Rusk W, Interview with Dean Rusk, circa 1985

[SIDE 1 NOT TRANSCRIBED: The first 25 minutes of Side 1 are Richard Rusk 00:10:0000:09:0000:08:0000:07:0000:06:0000:05:0000:04:0000:03:0000:02:0000:01:00reading what seems to be Stephen J. Morris' article in the Atlantic (Jan. 1985, 00:20:0000:19:0000:18:0000:17:0000:16:0000:15:0000:14:0000:13:0000:12:0000:11:00Vol. 255, Issue 1, p. 70). Dean Rusk discusses Cambodia and other issues in 00:31:0000:30:0000:29:0000:28:0000:27:0000:26:0000:25:0000:24:0000:23:0000:22:0000:21:00Southeast Asia for the remainder (approx. 20 minutes) of the Side 1]

BEGINNING OF SIDE 2

SCHOENBAUM: I wondered whether, when you were talking about [Michael Joseph] Mansfield and his about-face on Southeast Asia--pick up your train of thoughts. I find it curious that they did not come to you and say--and try to persuade 00:46:00you, first of all, as to their point of view before they went public and caused--When you go public, then you suddenly have your ego out in front, and they take a position, and they are suddenly rallying the forces around and it becomes a confrontation. I am surprised that they at not point, at least I don't know of any point--that they did not come to you in private or go to the President, or ask for a meeting with you.

DEAN RUSK: Well, I had a good many discussions with Mansfield in private. I'd occasionally go down, and he would have two or three other senators there with him in his office there, and we would talk things over. But he wrote a good many letters to the President in which he spelled out in some detail the reasons for his--But it is curious how a person is influenced by the particular job he holds. When he was a senator he would put in resolutions requiring a sharp 00:47:00reduction in our forces in Europe. But now that he has been Ambassador to Japan, he has been pressing for the building up of American forces in the Pacific.

RICHARD RUSK: You were about to comment on LBJ's ability to read senators.

DEAN RUSK: Well, he had--As Majority Leader of the Senate during the 1950s, he had studied these senators very carefully, and he knew a lot about what caused each senator to tick. He used to tell me about what Senators were going to do in the longer run, and he was very accurate in that. He could give me the reasons why people like Fulbright, Mansfield, and Frank Church went into opposition on Vietnam. He could give me a more analytical and thoughtful account than they 00:48:00themselves gave me.

SCHOENBAUM: Can you share with us what did he say specifically about the reasons why these senators went into opposition?

DEAN RUSK: Well, I think one I can say. He thought that Mansfield and Frank Church would simply revert to isolationism more or less along the old [William Edgar] Borah tradition, and that that was bound to come, their being senators from where they were and so forth. And there is a good deal in that.

RICHARD RUSK: Wayne [Lyman] Morse used to give you a lot of hell back in those years. What are your memories of Wayne Morse?

DEAN RUSK: Well, I always respected Wayne Morse because he stood up and stated clearly what he thought about these issues. I thought he was wrong on certain 00:49:00points, but nevertheless I respected him for it. We always remained friends. After I left office and was down here, he came to see me once. He was running for reelection in Oregon and he was being attacked as being a left-winger. I said, "Wayne, I don't know how it would go down in your state, but if you want me to come out there and make some speeches knocking this idea that you are a left-winger out of the ball park, I am at your disposal. Just call on me." And he cried, putting his arm around me. We were always friends. I disagreed with Barry Goldwater on a number of points, but we have always been friends.

RICHARD RUSK: Wayne Morse said at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin that South Vietnam was not worth the life of one American soldier. He might have been right.

DEAN RUSK: Well, that ramifies into a lot of other questions.

RICHARD RUSK: It sure does. Any other anecdotal types of stories about these congressmen: some of the congressional testimony you took part in?

DEAN RUSK: Well, these senators and congressmen hope to get reelected, typically, and they pay attention to the dominant interests in their particular constituencies; and you get a good deal of that. We have a fair amount of ethnic politics in our country. And you would expect a senator or a congressman from New York City to be strongly in favor of Israel. There's no doubt about it; you know where they come from. You expect senators from Louisiana westward to be strong supporters of the oil and gas interests, cattle; another one might be 00:51:00steel; another one might be tobacco. Well, you expect that because, to them, their number one problem is getting reelected unless they have announced that they are not going to run again. And so you have to put those jigsaw pieces together to see how it comes out in terms of the national interest and a unified American foreign policy. And sometimes fitting those pieces together gets to be a little complicated.

