00:00:00SCHOENBAUM: Maybe we could start by asking what specific discussions you
had leading up to your appointment, and who were the people primarily
responsible for your appointment, and why were you interested, and why were
they interested in you.
DEAN RUSK: While I was an Assistant Secretary of State in
the Truman Administration, I was invited to join the Board of Trustees
of the Rockefeller Foundation. There were already on that board a number
of people who I had served with in government: people like Robert
[Abercrombie] Lovett, John J. McCloy, John [Sloan] Dickey, John Foster Dulles and
some others. So I simply became a member of the Board. Well,
then Chester [Irving] Barnard was coming up for retirement. There is an
automatic retirement age of sixty-five at the Rockefeller Foundation, so they appointed
00:01:00a search committee of the Board of Trustees to find out and
recommend a new president. I spent one or two evenings with that
search committee. On that committee were, I remember, John D. [Davison] Rockefeller,
III, John Foster Dulles, and one or two others. There was no
detailed discussion with me about whether or not they were going to
propose my name, they just seemed to want to talk but they
did in fact propose my name.
SCHOENBAUM: What did they talk about? What were they interested in?
Did they ask you questions? What was their approach?
DEAN RUSK: Well, I rather forget the details, it was so
00:02:00long ago. But they talked about, in general, how I saw the
world situation, how I saw the possibilities for a foundation like the
Rockefeller Foundation, and somewhat about my experiences both in the Pentagon and
in the State Department. I think they wondered if I had had
much administrative experience. Well, I had had during the Truman Administration as
Assistant Secretary of State, but not strictly speaking much administrative experience in
the Army during the war. I had been Dean of Faculty at
Mills College and that involved some administration.
SCHOENBAUM: Did you bone up for the interview?
DEAN RUSK: No, they just invited me to have dinner with
them. We spent the evening talking. I was not in the position
of an applicant for the job. I had not put together any
00:03:00materials or letters or anything of that sort. But anyhow, they had
suggested that in December 1951, when they had one of their two
annual board meetings at Williamsburg, they had suggested to me that I
remain in Washington until they called me down there. So, presumably they
took up my name and voted on it. And then Flora [M.]
Rhind, Secretary of the Foundation, called me in Washington and said that
the Board wanted me to come on down. So I put Virginia
and myself in a car and drove on down. But she did
not tell me on the phone whether or not I had been
elected. But I went on down, then they told me I had
been elected. I don't know whether John Foster Dulles played any key
00:04:00role in that. I did tell John Foster Dulles that on this
kind of job, just as in jobs in government, there ought to
be a periodic review to see whether or not it was working
and that we should not proceed on the basis that this was
necessarily a lifetime post. So I wrote a letter to him as
Chairman of the Board, suggesting that at the end of five years
we take another look at it. But it was relatively simple.
Then when it was announced that I would succeed in July first,
1952, they gave me an office and put me on a salary
00:05:00as soon as I could leave the government, so I could be
there to begin to get used to things while I was still
president-elect. Then we had to made arrangements about finding a place to
live and all that kind of thing.
SCHOENBAUM: You moved from Washington to New York?
DEAN RUSK: To New York, and we found a house in
Scarsdale, New York, and stayed there for the entire period. On the
day on which I was elected president, I was invited by Mr.
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to have lunch with him at his home
there in Williamsburg. I must confess that I had a little thought
in the back of my mind that I was going to get
my marching orders from Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. because he had
been the great organizer and first leader of the Rockefeller Foundation in
many ways. It was quite the contrary. He only said really two
00:06:00things to me about the foundation. First, he said, "Mr. Rusk, I
never want to hear from you about the Rockefeller Foundation. You should
not look over your shoulder at me. My son John is on
the Board and if you ever want to talk to a member
of the family, he is available, he is at your disposal." The
second thing he said was, "I suggest that you take some time
off and spend several months in the wilderness alone just thinking about
what could be done with a fund of this size for the
well-being of mankind around the world. Don't feel yourself chained by the
past." Well, that was excellent advice but I didn't have a chance
to take it because my first big duty as President of the
Rockefeller Foundation was to respond to congressional committees of inquiry and that
required me to go back in great detail over everything the Rockefeller
Foundation had done since its founding in 1913. So I steeped myself
00:07:00in the background of all its grants and activities and so forth
in order to be responsive to those congressional committees.
SCHOENBAUM: You knew that this was looming on the horizon at
the time you took over the presidency? So you knew what you
were getting into.
DEAN RUSK: Well, it came about the same time.
RICHARD RUSK: I have a question about your letter to the
Board of Trustees. Is this the same letter that Warren Cohen referred
to? Apparently there was a degree of controversy with regard to your
appointment, and you wrote a letter in response to that controversy.
DEAN RUSK: I don't recall that it was in the framework
of any controversy.
RICHARD RUSK: He saw it in that light.
