Rusk 7P, Dean Rusk autobiographical sketch, Part 2, circa 1985

DEAN RUSK: One point, on which most of the writers have got it wrong, had to do with the relations between General Stilwell and Lord Louis Mountbatten. Officially, they had to represent different points of view originating in London and in Washington, but they had a high regard for each other personally, partly because each one knew that the other wanted to fight, wanted to get on with the war. Although General Stilwell was sardonic about any kind of headquarters or 00:01:00bureaucracy or red tape or anything of that sort, he often spoke to me of his high regard for Lord Louis Mountbatten as a person and as a commander. Lord Louis was a most extraordinary man, had all the endowments that any man could wish: he was extremely handsome, had position, wealth, intelligence and was, I think, a fine leader in that theater. He had the disadvantage of being in a 00:02:00theater of operation of such low priority that he was never given the resources with which to conduct the kind of war against the Japanese which he had in mind. But that was true for all of us out there in that particular part of the world since the war in Europe and the war in the Pacific had overwhelming priority as far as resources were concerned.

In June 1945, I was given rest and recuperation leave and a chance to come back and spend a month with your mother and David, who were living at Mills College. 00:03:00That month was a joyous occasion--we had been separated for two years. I had not been with David during his earliest growing period and so it was a period of very special meaning to our family. While I was on R and R leave at Mills, however, I received orders transferring me from the CBI theater to the Operations Division of the War Department General Staff -the famous OPD, and 00:04:00instead of returning to India, I reported back to Washington to serve in a section of the General Staff charged with long range policy planning issues, such things as our participation in the newly born United Nations, matters dealing with the terms, circumstances of the eventual surrender of Japan, problems arising out of the occupation of defeated Germany, many questions of 00:05:00that sort. I was not among those officers who were informed about the development of the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb. But I remember very vividly the day that the flash came in reporting the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. A colonel of the regular army sitting at the next desk, upon reading this telegram exclaimed, "This means that the war has turned upon itself and is 00:06:00devouring its own tail. From this point forward, there will be no sense in governments resolving their differences by war." That instinctive insight has not yet been translated into the real world although we have now put behind us thirty-seven years since a nuclear weapon has been fired in anger.

The section of the General Staff on which I was serving at that time provided the staff backup for General George Marshall with regard to the matters coming before our Joint Chiefs of Staff or the U.S.-British combined Chiefs of Staff. 00:07:00We also provided the staff support for Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, who was the War Department's member of the State/War/Navy Coordinating Committee called SWNCC in those days. That meant that we were involved in a wide range of major policy issues and there was never a dull moment. For example, we played a part in the decision to retain the Emperor of Japan, we felt that act alone would open the way for peaceful post-war occupation of Japan rather than an occupation being imposed upon a resisting people which would have been, among 00:08:00other things, a major military burden upon the forces of the United States.

The actual surrender of Japan came somewhat more quickly than we had anticipated, even with the atomic bomb, and so when it occurred we still had to spend several all-night sessions preparing the actual surrender documents to get them out to General MacArthur for the ceremony on the battleship Missouri. Those surrender documents had to be agreed with the British and the Russians and the Chinese.

One episode there turned out to be more significant than we thought at the time. There was a difference of view between the State Department and the War Department as to the areas in which American forces would receive Japanese surrender. The State Department wanted us to take the Japanese surrender as far north on the mainland of China as possible, including major points in Manchuria, but the army did not want to make itself responsible in those areas in which it 00:10:00did not have adequate forces in the event of trouble either with the Japanese or the Russians, so the Army did not want to go on to the mainland at all for purposes of accepting the Japanese surrender.

