Apparently Truman himself wrote a letter to the trustees thanking them for their support and the trustees on the one had were real glad they were able to help furnish the war in the fashion that it happened, but on the other hand were a little bit sorry to get caught up in this great dilemma. Do you remember it? Was it discussed when you were there?

DEAN RUSK: No, it wasn't really discussed. By the time I got there it was sort of all forgotten. But it was something the trustees were caught by surprise with and caused a good many of them to think things over. But there is another part 00:49:00of the relationship between a particularly larger private foundation and the government. Government has to operate on budgets it gets from Congress. But people in government frequently come up with things they want very much to do but haven't got the money for, and so they attempted to turn to foundations to get foundations to do what they themselves would like to do but can't pay for. Well, in effect, those are the crumbs that fall off the tables of government. And the Foundation's view is that, as a matter of priority, if these are so low priority in government, not to be worth government financing, then it is not the job of a private foundation to come in and pick up these crumbs. So there have 00:50:00always been some problems on that. President [Dwight David ] Eisenhower, during my period, launched what he called the "Peoples to Peoples Program." And when he launched it, he did so with the idea that private foundations would pay for it, that this would not be a tax supported activity. Well, heck, since 1913 the Foundation had been involved in a "peoples to peoples program" and we did not want to divert our Foundation funds into that particular program because we were already in the business up to our necks. President [John Fitzgerald] Kennedy was somewhat disappointed because major foundations did not come in with larger and quicker money for the performing arts center there in Washington D.C., which was later named after him. It's too easy for people in government to think that they can somehow supplement appropriations by calling on private foundations to pick 00:51:00up the tab on these things. Foundations are generally rather resistant to that kind of thing. We could be swallowed up by government if we went down that trail.

RICHARD RUSK: Just looking at a list of projects that the Foundation had funded, I see where the Rockefeller Foundation got behind [Alfred C.] Kinsey in his studies of sexual behavior. Did the general public ever figure that one out or did it ever become a controversial grant?

DEAN RUSK: We made those grants through a committee of the National Academy of Sciences, and we thought it was important that this field be subject to research. That was one of the issues which came up before the Reece Committee for investigation. But when Kinsey published his book on the male and was ginning up for his book on the female, we submitted the Kinsey work to a group 00:52:00of statisticians to have them take a look at it. And they came back with a very, very negative report on the abuse of statistical method by Kinsey because he would take various captive groups, like prisoners and people like that, and get interviews from them. It was not in any sense a scientific sample. Then he would derive from that what the entire population was thinking and doing in this field. So, we pulled back from the Kinsey work and were charged by some people as having pulled back because of the congressional investigation. But it really 00:53:00was because of the very poor statistical methods which Dr. Kinsey had been using. Almost every year we would make a grant or two that we called our "frolic" for the year. We thought we ought to just keep our hand in in making unusual grants just so that we would not become completely in a rut. For example, we supported Dr. [Joseph Banks] Rhine's work for a time in extrasensory perception, at Duke, not on the grounds that anybody could prove that it was correct, but it was very, very difficult to prove that it was incorrect. So, we put some money into that. So that we tried to be a little frolicsome occasionally in some of the grants.

RICHARD RUSK: Can you think of any other weird types of grants that you might have made?

DEAN RUSK: I can think of some we didn't make. We were asked at one point 00:54:00during my period by some people out in the Midwest to provide funds to give them a chance to study the sociology of juries. One of things they were going to do would be to tape-record jury sessions without the knowledge of the jurors. We simply rejected this out of hand as a matter of public policy. Then, I remember one grant that bothered me. I forget now what we did about it. But some group of sociologists and psychologists wanted to study hostility among children. They were proposing to induce hostility into groups of children in order to make these studies, and we didn't care much for that. So, you have public policy 00:55:00considerations coming into the business of philanthropy very often. Now there was one field in which we did move somewhat contrary to official public policy during the fifties and that was to begin to take an active interest in the population problem: family planning. You see, up through the early sixties, family planning was contrary to the public policy of the United States. You could not send contraceptives through the mail in this country, for example. So we did some experimental work in the villages of India on family planning techniques as to what sorts of things might be acceptable in that kind of culture. And we were a little nervous that we might get caught at it by people in Washington and they would raise a hue and cry about it. But then, during the 00:56:00decade of the sixties public policy on this turned right around 180 degrees with the help of a lot of work in the executive branch and private people like John Rockefeller III, who had organized the Population Council in the private field, and people like Senator [James William] Fulbright in the Congress, and others. It became possible then for President [Richard Milhous] Nixon to sign a family planning bill for the United States with about $350 million in it to encourage family planning in the United States.

RICHARD RUSK: When you tried to shift the focus of the Rockefeller Foundation in a broad way, from domestic concerns to international concerns such as population, hunger, disease, food production, did you encounter serious resistance from the Foundation or trustees in this new shift of emphasis?