DEAN RUSK: Well you see, John Foster Dulles had been deeply
embarrassed by his sponsorship of the appointment of Alger Hiss as President
of the Carnegie Endowment, and I think he was of the mind
00:08:00that maybe we ought to try this out for a few years
to see how it worked and if it didn't work we could
do some thing else. You see, I was of the same mind.
When you took those jobs in government that I had held, you
knew that you were going to be there only for a limited
period of years. I had been in the Civil Service in the
State Department on a tenured basis, but when you become an Assistant
Secretary, a Presidential appointment, it is up and out. You know that
those jobs are temporary. So this was not an unusual idea in
my mind.
SCHOENBAUM: Before we get to the Foundation itself, could we talk
about John D. III? I take it that your impression of him
was favorable.
DEAN RUSK: Oh yes. He was a tremendous man, the father
00:09:00of the five brothers. Of course, he had long since retired from
the Rockefeller Foundation board at age sixty-five. At that time some of
the Trustees wanted to change the bylaws to make it possible for
him to stay on the board and he flatly refused. He said,
"No gentlemen, I wrote those bylaws and I am going to comply
with them. We ought to build in a turnover in the leadership
of the Rockefeller Foundation." And so, he had long since been out
of Foundation affairs.
SCHOENBAUM: His advice to "go into the wilderness," as I remember,
he did have a feel for nature, for conservation.
DEAN RUSK: I think he used "wilderness" as a metaphor. He
was strongly of the view that a foundation like the Rockefeller Foundation
should not become some impersonal bureaucracy, but that it should be directed
00:10:00and led by actual living, breathing human beings who had some ideas
in their heads and he thought I ought to take some time
to reflect upon these things and think about priorities and where the
marginal impact of the fairly limited Rockefeller funds could make the most
difference.
SCHOENBAUM: Organization-wise, you came into the office in New York. I
know roughly how it was organized. They had apparently several divisions, primarily
up until that time, and I guess you continued it. They were
concerned primarilywith medicine and health.
DEAN RUSK: Well, there were divisions of medicine/public health, the natural
sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. That was the basic framework.
But by the time I became president, I and a good many
00:11:00other Trustees felt that since enormous funds from governments, international organizations, and
other places were coming into the field of medicine and public health,
that the time had probably come for the Rockefeller Foundation to cut
back on its activity and interest in those fields, because our funds,
were relatively, so minor in relation to what everybody else was doing
that perhaps that wasn't the best use of our money. So I
went through the process of cutting back on our personnel and our
grants in such fields as medicine and public health. We built up
the natural sciences end of it. We soon established a separate division
of agriculture because we quickly became heavily involved in what later came
to be known as the Green Revolution. Then we expanded certain fields:
for example, it was during my period that the Rockefeller Foundation began
00:12:00to get into the arts field. But we had some very able
officers there. Some of them had been there a long time with
a great deal of experience. There was a little bit of a
shake up in attitude in one point. By the time I got
to the Rockefeller Foundation many of the old-time officers had sort of
developed the view that the primary function of the Board of Trustees
was to approve their recommendations, and that the officers themselves were the
Foundation. Well, I took the view that by law and by charter
the Board of Trustees was the Foundation; that is where you start
from, and that we ought to emphasize that it is the Trustees
who are responsible for the activities of the Rockefeller Foundation. I worked
at that pretty hard. I tried to visit every year or so
00:13:00with each Trustee at his own home base, spend a day and
spend as much time as he was willing to give me--There were
fifteen or sixteen Trustees--just talking one-to-one on the Foundation, and its direction,
and so forth. I found that very valuable and it also contributed,
I think, to a high degree of cohesion among the Trustees as
to what we should be doing. So I think that we soon
worked out a pretty good working relationship between the officers and the
Board of Trustees.
RICHARD RUSK: Did the Trustees themselves welcome the additional responsibility of
being more heavily involved in these policy decisions.
DEAN RUSK: I think so.
RICHARD RUSK: I assume it would have meant a lot more
work for them.
DEAN RUSK: Well, it did to a degree, but I think
these Trustees all enjoyed the work. Another thing that we did all
00:14:00along, when we invited somebody to become a member of the Board,
it was emphasized to them by the Chairman of the Board, whoever
the chairman was, that they should not become a Trustee unless they
were willing to work at it and give it some time, that
we didn't want honorary trustees, we wanted working trustees. That was made
very clear to them at the very beginning.
SCHOENBAUM: How did you get the paperwork? Did you actually give
them proposals to review or--
DEAN RUSK: Well, we had two annual meetings of the full
Board of Trustees. Then we had an executive committee of the Board
of Trustees, made up of seven or so, that met once a
month in between Board meetings. For each one of the meetings of
the Board or executive committee we prepared what was called a docket.