RICHARD RUSK: Speaking of the national interests and a unified American foreign policy, post-Vietnam period has been a period of real transition for American foreign policy. And regardless of who is at fault, and how much of that fault is responsible to the branch parties, what would be your recommendations now for rebuilding a consensus for foreign policy among the American people?

DEAN RUSK: Well, you have heard me say this before. Maybe I have said it on 00:52:00tape. We have got a new generation coming in now in positions of responsibility: people who have had no chance to remember the things that my generation remembers or take for granted the things we took for granted at the end of World War II when we built the United Nations and NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization], the Marshall Plan, and things of that sort. They also don't have the same deep sense of what collective security means for the preservation of peace in the world. My generation of students had been led down the path into the catastrophe of World War II, which could have been prevented. And many of us were fed to the teeth, although we did our duty in World War II. Now the idea of collective security has eroded considerably, and one can understand why that should happen among the American people. We have taken something like 600,000 casualties in dead and wounded since the end of World War II in support of 00:53:00collective security and it hasn't been very collective. We put ninety percent of the non-Korean forces in Korea; eighty percent of the non-Vietnamese forces in Vietnam. Some of those who had the same treaty obligations we had simply sat on their hands and didn't do a damn thing. So if my cousins in Cherokee County say to me, "Look, if collective security means 50,000 American dead every ten years and is not even collective, maybe it is not a good idea." I have profound respect for that reaction. But that still leaves this new generation with the questions, "If not collective security, then how do you propose to prevent World War III?" And we are not even discussing that question. If not NATO, then what? What do you put in its place, if anything? Because if we simply drift back into that combination of pacifism, isolationism, and indifference which led my generation into World War II, then I think we are in for some real trouble ahead.

RICHARD RUSK: There was some a loss of bipartisan support for foreign affairs 00:54:00with the Vietnam period and perhaps partially as a result of Vietnam. I'll ask kind of a tough question: To what extent do you think Lyndon Johnson, and his administration, and Dean Rusk may have been partially responsible for the loss of that bipartisan support, with respect to congressional relations?

DEAN RUSK: I wouldn't put it on a bipartisan basis because there were times when we had stronger support from the Republican side than we did from the Democratic side. After all the only two members of Congress who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution were two Democratic senators. I don't think it is a question of partisanship. I think these are matters that cut across political parties. And some of our major issues today cut across political parties: the Star Wars business, for example, where there is some important Republican resistance in the Congress today t this whole business of Star Wars.

RICHARD RUSK: At least if there is not bipartisan support necessarily, a consensus for foreign affairs, still you feel that the major issues in foreign affairs do not hinge along partisan lines?

DEAN RUSK: That's correct.

RICHARD RUSK: Well that is encouraging. Is that the way you fellows see it?

JOHNSON: Well I noticed in Atlanta, the Secretaries of State uniformly called for greater bipartisanship in policy. Back in the late sixties some members of Congress criticized that as a slogan which really had behind it the idea that dissent ought to be quelled on Capitol Hill and people ought to rally behind the President and support him whenever possible.

DEAN RUSK: Well, I realize that this is a complex question, but it is important for the American government to be able to speak for the United States when it is 00:56:00talking with other nations. And the quality of that voice is affected by whether or not you have broad bipartisan support or whether there is complete confusion and disarray within our own society on those issues. For example, if we had had great confusion in this country, or if the OAS [Organization of American States] had not been unanimous, and NATO had not been unanimous at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Mr. Khrushchev could have been led into some serious mistakes. But this is one of prices we pay for democracy, and I am glad to pay it--is a certain sense of confusion and disarray in the handling of our relations with other countries. There is no way, I think, to avoid that in a free society.

JOHNSON: One gets the impression from reading Henry Kissinger that he thinks that people and legislators should express their views every four years, in what 00:57:00you call our "quadrennial silly season," but between elections the people ought to support the President.

RICHARD RUSK: Kissinger is an elitist. He would be among that group of [Dean Gooderham] Acheson & [George Frost] Kennan and some others that you labeled.

DEAN RUSK: That's right. No, I think that policy officers must always have in the back of their minds, what would the American people think about this if they knew about it tomorrow morning at nine o'clock? That is utterly fundamental. Now that doesn't mean that the passing whims of the American people are the guidelines of policy. Edmund Burke reminded the electors of Bristol that he was not in Parliament simply to represent their passing whims but to bring to bear his conscience, his best of his abilities, to make good judgments on what is good for the realm. And we ought to bear that in mind in a representative form of government.

