00:00:00RICHARD RUSK: Some critics have charged that our Vietnam policy was
wrong from its inception, that the real mistake was made at the
very beginnings of this policy in the late 1940s when we began
to align ourselves with France. These critics say that Ho Chi Minh
and his Vietnam movement, with a few representatives of Vietnamese nationalism--given their
resistance to both the French and the Japanese--that Ho had for many
years sought American refuge, that we collaborated with Ho in our common
fight with Japan, etc., and that by choosing the side of the
French, we chose the wrong party. As a general question, what are
your views on that?
DEAN RUSK: Well, it is true that during World War II
we tried to encourage anyone who was willing to shoot at the
Japanese. This included the Chinese communists, and included Ho Chi Minh. I
00:01:00personally, while I was in the China-Burma-India Theater under General [Joseph Warren]
Stilwell, authorized the dropping of arms and American cigarettes to Ho Chi
Minh and in what was then Indochina.
RICHARD RUSK: That was your personal authorization?
DEAN RUSK: Yes.
RICHARD RUSK: You personally, not Stilwell?
DEAN RUSK: No, I personally authorized that, acting for General Stilwell.
SCHOENBAUM: At Ho Chi Minh's request?
DEAN RUSK: Well, we had contact through agents with him so
that we could do that. I think one has to remember also
that during World War II, Franklin (Delano) Roosevelt thought that the great
colonial areas of Asia--India, Burma, Indochina, Indonesia--ought to come out of World
War II as independent nations. But he was strongly opposed on that
by Winston [Leonard Spencer] Churchill. Churchill had been the man who said,
00:02:00"I did not become His Majesty's First Minister to preside over the
liquidation of the British Empire." Then along about January 1945, Franklin Roosevelt
quit butting his head against Churchill on this--more or less lost interest
in this subject. I say that because in 1944 various and sundry
Frenchmen turned up out in the CBI Theater asking to be parachuted
into Indochina. We didn't know what American policy was on that so
we sent a cable back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff asking
for a statement of American policy towards Indochina. Months went by and
nothing happened. We sent follow-up cables and we sent a staff officer
back once or twice and couldn't get an answer. Finally around January
of 1945, the answer came. It was Joint Chief of Staff paper
headed, "American Policy Toward Indochina." The first page said, "The Joint Chiefs
00:03:00of Staff asked the President for a statement of U.S. policy on
Indochina. The President's reply is contained in Annex One." I flipped over
to Annex One and it said, "When asked by the Joint Chiefs
of Staff on U.S. policy toward Indochina, the President replied, 'I don't
want to hear any more about Indochina.'"
When Franklin Roosevelt dropped his own interest in it, then policy in
the whole area moved to the British, because the British Chiefs of
Staff were the agents for the Combined Chiefs of Staff for Southeast
Asia. So that meant, in fact, that the policy moved into Mr.
Churchill's hands. So at the end of the war, Lord Louis [Francis
Albert Victor Nicholas) Mountbatten received the surrender of the Japanese forces in
Indochina and the British went back to India, Burma, and Malaya; the
Dutch went back to Indonesia; and the French went back to Indochina.
So, history could have been rewritten if indeed those great areas had
00:04:00immediately been brought out of the war as independent nations.
Well, during the Truman Administration while we were building NATO [North Atlantic
Treaty Organization], a good deal of thought was given to whether or
not we should have a NATO in the Pacific. And there was
a good deal of interest in the Congress for something like a
NATO in the Pacific. So at the staff level, we discussed what
later came to be known as the SEATO Treaty [Southeast Asia Treaty
Organization], and we, during the Truman years, rejected that idea.
RICHARD RUSK: When did the idea of a regional collective organization
first come along?
DEAN RUSK: Well, it came along more or less parallel with
the discussion of NATO: 1946-1947 along in there. But we rejected the
00:05:00idea of a SEATO Treaty during the Truman Administration because we thought
it would be a mistake for the United States to go into
Southeast Asia and ally itself with some and not all of the
nations of the Southeast Asia and then have the presence or the
relationship with the U.S. become a divisive factor within the region. We
thought it would be better for us to wait until the entire
region developed its own security consciousness and then we could stand in
strong second line support for the region as a whole.
RICHARD RUSK: Were there other factors than that one that led
you not to encourage an alliance?
DEAN RUSK: Well, during the Truman years we stayed offshore in
alliances in the Pacific. We had alliances with Japan, with the Philippines,
with Australia and New Zealand. We did not go into the mainland.
It was not until the [Dwight David] Eisenhower Administration that they proceeded
to develop the security treaty with South Korea, with the Republic of
00:06:00China on Taiwan and the Southeast Asia Treaty. Now when the Geneva
Conference during the Eisenhower years divided Vietnam at the parallel, then apparently
the attitudes in Washington changed and we concluded these--during the Eisenhower years--these
additional security treaties out there. It was partly because of the Eisenhower
Administration's concern about the possible directions of Chinese policy.
SCHOENBAUM: After the fall of China?
DEAN RUSK: Yes.
RICHARD RUSK: Getting back to your days in CBI, let's just
deal specifically with your role and your work in that theater during
those years. Were you aware of the OSS [Office of Strategic Services)
mission to establish an espionage and intelligence network there? Were you aware
00:07:00of the so-called marching orders that a fellow named [Archimedes L.A.] Patti
had from his boss, through the White House apparently, that the U.S.
was not to get involved in encouraging the French to reassert their
colonial power?
