00:00:00[Interview was recorded over the telephone, poor audio quality]
RICHARD RUSK: [audio for this initial introduction was recorded at a very low
volume] This interview is with Mr. Harlan Cleveland, assistant secretary of
international affairs, 1961-65. And 1965-69 he was U.S. Ambassador and
representative to NATO. This interview also contains remarks from Mrs. Cleveland
at the beginning of the tape.
[break in recording]
LOIS CLEVELAND: --for some time. That was when he was quite a bit younger and
your father was trying to get him to come up to the Foundation, and he could not
cut loose then. So, when he had the chance to go to the State Department and
work with your father, he did not even think twice. I remember one time your
mother had to make a little speech to a group of ladies and she and I walked in
together, and she took hold of my arm and her hand was just shaking, and I
00:01:00thought this woman does this six, eight, ten, twelve times a week and it is hard
for her every time. And she does it so that her husband will not be tagged with
all these things. She went to all those embassy parties by herself.
RICHARD RUSK: That's right.
LOIS CLEVELAND: Took all the embassy wives out to the house one on one. She
knew all of them. At the final banquet, I remember, the whole white-tie group
stood up as a man and applauded like mad when her name was offered.
RICHARD RUSK: Is that right? The final dinner for my father and mother? When
was this that you noticed my mom's hand shaking before her speech? I am not
surprised to hear it. I know she was real uncomfortable about that kind of thing.
LOIS CLEVELAND: I know because I would be, too. This was something at the
00:02:00Cosmos Club, but it was a women's group of some sort.
RICHARD RUSK: What year would that have been roughly do you think?
LOIS CLEVELAND: It never occurred to me that she was nervous. Here she was the
wife of the Secretary: my goodness, top dog! I was nervous, but I did not think
she ever was. It was kind of a revelation that she was conquering that and just
going ahead and doing what needed to be done. The embassy wives loved her
dearly. They thought she was wonderful.
RICHARD RUSK: Would that have been during the Kennedy years or the Johnson years?
LOIS CLEVELAND: The Kennedy years. During the Johnson years we were in NATO.
No, this was about '62 I would say.
RICHARD RUSK: Well, that is interesting. Do you have any more stories on my mom
or my dad?
00:03:00
LOIS CLEVELAND: Yeah, I remember one night we had an embassy dinner up there on
the seventh floor, and it was going on and on. It was very, very late. And
Harlan saw your father, and he told Harlan at a quarter of twelve, "Well, you
can go home early. I don't think we need any more tonight." He said that one of
the things that impressed him was that he had known your father before he went
there, and by the time he left he didn't know him very much better, and that he
00:04:00never played favorites. There was no scratching for position with your father
because he never worked that way. It really cut the dissension and rivalry down
to practically nothing.
RICHARD RUSK: Was he a hard man to get to know? Did you and your husband feel
that you knew him?
LOIS CLEVELAND: Not closely and personally, because he discouraged that because
it could lead to this kind of thing. He didn't start it. But they never doubted
for one minute his support and his friendship. I don't mean that. He just wasn't
allowing any competition to be the inside man.
[break in recording]
CLEVELAND: He made reticence a policy.
00:05:00
RICHARD RUSK: You're right about that.
CLEVELAND: That affected everything he did. It affected all of us who worked
for him. He is never going to write this story. He said that even when he was in
office. Give me just a second. Ma Bell is interrupting it seems. When he was
president of the Rockefeller Foundation he offered me a job which I was very
disappointed to turn down because I already had a job that I hadn't finished by
00:06:00a long shot. I was spending a lot of Foundation money and I couldn't quite
imagine that it would be as much fun to give it away. The man who was in charge
of the social science part of the Rockefeller Foundation died rather suddenly
and that was the job that he was talking to me about. I said at the time to my
wife and others that I really turned it down with much reluctance, because if
there was anybody that I wanted to work for in the United States it would be
Dean Rusk. So I was really delighted when he called up one day during the
interregnum after the election, before Kennedy took office, and said, "There
00:07:00seem to be two ideas about what you should do in the new administration." I had
been sitting there wondering whether anybody was going to call up about anything.
RICHARD RUSK: Waiting for the phone to ring, huh?