DEAN RUSK: No. I tried to talk these things out with individual trustees in 00:57:00formulating policies or policy suggestions to put to them as a whole. And I felt very strongly myself that what was going to happen in the third world was going to be a ticking time bomb for the entire human race in so many different ways.

RICHARD RUSK: You could sell the argument even from the point of view of the best interest of the United States.

DEAN RUSK: Well, you didn't really have to with that Board of Trustees because the charter purpose of the Foundation was to contribute to the wellbeing of mankind throughout the world. See, we had an international charter. And although well into the sixties a majority of the funds were spent in the United States, 00:58:00nevertheless we had a worldwide charter. And then a good many of these trustees had had sufficient experience of their own to realize what was happening out there where two-thirds of the world's people live was going to be very important for all of us.

RICHARD RUSK: Did you get everything you wanted? Was there any specific goal or general direction that you wanted to take the Foundation that was frustrated by the trustees?

END OF SIDE 1

BEGINNING OF SIDE 2

DEAN RUSK: He once said, "They must have had a good daddy." And that was true. Old John D. Rockefeller, Jr. was quite a father. John D. Rockefeller, III was 00:59:00very much involved in the Rockefeller Foundation. David Rockefeller was very much involved in the Rockefeller Institute which later became the Rockefeller University over on the East River. Winthrop Rockefeller became Chairman of the Board of Colonial Williamsburg. So they sort of divided up their philanthropic interests. And then, of course, Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. made major investments in the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which was a separate philanthropy, which is organized to give the five Rockefeller brothers a chance to pursue their own personal philanthropic interests. That was a very important philanthropy and did a lot of good things. Let me repeat what I have said to you 01:00:00before. In retrospect, I think that the greatest contribution made by the Rockefeller Foundation was its endless search for talent, demonstrated by its 01:01:00rather remarkable fellowship program. They scoured the world for first class minds among younger people to see if they could give those people an opportunity to go flat out to the limit of their ability. Most of their fellowships were postgraduate, postdoctoral fellowships where the formal education had already been completed and where an additional experience in Western Europe or the United States or somewhere might Cop off what was there. Then the Foundation tried to follow up on these fellows when they went back home to see whether they might need some books, some laboratory equipment, or some additional reinforcements so that they could make the best use of what they had learned in their fellowship years. I think that constant talent search was one of the most 01:02:00important things because institutions mean nothing except for the people who are in them.

RICHARD RUSK: Did you ever get into any trouble for robbing talent from overseas countries?

DEAN RUSK: No, we were very careful about that. We always had an in-depth interview with a person before we offered them a fellowship. And if there was any indication that they looked upon a possible fellowship as a cover for immigrating to the United States, we dropped it straightaway. In contrast with some of the experiences of other fellowship programs, I think I remember once seeing some figures indicating that only one out of a thousand of our fellows failed to go back to the country of origin and continue their work back home.

RICHARD RUSK: Do you believe the figures?

DEAN RUSK: Yeah. I believe the figures. That did not come about on the basis of any contractual agreement that they would go home--we weren't going to sue anybody--but just on the basis of looking for people who were committed to working in their own countries to improve things. So I think the Foundation has a record on that. We were not stealing talent from other countries. The United States has, and continues to do so in drawing nurses out of the Philippines where they badly need nurses because they can work in this country at somewhat less pay than some of our American nurses are willing to do. Interns: there has been a great abuse of foreign interns in our county hospitals and things of that sort. As a matter of fact, I was told once in New York that if I were involved in traffic accident there would be only one chance in five that the intern on the ambulance could speak English.

RICHARD RUSK: Did you continue the practice, as president of the Foundation, of giving these little grants-in-aid, smaller type grants averaging two or three thousand dollars worth, which Fosdick said was a good cure against the problem of "bigness"?

DEAN RUSK: Yes, we had that capability. As a matter of fact, in my time we had a lump sum appropriation for fellowships and the officers and I could approve an actual fellowship without going to the trustees on it. We also had a great grant-in-aid capability in which I could, under my own signature, give final approval to a grant-in-aid up to ten thousand dollars. That was later lifted to fifteen and I think maybe it's twenty now. So, we were able to use that kind of 01:05:00pin money here and there to pretty good effect. Now the thing to watch out for in something like that is the problem of scatteration: distribute your funds in such small bits, over such a wide area that you don't get any real impact in any single area. So one has to watch that a little bit.

RICHARD RUSK: Whoever it was who developed penicillin, or got it to a stage where it was practical as a drug, had one of these little Foundation grants?

DEAN RUSK: He had a little grant. And I always resisted any effort by anyone in the Foundation to claim any credit whatever for penicillin because we had made a very small grant to that fellow. It was his brain, his work.