DEAN RUSK: Well, I was aware of the activities of OSS
00:08:00out in that theater because my job under General Stilwell kept me
very close to OSS activities, and I knew some of the key
people.
RICHARD RUSK: Who were the key people that you dealt with?
DEAN RUSK: Well, I would have to scratch my head a
little bit for names but one of them was this man who
has been long-time head of the Smithsonian: [Sidney] Dillon Ripley (II]. But
OSS during the war had an extraordinary combination of blue bloods and
thugs. They had some top people out of Wall Street in OSS
in those days, and some extraordinarily able people, but also some fellows
who knew how to do the dirty work. So it was really
quite a lively and interesting activity.
SCHOENBAUM: You knew Ripley personally back then?
DEAN RUSK: Sure.
RICHARD RUSK: Archimedes L.A. Patti?
DEAN RUSK: I don't remember his name.
RICHARD RUSK: How about Abbot Low Moffatt?
DEAN RUSK: Yes, I knew him.
RICHARD RUSK: Major Frank White?
DEAN RUSK: I don't remember him.
RICHARD RUSK: Team activity of the OSS in Indochina; I believe
that was a fifty-man force of advisors we had initially used to
train leaders in Vietnam?
DEAN RUSK: No, I am aware that we had agents and
activities going on down there, but I didn't follow the details of
it.
SCHOENBAUM: What was the purpose of their activities?
00:09:00
DEAN RUSK: Their purpose was to encourage anybody who was willing
to shoot at the
Japanese. General Stilwell's mission was an impossible mission in one sense. He
had been sent out there to get the Chinese and the army
in India to fight the Japanese as soon and as hard as
possible; and he was to do this without any significant American combat
forces of his own. Well, it soon became clear to some of
us, certainly to me, that Chiang Kai-shek was not going to commit
such forces as he had against the Japanese because he was looking
over his shoulder at the Chinese communists at the end of the
war and he aready was beginning to see [Douglas) MacArthur and [Chester
William) Minitz coming across the Pacific. It was also clear that Churchill
was not going to commit the army in India against the Japanese
until after the defeat of [Adolph] Hitler because that was the only
Imperial reserve that Churchill had left. Indeed, it was Indian divisions that
00:10:00held the Middle East there at critical points of World War II.
So the very nature of Stilwell's mission led to frustration, irritation, impatience.
SCHOENBAUM: So, the OSS did work directly with Ho Chi Minh?
DEAN RUSK: Sure, sure.
SCHOENBAUM: Why didn't that combination carry over to after that time--
DEAN RUSK: There is one very good reason for it. During
Mr. Truman's full term, beginning with the election of 1948, the French
were back in Indochina and we were in the then position of
the Marshall Plan, the construction of NATO. And Dean [Gooderham] Acheson himself
was basically a North Atlantic man. He didn't give much of a
00:11:00damn about the little brown, yellow, black other peoples around the world;
and he was so anxious to have full French cooperation in things
like the Marshall Plan and in NATO that he did not want
to press the French very hard on Indochina.
There is another reason too. We were disarmed; we did not have
a single division or single group in the Air Force ready for
combat. And so we, on the one side, tried to keep good
relations with France; but also we tried to press them to reach
a political settlement of the situation in Indochina. But we did not
press them hard enough to cause the French to say, "Well we
are leaving. It's your baby. "Because we didn't want that baby; we
didn't know what to do with it; and didn't have the resources
to do anything with it anyhow.
00:12:00
SCHOENBAUM: Had you heard Ho Chi Minh's name at that time?
DEAN RUSK: Oh sure. I had never met him, but I
knew about him.
RICHARD RUSK: I really want to focus in on your knowledge
of the OSS activities or whatever dealings or relationships you might have
had with them. Would you have been the man on Stilwell's staff
to have known exactly what these contacts were?
DEAN RUSK: Well, not in detail. But I knew about them
as a matter of policy. I am sure we kept General Stilwell
informed; but he did not go into the details of that type
of operation.
RICHARD RUSK: Did you have any dealings with William [Joseph] Donovan,
head of the OSS?
DEAN RUSK: No, he might have come out for a visit
or something, but he was back in Washington. But there are two
or three other names there that were of key importance.
RICHARD RUSK: You weren't aware of any directives from the White
00:13:00House to these fellows that they were not to get involved in
supporting France to reestablish--
DEAN RUSK: That doesn't surprise me at all to hear that
that might have happened. Because you see, F.D.R. had, up until 1945,
pretty strong ideas about the importance of independence for these great colonial
areas of Asia. He sent special missions out to India during the
war to talk to Indian nationalist leaders-- the Phillips mission and others--even
when some of them were in jail. As a matter of fact,
we had a single patch that we wore on our shoulder: the
CBI patch. It showed the Star of India, the Sun of China,
and the red and white stripes for the United States. And every
00:14:00American in that theater wore that same shoulder patch. The purpose of
inventing that single shoulder patch was to have a symbol indicating to
all and sundry that we were out there for the so le
purpose of fighting the Japanese and we were not there for the
purpose of restoring British rule in India. The British resented that; and
that brought about some clashes between us and the British on things
like war information policy, because we kept thirty feet away from the
idea of restoring British rule in India. But, you see, again at
the end of the war that part of the world fell under
Churchill's policy direction. Mr. Roosevelt, in effect, resigned from the play.