00:15:00This would be a big book with all of the proposals in
it that would be coming up at the meeting. And we sent
that to them in advance so they could go over that and
study it, and be ready with their questions, and have a chance
to think about it. Those dockets were prepared following a docket conference
which I had with the officers. We would have the heads of
the different divisions in there, and as these items came up there
would be a discussion in which all heads of divisions would participate,
even though the subject might have been chiefly on one division. We
had some very interesting, and I think profitable, discussions in those docket
conferences. There we would decide which things to put to the Trustees
and therefore which would go into these docket books. Well, then when
we had reached that stage we asked our counsel, during my period
00:16:00Chauncey Belknap of the firm of Belknap and Webb, to go over
the docket to see if he saw any legal problems involved in
any of it. And very rarely did that occur. I remember on
one occasion we were proposing to make a grant to some foundation
or organization there in New York to help them search out and
upgrade black talent, and our lawyer told us that that particular grant
would probably be in violation of the fair employment legislation of the
State of New York because it was concentrated on blacks. Well, we
discussed his point with the Trustees, and I think it was I
who raised the question that if we made this grant who would
complain. Would the Attorney General of the State of New York bring
00:17:00a suit against us? Who is going to complain? And when it
was clear that nobody would complain, we went ahead and made the
grant. In a truly theoretical sense it might have been contrary to
the law, but in practical terms not.
SCHOENBAUM: You said that during your years, the Foundation moved into
00:19:0000:18:00the arts. This is something you don't have a history of being
personally interested in, the arts. Can you describe what your own interest
in the arts is, where you came in contact with the arts?
I assume we are talking about painting and sculpture and ballet and
dance and music.
DEAN RUSK: Well, I can't claim to be any kind of
an expert in art. I am one of those who appreciates the
kind of art that I like. But when I was in Europe
as a student I attended operas and the theater quite a lot.
00:20:00You see, in those days in Europe they sold standing room tickets
to students for almost nothing. And I could go to the opera
in France, Germany, the Comedie Francais, for very little. So I used
to enjoy that. But I can't claim to be in the know
as far as the arts are concerned. But I felt that this
was a part of life that should not be neglected. The Rockefeller
Foundation put very little attention to it. Looking back on my own
college experience, Davidson College was a very good liberal arts college but
it was a desert as far as the arts were concerned. We
had a marching band, and we had a glee club, and that
was about it.
So we began to see what was possible in the arts. We
ran quickly into a question which I think is a very difficult
00:21:00question to answer, and that is "What is the connection between money
and creativity in the arts?" What has money got to do with
creativity? You hear about all these artists who worked away in the
attics in Paris, living on a shoestring and that kind of thing.
And as we probed around on that and talked to a great
many people, we thought that maybe one thing we could do something
about would be to give young creative artists a chance to see
their work in production; young painters to see their paintings shown, exhibited,
criticized; in the case of young dramatists, to see their plays performed;
in the case of young composers, to see their compositions performed. For
example we made some grants to the Louisville Symphony Orchestra to make
00:22:00it possible for them to play and produce new compositions. And I
think that that was pretty useful. We also gave a good many
fellowships and study grants to young artists, to buy time, to have
some time in which to work. Many of them were having to
earn their living as waiters or something like that.
SCHOENBAUM: Are there some success stories of people that you remember?
00:23:00
DEAN RUSK: Well, you would just have to look back through
some of the grants. None of them actually spring to mind at
the moment. We were very careful about not claiming credit on that
kind of thing. Over the years, in its talent search, the Rockefeller
Foundation has located and supported the work in one way or another
some ninety people who later won the Nobel Prize. The Foundation never
used that figure. It shouldn't, because all we were doing was putting
in some money. It was their talent, their brains, their abilities. And
so our attitude during my period was that the Foundation itself should
not attempt to take credit for work that others have done. We
simply, in our Annual Report, accounted for every dime we spent and
let it go at that.
SCHOENBAUM: I noticed that one of the books said that you
00:25:0000:24:00switched from the emphasis on preservation to an emphasis on interpretation in
the arts. Was that a conscious move.
DEAN RUSK: Well, we did make an occasional grant or two,
I think maybe to Columbia University, for some very sophisticated work on
art preservation. This gets you into atomic and molecular materials of all
sorts because some of our great masterpieces were in the process of
deteriorating for lack of pest control, and lack of temperature and humidity
controls, and things of that sort. And so the restoration of masterpieces
that were deteriorating was quite a fine art as well as a
science. I made a mistake once when I was visiting Madrid, I
00:26:00visited the Prado and saw that their great masterpieces there were poorly
lighted, badly hung, no environmental controls of any sort in terms of
humidity and temperature and things of that sort, no pest controls. And
so I tried as tactfully as I could to inquire whether the
Rockefeller Foundation would be permitted to provide the funds to do something
about this. But Spanish pride immediately rejected this. I think I did
not do that as tactfully as I might have, but they have
now done a good deal to improve the conditions of the Prado.
SCHOENBAUM: What was it like personally to be president of the
Rockefeller Foundation? Were people obsequious to you?