The compromise was finally reached that we would at least have a toehold on the Korean peninsula as a kind of symbolic presence. Two colonels, Colonel Charles [Hartwell] Bonesteel and I, who had been a classmate at Oxford by the way, went into a neighboring room to make a map study of the Korean peninsula. I think 00:11:00this occurred in the middle of the night while the State/War/Navy Coordinating Committee was meeting. We looked at the map, and we thought that it would be well to have Seoul, the capital of Korea, in the area in which Americans would accept Japanese surrender. But we knew that the army was going to be very resistant to any extensive area so we looked just north of Seoul for some convenient dividing line and there were no clear geographical points that would make a logical line for the areas in which the surrender would be accepted, but 00:12:00there was the 38th parallel and we recommended that. Well, none of those present at the meeting from State/War/Navy were aware that at the turn of the century the Russians and the Japanese had been in discussion with each other about a division of a sphere of influence in Korea along the 38th parallel, had we known that, we would almost certainly have accepted any other line of demarcation because if the Russians remembered then they would interpret that as an 00:13:00acknowledgement of their sphere of influence in Korea along the 38th parallel and in any talk we later put forward about the agreed unification of Korea was just for show; it was not real. But in any event, it was that kind of accident that was responsible for the 38th parallel.

My work on the General Staff at this time brought me in regular contact with that part of the Department of State that was working on the United Nations. We were particularly interested in such things as the makeup of the armed forces which the U.N. Charter provided would be furnished to the United Nations through 00:14:00special agreements negotiated with the U.N. Security Council. And so I had become well acquainted with people in the State Department working on United Nations affairs.

In February 1946, I was demobilized as an army officer, the rank of colonel, and accepted a position as Assistant Chief of the Division of International Security Affairs in the Department of State. That division was part of the Office of Special Political Affairs which was the office handling United Nations matters at that point. The office had been created during World War II for purposes of 00:15:00planning for the post-war world organization. The Division Chief under whom I worked was an old friend, Joseph [Esrey] Johnson, later to be president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The director of the Office of Special Political Affairs at that time was a man named Alger Hiss.

During that service as Assistant Division Chief one of the interesting things I did was to accompany Secretary of State James [Francis] Byrnes to New York where he sat in the Security Council to represent the United State over the question of Azerbaijan, the first case before the United Nations Security Council. We and 00:16:00the Russians had put a line of communications through Iran during the war to have that additional route through which to ship Middle East supplies to the Russians in support of their war effort and we had our forces in the southern part of Iran during that period--transportation/communication fores and they had theirs in the northern part of the country, particularly the northwest province of Azerbaijan. But at the end of the war, they refused to withdraw their forces and this looked to us and to the rest of the world like an attempt to grab all of the province of Azerbaijan for Russia, so the matter was brought to the Security Council. You might find a picture of Secretary Byrnes sitting 00:17:00there at the Security Council table and you will find seated behind him a fellow who looks strangely like your father.

In the summer of 1946, I was asked to come back to the Pentagon to take a position as the personal assistant to the Secretary of War, Mr. Robert Patterson. Actually, I worked principally under his assistant secretary, Mr. Howard Petersen, longtime friend who has been, for many years, a banker in Philadelphia. In that job I continued to work on United Nations matters on 00:18:00United States participation in the fifteen nation Far Eastern Commission, which used to meet at the little Japanese Embassy out on Massachusetts Avenue and which had a kind of supervisory control over the occupation of Japan. I worked on the integration of the army and a number of other questions that were part of the responsibility of the Secretary of War. I remember how desperately we had to work to find food for occupied Germany and occupied Japan, there was a world food shortage at that time. We had a direct responsibility for feeding the 00:19:00peoples in these occupied countries, and it was a very close thing in terms of scratching up enough food on which they could live.

In early 1947, George Marshall, who had spent a year on that fruitless mission to China at the request of President Truman, became Secretary of State succeeding Secretary [James Francis] Byrnes. Soon after he took over the State Department he invited me to come over and take charge of the Office of United Nations Affairs, the job formerly held by Alger Hiss, and I made that move 00:20:00because I had a keen interest in the United Nations and went over to the State Department again.

Working under George Marshall in the State Department was a very special experience. He was a man who tried to pick people in whom he had confidence and then delegate major responsibility to them. His view was that if he found somebody to whom he could not delegate, he would remove them and get somebody else to do that job. I learned a great deal from George Marshall, and I will be 00:21:00doing an article one of these days on George Marshall as a teacher.