SCHOENBAUM: And with respect to Indochina, Churchill left it to the
French. His policy was--
00:15:00
DEAN RUSK: Yes, he left it for the French to go
back to Indochina, for the Dutch to go back to Indonesia, the
British to India, Burma, Malaya. Now when Mr. Truman became president under
the tragedy of Roosevelt's death, he was so much involved in winding
up the postwar problems with regard to Germany and in completing the
war against Japan, that I don ' t think he himself paid
much attention to this matter. He didn't pick up Roosevelt's earlier policy
and heckle Mr. Churchill on it, that sort of thing. It was
not until [Richard Clement) Attlee became Prime Minister in England that the
British themselves moved to an independent Indi~, Burma, Malaya and things like
that. It took a little while longer for the Dutch and the
French to work their way out of Indonesia and Indochina.
00:16:00
No, I knew about this because OSS had a small liaison group
with us in the main headquarters in Delhi; they had a small
group down at Ceylon at the headquarters of the Southeast Asia command
under Lord Louis Mountbatten, and they had a headquarters over in Assam.
So I visited those installations and talked to the people. We kept
in close touch from a policy point of view.
SCHOENBAUM: Were you aware of the OSS high estimates of Ho
Chi Minh and his Vietnam movement? Did you ever see the OSS--
DEAN RUSK: Oh, I was aware that they thought he was
a good person to bet on to get on with the war
against Japan. But one has to take into full account the interest
which Dean Acheson, his period in the Truman Administration, had in close
working relationships with the French in Europe--Marshall Plan, NATO.
00:17:00
RICHARD RUSK: Were you aware at the time that it happened
that Ho Chi Minh, from late 1945 to the end of 1946,
repeatedly cabled the American government and the White House asking for American
recognition, often expressing his request in terms of the principles of the
Atlantic Charter, type of thing? Were you aware of it In CBI?
Were you aware of it during the Truman years or later?
DEAN RUSK: Well, I wasn't particularly aware of the political side
of it during my CBI service because basically our approach and what
we thought about him was that he was a fellow who was
willing to shoot at the Japanese. I don't recall myself those immediate
postwar messages from Ho Chi Minh because I was Assistant Secretary for
00:18:00United Nations Affairs and I was Deputy Undersecretary for a period before
I became Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs.
RICHARD RUSK: Did you become aware of them during the Kennedy
and Johnson years?
DEAN RUSK: In a general kind of way. I didn't research
the detailed record.
RICHARD RUSK: You didn't read the cables then? You weren't aware
of the fact that for a year and a half Ho Chi
Minh--
DEAN RUSK: He had made some overtures to us, but that
was at a time when our relations with the French seemed to
be paramount to Dean Acheson. First, when during the Eisenhower Administration we
00:19:00concluded the Southeast Asia Treaty, that treaty became a part of the
supreme law of the land and there was a direct linkage between
how we reacted under that treaty and what capitols in other parts
of the world might think we might do if other treaties became
involved like the Rio Pact in the Western Hemisphere, NATO in Europe.
But it was a part of the supreme law of the land.
On the day before Kennedy's inauguration he met with President Eisenhower. Present
there were the then sitting Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, myself,
Bob [Robert Strange] McNamara; Clark [McAdams] Clifford was on our side along
with Kennedy. And this was a kind of turnover of responsibility meeting.
The only specific advice which President Eisenhower gave to President Kennedy at
that meeting was to put American troops into Laos. Laos at that
00:20:00point was where the major action was. The North Vietnamese were throwing
troops in there, Soviet airlift flying them supplies, that sort of thing.
Eisenhower said to Kennedy, "You should put troops into Laos, with others
if possible, alone if necessary." So, as soon as we took office
we immediately gave a lot of thought to Laos, but despite all
of the memoranda and paperwork and pullings and haulings on the subject,
the more we looked at Laos the less inviting it was to
put American troops in there.
RICHARD RUSK: We have got your answer to that verbatim in
the very first tape. Who specifically, if you recall, were the experts
on Indochina and Vietnam within the Department, say from the years 1943
to 1952? Do you remember who the key guys were?
00:21:00
DEAN RUSK: No, I would have the check the records on
that.
RICHARD RUSK: Did you get good intelligence and good estimates as
to what the complexities of that situation in Indochina were at the
time that al l this happened? I know from everything that's been
said that these other considerations outside of Indochina entered heavily into it,
in American policy. But how about within Indochina itself? Did you really
scope out to your satisfaction the nature of--
DEAN RUSK: Well, I think we had a pretty good understanding
of what was happening in Indochina. As a matter of fact, some
of us including myself, realized that the French would eventually have to
get out of Indochina; there would have to be the independence of
India, Burma and so forth; and that the Dutch would have to
get out of Indonesia. I was one of the midwives in Indonesian
independence in the sense that I worked closely with Secretary [George Catlett]
00:22:00Marshall on that problem. And one of the critical points in it
came when Marshall said to, I think the Prime Minister of The
Netherlands that "You can't stay in Indonesia. If you made an effort
to do so by yourselves it would bleed you white and you
still would have to get out. And there is no one prepared
to help you stay in." And that military judgment made by Secretary
Marshall made a real impression on the Dutch. They had no way
of doing it. They couldn't do it. There were islands of a
hundred million population, that sort of thing.
RICHARD RUSK: And anti-colonialism was the thrust behind our policy towards
Indochina back in 1945-46--
DEAN RUSK: Yes, reinforced by this very practical consideration that the
Dutch didn't have the muscle to stay. That they simply did not
have the power; but France might have. But you see in France
during this period, there were no French governments that were strong enough
00:23:00internally in France to get rid of Indochina. French governments could fall.
