00:00:00HOLBROOKE: The question is the effect of all the deaths on the policymakers.
Well, we know that [Robert Strange] McNamara was traumatized by the sight of one
man burning himself to death on the Pentagon steps and throwing his baby to
safety just before he died. It was an awful scene, but why McNamara chose to be
so traumatized by that when several hundred people were dying a week in Vietnam
is a legitimate question. That just shows that McNamara's will had been broken.
I think it was horrible, a man burning himself to death, but McNamara's policies
were putting people at risk and many of those people were dying. Your father
says that [Lyndon Baines] Johnson felt those casualties so deeply. The correct
answer to the question is very, very difficult to access. A person who assumes
00:01:00one of the highest three or four offices in the land must be prepared to use
American power in defense of American interests as he sees fit. He must also be
prepared, therefore, to countenance the result that American lives may be lost
in defense of national objectives. He must, at the same time, be extremely
careful not to send Americans out willy-nilly to their deaths. Jimmy Carter was
very proud of the fact that nobody died in combat in his Presidency; but in the
end, eight people did die in Iran during the rescue mission through an airplane
accident which could have happened anywhere, but happened to happen at that
particular moment. In regard to your specific question, it seems to me that the
00:02:00endless mounting of deaths without clear definable progress toward the political
goal of a solution to the Vietnam problem was the central dilemma. After all,
what was the issue? The issue was Americans were dying. It was this, by the way,
that led [Richard Milhous] Nixon and Melvin Laird, when Laird became Secretary
of Defense, to adopt the so-called Vietnamization Strategy in which they would
deliberately reduce American casualties by removing Americans from combat even
if the military said this wasn't the most effective use of American fire power.
Because it was the Nixon-Laird perception that it was the casualties that were
the greatest political vulnerability, particularly those of young draftees who
were, in their view, much more expensive in political terms to lose than
00:03:00professional Air Force pilots. And they were right. But it would be wrong of any
policy maker to be so callous and brutal as not to care about the casualties.
And if it weighed heavily on the policymakers, that was all right. There is
nothing wrong with that.
RICHARD RUSK: How did it affect my father in terms of any influence upon his
decision-making? Did that loss of life and that escalation of loss of life help
to lock him in, to try and push ahead and make something out of this. Because if
he didn't, all those lives were lost in vain.
HOLBROOKE: Well, you've got to ask him that question. I've never asked him that
question, but I think you're probably on the right track.
RICHARD RUSK: You think it didn't lock him in?
HOLBROOKE: I think it probably locked him in, but I'm just guessing, Rich. Next
question: Was Vietnam an obsession in the government by 1968? Clark [McAdams]
Clifford contends Vietnam had become an obsession by '68. Rusk contends that
00:04:00other policies went forward and the government was not hamstrung by impassable
debate over war. What are my views? My view is that Clifford is probably right
that in '68 there was an obsession, but that Mr. Rusk is right that other things
went forward, like U.S. [United States]-Soviet relations, which reached the edge
of a summit. But that does not mean that the Administration was not paralyzed,
and I think that this is a semantic disagreement here. I'm sure that your father
would agree completely that Vietnam had become an obsession, but he would
demonstrate that other things happened in '68 and that is correct. I don't think
this is a real issue. I think this is just words. The next one: What about the
effect of [inaudible] loss of life? We just discussed that. The next one is, did
he have a fatal flaw as Secretary of State? To what extent was he as a role
00:05:00model for me as an FSO [Foreign Service Officer] and FSE I ]?
RICHARD RUSK: Answer the first one first; that's two separate questions.
HOLBROOKE: Did Dean Rusk have a fatal flaw? Surely, I don't think I can answer
that. He is today what he was in 1960 and his strengths are so strong. No person
is perfect. Every person's strengths usually leave a corresponding weakness. His
strength was his ability to hold clearly the principles in face of tremendous
pressure: his total loyalty to the President, his lack of ego, his self-effacing
qualities, and that led to corresponding weaknesses. Was he qualified to be
Secretary of State? Absolutely. No question. And most people who argue that he
shouldn't have been Secretary of State, that there were other people, just
00:06:00missed the point. Everybody who knows him and saw him in action then, or sees
him in action now, knows that he was a man of great stature and, in my view, the
best qualified man in 1961 to be Secretary of State.