JOHNSON: Although, you know he was defeated shortly after making that speech.

DEAN RUSK: He still was right.

JOHNSON: I agree.

DEAN RUSK: I remember being in a hearing once and an old friend, Congressman [Lawrence Brooks] Hays from Arkansas, marvelous fellow, great raconteur--

RICHARD RUSK: Is this the same one who was involved with the McCarthy effort to review the foundation support?

DEAN RUSK: No, this is Brooks Hays. Well he got up to leave--The bells had rung to go vote--and turned to me and said--I was testifying on foreign aid. And he said, "Mr. Secretary, I hope you will excuse me, but I have to go up to the floor and vote on an Arkansas River bill. It doesn't do me any good to sit here and listen to you talk about the Tigris, and Euphrates, and the Nile if I don't 00:59:00vote on this Arkansas River bill."

RICHARD RUSK: When did he make that comment?

DEAN RUSK: I forget. That was before he was defeated because of his civil rights votes.

RICHARD RUSK: I have got a softball for you: Warren Cohen, in his book Dean Rusk, said that you were unsurpassed in your ability to explain American policy to a skeptical audience and win its confidence. That is high praise from Warren Cohen. Taking those words at face value--And I think we probably ought to concur with that just based on the other things that we've read and already know of you--Just in your own opinion, analyzing yourself, why is it that you were so effective with Congress? And I think you were. You must have worked hard at it. 01:00:00Obviously you put in a lot of work. How did you try to handle those people? What did you do? What were your tactics in dealing with those fellows?

DEAN RUSK: Well, one thing I think I can honestly say without too much presumption is that I never lied to the Congress. I never thought one thing and said another. And I think they appreciated that. I also was as candid with them as the traffic would bear. So I think that by and large they heard things from me that went beyond what they read in the morning newspaper, which is their common complaint. But a lot of it is just investing the time to try to do business with them.

JOHNSON: I remember Bill [William Egan] Colby telling me once that how in the world was he going to run the CIA if he had to spend sixty percent of his time 01:01:00on Capitol Hill.

DEAN RUSK: Yes.

JOHNSON: It was very frustrating. He had a good point.

DEAN RUSK: Well, at the beginning of World War II, George Marshall, Chief of Staff of the Army, was called down to Capitol Hill to meet with committees so often that he finally said to the Congress, "Now wait gentlemen, you have got to decide. Do you want me to run the war or do you want me to spend my time down here?" And they finally let up on him a bit. You see, having the Secretary of State come before your committee or sub committee sometimes gets to be a matter of prestige.

JOHNSON: And it gets the TV cameras there too.

DEAN RUSK: Yes, and this is something that senators and congressmen like. I found, for example, that if I went down to brief the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on something that was going on, I always had to go that afternoon or the next morning to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Otherwise there would be great jealousy. You just took that for granted.

JOHNSON: Based on what you said about members being harried individuals and not having much time, is it fair to say that they were for the most part poorly briefed for these hearings?

DEAN RUSK: Well, I think it depends on how much time they have been there. When a new President comes into Washington there are two reservoirs of experience in foreign relations matters that he ought to tap. One is the professional Foreign Service; the other are the experienced members of these committees of Congress because they have been there year after year. They have seen a lot of this before. There are times when that experience works against you because when I appeared thirty-two times before Congress on behalf of foreign aid, each time 01:03:00they wanted me to come: not the head of the agency or anybody else. They wanted me to come and they sort of wanted me to say something fresh about foreign aid. Well you can't make thirty-two different speeches about foreign aid and so they just got bored from hearing the same thing year after year. As a matter of fact, George [Pratt] Shultz here in Atlanta last year put it in two sentences: "This country could not be prosperous if two-thirds of the world is in abject poverty and misery. This country cannot be safe in a world in which two-thirds of the world is in violence and chaos." Now that's why foreign aid. It is an insurance policy. And when you have said that, you have said it all. All the rest is just window dressing. Sometimes a senator or a congressman will get a special bee in 01:04:00his bonnet. For example, Senator [Elbert Duncan] Thomas of Utah made it his life's work to insert the phrase "under God" in the pledge of allegiance to the flag. Senator Lyndon Johnson got to be a great proponent of the East-West Center in Hawaii as an educational institution. Otto [Ernest] Passman, who was the chairman of my subcommittee on foreign aid, had certain pets in his basket that he would pursue: the American University of Beirut, for example, and one or two others. So you have to take those into account.