But those first years at the United Nations were very stimulating and rewarding years. There was a new atmosphere, there was a new sense that maybe things could work out for the better although we knew immediately that we were going to have major problems with the Russians in the United Nations as elsewhere. When the General Assembly of the United Nations meets in September each year, almost every major question of foreign policy comes before the General Assembly in one way or another, either in debate or before one or another of its major 00:22:00committees. So my job in backstopping the U.S. delegation to the United Nations drew me into almost every aspect of our foreign policy, and I had to work closely with those in charge of our relations with Europe and Latin America, Asia, Near East, Africa, just to get our delegation to the United Nations properly informed and instructed for those sessions up in New York.

While I had been special assistant to Secretary of War Patterson, he offered the Presidio of San Francisco to the United Nations for its new home. It was a 00:23:00fantastic offer because the Presidio had extensive grounds, it had residences, it had office buildings, it had a hospital, it had an airstrip, a golf course, a yacht harbor, movie house; it had everything. It was probably, in those days even, a hundred million dollars property. But the United Nations turned it down for that location there on the East River in New York. My own guess is that had we had jet commercial aircraft in those days, they might well have accepted the Presidio, San Francisco. But there were many delegations who simply could not face the prospect of making a long flight to New York and then making another 00:24:00three thousand mile flight on to San Francisco and so the New York site was chosen.

While I was on that job involving the United Nations, it was my practice about once a month to sit down with one of those long yellow pads used in government and make a list of the matters in which I thought I should be concerned, be thinking about--one line per item. And those lists would usually run eighty, ninety or one hundred items each month. When I made a new list I threw away the 00:25:00old list, although I wish now that I had kept them. Once I ran across one of these lists that I had stuck away in a draw somewhere that was a year old, and it was fascinating to see what had happened to such a list in the course of a year, how extraordinarily things had changed; some problems had gotten better and some problems had gotten worse. New problems had arisen, older problems had simply disappeared and I could speculate on whether there was any correlation between which things improved or got worse and whether we ourselves had done anything about them. I think we tend to exaggerate the necessity for action about a lot of matters which, given time, will simply work themselves out or 00:26:00disappear while new problems come into existence.

That job as office director was made an assistant secretary job in 1949, and I became the first assistant secretary of United Nations Affairs on my fortieth birthday. At the time there was comment that I was very young to become an assistant secretary of state but now the titles have been inflated so much there are a great many assistant secretaries much younger than that.

When President Truman was reelected in 1948, Secretary Marshall, who had been 00:27:00having some health problems, resigned and Dean [Gooderham] Acheson, became secretary of state, and I continued to serve in United Nations matters when Dean Acheson took office. After a time he asked me to become deputy undersecretary for political affairs, whose technical rank was still that of an assistant secretary but the function was given the name of deputy undersecretary. My job was to help the secretary in coordinating the points of view, interests and attitudes of the various political bureaus of the Department: Europe, Africa, 00:28:00Latin America, Asia and so forth. There were a good many differences of views among these bureaus because they had different responsibilities and it was perfectly natural. For example, on colonial issues you would have the Asian and African bureaus in disagreement with the European bureau because the European bureau was responsible for our relations with the colonial powers. My job as deputy undersecretary was to help iron out those differences with a view to developing some national policy with regard to matters in which there were inherent contradictions.

After a time as deputy undersecretary, I became assistant secretary for Far Eastern Affairs. The China question had created deep divisions in the United States and it provided the occasion for a series of vicious attacks in the Congress and by others against some people in the State Department, including some of the old China hands, involved Dean Acheson himself. It was one of the motivations behind what came to be known as McCarthyism, and so I indicated to Dean Acheson that if he wanted me to take on the Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs 00:30:00and try to make a fresh start, that I would be willing to do so and he accepted that suggestion. My principal experience with the Far East had been during World War II and at the end of the war when we were dealing with such things as the surrender of Japan.

I had been assistant secretary for Far Eastern Affairs only a few months when the Korean War broke out, beginning with the major invasion of South Korea by North Korean forces, and I suspect that I am going to have to do a special tape of the Korean War so I won't try to go into much detail here.

