Rusk SS, Dean Rusk interviewed by Richard Rusk, Part 1, circa 1985

RICHARD RUSK: Okay, Pop.

DEAN RUSK: Where were we getting back--

RICHARD RUSK: Talking about the Truman administration.

DEAN RUSK: Getting back to the days of official life, this checklist of questions that have to be asked in connection with any serious policy question. The first question on that list is what is the question. Now, back in the Truman administration, the question came up as to whether the officers and staff of the United Nations [U.N.] would have to have the approval of their own governments before they could be employed at the U.N. Well, at that time, we were looking toward a genuinely international civil service, and also there were some people who had worked in the League of Nations before World War II, who seemed to be good prospects to take on reasonably important jobs in the United Nations. And 00:01:00some of them were nationals of countries which had had a radical change in government and might not get national approval. And so we felt that the Secretary General of the U.N. ought to be able to appoint officers and staff to the Secretariat without the approval of the national governments involved, so our answer to that question in those days was "no." Then during the [Dwight David] Eisenhower Administration, the question was turned around, and it got to be, "Do we want Americans working for the United Nations who could not pass a loyalty and security test in their own government?" And after the [Joseph Raymond] McCarthy period and all that, the answer to that seemed to be "no." And so we--that is the Eisenhower Administration--informed the Secretary General of the U.N. that we wanted to have clearances on anybody, any American, who was being named to the Secretariat. I am told--I can't verify this--that Dag 00:02:00[Hjalmar Agne Carl] Hammarskjold, who was then the Secretary General, smiled and said, "Well I've been waiting for this, because almost every other member of the United Nations has long since told me that they wanted the same thing."

So now, one has to take for granted that anyone who is appointed to the United Nations staff has to have the approval of his own national government, which is a little setback for the idea of a genuinely international civil service. But "what is the question" is the first question on our list. The next, right behind it, is the question "whose question is it?" Is it something that the United States ought to be concerned about? Or is it something that we just leave to those who are involved? Now, that is not as easy as it sounds, because you've got a very active press there in Washington and they're very likely to ask you 00:03:00at a press conference or whatever chance they get, "What do you think about what's happened in so-and-so?" Well, if you say, "Well we don't think anything about it. It's not our problem," they'll go off and ooh and aah about that. But if you express an opinion about it then you can be sure that the very next question is, "Then what are you going to do about it?"

So, if you know ahead of time that you're not going to do anything about it, you have to be careful about what you say about it. But there are a lot of questions that come up that are simply not ours. For example, during the sixties, Britain and Spain got into another round of argument about Gibraltar. And each one of them came to us and asked to take their view on the issue of Gibraltar. And I said to each one of them "Now look, both Great Britain and Spain had diplomacy 00:04:00long before the United States was born. Now we have nothing to do with how the Gibraltar situation developed. Now just go away. We're not going to take any part in it. We're not going to express any view, take any hand in it at all." And both of them were irritated because they wanted us to. Each one of them wanted us to side with them on that particular dispute, you see. You see, influence on American policy is one of the primary objects of most foreign policies for foreign offices in the world. And you have to go through the process of deciding whether its something we ought to get into anyhow, in any way, shape, or form. Now, there are certain general rules that apply in almost any of these things, and that is that we much prefer to see disputes settled by peaceful means than by violence, things like that. But, again, you have that 00:05:00long checklist to go through before you find yourself coming to a conclusion or policy. But very often doing nothing is the right action to take. But you have to be careful that if you do nothing it is on purpose and not through delay, procrastination, neglect, things of that sort.

RICHARD RUSK: You had a chance to witness the careers of probably, oh, seven to ten Secretaries of State as well as your own. Did all the rest of these fellows put in the kind of schedule that you did?

DEAN RUSK: I think--Well, [George Catlett] Marshall did not. Of course, he had 00:06:00Robert [Abercrombie] Lovett as his Undersecretary, who he had worked very closely with during the war when Lovett was Assistant Secretary of War for Air, during World War II. But he had Robert Lovett as his own Undersecretary and Robert Lovett could have been anybody's Secretary of State. So, Marshall was very comfortable in leaving things to Robert Lovett. Now Robert Lovett put in some pretty long hours. But, I think you'll find that, following Marshall, most Secretaries of State put in long hours.

RICHARD RUSK: Did you have a Robert Lovett working for you?