RICHARD RUSK: Fosdick took the story up through 1950. Can you name the top achievements, the really big ones that stand out in terms of the Foundation's 01:06:00programs between'50 and '60. Was miracle rice developed during that period?

DEAN RUSK: Well, we established the International Rice Research Institute in Los Banos during my period, during the fifties, but they did not break through the hybrid barrier with rice until maybe the early sixties. You see, we get enormous vigor from hybrid corns and hybrid wheats, but up until the late fifties hybrid rice was sterile. It wouldn't reproduce itself and that was a major blockage in breeding superior breeds of rice. So we decided, during my period, to attack this problem and felt that we ought to do it on a cooperative basis involving several rice growing countries in Asia. Our officers visited 01:07:00these different countries and they thought it was a great idea, but each one of these countries insisted, of course, that the institute ought to be in their particular country. We couldn't get any agreement among these countries as to where it should be. So we just stopped that consultation and made our own decision as to where to put it, and we decided to put it in Los Banos in the Philippines with a close affiliation with the University of the Philippines. And then we had Asians on the board, and the advisory panels, and on the staff, and things like that. Well that was, to me, a source of great satisfaction because it had a lot to do with the "green revolution" which has greatly enhanced the possibility of producing basic foodstuffs. I think the work done in the agricultural program in Mexico was of fundamental importance.

RICHARD RUSK: George Harrar's program?

DEAN RUSK: Yes, both in wheat and corn. And that was very satisfying because it 01:08:00does show the way to making full use of available capabilities to grow basic food in a world in which we are going to need an awful lot of food in the coming decades.

RICHARD RUSK: You have spoken in general terms about how your greatest efforts remain in leadership training and the search for talent. But as far as the handful of specific projects that really leap out and stand out in your mind during your years in office, are there any others in particular?

DEAN RUSK: I think that some of the work we did to improve the quality of universities in the third world was important. Now our funds were only marginal in some respects, but it could make the difference in quality in certain key 01:09:00departments here and there. And, of course, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts project in which we participated very strongly has been a very satisfying thing to bring together there the Met, the New York City Ballet, and the Julliard School, and things like that. That was a major contribution to the performing arts in this country. But again I would go back and say that as far as I am concerned the greatest satisfaction came out of these fellowships because there is nothing to substitute for people.

RICHARD RUSK: When you folks went into the area of public health overseas, on an international basis--

DEAN RUSK: That began back in the teens.

RICHARD RUSK: Yes, prior to your time. But eradicating and controlling these diseases and epidemics combined with the revolution of increased techniques in 01:10:00food production. Did you and the trustees of those times foresee the problems which would occur with overpopulation?

DEAN RUSK: The Rockefeller Foundation never took the view that, in regard to its work in medicine and public health, it should pull its punches on the grounds that the result might be too many people. I think there were moral, humanitarian, as well as what might be called policy considerations working against that. But I think it is true that as medicine and public health moved rapidly that it was apparent that there was going to be a demographic problem right around the world. And so, we got at it by putting a good deal of effort 01:11:00into support of demographic studies as well as family planning, and to get at it from the other side of the ledger by helping people to produce more food. We never took the view that the way to limit population is through disease.

RICHARD RUSK: Did it surprise you folks to the extent that the population has mushroomed in the fashion that it has?

DEAN RUSK: No, I think the--

RICHARD RUSK: That old dilemma again: advances in one field sometimes discourage progress in another.

DEAN RUSK: Yes, most major problems merge into other major problems. But you see, with the explosion of communication that has occurred these billions of people around the world now know that illiteracy, disease, abject poverty are 01:12:00not part of the universe in which God placed us, but that something can be done about it. And so, these are now matters which relate directly to the possibility of peace in the world because millions of people are not going to starve peacefully, as they might have in the old days in places like China and India. So there is an urgency about these matters that the Rockefeller Foundation took up seriously in the 1930s and stepped up its work in agriculture, family planning, things of that sort.

RICHARD RUSK: We've covered a fair amount of ground in these two interviews. Can you think of anything we haven't covered? I've got some more questions here and we can go on forever, but I'll ask you at this point: Anything particular that you'd like to stick in the record that we haven't touched upon? Go ahead.

DEAN RUSK: I was somewhat skeptical about some of the things which were being done in the so-called behavioral sciences where some people were trying to put numbers on things that could not be numbered and where they developed esoteric language of their own that those outside of the trade could not even understand. Early in ray tour as president of the Rockefeller Foundation I was invited to meet with a group of top behavioral scientists up at Arden House, the Harriman home up north of New York City. We spent a day having these behavioral scientists talking to me about what they were up to, what they were doing. At the end of the day, they turned to me for any comments and I, perhaps not too tactfully, said, "Well, one of my comments is that unless you people can tell me 01:14:00what you are doing in terms that I can understand, I am not sure that you understand what you are doing." So I brought that skepticism into the Foundation with me. One of these behavioral scientists later remarked that it was a black day for the behavioral sciences when Dean Rusk became president of the Rockefeller Foundation.