At the same time, however, we were anxious to bring the occupation of Japan to a conclusion. It was our view and it was a view shared by General MacArthur, that the occupation had reached a point of diminishing returns. President Truman had asked Mr. John Foster Dulles, leading Republican who had worked with us on United Nation matters and other foreign policy questions, to come back into the administration in order to work toward a bipartisan basis on all of the 00:32:00questions in Asia with the exception of China. There was little prospect that the Republicans and Democrats could get together on China partly because the Republicans were making a major partisan issue of the so-called loss of China. So Mr. Truman asked John Foster Dulles to turn his attention to the Japanese Peace Treaty, and he became our principal negotiator of the Japanese Peace Treaty. I was his principal backstop as far as staff was concerned in the 00:33:00Department of State. Mr. Dulles did an extraordinarily fine job in working out the Japanese Peace Treaty, traveling all over the world discussing it with thirty-five or forty countries. In preparation for a possible Japanese Peace Treaty, the bureaucracy in Washington put together stacks and stacks of position papers and based on those papers, the peace treaty would have been a very long and complicated affair, but Mr. Truman wrote John Foster Dulles a very simple letter, not more than two pages in length, if effect telling Mr. Dulles that he, 00:34:00Mr. Truman, wanted a peace of reconciliation with Japan and instructed Mr. Dulles to get that kind of peace. So Mr. Dulles, with the help of others, such as myself, brushed aside all of this accumulated paper work. He went for a simple, direct, relatively brief peace treaty. There were some problems because certain countries like the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, were not particularly interested in a peace of reconciliation.

There were countries who wanted large reparations but we Americans knew that any 00:35:00reparations imposed upon Japan would become a burden upon the United States and so we resisted the idea of including major reparations in the peace treaty.

It was finally worked out and the Japanese Peace Conference was held in San Francisco. We developed procedures which made it impossible for the Soviets to veto the Japanese Peace Treaty. We had earlier succeeded in denying to the Japanese an occupation zone in Japan itself as it happened in Germany. After all, the Soviets were in the war against Japan only for a few days before the Japanese surrender. And so the rest of the world proceeded with the Japanese 00:36:00Peace Treaty concluded in San Francisco in 1952.

At the same time we concluded a security treaty with Japan and with the Philippines and with Australia and New Zealand, the so-called ANZUS Treaty. The treaties with the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand were aimed as much at the possibility of a Japanese military revival in the Pacific as in any other threat. These treaties were in part a quid pro quo for the acceptance by the Philippines, New Zealand and Australia of a peace of reconciliation with Japan.

I had, I think in 1951 perhaps, been invited to become a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. There were a number of friends of mine on the Board, people like John J. McCloy, Mr. Robert Lovett, Mr. Lewis Douglas, John Foster Dulles and others. After a period as a trustee, I was invited in 1952 to become president of the Rockefeller Foundation. I felt that I should take that job; the 00:38:00prospects were fascinating in terms of the work that a private foundation could do to contribute to, as the Foundation charter puts it, "To contribute to the wellbeing of Mankind throughout the world." The Rockefeller Foundation had established a very honorable reputation with its work, wholly non-political in character, such things as public health, medicine, the arts, particularly in the so-called developing nations. Mr. Truman called me over to see him at that point and told me that I could have any job in his administration that I would take; 00:39:00for example, he suggested that I might become ambassador to Japan. "But," he said, "I will not stand in your way in taking the best job in the United States." referring to the presidency of the Rockefeller Foundation. So, in the spring of 1952, I became president of the Rockefeller Foundation. [Richard, we can get into this in some more detail, but I think first you ought to read the annual President's Review that I wrote on the work of the Rockefeller Foundation to give you some background so that you will know a lot more about what the Foundation was doing and my general approach to its work and then we can make a 00:40:00special tape on that.]

During the Foundation years, I continued to be active in international affairs, in fact I visited widely in many countries; was active in the discussion groups at the Council on Foreign Relations. I did a certain amount of lecturing on international matters. I had never taken any active part in elective politics. Beginning with World War II, it would have been inappropriate for an army officer during the war, and during the years at the State Department we were expected to stay out of elective politics. Of course, at the Rockefeller 00:41:00Foundation, a tax-exempt, philanthropic institution, it would have been inappropriate for me to take too much of a part because it would inevitably leave the impression that somehow the Rockefeller Foundation was, itself, in politics which was a no-no. But we were encouraged to be as active as we wanted to be in local matters, politics at the local level.