CLEVELAND: All kinds of friends of mine were being appointed for things. And I
had been chairman of Citizens for Kennedy for our part of upstate New York
around Syracuse. He said, "Well there are two jobs; there are two people: [Henry
R.] Harry Labouisse and you. And there's the AID [Agency for International
Development] program, the foreign aid program, and there's the job in the State
Department as Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs." The
00:08:00deal is that Adlai [Ewing] Stevenson [III], of course, had wanted to be
president, and then had wanted to be Secretary of State, and had settled for
being Ambassador to the U.N. Part of his deal with the President was that he
would get to nominate the person for the Assistant Secretary job, would be his
backstop. I told your father, "Well if I were the new administration I would put
me in the AID program," because earlier during the last of the war and the
Marshall Plan and so forth I had spent quite a number of years in the very early
00:09:00stages of the AID business. I said, "Precisely for that reason I would rather do
something that I haven't done before on the political side of diplomacy." I had
always been on the economic side. I would really rather work in this job which I
realize was being the man on the flying trapeze between Adlai Stevenson and Dean
Rusk. So he said, "Well I will try to make it come out that way." And evidently
he did, although he had a lot of trouble with Bobby Kennedy, who had taken a
dislike to me during the campaign.
RICHARD RUSK: Is that right?
CLEVELAND: And I had taken an enormous dislike to him, which I carry to this day.
RICHARD RUSK: Is there anything in that that I would be interested in, or not really?
CLEVELAND: Well, I don't know. It would take up too much of your time.
00:10:00
RICHARD RUSK: That's funny! Bobby Kennedy was a man who attracted some strong
supporters and yet some people really couldn't stand him.
CLEVELAND: It is said by people who knew him well in his last two, three, four
years that he became the great liberal and so forth. But my contacts with him
made it seem more credible that he was the person who had worked for [Joseph
Raymond] Joe McCarthy earlier in his life. He was the rudest man I've ever met:
unnecessarily so. I'll give you just one example. I was in Syracuse and I was
chairman of Citizens for Kennedy. And I went over to Auburn, a town near
00:11:00Syracuse, to pick him up and bring him back from a baked-bean dinner, I think
they were having to symbolize New England, for him as part of the campaign. So
on the way over--I had written a long memorandum for the Kennedy campaign about
how they ought to handle the foreign policy issue in the campaign. Then I had
listened to most of his speech in Auburn. And Robert Kennedy had not been taking
the line that I had suggested in my memo, so I called this to his attention and
00:12:00sort of argued the case for how I thought it ought to be handled. In the middle
of a sentence he leans over and turns on the transistor radio in the car full
blast so that it was impossible to hear anything. Now, you know, I was trying to
get his brother elected President and I considered that that was an
unnecessarily rude act, but that was quite typical.
RICHARD RUSK: The only man in government who really gave my dad a hard time inthat sense was Bobby Kennedy, on things like ambassadorial appointments in
trying to resurrect his old China hands, and things like that. So, I guess it
rings true.
CLEVELAND: My appointment was held up for several weeks: my formal appointment.
I came down as a consultant the third day of the administration. And I was
sitting in what was going to be my office, waiting for the formal papers to come
00:13:00through and wondering why it was taking so long. And you father finally told me
that the reason it took so long was that Bobby Kennedy had objected and had been
overruled by his brother.
RICHARD RUSK: Do you know if my dad fought on your behalf? Did you ever find
out anything about that story?
CLEVELAND: Well, of course, as in everything else--and maybe we can get into
this a little--you never learned what he and the President said to each other.
You never learned that from him. He obviously fought for it and won that round.
I think that I was one of relatively few people in those first rounds of
appointments that he really regarded as his nomination. I think [Phillips] Phil
00:14:00Talbot would be another. But, for example, [G. Mennen] Soapy Williams, the
former governor of Michigan, had been publicly appointed as Assistant Secretary
for Africa even before your father's appointment was announced. That was
settled. So it was kind of a mixed bag of appointments. But I always had the
feeling at least, that I was one of those that he really thought was a good idea.
RICHARD RUSK: I talked to your wife briefly before you came home. She told me
that my dad is one of three people you really looked forward to working for one
day. Why was it you thought that highly of my dad? Perhaps it's worth going back
into the story and trace out your earlier involvement with him. Do you care to
00:15:00do that for me?