JOHNSON: Does the seniority system in the Senate produce senility among some chairmen? For example, [Theodore Francis] Green, now in his nineties--Was he capable of running that--

DEAN RUSK: Well, I suppose, although--George [David] Aiken was one of the 01:05:00finest senators in the Senate up until the time he left although he had gotten into his eighties. It depends. Some of them get to be rather senile. I remember--I forget his name now--there was a very old chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It was customary in those days for an incoming Ambassador to pay a courtesy call on the Chairman. We had an Ambassador coming in from Switzerland and a Foreign Service Officer took him down to pay his courtesy call on this old Chairman. And in the course of a little lull in the conversation, the Chairman said to the ambassador, "Mr. Ambassador, how are you getting along with the guerrillas in your country?" Switzerland! Another aged 01:06:00Senator on a trip to Greece went to a reception and went up to Queen Frederica and slapped her on the bottom and said, "Hello Queenie, how are you this evening?" Or another senator would go to Africa and talk to them about having just climbed down out of the trees. Sometimes you have to live with some of those things, and there are times when they are embarrassing. I had a senator who thumbed a ride with me on a flight across the Atlantic, and he had too many drinks and couldn't keep his hands of off the young women on board. So I planted him in his chair and put my security man in the seat across the aisle and I said, "Now Senator, you are going to stay in your seat and my security man is going to sit here and see that you do." And he got very angry with me and was pretty rough on me the rest of the Senate. I was just helping him stay out of trouble. He could have gotten himself in a real mess there if he hadn't been careful.

JOHNSON: Members do a lot of travelling abroad and ostensibly their objective is to conduct oversight of our facilities abroad. Do they do this in a serious way, for the most part, or is it fun and games?

DEAN RUSK: On the whole I have been in favor of senators and congressmen making these travels abroad because it made quite a difference for them to see and hear and smell the situations that they were dealing with only on pieces of paper in Washington. I think it is usually a very good thing for them and I am very much in favor of these interparliamentary union kinds of sessions that we have: both the general one and the special ones with Canada and Mexico. You see, the 01:08:00Supreme Court has indicated more than once that the President is the sole organ of our communications with other nations. Well that is there as a legal principle, but it is violated more than not. Senators will go abroad. They will want to talk to the top people in particular countries and then they will say things that cut across what the President and Secretary of State are trying to do with those particular countries. That sometimes complicates things because foreigners don't know how to understand this.

SCHOENBAUM: Is that sometimes helpful, though, that you can kind of test the waters? You can either repudiate the comment quickly or you can leave it hanging and see how it flies in the particular capitol. Was there any instance of that?

DEAN RUSK: Well, I prefer the situation where senators and congressmen going abroad will put in a couple of hours to get a good briefing on matters they might encounter when they go abroad. Most of them are very careful about not taking differences beyond the water's edge.

SCHOENBAUM: You had some problems with notable private citizens who went abroad. Remember George Romney? He, at one point, went to Vietnam and he came out with a very famous remark that got quoted for months all over the country. It was his "I was brainwashed" remark. Do you remember anything about that?

DEAN RUSK: Well, we have a lot of Americans wandering around talking to other governments in violation of law: by the way, a law under which there has never been a prosecution.

RICHARD RUSK: What is the name of that law?

DEAN RUSK: The Logan Act. You see, back in the 1790s a Quaker named Logan had some talks with the French government on some matters which were being discussed with the French by our own government. The Congress got mad and passed this Logan Act. But there has never been a prosecution under it, and I have some doubt whether it would stand up as constitutional if a prosecution were brought. But a lot of private citizens inject themselves into these things.

SCHOENBAUM: Do you remember anything specific about George Romney's trip? Did you set that up?

DEAN RUSK: No. I am sure we assisted him in getting out there, made arrangements for him.

SCHOENBAUM: He didn't talk to you?

DEAN RUSK: No.

JOHNSON: This may be a harebrained idea, but what if the chairmen and ranking members of the two foreign affairs committees were invited to NSC [National Security Council] meetings of importance--crucial NSC meetings--to sit in on this information?