And just as it later took a Charles [Andre Joseph Mario] de
Gaulle to get rid of Algeria, there was not that kind of
figure in France at that time who could do what had to
be done in Indochina.
SCHOENBAUM: When you were Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, what
dealings did you specifically have with Indochina? It was obviously not a
paramount area of the world. We were concerned with other things at
that time: important things like Korea. But what dealings did you have?
DEAN RUSK: Well, we worked pretty hard with the French during
that period trying to press them to move ahead on the political
side of extricating themselves from Indochina. For example, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos were
00:24:00what was at one time called associated states with France. And we
tried to increase their international status; we sent our own representative to
those three associated states; we provided them with aid of one sort
or another.
SCHOENBAUM: Who did you meet with at that time? Did you
hold meetings with French officials? Were there discussions?
DEAN RUSK: Shortly after I became Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern
Affairs came the outbreak of the Korean War. When that first happened--I
think I might have said this before--we had no way of knowing
whether this was simply something limited to Korea or whether there was
a general communist movement in Asia. So President Truman intruded the Sixth
Fleet between Taiwan and the Mainland and we stepped up our aid
to the French in Indochina.
00:25:00
RICHARD RUSK: About ten million dollars worth of military aid. Was
that the first instance of substantial American aid to the French in
Indochina?
DEAN RUSK: Well, I have no doubt that in the early
stages of the Marshall Plan that some of the aid we gave
to France for the rebuilding of Europe, in fact, trickled off in
support of their effort in Indochina. That was somewhat of a troublesome
thing for us, because in our minds that was not the purpose
of the Marshall Plan. But then we did step up our aid
to the French at the time of the outbreak of the Korean
War, hopefully as a kind of warning to the Chinese that if
there were to be this general communist movement in Asia that we
would be very much concerned about any kind of move of theirs
into Southeast Asia.
RICHARD RUSK: I take it that you were convinced by events
that were happening elsewhere, Korea, China, Russian moves in Eastern Europe, etc.,
so that what happened in Indochina was not a case where you
00:26:00fought your argument, lost, and signed on as a good soldier. You
were generally convinced that our subsequent policy there had to be because
of these things happening in other--
DEAN RUSK: Well, I felt, myself, that Roosevelt's instincts in World
War II were right: that these great areas in Asia had to
be independent; that colonialism was gone as far as Asia was concerned.
And the question was just how and when to move along on
that, given the Churchillian policy right at the end of World War
II when they were more or less in charge of what was
happening out there. But, on the other hand, I also understood why
Dean Acheson was very keen about us maintaining a working relationship with
France on non-Asian matters, on European matters.
RICHARD RUSK: Can you remember at what point--I assume it would
00:27:00have been in the late 1940s or perhaps 1950s--that you more or
less shifted from one view to the other in terms of our
actual policy? Was it a definitive point or was it a gradual
process that you and the Department shifted over from FDR's concern for
anti-colonialism towards the need to support France?
DEAN RUSK: Well, after all I had a boss named Dean
Acheson, so it was clear that there were some limits on what
we could do about pressing. Now, we got the Indonesian problem solved
while Marshall was Secretary of State; but Dean Acheson was not, in
effect, going to break relations with weak governments of France over Indochina.
He was going to put sufficient restraints on our attitudes there so
that we could continue to work closely with France on European matters.
00:28:00
RICHARD RUSK: You could show us some blue sky as far
as Dean Acheson is concerned. Hes gone. He's not present. And we
would be really interested in exactly, if you could possibly reconstruct it
for us, at what point and in response to what external event
did you really adopt that position. Again, were you being a good
soldier or were you genuinely persuaded by things happening elsewhere that our
position toward aiding the French--
DEAN RUSK: Well, it is a little hard to answer that
question. George Marshall once was asked when he was Secretary of State,
somebody asked him, "Mr. Secretary, what is your personal view of this
matter. " He said, "Personal view? I don't have personal views on
matters of public policy; (laughter) my views now are the views of
00:29:00the Secretary of State, and I reached those views by the constitutional
process."
RICHARD RUSK: You've never been in doubt?
SCHOENBAUM: You never thought that this was a mistake? Before you
went to sleep at night you never--
DEAN RUSK: I did not think that, whatever our cooperation with
France was with the Marshall Plan and NATO, that the French could
stay in Indochina. I never had the view that they could stay.
But the issue came to a head during the Eisenhower Administration when
the question arose as to whether the United States should in any
way intervene in Indochina to assist the French. And there were sharp
differences of view within the Eisenhower Administration on that point.
SCHOENBAUM: Did you oppose--did you specifically oppose.
DEAN RUSK: Well, I was in private life then. But it
was interesting that you could almost plot the temperature in Washington on
this point by looking t where John Foster Dulles was. When he
00:30:00was in town, there was a strong inclination to do something to
help the French in Indochina as an anti-communist kind of thing. But
when he was away on a trip or something, then the attitude
in Washington moved negatively toward this idea. Eisenhower made the final decision
that we would not intervene any troops to assist the French in
Indochina; and I think that was the right decision.
SCHOENBAUM: Did you have any input to that decision?
DEAN RUSK: No, no. I was with the Rockefeller Foundation then.
I didn't get involved with it.
RICHARD RUSK: Between July of 1950, when Truman made his commitment
of ten million dollars worth of aid to the French, and to
the end of the Truman administration, were there any other significant steps
taken by the U.S. government to support the French in Indochina?