You will remember, Richie, that during our years at Scarsdale when I was at the Rockefeller Foundation, we took an active part in the Scarsdale community. I was 00:42:00a member of the Town Club and for some time chairman of its Education Committee. We had our Saturday sports programs which you remember very well. I was on the library board there in Scarsdale and was a local Democrat although the Democratic party in Scarsdale was very much of a minority party. I was co-chairman of the Democratic Committee in support of the candidacies of John F. Kennedy and his running mate Lyndon Johnson. We had Adlai [Ewing] Stevenson [III] come to Scarsdale during that campaign. There had been a love affair between Stevenson and the Democrats of Westchester County. We had a huge 00:43:00turnout, the high school auditorium was filled and we had a big crowd outside with speakers. One of the problems was that Adlai Stevenson spoke to his old supporters and friends without mentioning the fact that the purpose of the meeting was to support the candidacy of Kennedy and Johnson. Since I was chairman of the meeting, it was up to me to spend about five minutes at the end of the evening reminding people that we were there to support the Kennedy ticket.

I had never met John F. Kennedy until after the election in 1960 when he was 00:44:00president-elect. In mid-December he called me to come to see him at his house there in Georgetown, Washington [District of Columbia]. I went in and we spent about an hour and a half together talking about various possibilities as secretary of state. He had three or four names on his mind and I had two or three suggestions to add to his list. We talked for about an hour and a half and there was no discussion whatever about the possibility that he might ask me to take the job. So I went on back to New York and told my colleagues at the Rockefeller Foundation that I would be staying at the Foundation, that any press speculation about my name that they might have seen had nothing to it. The very 00:45:00next day Kennedy called me and told me that he wanted me to take the job. I said, "Now wait a minute. There are a lot of things we ought to talk about before you make that decision." And so he said, "All right, come on down to West Palm Beach tomorrow and we will talk things over." So I went down to West Palm Beach and we spent a morning together talking about personnel matters such as getting Adlai Stevenson to take the U.N. job and Chester [Bliss] Bowles to become undersecretary of state. In fact, during that morning he telephoned both of them to insist that they take those two posts and then he made the announcement about mid-day down at West Palm Beach.

I had never in the world expected that I would be secretary of state. I had not 00:46:00organized my life or my staff for that possibility. I didn't have any team to take with me to the State Department so that my team on the job was to be the Foreign Service. But that ushered in a pretty hectic period; much of the burden of that transition to become secretary fell upon your mother because she had to make arrangements for you kids to finish your year in Scarsdale and to get everything put together for a move to Washington, to find a place in Washington in which we could live. We had very few resources and couldn't do it on the grand scale that some people were able to do it. I think I lost about fifteen pounds in the first three weeks after Mr. Kennedy's announcement. But that was 00:47:00about the story as to how I was tagged for the job as secretary of state.

END OF SIDE 1

BEGINNING OF SIDE 2

DEAN RUSK: There is one postscript I want to put on the comments I made about living on Whitehall Street in West End along that railroad track. It was a very stimulating place for a young boy to be growing up. Down at one corner was old 00:48:00Number Seven fire station and when we first moved there the fire wagons were drawn by horses who were trained to leave their stables when the bell rang and take their places along the shaft, harnesses would fall down on them from above more or less automatically and with the fastening of three of four buckles they were all already to go. The pump was driven by steam and the pump wagon was fired by coal. In the middle of the night it was very dramatic to see that pump wagon pulled by horses running along with the fire blazing out of its stack and 00:49:00with the open oven into which the firemen were shoveling coal.

Up on the next corner, in the other direction, was a switching tower for the railroad and we could climb up into the tower and sit and watch the switchman there pull his levers and his signal and route trains through a major assembly yard which was just north of the switching tower.

Right across the railroad track was a huge ice plant and we could go over there and sit on the rafters and suck ice and watch them make ice. They made it in big blocks in those days and the ice trucks would go out and chip off the amount of ice that a particular customer wanted for their iceboxes. Next door to the ice 00:50:00plant was a Karo syrup plant, and again we could go over there and sit on the rafters and suck sugarcane and watch these huge caldrons of syrup boil away while they were making syrup.