RICHARD RUSK: He probably was one of the best qualified we've ever had.
HOLBROOKE: Absolutely. As for his role model for me as an FSO, there's no
question that I would not have ever thought of the Foreign Service as a career
if it were not for having met Dean Rusk at the most formative point in my life,
when I was in high school, and when he was already talking about the Foreign
Service, and then while I was in college, at the precise moment I was looking
into what career, finding him in Washington as Secretary of State. He was the
first person I'd ever known personally who became a person of national
importance and he encouraged me in joining the Foreign Service. As for the East
00:07:00Asia job, the fact that I followed him in that job with a gap of twenty-seven
years or twenty-five years was just a wonderful coincidence. That was a genuine
accident, but one which gave me a certain personal pleasure.
RICHARD RUSK: He had used George [Catlett] Marshall as a model for himself in
the performance of his office and the way he conducted himself. Was that also
true in the case of Dick Holbrooke and my father, Dean Rusk?
HOLBROOKE: Well, I don't think he was my model by the time I became Assistant
Secretary of State. I think he was one of a number of important influences in my
life and I admired certain qualities in him immensely, as I still do. But I'd
also come under the influence of two or three other people who had given me
positive models, notably [William Averell] Harriman and Clifford, both of whom
I'd gotten to know very well and who were very, very different types of people,
00:08:00and there were some important negative models too. Bob [Robert William] Komer
was a very strong negative model for me because I did not like what I saw in the
way he conducted his business. I thought he showed an unprincipled style. And
there were two other important positive models for me: Nick [Nicholas de
Belleville] Katzenbach, who had been my direct boss and was one of the most
brilliant people I'd ever dealt with or worked for, and Cy [Cyrus Roberts]
Vance, who, after all, had given me the job and to whom I owed everything. So he
was no longer the single model. He was not as clear a symbol to me as George
Marshall was to him. But on the other hand, he was more important in the
00:09:00development of my career than Marshall was in his because I would never have
joined the government if it weren't for Dean Rusk; whereas Dean Rusk was already
in the government long before he'd ever met George Marshall.
Next question: Pentagon Papers. I think my letter will suffice for the time
being. I haven't read the Pentagon Papers now in a long, long time. But my
memory is that as we sat in the back office of Robert McNamara, using all the
files available to us, the more we looked at the data, the worse McNamara
himself looked, and the more inconsistent McNamara looked. While by contrast,
Dean Rusk's role became steadier and steadier. On the other hand, there were
very, very few documents with Dean Rusk's own footprint on them. He, because of
00:10:00his uique understanding of his relationship with the President, had left very
little personal evidence behind of his views. Whereas he would transmit orally
and not reduce them to writing, lower level officials had to put things in
writing. And that's why the Pentagon Papers will always be an incomplete,
although valuable, testimony. They'll tell you more about [John Theodore]
McNaughton and [William Putnam] Bundy and [Paul Culliton] Warnke that they will
about Rusk and Johnson and [John Fitzgerald] Kennedy. What's particularly
missing from the Pentagon Papers, as I've pointed out repeatedly, is the
Presidents themselves. Presidents do not send memos to people arguing for
policy. They make decisions.
RICHARD RUSK: My dad was criticized for not giving adequate leadership to the
Department of State in foreign affairs during the sixties. Some people saw him
as being sort of a weak man, not very strong. And yet, in the way he
00:11:00conceptualized his office, all the advice that both of his Presidents got on
foreign affairs, as far as the Secretary of State was concerned, come strictly
through him. He didn't go in there with a team of people all advising the
President: task forces and stuff like that. He bore the responsibility for
advice himself. In that sense, is that weakness or is that strength? It seemed
like he, personally, giving the way he conceptualized that office, was bearing
that responsibility for advising the President totally upon his own shoulders.
Is that a point worth speaking of and making?