DEAN RUSK: I wouldn't object provided everyone understands the constitutional position. At the end of the day in an NSC meeting, it is the President who gives the final direction. But in terms of having, say, the chairmen of the foreign 01:12:00relations committees and the senior minority member--What I would prefer would be a regular monthly bull session between the President and the bipartisan leadership of the Congress, not to decide specific points, but just to develop some further consensus about what is going on in the world and what our general situation is with regard to it. Fulbright used to complain about Presidents calling senators down to the White House to talk with them. He used to say that the very atmosphere and the awe that attaches to the White House makes this an uneven conversation. And there is something to that. When [William Ewart] Gladstone was writing about his relations with Queen Victoria he said, "It is very difficult to argue on your knees." But I don't know; the senators and 01:13:00congressmen don't mind speaking up and defying the President as soon as they get outside of the room, so why can't they do it inside the room?

SCHOENBAUM: Is the atmosphere in that Oval Office kind of awesome?

DEAN RUSK: Well yes, when you think of the White House as the place where every President, beginning with John Adams, received members of Congress and entertained their guests.

RICHARD RUSK: Well the last question and your answer relate to this whole problem of how do we reestablish a broad-based consensus for American foreign affairs. And you answered in terms of a new generation.

DEAN RUSK: Well one way is to talk it out. My experience with the committees of 01:14:00Congress was that if you invested the time required to talk it over, that a consensus would emerge, not necessarily in full support of what I was proposing or what the President was proposing. But you might go back and make some adjustments in what you were thinking and doing on the basis of what you had heard in the Congress. Lyndon Johnson was very sensitive to what he perceived to be the views of the Congress, particularly the Senate. For example, I am sure that he authorized some--Let's see, what was it?--some weapons system because he thought he was responding to the Senate. And he was quite surprised about two years later when he found that the Senate didn't like this very much. He had 01:15:00been listening, maybe, to [Richard] Dick Russell [Jr.] and one or two others. For twenty years Dick Russell may well have been the second most powerful man in Washington. He not only was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he was the de facto chairman of the Appropriations committee because the real chairman, Carl [Trumbull] Hayden, was so old that he didn't take much of an active part. Presidents beginning with Harry kept in touch with Richard Russell frequently, and LBJ used to call him two or three times a week at least to get his reactions to particular matters.

SCHOENBAUM: Did you call him directly too?

DEAN RUSK: I would go to see him. I didn't call him on the phone. But there are certain subjects on which he was the czar; he was the king. For example, if we wanted to sell or lend a destroyer, or a PT [patrol torpedo] boat, or something 01:16:00of that kind to a foreign government, only Richard Russell could make that decision because it had to have legislative support. He was the key man in that, and if he said, "No," the answer was no.

SCHOENBAUM: Did you have a special kind of personal relationship with him, being from so close?

DEAN RUSK: No, it was friendly, but not close. You see, I had technically come to Washington from New York. But even so--

SCHOENBAUM: He considered you a Yankee?

DEAN RUSK: No, he considered me a Georgian.

RICHARD RUSK: Incidentally, John Kennedy called Richard Russell during the time he was considering your appointment and asked him his opinion of you as a Secretary of State. Richard Russell said that he didn't really know you that well once you had left for Oxford, but that "if he is anything like his brother Parks [Rusk], I would highly recommend him."

JOHNSON: It's quite remarkable when you think that Carl Vinson, Dean Rusk, and 01:17:00Richard Russell were all--in government was quite a feat for the state of Georgia.

DEAN RUSK: Well there was a time there in the fifties and sixties when one could say that the South lost the Civil War but captured Washington.

RICHARD RUSK: Let's get into the question of the effect of TV on committee hearings and on this larger question.

DEAN RUSK: Yes, I think it is worth flagging this for future study. When the Senate and House committees get further along in putting out the transcripts of their executive hearings, it will then be possible for somebody to study the difference in the quality of the discussion in private session over against public sessions. My guess is that you will find there is a significant difference. When I went before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1967 for two days of televised hearings. We weren't talking to each other, we were 01:18:00talking over heads through the cameras to a wider audience. At my age I am willing to admit that I could be wrong, but I will never change my mind: I am utterly opposed to the presence of television cameras in court proceedings and in legislative proceedings because I think the presence of the cameras creates a distortion of the entire scene. If you ever see the rerun of those two days of television hearings in 1967, you would think that certain senators were trying to cut my kidneys out. But when the hearing was over we went into a little room behind the committee room, and had a drink together, and everybody was on a first name basis. No big deal from that point of view.