DEAN RUSK: We continued to provide aid to the French; and
whatever the purpose of that aid, the effect of it was to
allow the French to put somewhat more resources into Indochina. But we
00:31:00also pressed the French pretty hard and Dean Acheson was agreeable to
this--
END OF SIDE 1
BEGINNING OF SIDE 2
DEAN RUSK: During the Truman Administration when we were providing substantial
aid to France under the Marshall Plan and other respects, some of
which undoubtedly went to help their position in Indochina--During the latter part
of the Truman Administration we pressed the French pretty hard to move
ahead on political solutions to the situation in Indochina. They developed the
three countries there as associated states, so they had a kind of
international status. We had relationships with them. I'm not sure in Vietnam
whether we openly recognized their independence. I don't think we quite perhaps
came to that point. But again we did not want to press
00:32:00the French so hard as to either cause a collapse of the
French Government in Paris or to cause the French just to turn
to whole thing over to us, because we didn't want that baby
on our hands at that time.
SCHOENBAUM: Did you recommend or was there any contingency planning for
what would happen after the French--You said you didn't think the French
could possibly stay. What did you think, in your own mind, would
happen at that point?
DEAN RUSK: We thought there would evolve three independent nations out
there: Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. But then it was during this period
that Ho Chi Minh began talking about his right to have control
over all of what used to be Indochina, including Laos and Cambodia.
Those who look upon Ho Chi Minh as a nationalist sometimes forget
that.
RICHARD RUSK: Were you aware of his claims to all of
that territory at the time that he made them or--
DEAN RUSK: No. When he made them, we heard them, so
00:33:00we were aware of it. But when people call Ho Chi Minh
a nationalist, so he was; but so was Adolph Hitler. Ho Chi
Minh wanted Laos, and the Laotians are not Vietnamese; he wanted Cambodia,
and the Cambodians are not Vietnamese. So, sure, he was a nationalist;
but he was a nationalist with an appetite. And we were looking
toward the emergence out there of three independent nations: Vietnam, Laos and
Cambodia. But things changed significantly when the Southeast Asia Treaty became a
part of the law of the land.
SCHOENBAUM: That's interesting. But the NATO Treaty and the Southeast Asia
Treaty-- Legally they say things that are very vague about the obligations
of the United States to come to the aid of threatened states.
They say something to the effect-- that shall do all necessary things,
00:34:00or shall take whatever action is necessary--
DEAN RUSK: There is one significant difference between the North Atlantic
Treaty and the Rio Pact, on the one side, and these later
treaties, on the other. In the NATO Treaty, it states that the
parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them
in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them
all. And in NATO if such an armed attack occurs each of
them will take such action as it deems necessary, including the use
of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the
00:35:00North Atlantic area. Now this idea of an attack against a NATO
ally being an attack against the United States raises some troublesome constitutional
issues in the Congress, for example. Because an attack directly against the
United States would involve major powers that would move to the President
of the United States in that situation. And so--
SCHOENBAUM: Were you involved in the drafting of that language?
DEAN RUSK: In NATO? No, but I was very much aware
of the discussion on that point, so that the Southeast Asia Treaty
said that each party recognizes that aggression by means of armed attack
in the Treaty area against any of those [parties] protected by the
Treaty would endanger its own peace and safety and agrees that it
will, in that event, "act to meet the common danger " in
00:36:00accordance with its constitutional processes. So the obligation of the SEATO Treaty
was that each one of us would act to meet the common
danger.
SCHOENBAUM: Yes. Of course that doesn't mean necessarily military action--
SCHOENBAUM: No, but it doesn't mean doing nothing.
RICHARD RUSK: This is jumping ahead to a period that I
think we can best cover later; but it wasn't until 1966 that
you first started invoking the SEATO Treaty as a means of expanding
our commitment.
DEAN RUSK: The issue there on that point is very simple.
We did not want to formally invoke the SEATO Treaty because we
did not want to give France and the United Kingdom a veto
in the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. But actually the SEATO Treaty was
at the heart of our policy during that period.
RICHARD RUSK: Pop, this is obviously a real tangled and confusing
period in our foreign relations: Indochina in the late 1940s and early
fifties. I think all accounts suggest that you guys really were aware
00:37:00of a lot of the complexities. Could you personally see your way
through the tangle of that period whereby support of the French would
not necessarily lock us into commitments that we later made? That we
would, in fact, be able to encourage the French to move towards
independence of Indochina and do the kinds of things that we really
did want to do, but were prevented by developments elsewhere?
DEAN RUSK: Given the situation that Churchill allowed to be re-established
in Asia at the end of the war, and given the inability
of the successive French governments during that period to go ahead and
do what Attlee had done in India and Burma and places like
that, I have always had in the back of my mind the
00:38:00idea that both in law and diplomacy there is a substantial difference
between rape and seduction. We did not feel that we were in
a position for force the French hand by simply demanding publicly that
they get out of Indochina; but we did believe that this could
occur by stages, and these stages not too far separated from each
other. So, we kept pressing the French to go down that trail,
to take one step after another. The creation of the associated states
in Indochina was one important step, and we were quite sure that
the outcome of it would be independence for those three associated states.
SCHOENBAUM: And this happened when you were Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern
Affairs. You personally were involved in pushing this project through?
DEAN RUSK: I must say that within the State Department there
00:39:00were some very sharp controversies over this kind of thing; because the
European Bureau in the State Department was all in favor of supporting
France because they were very much involved with France in Europe, you
see.