00:27:00
DEAN RUSK: One of the besetting sins in the foundation world
is the temptation to play God: the notion that just because there
is money behind it that your ideas are important. And I had
to keep reminding my colleagues about that from time to time.
RICHARD RUSK: Explain that.
DEAN RUSK: Well, if somebody came in with a proposal, there
is a temptation on the part of foundation officers to want to
move it around, to change it a bit, shape it up in
00:28:00accordance with our own views as to what ought to be done.
Simply because there is money behind it, these ideas sometime appear to
be more important both to the Foundation officer and to the prospective
recipient than they deserve to be. But I remember I used to--My
old friend Bob [Robert Francis] Goheen, who was to become president of
Princeton--I didn't frame it up this way but it just happened. He
came in to see me asking for about a half million dollars
for some program they had in the humanities, and I had several
of my colleagues sitting with me at the time. And when he
got through with his proposal, one of my colleagues said, "Well, now
if you could just move this over and turn it in this
direction a bit." And another one said, "Well, what about doing it
this way?" and so forth. Young Goheen, who was then in his
00:29:00thirties, interrupted and said, "Now wait a minute, gentlemen, I am telling
you what Princeton University wants to do. The only question before you
is whether you want to give it any money. We know what
we want to do." I laughed and we gave him his money.
Most of those who come to us are people who are carrying
heavy responsibilities and were not intimidated by us. At the time in
the mid-fifties we decided to liquidate the General Education Board. It had
been established in 1903, I think, to support education in the United
States. And over the years the General Education Board had made a
good many endowment type gifts. Well when you start making endowment gifts,
00:30:00you start spending money pretty heavily, and so our resources were being
drawn down. So we thought we had just better go ahead and
spend the General Education Board out of existence. I remember coming down
to Atlanta and talking to Dr. Benjamin [Elijah] Mays, long-time president of
Morehouse. One of the questions I put to him was whether we
should concentrate the remaining funds in the General Education Board in black
education and he smiled and said, "Oh no, don't do that. These
white boys need education just as much as our black boys do."
The General Education Board had put a lot of money into southern
universities like Vanderbilt, Tulane, places like that, Fisk, Tuskegee. But we decided
to liquidate it rather than try to hang on and do little
tids and tads on a shoestring. So that was wound up during
my time.
SCHOENBAUM: Did Davidson College suddenly think that they had a friend
00:31:00and try to approach you? (laughter)
DEAN RUSK: No, not really because--
RICHARD RUSK: It would not work in that direction. (laughter)
SCHOENBAUM: I realize it wouldn't.
DEAN RUSK: Neither the Rockefeller nor the General Education Board took--
END OF SIDE 1
BEGINNING OF SIDE 2
DEAN RUSK: We made a substantial grant to a Japanese university
and about a year later we discovered that nothing had happened. They
hadn't done anything with it. We discovered that they felt they simply
couldn't afford to spend it because the interest they were getting on
demand deposits from their bank was such that they--(laughter)
Then I remember we would give a good many books to universities
abroad. In my travels I visited a good many of these places
and found that these book gifts had been put into locked cabinets
00:32:00with glass covers on them with a sign put up there on
them "A Gift of The Rockefeller Foundation," but nobody could use these
books. And so I insisted that they unlock these things and let
people use them, and the reply was "Well, they would be stolen."
I replied, "Well, at least somebody would have them who wanted them.
Books are to be used." A number of little things like that
that had to be followed up.
One thing we did do, I think the most important single thing
the Rockefeller Foundation has done over its history has been the thousands
of postgraduate fellowships we have given all over the world. This is
particularly important in the so-called developing world because most of those newly
independent countries started off as independent nations with a tremendous shortage of
manpower in every field. When the Belgian Congo, now Zaire, became independent,
00:33:00it had something like a dozen university graduates in the whole country.
When Indonesia became independent, a country of a hundred million people, it
had only seventy-five or so university graduates in the whole country. So
we emphasized fellowships. Now the Foundation did make fully adequate provisions in
its fellowships so that people could do what they wanted to do
comfortably on those fellowships. And we helped them be admitted to the
appropriate institutions in this country or Western Europe. Most of the fellowship
candidates, about eighty percent of them, wanted to start off by wanting
to go to Harvard. Well, Harvard is not the place to study
agriculture or forestry and a lot of these other things they were
studying, so we had to work on that a little bit. We
then, however, because we had the money to do it, we followed
up on these fellows when they got back home, and if we
found that they needed some pieces of equipment or some reinforcement to
00:34:00their libraries or something of that sort, we could back them up
after they got back home.
SCHOENBAUM: Did you concentrate on any particular area of the world
in these education programs?