RICHARD RUSK: What about the social sciences in general? I know that the Foundation had its great successes and very dramatic successes in areas like public health, hookworm, and stuff like that. But when it got into the field of the study of man and his behavior--

DEAN RUSK: Well, the social sciences are much more difficult to deal with and achieve major breakthroughs in.

RICHARD RUSK: They are not really a science compared to some others. There are so many variables.

DEAN RUSK: I suspect that some people have been led astray by aping the 01:15:00techniques of the natural sciences in the study of man and in the humanities. I am not sure these same techniques really apply.

RICHARD RUSK: The Foundation has invested a lot of funds in the social sciences. Did you folks get your mileage worth out of those investments or was that an area of some disappointment to you and the trustees?

DEAN RUSK: I think we tried to contribute to both research on the one side and public information on the other and international exchanges in the field. We gave substantial grants to the Institute of International Education, to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, to the Foreign Policy Association, and comparable activities abroad. We put funds into the building of an international house in New Delhi, an international house in Tokyo as an encouragement for more 01:16:00exchange among different peoples of different cultures, traditions, and so forth. We put a lot of money into economics along the way. For example, we supported very heavily what they call the National Bureau of Economic Research.

RICHARD RUSK: The one that keeps all the statistics on the American economy?

DEAN RUSK: Yes, and the study of economic cycles and things of that sort.

RICHARD RUSK: Make your comment about the tendency of these fellows that if they think they can get it right on paper, they have got the problem solved. Would you care to speculate on that bias of social scientists?

DEAN RUSK: Well, there was a little bit of a bias in the Rockefeller Foundation as far as those studies which would have an impact upon the wellbeing of man kind. Now we did respect science and scholarship for its own sake, knowledge for 01:17:00its own sake, and we supported a good deal of that kind of research and study. But on the other hand we tried to stay alert as to what the results might be of particular studies, particular work. For example, we put some money into the aesthetics of cities as a whole in case people wanted to give thought to that. We put a good deal of work into the problem of adequate drinking water. We put some money into architecture for modest homes for people who had no low-cost housing to live in.

[break in recording]

DEAN RUSK: --that travel to other countries would involve me in. It turned out to be an invaluable experience to me when I became Secretary of State. In this nuclear business there are a good many scientists who gave us the atomic bomb [and who] have been rather patronizing and scornful of politicians and policy people. But the fact is that this month we have already put behind us thirty- 01:19:00nine years since one of these things has been used. So on the whole the policy people have not done too bad a job. One thing we did at the Rockefeller Foundation that John D. Rockefeller, III, as chairman of the Board, was very good about: When we invited somebody to become a trustee to the Rockefeller Foundation, we emphasized that if they became a trustee they were expected to take it seriously, to attend meetings and work at it; and if they did not feel that they could do that they should not come onto the Board. And we had extraordinary attendance at our trustee meetings. John D., III was a quiet and unassuming kind of man, but he could bring to a project which he was interested 01:20:00in persistence and a determination in his quiet way that really got a lot of things done. His work in the population field, both here and abroad, has been a major contribution toward this entire population problem. He himself organized the Population Council and got it started with his own funds and was a major contribution.

RICHARD RUSK: Was it John D., Jr. or III that we visited at Jackson Hole that one summer, when you warned me not to ask how much money he had?

DEAN RUSK: I forget which one of the Rockefellers was there at that time. It was not Jr., no.

RICHARD RUSK: You made the point that the investment wing and the philanthropic wing of the Foundation were two separate entities and you kept them separate.

DEAN RUSK: That's right.

RICHARD RUSK: And you didn't let one influence the other. Did you run into any situation where there would be conflict or tension between those two wings? I bring this up because Jay Rockefeller, apparently when he was running for governor against the strip mining interests, ran into a situation where the Rockefeller family itself was involved in the coal industry in West Virginia. That's one example. There would probably be others given the breadth and depth 01:22:00of Rockefeller investments in industry. Was there overlap?

DEAN RUSK: No, that kind of problem just wasn't present during the fifties. For example, we were never asked by anybody whether or not we had invested in companies that were doing business in places like South Africa. We invested in primarily common stocks and companies that were listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and we invested in government securities. And those questions of political inhibitions upon investments on the big board of the New York Stock Exchange just didn't come up in those years. As trustees we had a responsibility to do the best we could to conserve and increase the assets of the Foundation, 01:23:00and that was a trustee responsibility which we took seriously. We did our best to invest our funds to the best advantage from an economic point of view. Then after we had made the money, we proceeded to give it away for philanthropic purposes. But we never bought any stock or made any loans for philanthropic purposes. We made money on the one side and we gave it away on the other. Those two things simply did not get crossed up with each other.