HOLBROOKE: Well, you see, the words strong and weak are very--by my standards,
Dean Rusk was and remains an immensely strong man, the strongest of all the
people in the Administration, by far. I don't have any question about that. The
00:12:00word weakness comes from people who do not understand what it required to carry
out the kind of role and mission as Secretary of State which Dean Rusk thought
was appropriate. Now, he had described the relationship in articles and public
speeches for years. It was a relationship which John F. Kennedy had told him he
wanted in a Secretary of State. So when Dean Rusk was appointed Secretary of
State, John F. Kennedy got exactly what Rusk told him he was going to get. And
in that context, it meant total loyalty, an absolute willingness to be a
lightning rod and take public pressure away from the President and observe it on
yourself, never duck, never blame it on other people the way Kissinger and
[Alexander Meigs] Haig [Jr.] always did, never turn the pressure back on the
White House. You know, basically it seems to me there have been two types of
00:13:00Secretaries of State. You've had the loyal subordinates of the President, who
conduct themselves impeccably and try to draw heat away from the President, of
whom Dean Rusk, Cy Vance, and George [Pratt] Shultz are the epitome. Then there
are the politically controversial Secretaries of State who draw attention to
themselves, of whom John Foster Dulles, Henry Kissinger and Al Haig are the
models. You have a third kind of Secretary of State who are really so passive as
to be non-entities, and in that category I would put William [Pierce] Rogers,
and maybe Christian [Archibald] Herter--although Herter didn't serve very
long--and Ed [Edmund Sixtus] Muskie who, although he was hardly a passive
person, served such a short time that he really played no active role. Dean
[Gooderham] Acheson is hard to categorize because, while he was immensely loyal,
00:14:00he also became enormously controversial. But the Marshall, Rusk, Vance, Shultz
model was the one that Kennedy chose, and he got the ultimate practitioner of
that model. That took enormous strength, and anyone who thinks it didn't
misunderstands what Dean Rusk stood for. He is an iron man. He never took a
vacation. He worked seven days a week, fifty weeks a year or more. He never
asked more of his subordinates than he asked of himself. And he distributed the
pressures very sparingly on other people. He trusted his deputies, [Chester
Bliss] Bowles and [George Wildman] Ball and Katzenbach fully and treated them as
almost equals--less so with Chester Bowles, not because he didn't like Bowles,
as I understand it, but because Bowles was simply not the right kind of man for
that job. But, having done that, it was a very small circle and he was
00:15:00absolutely loyal to that principle.
You say that [Robert Francis] Kennedy considered Dean Rusk a weak man. That was
clearly wrong, but it's also important to understand why Bobby Kennedy took that
view. Bobby Kennedy was an activist who did not understand the Dean Rusk he
thrust for the job. And as Kennedy got more aggressive and more interested in
foreign policy, he probably wanted to be a kind of a shadow foreign minister
himself. But, I speak now as a person who had the highest affection for Bobby
Kennedy and the greatest respect for Dean Rusk. I think that that was another
one of those dialogues which never took place. They couldn't straighten out
00:16:00their relationships. They were too conflicted. It was probably not the right
thing to do to bring Bobby Kennedy into the Cabinet as Attorney General. It
would have been better to keep him in the White House as a personal trouble
shooter and close confidant of the President. But as it worked out, it came
about that this took on a kind of a Grecian--Greek tragic quality. And now,
we're talking here about mythological figures who would be analyzed and talked
about for the rest of our lives. The important thing is for us to try to
separate reality from myth. The reality is simple, to my mind: Dean Rusk was an
iron man. And you can argue with his conception of how he would conduct himself,
but you cannot argue that he was weak because, as you look back on the R whole
00:17:00saga now, he was the strongest of them all. But Bobby Kennedy couldn't see that
in the days when his brother was President. How could he see that? That was a
different world. You know, at that time McNamara looked stronger; Bundy looked
stronger. You're talking about 1963 and 1964. Now we have the benefit of
hindsight and the breaking up of so many other people. You can see what strength
it took for Dean Rusk to stick to what he stood for all these years.
END OF SIDE 1
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