DEAN RUSK: Well, by and large the Rockefeller Foundation since 1913
had given a kind of priority to the Western Hemisphere, to Latin
America. It was there that we launched the great program that found
the answer to yellow fever. It was there that we worked on
malaria. The agricultural programs concentrated in the beginning in Mexico and Colombia
and Peru. In medicine we concentrated heavily in the old days in
places like Brazil. Now in the pure sciences, our activity in Western
Europe was pretty keen, at least in terms of finding individual scientists
that needed support.
00:35:00
We became aware also that if you look out all across Latin
America, Africa, Asia, you would probably not find a single university which
would be considered eligible for admission to the American Association of Universities,
this group of fifty elite universities in this country. Now that was
understandable from an historical point of view, but my feeling was if
that were still true thirty years later it would be a shame.
So we tried to upgrade some of these universities, usually department by
department. We put a good deal of money in the American University
in Beirut for example. But we tried to upgrade higher education at
key points, because if they were to meet their trained manpower requirements
00:36:00most of that training would have to occur in their own countries.
It could not be done just on the basis of foreign fellow
ships and foreign travel.
RICHARD RUSK: Did that emphasis on the Western Hemisphere exist throughout
the life of the Rockefeller Foundation?
DEAN RUSK: Pretty much so.
RICHARD RUSK: What about elsewhere in the world?
DEAN RUSK: Well the Western Hemisphere; and then of course, at
the very beginning there was a pretty heavy interest in China.
SCHOENBAUM: Was there an emphasis on Taiwan and funding things in
Taiwan?
DEAN RUSK: Not really.
SCHOENBAUM: How did you personally spend your time, and what percentage?
Were you dealing primarily with the officers and making hiring and firing
decisions, or were you dealing with overall policy that filtered down into
grant applications, or were you reading grant applications, or out traveling, or--
00:37:00
DEAN RUSK: Well, we had a rather limited staff in New
York. Our general approach had been that since these were philanthropic funds
provided for philanthropic purposes that we shouldn't eat too many of these
funds up with our own administration, our own staff. So we might
have three or four officers in each division there in New York,
but they were all of very high quality. We relied very heavily
upon the process of going out and visiting with top people in
the field and getting their judgments as to where the most important
work was being done and where the cutting edge of the sciences
were moving--
SCHOENBAUM: And you did a lot of that personally?
DEAN RUSK: I did a good deal of that, but the
00:38:00officers traveled a great deal, both at home and abroad. We were
trying to keep in touch with the, if you like, the gossip
in the different fields as to where the really top work was
being performed.
RICHARD RUSK: You concentrated pretty much on policy and you had
to have a good number-two man handle most of the administrative work.
DEAN RUSK: Yes although, you can delegate but you can't abdicate
responsibility. And so I would occasionally take an active part in just
administrative detail. Big things are made up out of a lot of
little things, and unless the little things are put right the big
things sometimes don't go right.
SCHOENBAUM: Who was your number two man there?
DEAN RUSK: Lindsley [Fiske] Kimball was my Executive Vice President: a
fine man. He had been, for a period, also head of the
United Negro College Fund in the United States.
RICHARD RUSK: Is he still around?
00:39:00
DEAN RUSK: I am not sure, but I think he is
dead now [Librarian's note: Lindsley Kimball is still living]. But I left
most of the actual administration to him. And the internal administration of
the records and the books and that kind of thing on policy
matters was pretty much in the hands of the secretary to the
corporation, Flora Rhind. She was very good. We had a treasurer and
a comptroller, but the staff in New York was a rather limited
staff.
SCHOENBAUM: How many did you have there approximately?
DEAN RUSK: You can get out one of these earlier reports.
They list them all. I should think not more than fifty, if
you include the administrators.
SCHOENBAUM: Where were the offices located?
DEAN RUSK: When I first went to the Foundation we were
on the fifty-fourth and fifty-third floors of the RCA Building, that big
00:40:00skyscraper there in the heart of Rockefeller Center. The Rockefeller family had
their offices just above ours. But then, in the mid-sixties they persuaded--they
asked us to move across the street to the new Time-Life-Fortune Building.
And we went there to about the forty-second floor there, but we
had two floors there. Of course, relatively, it was a high-price space.
When the time came for us to move across the street to
the Time-Life Building, we looked rather seriously into the question as to
whether we ought to build our own building. The Ford Foundation was
in the process of building their own building. Well, we looked at
it and decided that it would cost us more to build our
00:41:00own building than it would be for us to go ahead and
rent. Since it would be more costly and we would be using
philanthropic money, we decided that we should not take the higher-priced approach
to it. You see, a tax-exempt philanthropic foundation is spending one-hundred cent
dollars, whereas a business corporation spends fifty-cent dollars because it can charge
off expenses to taxes. So I was very conscious of that. For
example, at one point some of my colleagues suggested that we get
a Rockefeller Foundation airplane. Well, we looked into that and it was
clear that without any ability to charge off anything to taxes, that
00:42:00maintaining a Rockefeller Foundation airplane would be relatively very expensive and just
didn't make any sense. So I turned that down.