CLEVELAND: I first got to know him somewhat when I was working for Paul [Gray]
Hoffman, who was one of the other people I really wanted to work for and did, in
the [George Catlett] Marshall Plan. But I wasn't in the Marshall Plan as most of
these people think of it: that is, as a European recovery program. I was
responsible for all of the developing countries. I was a sort of underdeveloped
areas guy in the Marshall Plan agency. I had started in charge of the China Aid
Program and then I was given the responsibility for the whole of all of the Far
Eastern programs.
00:16:00
RICHARD RUSK: You worked on the China desk in '48 and '49 I guess, huh?
CLEVELAND: Yeah. It was the China Aid Program, as it was called from '48 and
'49. And then in '49--Most programs like that run out of money. But we didn't
run out of money, we ran out of country. The communists took over the mainland
and we were left with Taiwan and a surplus of about $100 million, which was
quite a lot more money then than it is now. [Dean Gooderham] Acheson and Hoffman
went up to Capitol Hill with that effort that I participated in and argued that
what the appropriations meant when they appropriated the money for China was
00:17:00really the general area of China. And they nodded their heads and said yes
indeed, that's what they had had in mind. And we then spread that $100 million
through the area. We started programs in the so-called Associated States of
Indochina, as they were then called: Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos; developed a
much expanded program in the Philippines; continued a program in Taiwan; and
started programs in Indonesia and Burma. For a time I was director of the Far
Eastern Program, which included sort of starting all those new programs and
continuing the programs in Korea, China, and Taiwan, and beefing up the ones in
00:18:00the Philippines. At that time your father was the Assistant Secretary of State
for Far Eastern Affairs. So, although I considered him as considerably
outranking me, he was my opposite number in a way in the State Department. So we
had some contact in that connection. My feeling in every one of those contacts
was that this was the most lucid mind I had ever encountered. He had a clarity
of thought and of expression that just seemed to me extraordinary. He also had a
00:19:00kind of judicial temperament, a sense of kind of looking at one side and the
other of issues and then coming up with what was almost the kind of judgment
that a judge might make, based on the rationality of it. So I carried away that
sense of--There were one or two cases where--I remember one issue where there
was a big issue between the people who were interested in our relations with
00:20:00France and the people who were interested in our relations with the Indochina states.
RICHARD RUSK: If I can recall my history, wasn't that China money, that surplus
money, pumped into the effort with the French and Vietnam Indochina?
CLEVELAND: Yeah. It wasn't military aid, though, it was economic aid. The
French had left in the sense of leaving their sovereignty. So our arrangements
were with Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. But we were still--You know, they were
00:21:00virtually French satellites still. So it was helpful. But there was a big issue
about whether we would put the money in through France or whether we would open
up our own aid missions and operate them directly.
RICHARD RUSK: That would have been 1950? Or rather 1949-1950?
CLEVELAND: Forty-nine, maybe early '50, but probably more likely late '49. So
there was quite a bureaucratic row in Washington about it, including the row
00:22:00within the State Department between people interested in the Far East and people
interested in getting along with France. The way it came down, the person who
really had to make the decision about it was your father. He was very judicial
and rational about it, but he decided, from my point of view, the right way:
that is, not doing it through France, but doing it directly.
RICHARD RUSK: He made that decision as Assistant Secretary?
CLEVELAND: That was how it came through to me. He presided at the crucial
meeting on the subject and rendered the decision. Now how much he had to clear
his skirts with people above him at that time, I don't know. But my guess is
00:23:00that the people above him had enough confidence that they figured that whatever
he did would be all right.
RICHARD RUSK: That would have been a rather important decision for that time.
CLEVELAND: It was an important decision. It came back in my mind much later
when, in the State Department in the sixties I was involved in several issues
between sort of European constituents and African constituents on issues about
the Congo and otherwise, where your father would say to me, "Now for purposes of
this particular issue, if you're on U.N. desk and the problem is between the
European Bureau and the African Bureau, your job is to coordinate the two of
00:24:00them. Bang their heads together and come out with a reasonable answer. You're a
Deputy Under Secretary," he would say, "for purposes of this particular issue.
But if you say that is what you are, and that is what you have been assigned to
do, I will deny it." He says that "Your job is to reconcile these things, but I
am not going to give you the formal mandate to be the coordinator of it." That
was rather a typical way in which he would operate. But I felt that he had
enough confidence in me so that I would sail into the coordination function with
00:25:00enough confidence so that that would abash the other participants. It worked
pretty well, but it could never be traced back to him. Not an untypical way of
administration for him.