Beyond these two plants was an industrial dump where the various industries and businesses in the area would throw out the things they no longer wanted, and we could find all sorts of things with which to make things. In our own backyard we had two huge cottonwood trees, which were wonderful for climbing in, which we 00:51:00could make tree platforms and treehouses. We had a sandy backyard, and we could set a brick up on edge and push it through the sand to make a track and we were in business as a railroad. There was never a dull moment for us growing up as children, there was always a fresh adventure every day.

Another postscript I might add is that I had a considerable variety of jobs when I was young. When I was eight or nine I was a delivery boy for a little grocery store run by a man named [Claude] Leatherwood just across the tracks. My job was to go out and visit customers he sent me to and get their orders, and then I 00:52:00would come back with a little red wagon and haul their groceries out to them. The railroad track was the dividing line between the poor white part of town and the poor black part of town. And in that job with the grocery store I would serve people in the rather squalid little houses in the black community as well as the people in the white community. I was paid for work on afternoons and Saturdays. I was paid three dollars a week by Mr. Leatherwood, and I would take my pay in the form of three hundred pennies. I had quite a sack of pennies at one time as I saved this pay from the grocery store.

There were other times when I would go over to the ice plant and get ice and 00:53:00deliver ice to various people for their iceboxes. When I was a little older I got a job as an office boy with the Foote and Davies Printing Plant that required me to catch the trolley cars and change trolleys downtown, but this was the principal printing house in Atlanta. My job was to keep the papers filed and to keep the Dictaphone records cleaned off so they would be fresh for further dictation, to handle the mail, to stamp the outgoing mail and get it to the postman--a variety of chores. But it was discovered that even in those days under the child labor laws in Georgia that I was too young for a job that caused 00:54:00me to have to move around with big and dangerous equipment such as the printing presses, paper cutting machines and things of that sort so my job at Foote and Davies came to an end.

Once I dropped into a place there a little further toward town on Whitehall Street called the Southern Electric Supply Company. I just walked in blind and asked them if they didn't need an office boy. It just happened that at the time I went in there they had stacks and stacks of correspondence that needed sorting out and filing away and so they took me to do that job and were apparently satisfied and kept me on as an office boy for about a year. While I was working 00:55:00for them we found that I would be permitted to buy electrical equipment, wiring and things of that sort at factory prices. So, my father took advantage of that and we wired our home on Whitehall Street and had electric lighting for the first time in my life. I was then about fourteen years old; before that we used kerosene lamps or indeed read by pine knots in the fireplace. I mentioned that when I was in high school I was the school page editor of the Atlanta Journal--so I had a variety of jobs along the way, all of which I enjoyed.

There is a postscript on the Japanese Peace Conference in San Francisco, I think I said 1952, it must have been 1951 and we did not permit the Soviets to exercise a veto to hold up the Japanese Peace Treaty. We did that through some extraordinary rules of procedure. Mr. Dulles had gotten agreements from all the other participants in the Congress except the Soviets and people like the Czechs and the Poles who were under the domination of the Soviet Union. But we devised some extraordinarily unusual rules of procedure. These rules of procedure 00:57:00specified that we had come to meet in San Francisco for the purpose of adopting that specific treaty which Mr. Dulles had already negotiated with the overwhelming majority. The presiding officer was Dean Acheson, the foreign minister of the host country. The situation was such that if the Soviets made a motion to amend the peace treaty prior to the adoption of the rules of procedure, the motion was out of order because the first item on the agenda was the adoption of the rules of procedure. After we adopted the rules of procedure, a motion to amend was out of order because the rules of procedure said that we 00:58:00were there to approve that particular text which was designated in the rules of procedure itself. It took the Soviet delegation about two days to understand fully what had happened to them and they walked out, I think on the third or fourth day, taking Czechoslovakia, Poland and one or two others along with them. But we were determined not to have the same experience with Japan we had had with the Soviet Union with regard to Germany, where the postwar effort to conclude the German occupation on the basis that was agreed to during the war, simply broke down because the three Western allies and the Soviet Union simply could not get agreement on any matter of real consequence.