JOHNSON: At the same time, you're quite a proponent of the value of having the public educated in foreign policy issues, and here's quite a means for doing it.

RICHARD RUSK: Those Vietnam hearings would be a bad one to single out for that because those were extremely valuable to everyone.

JOHNSON: Maybe they were misleading.

DEAN RUSK: I have had a lot of mail in subsequent years about those hearings and most of the mail concentrates on the fact that I kept my cool during that whole business. Well one cardinal rule for any--

RICHARD RUSK: Didn't you have a comment to that that fortunately they weren't able to see the "redness of my neck" or something like that?

DEAN RUSK: No, that I bit my tongue on the back end. If you lose your temper before a congressional committee, they will just cut you to pieces. They are experts on that and that is the last thing in the world one should do.

SCHOENBAUM: That's what [Alexander Meigs] Haig [Jr.] did. I think a little bit too much.

DEAN RUSK: It's a remarkable constitutional system. I wouldn't trade it for any 01:20:00other I know.

RICHARD RUSK: We don't need constitutional change to deal with this present impasse or difficulties created by a system where there is built in conflict between the branches?

DEAN RUSK: No, because I think the constitutional system forces us to seek consensus and I think, myself, that that is wholesome. No, I wouldn't change it from that point of view. I would look for more efficient ways to exchange ideas between the executive branch and the Congress, because a lot more of it goes on than anybody supposes. It is not just the Secretary of State; it is the Undersecretaries, the Assistant secretaries, who frequently are down on Capitol 01:21:00Hill talking to members of Congress, quite apart from the congressional relations people who spend a lot of time at it. Although once the Congressional Relations people--the Assistant Secretary--was before John [J.] Rooney on our State Department appropriations. He turned to this fellow and said, "Now, just what is the function of your office?" And this man went into this business about maintaining contact with members of Congress and so forth, whereupon John Rooney turned to members of the committee and went right down the line: "Congressman did any one of these fellows ever come to see you?" And in every case the answer was "no." Then he turned to this Assistant Secretary and said, "Now what do you say to that?"

JOHNSON: There is a problem in a way because we are competing in this world 01:22:00with nations which are organized in a very hierarchical way and are able to make decisions quickly. Yet we have this cumbersome, but very healthy system with open debate. But it does give us somewhat of a disadvantage in making rapid decisions, doesn't it?

DEAN RUSK: Yes, but there are also many situations where rapid decisions are not likely to be good decisions. When I was Assistant Secretary for United Nations Affairs, it was my custom once a month to sit down with one of those long legal pads and make a list of the things that I thought I was supposed to be concerned about: just one item per line. And these would usually run from eighty to one hundred items. When I would make up a new list, unfortunately, I would throw the old list away; but once I ran across one of these lists in a bottom drawer that was a year old. It was astonishing to go over that list a year later to see what had happened. Some problems had simply disappeared on 01:23:00their own; new problems had arisen; some problems had improved; some had gotten worse. It was very hard to find any clear connection between those that had gotten better or worse and whether we had done anything about it--very hard to find any coordination between the two. But the pace and the acceleration of change is continually picking up, and problems that you are thinking about today will be different problems tomorrow and the whole scene is in rapid movement. And sometimes--in hunting birds you have to lead with your sights or you will get nothing but tail feathers for your pains because you may be behind the play. The problems might have moved out from under you. This is one of the problems that we professors have in having an effective input into foreign policy and thinking because by the time the professors work out all their footnotes and 01:24:00have anywhere from nine months to two years to produce them, the problems have changed: flown out from under them. So that makes it difficult for effective communication between academia and the world of decision.

JOHNSON: And to some degree, a lesser degree, Congress is out of pace too because it hasn't had the (unintelligible) and to that extent the Congress becomes a [stumbling block??]

DEAN RUSK: To some extent. To some extent. On the other hand, there are certain threads of continuity in our policy which are well understood and taken for granted, where the Congress can play an important role when a new bunch of fellows come to town in the executive branch and have no memory about how these things happened before. They can make an important contribution to many of these problems.

JOHNSON: If they're consulted.

DEAN RUSK: But when you say, "If they're consulted," why should members of Congress sit there like pouting dowagers waiting to be persuaded? Why don't they take more initiative? I think I said before--if not, I will say it now--that you might be surprised to know that in my eight years I remember only a half dozen occasions at most when a congressman or a senator would take the initiative to pick up the phone and call me and say, "I would like to talk to you about something." They leave that initiative to the executive branch and it is quite a burden.