RICHARD RUSK: Two questions come to mind. One is relating to my dad's
impression on you in the early fifties when you knew him early. That is, did he
have that degree of reticence about him then that he later had as Secretary?
CLEVELAND: Well, I guess I did not really know him well enough in those days to
know what he was keeping back. My main impression from those days was his
capacity to not only analyze foreign policy issues but to explicate them. He is
00:26:00one of the few people I have known who really speaks in full sentences.
RICHARD RUSK: Oh boy, we find that out with these transcripts and oral
histories. They are grammatically correct. His conversational English is
grammatically proper written English.
CLEVELAND: Yes, well that struck me even in the fifties or late forties. So I
was not at all--Well, I was just impressed with him at the time. And so, as I
saw him occasionally in the period when he was with the Rockefeller Foundation,
00:27:00I had that same sense of lucidity. And I always had a very warm feeling about
him even though he was not a person, and particularly later in the sixties, with
whom you felt you could have a sort of close personal friendship. Although I had
been calling him by his first name for some years in the interim, when I came to
Washington I quickly realized that somehow it would be more appropriate to call
00:28:00him Mr. Secretary. And for the eight years that I worked for him in the State
Department and then as Ambassador to NATO, I called him Mr. Secretary.
RICHARD RUSK: What did he call you?
CLEVELAND: He called me Harlan. And when he was out of office I started calling
him Dean again and that seemed to be all right.
RICHARD RUSK: I don't think it would have mattered either way.
CLEVELAND: Well, I don't know. The other people who had known him that were
there, some of them had known him even better than I had, they had the same
feeling that we were addressing an office, which is very much what you do with
the President. Even his closest friends would kind of freeze up and call him Mr.
President after he got elected.
00:29:00
RICHARD RUSK: Well, my dad was greatly influenced by George Marshall, and I
could explain some of the reasons for his more formal relationships with people
as a--
CLEVELAND: I think that you ought to make a major theme of the influence on him
of George Marshall.
RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. He talked a great deal about George Marshall did he?
CLEVELAND: He was full of stories about George Marshall.
RICHARD RUSK: Okay. Well I think we have them all. I think we do.
CLEVELAND: I'm sure you have them all? My favorite was the story about George
Marshall when he was called up about when V-E [Victory in Europe] Day was going
to be exactly.
RICHARD RUSK: We have it.
CLEVELAND: He regarded that as a very good thing for Marshall to have done.
00:30:00RICHARD RUSK: And I suppose that when he was giving some directives or
directions to his staff, that is the form in which he would give them. He would
tell these stories and these anecdotes rather than say explicitly what he wanted
done and in what way things should be done, huh?
CLEVELAND: Well, it was interesting. He was not really very much like George
Marshall whatever his self image, because he was not a person to give orders.
The old theory of administration was recommendations up, orders down. I guess
for him you would have to say it was recommendations up and indications down.
The typical situation would be this: We would gather in his office to discuss
00:31:00some issue that would have to be decided ultimately by the President. We would
debate the issue. He would participate, but mostly by asking questions. Then the
meeting was over. He did not ask for a consensus, he knew what we thought. He
would then go over to the White House and sort the question out with the
President, through both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
00:32:00
END OF SIDE 1
BEGINNING OF SIDE 2
RICHARD RUSK: Incidentally, while we have this interruption--and again as soon
as dinner is ready I'll hang up and we will reschedule at your convenience. I
think you are the type of fellow who definitely has some things to say about my
dad and I would like to get back with you. But let's not push it, and keep our
priorities straight as far as dinner is concerned and things like that.
CLEVELAND: We could reconvene more easily over a weekend.
RICHARD RUSK: Okay, that would be fine.
CLEVELAND: About another twenty minutes. Let's see, where were we--
RICHARD RUSK: You were speaking of my dad's manner of operation with groups. I
presume you were talking about the assistant secretaries and how he would
00:33:00participate but not really give directions. Go ahead.
CLEVELAND: Then he would go to the White House and there would be a
conversation between him and the President, perhaps some staff, but often I
think just with the President. Then he would come back and he would tell us what
the policy was. Typically, we would never know whether this was a policy that he
had strongly argued for and had been accepted, or a policy he had strongly
argued against and had been overruled. But when he came back it was the
President's policy. He very much felt like the President's deputy for foreign
policy, which is exactly how a Secretary of State ought to feel, I think. And it
00:34:00was not his job to be second guessing it after the President had spoken. But it
was his job to mobilize all the best possible advice he could get, including his
own opinion. But it certainly was not his job to tell us, "Well, the President
has decided this but I sure don't agree with it, but we have to do it anyway."