SCHOENBAUM: And they had Acheson more on their side than you
had Acheson on your side.
DEAN RUSK: Indeed they did. So 1 had to use a
little seduction myself in the Department. But the facts on the ground
were moving toward independence for these three countries.
SCHOENBAUM: And you tried to push that along with French officials
and--
DEAN RUSK: Well, I tried to push it along within the
Department. Of course, when you meet with French officials you are tied
to the policy that has been adopted by the Secretary of State
and the President and you just can't go off on your own
and talk with foreign officials.
RICHARD RUSK: [Warren I.] Cohen assessed in his book that you
00:40:00yourself became a convert because of the events happening elsewhere.
DEAN RUSK: Well, he is not a psychiatrist and did not
lay me out on a couch on such matters. But the truth
is that I was an officer of the United States Government, and
1 had an obligation to try to carry out the policies that
I was instructed to carry out by the Secretary of State and
the President.
RICHARD RUSK: This whole business of Vietnam in the beginning was
very much a part of the conflict within the Department itself between
the Europeanists and so called moralists or internationalists--
DEAN RUSK: The situation on the ground was the decisive thing
and there were differences within the Department about how to deal with
them, how to move. You see, my Bureau, the Far Eastern Bureau,
didn't have any real responsibility for our relations with France. So in
that sort of thing I had a free ride because I didn't
have to pick up the broken china if things went sour in
00:41:00our relations with France.
SCHOENBAUM: Did you have relations then with Ho Chi Minh or
any of the people who were opposing France?
DEAN RUSK: I don't recall that I, myself, had personal talks
with any of the Vietnamese, the Laotians, or the Cambodians during that
period. We had people who did have such contacts; but I was
not one of them.
RICHARD RUSK: In view of the tangled beginnings of our commitments
in Southeast Asia, did those beginnings ever cause you to question the
validity of our later commitments during the Kennedy or Johnson years? Obviously
SEATO was made the law of the land and we had a
certain obligation to sign on, but further than that.
DEAN RUSK: I think I may have mentioned earlier that I
thought we went into the Southeast Asia Treaty pretty casually. There was
no real public debate on the matter, far-reaching public debate, as there
00:42:00had been about NATO. Even in the Senate they gave it pretty
casual attention. I reviewed the Congressional Record on the floor discussion in
the Senate on the occasion of the adoption of the Southeast Asia
Treaty, and it was really quite casual in character. So it was
adopted, I think, without fully realizing the importance of the commitment that
was being made. You see, that was the time when Mr. Dulles
and others were talking about massive retaliation, bigger bang for a buck;
we were trying to get more of a posture out of sharp
reductions in our defense budget and things like that. So, I think,
the impression was unfortunately left that this was a commitment that was
00:43:00being made on the cheap; that it really wasn't going to cost
us anything. There was not a serious consideration of the gravity of
the commitment at the time of the adoption of the SEATO Treaty,
but it became a part of the law of the land; and
when it did so, it was inevitably linked to the question as
to how other capitals would think we would react under other mutual
security treaties. It was immediately linked to the whole question of collective
security in the world.
If I could continue on the beginnings of the Kennedy Administration for
a moment, I say the more we looked at Laos the less
inviting it came to be to put American troops in there. We
thought, for example, that the Laotians are a people who were civilized
in their own way and peaceful--that the Laotians weren't very much interested
in killing each other when on ly Laotian forces were on the
00:44:00battlefield in that internal struggle in Laos. A few explosions made a
very large battle; there were very few casualties. I remember one report
where the two Laotian sides left the battlefield and went to a
water festival together for ten days and then went back to the
battlefield. It was only when the North Vietnamese forces came in there,
sort of shock battalions, that there was any serious fighting.
So we thought that the thing to do was to do our
best to get everybody out of Laos: ourselves, the French, the North
Vietnamese, everybody; and let the Laotians manage or mismanage their own affairs.
There was strongly the view on our side that at least the
Laotians would not kill each other and that that might set up
a kind of island of peace there in Southeast Asia which would
be a substantial contribution toward peace in the entire area. So we
went to the Laos Conference in Geneva and achieved the Laos Accords
of 1962. In getting those Accords we made some concessions compared to
00:45:00the Eisenhower Administration which were fairly far-reaching. We accepted a neutralist as
Prime Minister of Laos. His name had been put forward by the
Russians. He was not our candidate, allegedly, during the Eisenhower years. We
accepted a coalition government made up of the right wingers, the neutralists,
and the communists. We accepted an International Control Commission. And so, the
Laos Agreement, think, was a good agreement. But the trouble was we
did not get any performance by the North Vietnamese.
SCHOENBAUM: What was your specific role in that? How did the
negotiating ideas develop for that?
DEAN RUSK: Well, I spent some time at the opening of
the Laos Conference myself, and Mr. [Andrei Andreevich] Gromyko was there, and
00:46:00the Chinese Communists were there. Chen Yi was then the Chinese Foreign
Minister; he was there. I remember we had a reception for all
the delegates at this Conference, and I remembered that John Foster Dulles
had refused to shake hands with Chou En-lai at a reception like
that. So I went up to Chen Yi at this reception and
put out my hand to greet him; and he looked at me
and looked at my hand and backed away and chatted with his
colleagues for a few moments. Then he finally shook my hand and
we chatted for a few minutes. (laughter)
But, we never got any performance on the Laos Accords from North
Vietnam. They did not permit the Coalition Government to operate in the
communist-held areas of Laos; they did not permit the International Control Commission
to come into the communist held areas of Laos; they continued to
use Laos as an infiltration route into South Vietnam, which was forbidden
by these Accords. So President Kennedy was deeply disillusioned by the failure
00:47:00to get any performance on the part of the North Vietnamese with
the Laos Accords.