RICHARD RUSK: Any perks at all go with the job?
DEAN RUSK: No.
SCHOENBAUM: Where did you eat lunch?
DEAN RUSK: Well, we did have an officers' dining room. And
that was a very pleasant place to have lunch because, typically, unless
you had a guest in and wanted a small table on the
side, you would sit around a long table. There you had a
lot of that interdisciplinary kind of discussion, and we had some great
discussions at that luncheon table. We had our lunches catered, we didn't
try to run our own kitchen. No, there were no special perks.
00:43:00
SCHOENBAUM: How did you get to work? Did you take the
train in like everyone else?
DEAN RUSK: In Scarsdale I commuted in by New York Central
railway. I must say after a few years, that commuting got a
little boring. I started out thinking that I could do a little
work on this train going to and fro, but I had an
uneasy feeling that when I would dig out the Rockefeller Foundation papers
to study that my neighbors were looking over my shoulder. They were
very curious, and so, I finally relaxed and just read the newspaper
during that time. I became interested in the sociology of newspaper readership
out of Scarsdale, New York, during that period. If you got a
train around 7:30 A.M., everybody was reading the New York News. Well,
00:44:00along about 8:00 A.M., it shifted to the New York Times. And
then about 8:30 it would shift to the Herald Tribune. Any train
from 9:00 on it was the Wall Street Journal.
We did give some though once to doing what some of the
other corporations around New York had done: move out to the country.
But our younger staff, the secretaries, the clerks, all those people absolutely
refused to move. They said, "We want to be right here in
Manhattan. This is where the action is. This is where it is
interesting." So we decided not to move because the younger staff people
and younger officers wanted to be there in Manhattan, they didn't want
to go out into the country.
00:45:00
SCHOENBAUM: During this period too, you were also active. You maintained
contacts in Washington and political life, did you not? Those were the
[Dwight David] Eisenhower years, but did you maintain contact politically with the
[Adlai Ewing] Stevenson [III] people? You were a registered Democrat.
DEAN RUSK: Well, since we were a non-political, tax-exempt foundation, it
was traditional that officers of the Foundation would not take active or
leading part in the national political scene. We did encourage our officers
to take an active part in our own local communities so that
in the little village of Scarsdale, New York, I was an active
Democrat in community affairs and during the 1960 campaign I was the
co-chairman of the Kennedy- Johnson committee in Scarsdale. But that was as
far as I ever got politically. No, we more or less stayed
00:46:00away from active state or national politics because, the role of the
Rockefeller Foundation could be misinterpreted if we were to do that.
SCHOENBAUM: Didn't you have some informal contacts with the State Department?
DEAN RUSK: Well, John Foster Dulles would call me occasionally to
talk about various things.
RICHARD RUSK: How many contacts, say in an eight-year period, did
you have with Foster Dulles once he was in Washington?
DEAN RUSK: Oh, maybe a dozen.
RICHARD RUSK: Mostly at his initiative, at least according to his
biography.
DEAN RUSK: That's right. Although there was one thing that was
done on my own initiative which you fellows might want to take
a look at. And the end of John Foster Dulles' hundredth day
in office, I wrote him a long letter about how he seemed
to be doing on his job. And it was a pretty interesting
00:47:00letter: still is, as a matter of fact. Well, then when I
became Secretary of State, I was very fortunate in getting the same
secretary who had served him for so many years, Phyllis [D.] Bernau,
now Phyllis Bernau Macomber. So at the end of my hundredth day,
very quietly and without any comment, she simply came in and laid
[on my desk] a copy of that letter that I had written
eight years earlier to John Foster Dulles. And then indeed, I sent
a copy of that letter to William [Pierce] Rogers, just for his
interest. But, it is not a bad letter, and for your own
education you two guys might want to read that letter.
But one interesting thing that occurred in the latter part of the
mid-fifties, Foster Dulles asked me to come down to Washington to see
00:48:00him. He wanted to ask whether I would be willing to undertake
a very private and very discreet negotiation between him and Senator Walter
[Franklin] George of Georgia, who was then Chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, on the subject of a change in China policy. I
told him I would if he wanted me to. And he and
I had two or three quite long discussions about what the alternatives
might be. Well, then about that time, Governor Herman [Eugene] Talmadge of
Georgia announced that he was going to run for the Senate against
Walter George, and Senator George looked the situation over and decided that
he would not run again. So Dulles made the judgment, which I
think was the right judgment, that under those circumstances. Walter George would
not want to take on so difficult and controversial a matter as
a change in China policy, so the whole idea was dropped. I
think the principal possibility that Dulles had in mind was a kind
00:49:00of two-Chinas approach. I don't think it would have gotten anywhere because
both the national government of China on Taiwan and the People's Republic
in Peking, categorically rejected that kind of approach.
RICHARD RUSK: How did you personally advise Dulles, forgetting the political
situation in this country? Were you in favor of a two-China policy
back in the late fifties?