He has never said anything like that. He had a very kind of constitutional sense
of the office he held. That was admirable but also somewhat frustrating,
obviously, for his subordinates who wanted to know where all the bodies were
buried and what all the gossip was. We never got any gossip.
00:35:00
RICHARD RUSK: I see that as being very damaging to this idea of trying to
develop departmental positions on things.
CLEVELAND: I'm not sure that it was really, because I think that essentially
what it did was it reserved to him the departmental position, and it did not
permit a situation in which the departmental positions were being developed by
all sorts of people. So I think that, in a way, it didn't derogate from his
power. It probably increased it internally. He always stayed away from any real
revelation of what went on between him and the President, and he certainly
00:36:00stayed away from any sense that he disagreed with the President on a matter
after the President had made a decision. I would say it's sort of a
constitutional view of the office.
RICHARD RUSK: Did that impair your ability to function as Assistant Secretary
for International Organizations? How did it work with you?
CLEVELAND: Well, no.
RICHARD RUSK: Did you know what was in his mind on the things that you needed
to know?
CLEVELAND: On the things that I really needed to know, I felt very comfortable.
One of the reasons for that was a kind of a special reason. He had been in my
job, you see. In fact, he was the first person to be in the job that I held when
00:37:00it became an assistant secretaryship: in fact much earlier, when it was still
called the U.N. Affairs Bureau. So he was very much interested in what I was
doing. I had very good, often just instant, access to him when we had a problem.
He was fascinated with the tactical issues in the U.N.
RICHARD RUSK: With the tactical issues?
CLEVELAND: With the tactical issues. In other words, if I would go up and say,
"Well now, we've got this problem in the Security Council about the Angola
Resolution. And we've got the so-and-sos on this side and we've got the other
people on the other side, and our dilemma is this, and our sense of strategy is
00:38:00that we should instruct Adlai Stevenson to do so and so and to say so and so."
On those subjects, instead of a kind of an Olympian posture he would get right
down in the staff work. He would say, "Well, I wonder if we couldn't," and he'd
kind of crinkle his smile. He'd say, "I wonder if we couldn't try this way of
doing this": some wonderfully creative procedural gimmick that he could have
thought up only if he had had previous experience in this particular kind of--He
had gotten very much interested in what he called "parliamentary diplomacy." He
00:39:00wrote a very good article in Foreign Affairs once on that, which if you haven't
seen, you should.
RICHARD RUSK: I've seen it, yeah.
CLEVELAND: He was very much interested in multilateral diplomacy as it was
practiced in the U.N. And, of course, back when he was doing it and when he--he
probably ought to be credited with the politics that created the U.N. force in
Korea, for example, over a weekend. He was very good at that sort of thing. He
still had this sort of almost technician's feel for what I was doing. And for me
that was not an obstacle at all. It was not a feeling that, "Oh my God, the boss
00:40:00is going to second guess me." It was a feeling that I could, first of all, get
to him almost immediately because he knew that the decisions we needed were
matters of hours, not days; and secondly, that when we got the problem to him
and explained it he would be a creative participant in the staff work. And it
was, therefore, a lot of fun to work with him that way. He was also very
sensitive, wonderfully sensitive, about the psychological problem of dealing
with Adlai Stevenson.
RICHARD RUSK: Let me stop you there for a minute and back up. Let me ask you
this question: Overall was he a good boss for you? You had said that you had
00:41:00wanted to work for him at one time. Obviously you anticipated that he would be
would be a certain type of fellow to work for. Did that pan out? Was he a good
man for you to work for?
CLEVELAND: Very much so, yes. Very much so. It was different from what I
thought because I had not really anticipated the reticence and the sort of
constitutional view of the office.
RICHARD RUSK: But you're saying--
CLEVELAND: In that job he was not a pal. I don't know of anybody that felt that
he was a pal. But substantively, and I was very much interested in the job
substantively, and in terms of political judgment and so forth, I always felt
00:42:00that he and I were very much on the same wave length. He gave me a great deal of
rope. I had a feeling, although this may not be justified and he might not agree
with it, but he gave me more rope than any other Assistant Secretary. The fact
that I felt that way is perhaps an answer to your question.