Now the Russians and the British were cochairmen of those Geneva Conferences.
And we tried to get the help of the Russians to get
some performance by Hanoi on those Laos Accords, but the Russians wouldn't
help at all. It was our judgment that they were not going
to put very much pressure on Hanoi because they did not want
to push Hanoi into the arms of China.
SCHOENBAUM: Did you talk to Gromyko personally about that?
DEAN RUSK: I am sure I did, but I don't remember
the exact timing of it.
RICHARD RUSK: Can I go back to one earlier question? Do
you recall as Secretary of State in 1962-68 ever going back to
the events of the late 1940s and the early 1950s in Indochina
00:48:00and reexamining--
DEAN RUSK: I read up on them considerably, yes. But doing
that--
RICHARD RUSK: and actively debating and discussing within the policymaking--
DEAN RUSK: but to go back and review those events would
not repeal the Southeast Asia Treaty.
RICHARD RUSK: All right. So with the SEATO Treaty and the
Geneva Accords--And at that point you felt that we were pretty much
locked into our commitment to Southeast Asia?
DEAN RUSK: The law of the land said that we would
act to meet the common danger.
SCHOENBAUM: Were you disappointed then when later on the Germans, and
the British, and the French started questioning our actions in Vietnam and
they were not --they seemed to be of the feeling that the
U.S. would and should take care of its obligations in Europe but
that the war in Vietnam was draining--
DEAN RUSK: I told my colleagues, the NATO Foreign Ministers, at
00:49:00one meeting on this point that they must not expect the United
States to be a virgin in the Atlantic and a whore in
the Pacific; (laughter) that we had the same treaty commitment that we
had in Southeast Asia as we did in NATO. After all, the
United States is a two-ocean country and we have got interests in
the Pacific which they did not share, for which they have no
responsibility. Now in Kennedy's first meeting with President de Gaulle, which was
in 1961, maybe '62, de Gaulle told Kennedy that there would never
be another French soldier in Southeast Asia. Now in effect he resigned
from the SEATO Treaty. But he stayed within the framework of the
Treaty; and then they participated in the meetings of the foreign ministers
of SEATO; and often they were very troublesome about a Southeast Asia
00:50:00communique from the foreign minister's meetings, about what it would say.
SCHOENBAUM: Were you present at the meetings between Kennedy and de
Gaulle in Paris?
DEAN RUSK: Yes.
SCHOENBAUM: How did de Gaulle treat Kennedy on that? Of course,
de Gaulle was a World War II generation leader and Kennedy a
younger leader. What was the atmosphere?
DEAN RUSK: Well, they treated each other with great courtesy and
friendliness. I have no doubt that de Gaulle, since he was the
only surviving member of the big four of World War II, looked
upon all the rest of us, including Kennedy, as just a bunch
of boys, new boys who had come to town. And he took
sort of an Olympian view in all of his conversations; but he
always did with everybody. But the British had the same obligation under
the Southeast Asia Treaty as we did, and practically did not lift
a finger to take steps to meet the common danger. And I
00:51:00was concerned about that because I thought that that kind of erosion
of these mutual security treaties could not help but have its effect
upon NATO.
RICHARD RUSK: Pop, was Vietnam a case where superpower and global
considerations took too much precedence over the local situation there--your critics have
said this--and it was probably a case where both superpowers were guilty
of doing it. We tend to exaggerate the global implications of things
at the expense of the local issue.
DEAN RUSK: Well, the local issue was, I think, inevitably entwined
with these larger issues. For example, although President de Gaulle criticized us
severely over Vietnam, had we done nothing under the Southeast Asia Treaty,
he might well have been the first one in Europe to shrug
his shoulders and say, "You see, you cannot rely upon the Americans."
00:52:00And we had in our minds something else that was very important
there while Kennedy was deciding to build up American forces in Vietnam.
We had just come through the very severe and dangerous Berlin crisis
of 1961-62. Then we had the Cuban missile crisis on our hands,
and very fresh in our minds was the question, "What would have
happened had [Nikita Sergeevich] Khrushchev not believed Kennedy during the Berlin crisis
of 1961-62 or during the Cuban missile crisis?" There could very easily
have been a general war. You see, in that Vienna Summit meeting
between Khrushchev and Kennedy in 1961, Khrushchev set out to try to
intimidate this new, young President of the United States. In a very
brutal kind of fashion, he threw an ultimatum at Kennedy on Berlin.
He told Kennedy what he was going to do, and he said,
00:53:00"If the western powers intervene in this in any way to prevent
what I am going to do, there will be war." He used
the word "war." Normally diplomats don't use the word "war." They talk
about the "gravest possible circumstances" or something like that--
SCHOENBAUM: This was in Russian, he was speaking through an interpreter?
DEAN RUSK: Yes. And Kennedy, at one point, had to look
at him and say, "Well, Mr. Chairman, there is going to be
war; it is going to be a very cold winter." The reputation
of the United States for fidelity to its security treaties, I think,
is a major pillar of peace in the world. Had Khrushchev not
believed Kennedy over Berlin or over the missiles in Cuba, it shivers
your spine to imagine what might have happened.
SCHOENBAUM: Was this ultimatum--This was the first time that this had
been given?