RICHARD RUSK: Speaking of funding in general, there was a big increase in funding from '32 to '59, a jump up to $34 million in 1959 in Rockefeller funding. How did you increase the funds?

DEAN RUSK: Well we had a very able finance committee so that our investments 01:24:00did well in those years. But also during my period, the trustees, on my recommendation, made a deliberate decision to begin to spend some capital each year in addition to income, and that increased substantially the level of spending that we would take on in any given year.

RICHARD RUSK: Have they been able to maintain that since you left?

DEAN RUSK: I think they have been spending capital pretty consistently since then, yes.

RICHARD RUSK: Do they still have as healthy a source of funding to work from as they did, or has that been declining?

DEAN RUSK: Yes, as a matter of fact the Rockefeller Foundation began in 1913 with a stake of, I think, something like $150 million from Mr. John D. Rockefeller, the grandfather. And over the years they have spent, I would think, a billion and a quarter dollars and have a billion dollars left. Their present 01:25:00portfolio is in the range of a billion dollars. So that's, among other things, a sign of extraordinary growth in American industry between 1913 and the present.

RICHARD RUSK: Gates made the comment to John, Sr., "Your money is steamrolling so fast that you better spend it as fast as you can or it will run away with you and your offspring."

DEAN RUSK: That's right.

RICHARD RUSK: Why is it that the foundations seem to be an American phenomenon? Now there have been other smaller ones overseas, but both Fosdick and some other people made the comment that it is pretty much an American development. Obviously it had something to do with conditions in this country and government nonintervention in earlier years.

DEAN RUSK: Well, Chat's an interesting question. I am not sure that I have a complete answer. But when Alexis [Charles Henri Maurice Clerel] de Tocqueville 01:26:00wrote his famous book about America in the early nineteenth century, he commented on the streak of generosity in the American people and the willingness of neighbors to help each other out and to band together to accomplish purposes which were not otherwise being taken care of by government or any other agency. There has been a philanthropic streak in the American scene; but I think also, beginning with the income tax, philanthropic giving has been encouraged by the tax laws by providing tax exemption for philanthropic contributions. You see, the American people today are coming up with something like sixty billion dollars of philanthropic giving every year. Now, about five percent of that comes from corporations, about five percent comes from foundations, but the rest 01:27:00of it comes from private citizens. One of the ways to raise really big money is through the March of Dimes technique: large numbers of small gifts from a lot of people. And it is just true that that is a part of the American scene. Now when I was president of the Rockefeller Foundation, I worked with some people in Europe, including Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands, to see what could be done through tax laws and things like that to encourage that kind of philanthropy in Western Europe. For example, in England back in the fifties there was no such tax deduction unless you made a seven-year covenant to make gifts of a certain amount over a period of seven years. Of course, when you have socialist governments there is a tendency on the part of socialist governments to think that this is a function of government and is not a function for private 01:28:00citizens. And indeed a little of that attitude grew up in our own Congress, that Congress should have more to say about how tax exempt funds should be used. But in a sense, as far as the Rockefeller Foundation is concerned, the tax exemption was not all that important. One year, I remember, just for interest I had our people figure out what federal income tax the Rockefeller Foundation would owe if it were taxed like any other business corporation. Well, to begin with you would get something like an eighty-five percent deduction on ninety percent of your dividend income from other corporations. Then we would presumably have the 01:29:00ordinary corporate five percent contribution capability. And then there were the administrative costs. The year I figured it out, the Rockefeller Foundation would only owe about $500,000 in income tax, and we could easily have made that up simply by not making grants to federal institutions. So there is nothing in it. The tax exemption didn't really amount to anything from the point of view of dollars, as far as the Rockefeller Foundation was concerned, if we were taxed like any other business corporation.

RICHARD RUSK: I have a general idea of what the Rockefeller Foundation is all about. By comparison, what type of things have the [Henry] Ford Foundation and the [Andrew] Carnegie Foundation gone into? Similar types of programs or something quite different?

DEAN RUSK: Well, to begin with, even though we have tens of thousands of 01:30:00foundations in this country, back in the fifties there were only about seven or eight foundations that had any major activity in the international field. There was the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation.

RICHARD RUSK: I remember the figure: seven foundations with assets in excess of a million dollars.

DEAN RUSK: Of a hundred million. But the Carnegie Corporation is pretty much limited by its charter to members of the British Commonwealth of nations. But then there was the [Will Keith] Kellogg Foundation that also was fairly active in certain agricultural activities, and there were two or three others. But basically there was only a handful of these big foundations that had any particular international activity. And in those days there were all sorts of 01:31:00quirks in the tax laws. I remember that Texas would not give tax exemption to foundation expenditures that were made outside of Texas. But to go back to your question about motivation, somehow it grew up as a part of the American culture, beginning with the pioneer days when neighbors would get together to raise a barn, or the husk a crop of corn, or in quilting parties, or whatever it might be. You just gathered together to do things like that.