DEAN RUSK: George [Wildman] Ball was my alter ego as Undersecretary of State, and I had great confidence in him, was entirely comfortable about leaving things in his hands when I went away on a trip. There was some, has been some gossip 00:07:00that when John Foster Dulles or Henry [Alfred] Kissinger went away on a foreign trip they would carry all sorts of policy matters along with them in their vest pocket. Well I didn't do that. When I went on a foreign trip I concentrated solely on the purpose of the trip, the things that were coming up on the trip, and I left everything else to the Acting Secretary of State back in Washington. I remember when the United Nations was meeting in Paris in 1948, the Secretary of State, George Marshall, was heading our delegation. On one occasion, he asked me to prepare a cable referring something back to the Department requesting instructions. And I must have smiled and said something like, "Instructions for you, sir?" or something like that. He said, "Oh, yes, it's the Acting Secretary who has access to the talents and resources of the Department. He is the one 00:08:00that has access to the President and the congressional leaders. He has the, in that Department, the knowledge of what the law says and all those things." He said, "Out here on my own like this, I'm not in a position to--"

RICHARD RUSK: This is Marshall talking?

DEAN RUSK: Yes. "--to set these policies. I want to know what they think of them in Washington." And I think there's a great wisdom in that. But, no, I had some extraordinarily able people around me in my service there. George Ball, when he left, Nicholas [de Belleville] Katzenbach, who came over--he was serving as Attorney General at the time. He came over to become the Undersecretary of State. People like [William] Averell Harriman and Llewellyn [E.] Thompson [Jr.], Chip--Charles [Eustis] Bohlen, and just a great bunch of people. And I was very 00:09:00fortunate. On the importance of how you state the question, I had picked up something in the Pentagon during the war. There when you write a military staff memorandum, it usually take the form of, first, a statement of the question; second, considerations bearing on the problem, no, facts bearing on the problem; third, considerations; fourth, conclusions; fifth, recommendations. Well, that was the sort of the template, the pattern, of staff memoranda in those days. Well, I've seen many of those memoranda which were written beginning with the recommendations. Then the whole paper would be written backwards. And very often 00:10:00some of the sharpest debate would occur on how you state the question, you see. Because the logical process is not necessarily the way the mind works in a lo of these things. Of course, George Marshall was a great teacher, and one thing which he insisted upon was what he called completed staff work. He wanted you to send in--He said, "Never send me a question unless you send me your proposed answer. Because if you haven't done that then you haven't thought enough about the question, therefore you haven't thought enough about the question to send it to me." And he wanted everything set up so that all he had to do was to sign his name on that piece of paper and then things would begin to happen. "Who's going 00:11:00to do what, how you go about it; everything has to be all set." That's what he told us.

RICHARD RUSK: When you came up with your answer, you would specify in detail how you'd implement that answer?

DEAN RUSK: If it required negotiation, who was going to do the negotiating. And so that everything was ready to go as soon as he put his name on that paper, you see. Now, and that was good schooling. I remember on one occasion, I took a particular point to teach some of my colleagues in the State Department a little lesson. Iraq was putting great pressure on Kuwait at one point during the mid-sixties, and it was looking like a pretty dangerous thing. Well the Admiral commanding at Norfolk had a little task force of his own out in the Indian Ocean, and we got a message from him saying that he'd ordered task force 00:12:00so-and-so to proceed north toward Kuwait and request instructions. So I sent this down to the Bureau of Inter-Eastern Affairs and asked them for a recommendation. Well, they came back with a pretty complicated paper, in effect, saying that if I thought so-and-so, I should do so-and-so, and if I thought so- and-so, I should do so-and-so. And I sent it back to them and said, "Now look, all that Admiral needs is a compass direction. He can sail north, he can sail east, he can sail south. He can't sail west, because he'd run into Africa. All I want is a compass direction from you." Now that was a little illustration of what George Marshall would call completed staff work. And also a little illustration of Marshall's constant admonition, "Don't fight the problem, try to solve it. Don't pretend the problem is something else, don't just say you wish 00:13:00it had never happened." And, so there was a good deal of detail in the process which could be very important.

RICHARD RUSK: Go ahead.

DEAN RUSK: When I was Secretary, one thing that I would do from time to time would be to take a few minutes to run in and visit and have a look at some part of the Department that Secretaries almost never visit, and where the people might not even know the Secretary was aware that they were there. For example, I visited the file rooms and the code rooms and the shipping department and once in a while I'd turn up in the general cafeteria, rather than the Secretary's dining room, for lunch, because I wanted to see and also be seen by the people 00:14:00working in those places. Because, after all, they were the people who did so much to keep the day-to-day work going. They were indispensable and yet they were never noticed. And I enjoyed doing that. And so when the time came for me to leave, when your mom and I went down in the elevator to go through the lobby to get in the car that final departure, the lobby was crowded with officers and staff of the Department who bid us goodbye. But eight years is a long time and so I got to know quite a few of them in the course of that--