RICHARD RUSK: And all of the negative aspects of his performance as a boss, in
your experience, was this reticence. Is there anything else that you could think
of for the record?
CLEVELAND: There may be a first cousin to the reticence, which is a
compartmentalization: That is, as the Vietnam war wore on--And during most of
that period of course, which was quite long, I was over in Europe as Ambassador
00:43:00to NATO. But I got back, I figured, at the end of my forty-four months in that
job, I had come back to Washington twenty-two times. So I was back quite often.
And, of course, my European colleagues were leaning on me very hard about the
war in Vietnam. So whenever I saw him there was a kind of incentive to tell him
what the Europeans and I, myself, were increasingly feeling about the war,
which, as my European friends kept saying, "Whatever obligation you think you're
00:44:00fulfilling out there, you've already over-fulfilled it." Well I tried a few
times, and I tried quite hard in a series of cables after I got authority from
Washington to probe deeply into the views on Vietnam of each of the countries in
NATO. That was to get different angles from what they might be getting from the
bilateral end of it in the capitol. And I got very negative feedback about the
00:45:00war in Vietnam. I sent a series of, I thought, very well-formulated and eloquent
cables back and got zero response to it.
RICHARD RUSK: Do you think he read the cables?
CLEVELAND: Well, I raised this question with him much later, just a few years
ago, and he said he didn't remember why he hadn't ever responded to that.
RICHARD RUSK: What year would that have been?
CLEVELAND: Probably late '67, during '67 anyway. But the point is that when you
would approach a subject like that, that was not part of your responsibility,
00:46:00you got no encouragement at all to pursue the conversation. Vietnam was for
discussion with the people who were managing the war in Vietnam.
RICHARD RUSK: I wonder if he was that way on all issues or strictly that one,
as touchy as that was.
CLEVELAND: I don't think so. Well, I think even when I was in Washington he was
very open to discuss the issues that were in my jurisdiction or which affected
NATO even if they were arguments between the Belgians and the Africans. But I
never felt any encouragement to tell him what he ought to be doing in some other
00:47:00part of his responsibility. And my feeling is that he, in a sense, never had a
kitchen cabinet. He never had a bunch of cronies that sat around discussing the
situation as a whole. Personally, I think that was too bad because I think he
might have gotten insight. Much later he asked me how come so many people now
say that "they thought I was going down the wrong track but they did not tell me
at the time." I told him essentially what I am telling you.
00:48:00
RICHARD RUSK: Good point.
CLEVELAND: That was not something that he encouraged. You know, it's kind of a
hierarchical society, and when the king indicates that he does not want to
discuss that subject, you don't discuss that subject.
RICHARD RUSK: That's interesting. That is an important point. One of the
reasons that I am doing this book is because I am trying to piece that story
together. If you look at my dad's career over seventy-five years, it's one hell
of a story, and yet he got involved in one of the worst things this country has
ever done. And as his son, I want to try to figure this thing out. And whatever
insight you can give me along those lines is very helpful and I encourage you to
do it.
CLEVELAND: My diagnosis would be, a very important part of that was this
constitutional view, particularly during the LBJ administration.
00:49:00
RICHARD RUSK: Let me back you up just a minute. When you discussed your views,
the NATO countries' reactions to Vietnam, and you brought these up with him, did
you ever try to break through that reticence, press those views on him in any way?
CLEVELAND: No, and I wondered later whether I should have jumped up and down or
anything, but somehow it did not seem appropriate in his presence.
RICHARD RUSK: Do you recall anyone in the Department so-called going to the mat
with him on that war? I know George [Wildman] Ball did in numerous ways.
00:50:00
CLEVELAND: George Ball was against the war for the wrong reasons. I helped
George Ball write two or three of the crucial memos that he put into the hopper.
But his basic view was that that we should not be pushing it so far because the
Chinese will come in and clobber us as they had in Korea. I didn't really think
then and I don't really think now that that was the main problem. But that was
the main thing that George was pushing. Maybe he felt that that was the main
thing that would be effective.
00:51:00
RICHARD RUSK: You don't recall an instance where he was severely challenged on
his views on Vietnam within the Department with which you may have been familiar?
CLEVELAND: I never witnessed it, no. And it was sort of a Vietnam coterie of
people, Bill [William Putnam] Bundy and others, who were managing the war. And
they were the people who were in the act. One of the hardest liners, of course,
was--Oh, what is his name? He was head of the Research and Intelligence and
later wrote a book saying, "It sure should not have been done this way."