RICHARD RUSK: Did you find recipient countries or recipient individuals a little bit surprised at what this was all about?

DEAN RUSK: A little hard sometimes for people to understand the concept of philanthropy. In India, for example, I had the impression--I could be wrong--that you could meet any philanthropic obligation you might have by 01:32:00dropping a few pennies in the cup of a beggar along the street. But the idea of really doing philanthropy in a big way, even on the part of those who had a lot of money, was simply culturally more or less unknown to them. Of course, in the protestant ethic in this country they had for a long time a great pressure toward tithing, giving ten percent of your income to the Lord. And maybe that 01:33:00got into being a part of our culture. I remember once, though, when I was at the Foundation, I went down to Texas to talk to a newly rich oil man to see whether he would give a million dollars to Texas University if the Rockefeller Foundation would give them a million dollars at the same time for some purpose we were interested in. And this gentleman heard me out, and when I got through he said, "Give them a million dollars? I have only had it for two years!" So apparently, you have to have your money for a while before you develop that kind of philanthropic instinct. And, of course, it may be that estate taxes have had quite an influence on this situation.

RICHARD RUSK: Can you think of an instance where other countries or institutions, because of contact with the Rockefeller Foundation concept of philanthropy, have adopted that as something that they should be doing themselves?

DEAN RUSK: Well, the Nizambad Hyderabad in India established a big foundation. But in one case the Rockefeller Foundation was a very specific stimulus for the organization of a foundation. Mr. Gulbenkian, an Armenian who lived in Portugal, a man with very large funds, lived to be over a hundred. He died, and in his will he indicated that he wanted a foundation established, the Gulbenkian Foundation, modeled on the Rockefeller Foundation. So at the time of his death the designated trustees of the Gulbenkian Foundation invited me to come to London to talk with them about the Rockefeller Foundation. But the more I talked 01:35:00about the Rockefeller Foundation; I think the less some of them were interested. And it turned out to become a Portuguese foundation and it didn't quite develop on the same basis. The old man had expected to live forever and he had not really buttoned it up tightly before he died, and so it didn't quite get to be the kind of foundation the Rockefeller Foundation was.

RICHARD RUSK: What is the general thrust behind the Ford Foundation, and also the [Daniel and Florence] Guggenheim?

DEAN RUSK: Well, the Guggenheim Foundation concentrated on mid-career fellowship for interesting, able, and stimulating people. I think almost all of 01:36:00their funds were spent in their famous Guggenheim fellowships. And they did an excellent job of selecting people that they would back for a year or two's free time to do what they wanted to do and finish up their work. The Ford Foundation was established pretty much on the same motivations that led to the establishment of these other big foundations. But almost all of the funds of the Ford Foundation at the beginning were in nonvoting Ford Motor Company stock. And because its name was Ford Foundation and that was the Ford Motor Company, there was sometimes a little tension between the foundation and the Ford Motor Company on the public relations aspects of what the Ford Foundation was doing over 01:37:00against the public relations interests of the Ford Motor Company. And the Ford Foundation over the years has diversified considerably now in its holdings. But Mr. Henry Ford II became chairman of the Board of the Ford Foundation and they were much larger than the Rockefeller Foundation for a while. But the problems of the motor industry in this country reduced their relative size considerably. We kept in touch with the other foundations. There was no antitrust law affecting foundations. There were times where we and Ford or we and Carnegie would join in supporting a particular enterprise. As a matter of fact, when we established the Rice Research Institute in Los Banos in the Philippines, the 01:38:00Ford Foundation put a substantial amount of money into that, but on the understanding that the expertise of the Rockefeller Foundation in such things would play the central role in terms of management and direction and things of that sort. But Carnegie and Ford both made major contributions toward education in this country and to some extent in other countries. They made endowment grants and things of that sort. I think both of them have done a very good job. Of course, my own preference is for the Rockefeller Foundation.

RICHARD RUSK: I know you don't want to engage in gossip. I'm aware of your reasons for not writing memoirs. But surely you must have gotten to know the Rockefeller brothers pretty well during this period, or at least some of them. Have you any general comments to make on them?