A further postscript on my years in West End while we were living on Whitehall 00:59:00Street--our family was very active in the Presbyterian church, and I told you my father had started out to be a Presbyterian minister but was not able to pursue it. We belonged to the West End Presbyterian Church and Sundays were a very important day to us from a religious point of view. I went to Sunday School around nine-thirty [ante meridiem]. I always went to the Sunday morning church service at eleven o'clock, then we had a young people's society meeting around 01:00:00six or six thirty on Sunday afternoon and then there was the Sunday evening church service. So a good part of our Sundays were spent at the church and that was where I found my friends of my age both in the Sunday School class and in the young people's society which was called the Christian Endeavor in those days. I was active in Christian Endeavor and when I was about twelve was, I think, president of the State Christian Endeavor, the Junior Christian Endeavor. And I remember driving to different parts of the state to attend Christian Endeavor meetings, sometimes to make little speeches about the work of Christian Endeavor. In those days I had an idea that I might, myself, become a 01:01:00Presbyterian minister but somewhere between high school and college those views began to fade and after I got to Oxford and saw the turbulence of world affairs and what was developing, my interests turned to international affairs more and more.

But the church was very important to us in growing up in Atlanta. There was very little of what would be called juvenile delinquency; on the whole our group of young people were quite well behaved; I never heard of drugs. We occasionally ran away somewhere and smoked a little rabbit tobacco in lieu of tobacco. I 01:02:00never took a drink of alcoholic beverage until I reached Oxford after I had graduated from college, which sounds like a very strange thing to say but it was a community that I look back upon with great appreciation and I got a lot out of it.

There was a boy scout troop organized in the West End Presbyterian Church and I joined that as soon as I was old enough. I enjoyed the scouting but I was not very good at such things as handicrafts, swimming and a few things of that sort and so I never made it beyond second class scout. Later on, when I was secretary 01:03:00of state, I used to meet with some Eagle Scouts each year as a kind of gesture of support but I was always a little embarrassed when they asked me about my own boy scout experience which didn't go very far.

One thing about West End which was of great importance: In our own family, because of the influence of my own mother and father, we were voracious readers. We read everything we could get our hands on. Fortunately, in West End there was a children's library called the Joel Chandler Harris Library on Gordon Street about six blocks from our home. It had been founded in memory of Joel Chandler Harris, the author of Uncle Remus stories, but the library was filled with all 01:04:00kinds of children's books, such things as the Rover Boys, the Tom Swift books, but also a good many more serious books about the world and so we were very active users of that children's library. The library at our school was not very good and we could not borrow from that in the same way we could from the Joel Chandler Harris Library which was call The Wren's Nest. All of the children in our family; my older sister Margaret, my two older brothers Parks and Roger, my younger sister Helen, and I all started out with a great interest in extensive 01:05:00reading that stayed with all of us throughout our lives.

When I was very young I memorized the Westminster Shorter Catechism. It contained the articles of faith of the Presbyterian Church, and I received a Bible from the West End Presbyterian Church when I memorized and repeated the Westminster Shorter Catechism from memory. I have reflected on that because the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism is the question, "What is the chief end of Man?" and the answer in the Catechism, a theological question it was, "The chief end of Man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever." Many 01:06:00years later during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as I drove around the streets of Washington and saw people on the sidewalks and shops not knowing what was going on, it came back to my mind this first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism "What is the chief end of Man?," because I realized during the Cuban Missile Crisis that this first of all questions about what life is all about had become an operational question before the governments of the world. I mention that simply because it almost startled me during the Cuban Missile Crisis to 01:07:00find myself thinking about that very first question in the Catechism.

I mentioned that I had taken ROTC four years in high school beginning with the age of twelve and extending through college; a total of eight years. In those days we all took ROTC, it was taken for granted. As a matter of fact, you had to have a medical excuse of some sort not to take ROTC; it was just taken for granted that if your country got into trouble and needed you for military service you would be there. That period of eight years of ROTC resulted in a 01:08:00commission as a reserve second lieutenant in the United States Army. Through keeping up with my correspondence work with the Army Reserve Program, I was promoted to first lieutenant and then captain. I was a captain at the time I was called to active duty in December 1940.

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