00:52:00RICHARD RUSK: Head of Intelligence at the Department of State?
CLEVELAND: Yes. But he wrote a really ridiculous history shortly after he got
out of the government: Roger Hilsman. I guess the most emotion I ever saw your
father exhibit was in talking about Roger Hilsman and his book. Because here was
this guy claiming to be a Vietnam dove and getting onto the best-seller list and
so forth, when inside the Department he was one of the hardest liners, one of
00:53:00the set of tough guys who really wanted to clobber them and so forth. I felt
equally strongly about it, but of course he wasn't my subordinate.
RICHARD RUSK: Hilsman claimed in his book that he resigned, but my dad says
that he fired him. Do you have any insights on that one?
CLEVELAND: Well, I would go with your dad. They may have allowed him to resign.
But he had become insufferable and his whole story that he tells in his book is
so egocentric and self-centered. I mean, on the Congo issue for example, which I
was very much involved with, he tells the story as if Soapy Williams and I were
00:54:00sort of on the African side against the European bureau. In fact, that was one
of the issues which I'd been assigned to try to sort out. And we did sort it
out. And we developed a policy and told the policy to the President about three
or four times at different crucial moments. And very late in the story, George
Ball asked Roger Hilsman to sort of review the whole thing and give him his
personal advice.
RICHARD RUSK: Yeah.
CLEVELAND: Roger builds up to that as the great climax of the story where he
takes all the papers home over the weekend (probably illegal, they were mostly
00:55:00classified) and reviews the matter and comes in with his opinion that the line
on which we were was exactly right. Somehow that's the climax of the story.
RICHARD RUSK: I see.
CLEVELAND: The rest of us never even knew that that was even part of it.
RICHARD RUSK: Can you tell me what my dad's reaction to Hilsman's leaving in
his book might have been: you know, the little anecdotal types of things that I
might be able to key in on?
CLEVELAND: Just that he was terribly impressed with the fact that Hilsman had
been on one side when he was in the Department and on the other side when he was
trying to collect readers for his book.
[break in recording]
CLEVELAND: --Of your father's reaction to people that did instant histories,
and then let's make a date to resume this.
00:56:00
RICHARD RUSK: Okay.
CLEVELAND: This story is one that I've been tempted to write down but I haven't
yet, but one of these days I may do so. It was while I was at NATO. And I came
back on one of my many trips and we had a lunch date with your father: [John J.]
Jack McCloy and I.
RICHARD RUSK: Jack McClay?
CLEVELAND: McCloy. He was not in the government, but was sort of a consultant
to the President on derailing the so-called Mansfield resolution, which was the
resolution that Mike Mansfield kept putting up about taking our troops out of
00:57:00Europe. So we had a date to discuss all of this with Dean Rusk in the eighth
floor special little sanctum that he had lunch in. And that morning the
Washington Post had all over its front page a new book by Arthur [Meier]
Schlesinger [Jr.]: not his big book about the Kennedy administration, but a
small book that he published later. I can't remember its title, but it had to do
with his perception that if Kennedy had been alive he wouldn't have done the
Vietnam thing the way--
00:58:00
RICHARD RUSK: Okay, that was maybe a hundred-page book on the war in Vietnam. I
recall it.
CLEVELAND: Well, the most natural thing in the world as we sat down to lunch
was for Jack McCloy to ask Dean Rusk "Well, what do you think of Arthur
Schlesinger's new book?" And your father made an absolutely classic "Ruskian"
statement. He said, "Well, I suppose that I met with President Kennedy maybe a
hundred times on Vietnam and Southeast Asian policy, and I don't remember a
single time when he held up his hand and said, 'Stop. We can't discuss this
subject, Arthur Schlesinger's not here.'" That's all he would say. But I think
that's vintage Rusk.
00:59:00
RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. I'm glad you told me that one. We've got a few stories
about Schlesinger. Of all the critical things said about my dad in all that
time, the only one that really affected me was Arthur Schlesinger's Thousand
Days and the Look magazine installments of it. I felt like I'd been kicked by a
mule after that one. The rest of them never got to me, but that one hurt. Yeah,
that one did. When do you want to talk again?
CLEVELAND: The best time would be--
END OF SIDE 2