DEAN RUSK: Well, 1 got to know them individually, although John D. Rockefeller, 01:39:00III was the only brother who was associated in any way with the Rockefeller Foundation. But I saw the others from time to time. They were an extraordinary group of brothers. They were all able, very great abilities, each one of them in his own different way. But the Rockefeller family from the very beginning, including the third generation, has had an extraordinary ability to find talented people to work with them and that is true of the five brothers as well as Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and the old man, the grandfather. But they were a very talented group. The five brothers are very different individually. Nelson 01:40:00[Aldrich Rockefeller] was very outgoing. He was the one who became heavily involved in politics at a very early age and was interested in public service and that kind of thing. Laurance Rockefeller was very much involved with environmental questions and restoration, but he was also the principal businessman for the five brothers. Winthrop Rockefeller went out to the southwest and organized some of these big supermarket kind of chains and had a farm out there which he was very proud of. He was also chairman of the Board of Colonial Williamsburg. David was very public spirited, became chairman of the Chase Bank. He was also much interested in public life but he did not actually 01:41:00participate in public life. John D. Rockefeller, III was relatively quiet. He did not reach out for public acclaim. [He was] very quiet and retiring in his nature, but when he put his mind to something he did so with great energy, effort, and persistence. He had a lot to do with turning around American public policy on family planning. If I had to put my finger on any one individual who had most to do with that it would be John D. Rockefeller, III. As a matter of fact, I once proposed that he be given a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in that field, but it didn't turn out.

RICHARD RUSK: In terms of public policy, he helped to turn that around in the mid-seventies?

DEAN RUSK: During the 1960s. You see, when I first took office as Secretary of State, if a senior official of government got up and started talking about family planning he would have had his ears boxed, because at that time it was simply against the public policy of the United States. I think it was still true that you could not mail contraceptives by mail, for example. You had to send them by express. Well, with a good deal of work with the government and in the private sector by people like John Rockefeller, III and in the Congress with the help of people like Senator Fulbright, the whole thing got turned around in the decade of the sixties and made is possible for President Nixon to sign a family planning law for the United States carrying something like $350 million for family planning in the United States. Now that happened in many other countries around the world. When I first became Secretary of State and you would poll the countries of the world on their policy with respect to family planning, there 01:43:00might have been twenty percent of them in favor and eighty percent against.

RICHARD RUSK: As a foundation, that was one you pretty much stayed away from?

DEAN RUSK: Well, not completely. But if you took such a poll today the figures would be reversed: eighty percent of the governments in favor and twenty per cent against. There were a good many Catholic countries opposed to family planning in the early sixties. But when it became known generally that the princes of the church were debating this among themselves, that tended to free up both Catholic laymen and governments of Catholic countries in this field. And also the demographic pressures began to be more and more apparent and governments realized more and more that something was going to have to be done about this population problem or it would swamp us all. There were some public 01:44:00relations problems with my job as president of the Rockefeller Foundation. It was a job that created a good deal of press interest and intrigued people. I remember that I once went on a visit to London, and the airline that I was traveling on apparently tipped off the press that I was arriving on one of their planes. So I was met at the London airport by a group of reporters and they were very itchy and anxious to know what checks I was bringing with me, what money I was going to give away to England and things like that. I just didn't say anything. I had nothing to say to them, just wouldn't give them anything. But then one reporter for one of the more popular London newspapers went off and wrote a wholly imaginary story about this nice young man who had several hundred million dollars to give away and didn't know what to do with it. Well, I was 01:45:00staying at the Clarendon Hotel. I was there for a day or so and then I went off to another part of England but kept my rooms for a couple of days. And when I came back to the Clarendon I stopped by the front desk to get my key and I said, "Is there any mail?" And, with a very funny look on his face, the fellow at the desk said, "Yes, your mail is in your room." I went up there and the bath tub was filled with mail. The British are great letter writers. And the mail had come flooding in from all over the place giving me advice about how to spend this money. So I had to have all that mail boxed up and sent back to New York and answered because I felt we had an obligation to answer it.

RICHARD RUSK: Any other memorable experience you can recall about advice from people on how to spend your money?

DEAN RUSK: Well in the foundation world you have to get used to the fact that you have to say "no" about twenty times for every time you can say "yes" because you just can't find that kind of money. But, it is not easy to say no to people when they think they have something really worthwhile going.

RICHARD RUSK: You must have been under a lot of pressure to spend money in ways that would relieve misery,

DEAN RUSK: Well, we set our faces very strongly against trying to deal with the problems at the consumer level because your money would disappear in a year's 01:47:00time with no permanent effect. And so, we just did not get into that.

RICHARD RUSK: Although the Foundation did, on rare occasions, during the big crash for example, during the great depression period of some going out of windows in New York City, I think the Foundation got involved in funding bread lines. After World War I and World War II there were efforts to directly use Foundation funds to help alleviate some of the misery of those times. Did you ever have to fire people or pull the plug on various projects because of improper use or uneconomical use, poor utilization of funds? I know it's not the kind of administrative chore that you would find comfortable, but did it have to be done?

DEAN RUSK: Well, there might have been some of that, but not during my time because it is just simply a way to disappear as a foundation. The scale of need is so great in relation to the rather limited sources of even a large foundation. And if you go down that trail there's nothing.

RICHARD RUSK: You spend yourself out of existence.