DEAN RUSK: Well, I felt that this was a fish that
wouldn't swim, therefore there was not too much to it. From our
point of view, it would be alright.
RICHARD RUSK: Because of our domestic scene and because of their--
DEAN RUSK: No, both Chinas absolutely rejected it. As late as
the mid-sixties we might have had considerable international support for the idea
of two Chinese seats in the United Nations because that was what
the reality was. There was a government on the mainland and a
00:50:00government in Taiwan. But both Taiwan and Peking categorically rejected any such
approach.
RICHARD RUSK: Personally how did you feel about a two-China policy?
Would we not have been better off going ahead, presuming that the
domestic situation would have allowed it? This may not be a fair
question to ask. But would we not have been better off going
ahead and at least proposing it? If both Chinas or either China
refused to go along with it, at least the ball is on
their side.
DEAN RUSK: Well, we did propose this approach to the people
in Taiwan on more than one occasion and they just categorically refused.
And it was clear also that Peking would have also refused it.
You see the one thing that both Chinas agreed on was that
there was one China and that Taiwan was a part of China.
SCHOENBAUM: They still, more or less, agree on that.
DEAN RUSK: That's right.
SCHOENBAUM: Where was the pressure coming from, from Dulles' point of
view? Was this something that [Dwight David] Eisenhower wanted?
DEAN RUSK: No. Just before [John Fitzgerald] Kennedy took office, Eisenhower
00:51:00said to Kennedy, "Now I will try to support you in foreign
policy matters as much as I can, but on one matter I
will have to oppose you publicly and strongly and that would be
the seating of Peking in the United Nations or bilateral recognition of
Peking." But before he became Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had
written an article, I think it was in Foreign Affairs, in which
he had sort of played with the idea of a two-China approach.
You see, he recognized, as all of us did during all of
that period, that there was an enormous gap between the real situation
in the real world and this fiction that they tried to maintain
in Taiwan that they were the government of all China, that they
would sometime go back to the mainland, and so forth. And that
gap between theory and the real world is always a troublesome thing.
00:52:00I think Foster Dulles had come to these ideas in his own
mind. But he was not going to move on it unless he
felt that he had some chance of success in the Senate, and
that was why he asked me if I would take on these
discussions with Walter George.
RICHARD RUSK: Because it would have been expensive domestically?
DEAN RUSK: Oh, it would have been very controversial domestically.
RICHARD RUSK: Going through all that and not actually achieve something.
DEAN RUSK: Well, you can't sort of leave out the domestic
side of it when you are deciding what to do. For example,
soon after President Kennedy took office I had a long talk with
him, just the two of us, on the alternatives with respect to
China. But he had in front of him a resolution of the
Congress which had been passed just two years before, I think it
was a unanimous resolution, objecting to the seating of Peking in the
U.N. and bilateral recognition. And he had in his mind the statement
that Eisenhower had made to him. So Kennedy just decided that there
00:53:00was not enough in it to be worth the eye-gouging kind of
controversy it would cause here in the United States, particularly in the
Senate. And so he told me in that discussion that he simply
did not want to reopen China policy. And as I left the
room, he called out to me, "And what's more, Mr. Secretary, I
don't want to read in the Washington Post or the New York
Times that the State Department is thinking about any change in China
policy."
So I went back to the State Department, and when people like
Adlai [Ewing] Stevenson [III] and Chester [Bliss] Bowles would come in to
talk about China, I would just play the role of the village
idiot. I did not tell them of my talk with Kennedy, because
I would be reading about that in the Washington Post or the
New York Times, so I just stonewalled it. You see, Kennedy was
more cautious than many people think of him as being because he
00:54:00did not feel that he had had a mandate in the election
of 1960. He had been elected by only a few tens of
thousands of votes; he used to say [by] Cook County, Illinois. I
remember one quip he made after the disaster of the Bay of
Pigs: He said, "I think I will ask for a recount in
Cook County!" So, Kennedy was very careful about choosing the issues on
which he would do battle, particularly do battle with the Congress. He
used to say to us, "If you're going to have a fight,
then have a fight about something; don't have a fight about nothing."
Now, had he been reelected in 1964 with a much stronger vote,
it is entirely possible that he might have considered a change in
China policy.
SCHOENBAUM: What other things did John Foster Dulles--In these dozen other
contacts, what else did he call you about? Did he want advice
about specific things, or want you to undertake a study, or something
00:55:00like that, in addition to the China--
RICHARD RUSK: Do you have the correspondence or records of your
contacts with him?
DEAN RUSK: I have never in my life been in the
practice of making memos of conversations.
RICHARD RUSK: Did he get in touch with you by mail
or phone?
DEAN RUSK: He would have his secretary call me or he
would call me and ask if I would come down to see
him.
RICHARD RUSK: So there probably wouldn't be a record of it.