RICHARD RUSK: What were you going to write your book about, Pop, as far as congressional relations are concerned? You talked about it.

DEAN RUSK: Well, if I live long enough, I may get out a little book on reflections on our constitutional and political system as seen from the point of view of someone who has sat in that chair for eight years.

RICHARD RUSK: Would there be anything of substance that you would have in your book that wasn't discussed here?

DEAN RUSK: We've commented on practically all the important points. I oppose some of these constitutional changes, and those who want to draw members of the Cabinet from Congress, for example, sort of a modification of the procedures. I oppose a single six-year term for a president. There are things that come out of our present arrangements that are constructive and are very good. There is far more consensus than people realize. When you think of those 2,100,000 cables that went out of the Department of State with my name signed to them, ninety-five percent of them would have been approved by the Congress had they 01:27:00been sent up there ahead of time. One little episode that reflects on what is consultation and what is not: when I was head of the United Nations Affairs under George Marshall in the Truman Administration, he invited Senator Arthur [Hendrick] Vandenberg, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to come down and spend a couple of hours with him going over the items that were coming up in the forthcoming United Nations General Assembly. He had me there to 01:28:00be prepared on particular details; and we went over forty or fifty items that were coming up on the agenda; and when it was over, Vandenberg got up to go and Marshall said, "Thank you very much. Senator. I am delighted to have had this opportunity for consultation." Vandenberg said, "Not consultation, Mr. Secretary, conversation." And Marshall immediately got the point and said, "Of course, you're right." You see, Vandenberg under those circumstances had no chance to go back and talk to his colleagues. You see, it was conversation; it was not consultation in the true sense.

RICHARD RUSK: On the occasions when Vandenberg did go back and consult, was he really delivering a block of informed and definitely a consensus of the (unintelligible) support there, or was this more or less rubber stamping?

DEAN RUSK: Oh no, he required his committee members to come to meetings, and they did, and required them to put in the time necessary to hammer out a 01:29:00committee point of view. And there were times when the executive would make adjustments to take account of what had come out of those discussions. But he was a superb chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee: one of the best we have ever had.

RICHARD RUSK: Any comments on Fulbright as a committee chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations: in general, overall?

DEAN RUSK: Fulbright is an instinctive maverick. He might have learned that in 01:30:00his early days as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford because at Oxford it is infra dig to agree with anybody else. That's why conversations at Oxford are so fascinating, including at High Table where the dons all dine together. But Fulbright was an instinctive maverick. Now there is room in the Senate for mavericks, but when one gets to be chairman of an important committee, that could create some problems. So there were times when the other members of the committee had to press him to let something come up for vote and go forward, when he himself was very reluctant and was trying to block it. But you have to work that out committee by committee and issue by issue. If you get a chairman who is obstructive, then there are, at least, ways by which his hand can be 01:31:00forced and letting it come to a vote, but it is not easy.

JOHNSON: I have heard Fulbright say that the falling out, the experience with Lyndon Johnson, came about as a result of (unintelligible) the fact that Johnson would not go in there (unintelligible). Does that seem accurate?

DEAN RUSK: Well, I don't know. I think that Fulbright would have dissented on Vietnam before it was over anyhow. But in the case of Dominican Republic, Johnson used a contingency plan that had been worked out under the personal direction of John F. Kennedy. When it looked as though foreign embassies and foreign nationals were in serious danger down there, he put the Marines ashore. 01:32:00Then after the Marines got ashore and various individuals came out of the capitols telling us what the situation was inside the capitol, including the Secretary General of Juan Bosch's own party. And it seemed apparent that there was going to be a blood bath and that we would either have a [Rafael Leonidas] Trujillo [Molina] kind of dictatorship or a [Fidel Ruz] Castro kind of dictatorship. Well, the OAS [Organization of American States] had already imposed sanctions on both of those guys for different reasons. And so we went to the OAS, and organized a so-called peace force, and put together an interim government to preside while elections were being held. And the Dominican people had their election and things worked out pretty well on the whole. I think Bill Fulbright, in retrospect, would probably say that that was a reasonably proper operation.

SCHOENBAUM: That was Ellsworth Bunker's finest hour, wasn't it.

DEAN RUSK: He did a brilliant job in that.

END OF SIDE 2