DEAN RUSK: If you can get at the root causes you can help millions of consumers by getting at the solution of the problem, like yellow fever for example, or hookworm, or whatever it might be. Now, it is also true that we sometimes attracted some people with mental problems. We had one of our doctors sort of as a standby to go out to our reception room to deal with cranks that might come in for one purpose or another. I remember one occasion when a young man came into the reception room and insisted upon seeing me. The receptionist thought there was something odd about him and so this doctor came out to talk with him. And 01:49:00apparently this young man said that Mr. Rockefeller had left his entire fortune to him on his twenty-fifth birthday and, "Today is my twenty-fifth birthday and I want to see the president of the Foundation so he can turn it over to me." But it's usually just some poor people who are unbalanced and just sort of talk them out of it.

RICHARD RUSK: Did you ever have to withdraw funding from a project because of misuse of funds?

DEAN RUSK: Sometimes we made grants that were conditioned upon those funds being matched by the recipient from other sources. And there were a few times when they were unable to match those funds and so those funds lapsed. But in my day there at the Foundation the idea was that we would decide ahead of time what was a good thing to do, and we would go ahead and give the money and then, in effect, forget it. We did not try to manage it or tinker with it because the responsibility belonged to the recipient institution.

RICHARD RUSK: Would it be given in lump sums to these projects, or would there be criteria set up by which they would receive disbursements?

DEAN RUSK: Well sometimes there would be grants over a period of years, but basically we tried to do it on a one-time basis. That was our favorite way of 01:51:00doing it. I think now, under the changes in the tax laws, foundations are expected to, in effect, monitor their grants a little more than we used to. And that has the complication that it gets foundations into a role which does not, in my judgment, belong to them, in trying to tell universities and colleges and places like that how to run their shop. But, no we had very good luck. We never had to sue anybody to recover any money because they had failed to meet the requirements. There is another point which may sound a little strange from a foundation operating so much in the research field and academic field. We tried to avoid leaving the impression with anyone who received one of our grants that 01:52:00they owed us an article or a book. We took the view that an article or book ought to be published when the author was really pregnant and just had to publish it, that we didn't want anybody writing articles or books just to satisfy a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation because that is the way you get a lot of junk produced. Now a lot of fascinating books came out of work supported by the Rockefeller Foundation--many articles. We did not get into the business of providing funds to assist people to earn a Ph.D., so we didn't get involved in supporting Ph.D. theses. Most of our grants were postgraduate, post degree grants of one sort or another. Now there were so many different things we 01:53:00did along the way. We became aware during my time there that a lot of newly independent countries were arriving on the scene. They not only had a great shortage of manpower, but a shortage of simple things like libraries. We found that these newly independent countries were having to establish new foreign offices without any working library for a foreign officer. So we put together what might be called a care package of books. [There were] about 600 books in French and English that we put together in consultation with some key people in both English-speaking and French-speaking societies. And we gave these collections of books to the foreign offices of these newly independent countries. We gave them twenty-five or thirty of these sets, and they were very 01:54:00much welcomed by those who received them because the colonial powers had left nothing behind for them to even begin to work with: such a simple thing as an encyclopedia. We found that many of these countries had no trained diplomats and we arranged with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a similar institution in Geneva to lay on a training program for young diplomats from these newly independent countries. And that was very successful. We also found the same thing was true in their treasury departments and the financial side of that business. We put some money into the World Bank to assist the World Bank in getting started with the program to train middle-level financial officers of these developing countries. That was so wel1-received and the World Bank was so pleased with it that the World Bank then continued that on its own funds. So, 01:55:00there were all sorts of things that appeared to be good ideas that we could get started with which nobody else would do. It would be very unlikely that the United States government, for example, would do these things for these newly independent countries that I was talking about.

RICHARD RUSK: This is a related question: Of all the colonial powers, you said that the British seem to do the best job as far as training an indigenous civil service and some indigenous leadership.

DEAN RUSK: And institutions of higher education.

RICHARD RUSK: Why the British? Why were they that way as contrasted with the rest? And I've heard this before.

DEAN RUSK: I think the British were looking all along toward a maximum amount, in effect, self-government on the part of their colonies. They got into that at 01:56:00a very early stage. They relied very heavily upon the Indian members of their civil service. Although there were some Britishers in the Indian civil service, most of them were actually Indians and they had a very able staff of top civil servants to rely on when they became completely independent. The same thing with colleges. In a number of the colonies they had colleges that were affiliated with the University of London, were actually related in terms of awarding degrees with the University of London. But for some reason the French, the 01:57:00Belgian, the Dutch, the Portuguese didn't go down that trail. As a matter of fact, it is kind of interesting to me that we found that the Rockefeller Foundation was welcome in the British colonies in Africa, for example, but we were not particularly welcome in the African colonies of these other colonial countries. They were rather suspicious as to what our influence might turn out to be. Now, one can take a broader view and look back and realize that a country like Britain, which went through several centuries of establishing the great institutions of freedom, took along with them in their knapsacks the seeds of the destruction of the British Empire because they could not be free--

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