DEAN RUSK: No. Well there might be in his files, I
don't know; but I doubt it. Sometimes these would turn on the
issues of the day. For example, at one stage there in the
early fifties--Eugene [Robert] Black was then President of the World Bank and
he was negotiating for a kind of consortium for the building of
the Aswan Dam. This would involve the World Bank, and it would
00:56:00involve U.S. aid funds, some private financing, and things like that. While
he was engaged in those negotiations, he and I agreed that if
they went ahead with that, that the Rockefeller Foundation would put up
significant funds to study, from the very beginning, the non-engineering impact of
the Aswan Dam: its impact upon agriculture--the testing of the soils that
were supposed to be developed by it, what it would do to
the snail disease, bilharzia, the question of the non-engineering impact of the
dam. Well then John Foster Dulles got mad at [Gamal Abdel] Nasser
about something and those negotiations were halted, the Russians raked it up
and went ahead with it. But they did not make any provision
for giving advance attention to these non-engineering aspects of the building of
the dam, and so they found themselves later with a series of
00:57:00problems which at least could have been anticipated and thought about.
SCHOENBAUM: I wanted to ask you too about the article in
Foreign Affairs that you wrote when you were President of the Rockefeller
Foundation. What occasioned that?
DEAN RUSK: Well, along about 1956, 1957, I was invited to
give the so-called Elihu Root Lecture at the Council on Foreign Relations.
These were three lectures, the first of which was on the Presidency,
the second was on the Congress, and the third was on, I
think, the State Department, the bureaucracy. Well, it was planned that these
three lectures would appear as a very small book or as three
articles in this journal, Foreign Affairs. Well, I procrastinated a bit, I
am afraid. But I did get the first lecture prepared as an
article on the Presidency, and that appeared in the spring of 1960.
00:58:00The lectures were well received at the Council. But in any event,
this article was published. These lectures were given when the last thing
in the world which I had in my mind was that I
would ever be Secretary of State. Fortunately, my procrastination meant that my
second and third lectures did not get published, because I had to
eat some of that article when I became Secretary of State. For
example, I complained that the Secretary of State traveled too much and--(laughter)
RICHARD RUSK: But the initiative for that article came from the
Elihu Root people?
00:59:00
DEAN RUSK: Well, the Council on Foreign Relations had invited me
to give the Elihu Root Lecture, and this was one of those
lectures.
SCHOENBAUM: Do you think that article influenced Kennedy? Isn't that one
of the things Kennedy read, or Kennedy's people read, when they were
considering you for Secretary of State?
DEAN RUSK: Well, I had never met Kennedy until he was
President-elect. In mid- December he asked me to come to see him
there at his place in Georgetown. I went over there and we
spent about two hours talking about various things. He had a copy
of this Foreign Affairs article on a nearby desk, but we didn't
talk about that at all. [Theodore Chaikin] Sorensen, in his book, seemed
to think we talked about that article, but we didn't. We talked
about different possibilities for Secretary of State. He had three or four
names on his list and I added a couple for his consideration.
There was no discussion about me as a possibility for that job.
01:00:00So I went on back to New York and told my colleagues
at the Rockefeller Foundation that they could forget any press speculation they
might have seen and that I would be staying at the Foundation.
Well, the very next morning 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." So he asked me to come on
down to West Palm Beach and we spent the morning of the
next day talking over a lot of things, and then he made
the announcement. But it came as a complete surprise to me in
every way. I had not lifted a finger trying to get anybody
to nominate me for it or support me for it.
RICHARD RUSK: About these lectures: Weren't you on the Council on
Foreign Relations?
DEAN RUSK: Well, I was a member of the Council on
Foreign Relations, as were eight hundred other people. It was a discussion
group. There was no such thing as a point of view in
the Council on Foreign Relations because they have a membership there that
01:01:00differ widely among themselves. But they did have various study groups and
lectures and things like that. And I was fairly active as a
member of the Council on Foreign Relations, but--
RICHARD RUSK: But you weren't part of a small policymaking group
for the Council?
DEAN RUSK: No. There was no such thing.
RICHARD RUSK: When you got the appointment--I remember when you got
back from Florida. I believe you traveled by train.
DEAN RUSK: No.
RICHARD RUSK: You had had some hours to get over the
feeling of what you had just been through in Florida. I remember
when you came through the door you were just as white as
a ghost.
DEAN RUSK: Well, I lost fifteen pounds in the first ten
days after that announcement was made. I had known enough about the
job to know something about the enormous responsibilities it carried. As a
matter of fact, I was in New York when Eisenhower announced that
01:02:00he was asking John Foster Dulles to be Secretary of State, and
Foster Dulles asked me to come over to see him that same
day. I went over there and we had a talk, and Foster
Dulles was pretty shaken. I had the strong impression that Foster Dulles
would have much preferred to be some kind of officer at the
White House "making policy."
END OF SIDE 2