DEAN RUSK: No, there had been a similar kind of ultimatum
00:54:00presented to Eisenhower. We had had several crises over Berlin before that.
But I remember that Alec Douglas-Home and I had to follow up
the Vienna Conference with further talks with the Russians about Berlin. De
Gaulle would not participate in any way in such talks. The Germans
agreed that the talks should take place; but they were a little
nervous about what might happen. But Alec Douglas -Home and decided that
we would talk just as long and just a repetitively as Mr.
Gromyko on this matter. We didn't see any possibility of a solution
which would be agreed to by both sides, but we just decided
to talk, and talk, and talk. Well, at the beginning Mr. Gromyko
sort of adopted the language that Khrushchev had used in Vienna: "there
would be war." I remember saying to him, "Now "Mr. Gromyko, if
you want war, you can have it in five minutes; all you
have to do is start it. But if you don't want war,
00:55:00then we had better talk about this further." And we finally talked
the fever out of it.
SCHOENBAUM: Was Martin [J.] Hillenbrand--Did he--
DEAN RUSK: I think he might have been present during some
of these talks. He was head of our Berlin Task Force for
a while during that period and was one of our top people
in the field.
RICHARD RUSK: Getting back to 1946, I am obsessed with the
tragedy of how close we came to avoiding what later happened. You
have been quoted elsewhere as saying that FDR and Truman possibly could
have pursued their anti-colonial policy but didn't; if they had done so,
history might have been different. We did pursue anti-colonialism with respect to
the Dutch in Indonesia and that was in 1946. How close did
00:56:00we come to following that policy across the board and perhaps treated
Indochina from an anti-colonial view? Was it a close thing?
DEAN RUSK: Given the weakness of governments in France, had we
been as rough with France as we had been with the Dutch,
we might well have brought about a fall of successive French governments.
We didn't see a government in France which had the standing or
the power to do what many of us thought had to be
done. And again, that was the period when we needed France for
other purposes. That interlinkage is very important.
SCHOENBAUM: Did you write any memoranda or anything which would still
be around which sets out your views?
00:57:00
DEAN RUSK: There should be some memoranda of mine in the
Foreign Relations of the United States during that period. But bear in
mind that as far as the public was concerned, I was an
officer of the Truman administration, and I had an obligation to follow
the policy the Secretary of State laid out for us.
SCHOENBAUM: Within the Department, there was give and take.
RICHARD RUSK: But we still haven't resolved and this is thirty
years later; and I am your son trying to write your story
and explain to my generation why we did certain things in Asia.
And I still--if you can let me know--I still need to know
to what extent you personally believed--in view of your commitments to world
peace, to a world view of things, the role of the United
00:58:00Nations, the rights of the brown and yellow and etc. types of
people--to what extent did you sign on with the later policy of
aid to the French because of your own personal assessment of what
was going on there versus to what extent were you following the
dictates and wishes of fellows like Dean Acheson?
DEAN RUSK: Well, I would not have frozen France out of
the Marshall Plan because of Indochina. That wouldn't have made sense in
terms of the overall picture and the overall interests of the United
States. I was in favor, as a matter of fact I think
I recommended, a step-up of aid to Indochina at the time of
the Korean outbreak hoping to dissuade China from moving in that direction
if they had any such ideas about doing so. But, it was
clear to me all the way through, whatever our particular policy was,
00:59:00that the countries of Indochina would emerge as independent nations. I had
no doubt about that at any stage. The question was when, and
how, and under what circumstances.
RICHARD RUSK: Did you and the Truman Administration take steps to
try to keep the Cold War out of Indochina back during the
late 1940s and early 1950s; try to keep these superpower considerations and
global considerations out of that particular local conflict?
DEAN RUSK: Well that would be a rather artificial thing to
do because Indochina was a part of the world scene. I mean,
it couldn't be separated out and treated wholly separately as if it
had no connection with anything else. Those relationships were there.
When Kennedy decided not to put troops into Laos, I remember very
01:00:00clearly that he said to us, "Now, if we have to make
a fight for Southeast Asia, we will have to do it in
Vietnam because there the lines of communication are very different." A million
people had moved from North Vietnam to South Vietnam to escape the
Hanoi regime at the time of the division of Vietnam at the
Geneva Conference; and it appeared that the South Vietnamese would be serious
about keeping Hanoi from overrunning South Vietnam. And so Kennedy, affected in
part by the disillusionment with the performance on the Laos Accords, thought
that we would have to take action in Vietnam.
RICHARD RUSK: You know the amazing thing is that during the
Truman years there was great progress--
01:01:00
DEAN RUSK: Well, I have always looked upon Truman as a
great president, but there was one matter on which I would criticize
him. He did not fight strongly enough to prevent the almost total
demobilization of the United States after V-J [Victory over Japan] Day. We
paid a terrible price for that in the ensuing years. That weakness
of ours, I think, tempted Joseph [Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili] Stalin to embark
upon that series of adventures which, in fact, started the Cold War.
I mean the Cold War was started when we were disarmed. It
was not until 1950 that we began to build up our armed
forces in any significant way.
SCHOENBAUM: Did you oppose that at the time. Did you fire
off some memos or hold some meetings or anything? You had pretty
close access to President Truman--
01:02:00
DEAN RUSK: Well, you could spit in the river if you
wanted to in those days; and there were those who did, and
I expressed misgivings about it. But there was just a national sense
of getting the boys home. We had troops rioting in the Philippines
to get home earlier than the plan had provided for.
END OF SIDE 2