Rusk VVVVV, Dean Rusk interviewed by Richard Rusk and John Haag, Part 2, 1986 January

DEAN RUSK: Well, I think I should probably say that when I arrived as an undergraduate at Oxford, I was more or less accepted as an honorary gentleman from the very beginning because Oxford undergraduates were of that class. Now, since then there has been a major transformation. My old tutor once told me a few years ago that about eighty percent of the undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge now are on some form of state aid. And that makes it possible for a lot of young people who never dreamed of going to Oxford or Cambridge to think of doing so. And so the class structure at Oxford and Cambridge has changed very considerably. But in my day there were a lot of young lords around. There were the sons of lords who went fox hunting and drag hunting and had their horses there at Oxford, and on their twenty-first birthday would give a big sherry party. I attended a number of those. But a lot of that has changed since then. 00:01:00There has been, I think, a considerable reduction in these class differences in England. Some of it is still there, but it's not such a heavy part of the social structure as it used to be.

HAAG: How did you get by on four hundred pounds a year? Or was that what your stipend was?

DEAN RUSK: Yes, but the pound was worth five dollars in those days.

HAAG: Right.

DEAN RUSK: So it was a little bit more than it sounds like today. But I got by because I had to. I didn't have any other resources. And so I had to watch my expenditures very carefully. But you could do it in those days. The fees at Oxford were relatively low. And your battles--that is, the payment for your room and board--were modest. So I was able to get by. I was lucky to be able to leave Oxford without being in debt; one managed. I had to watch my pennies during vacation periods. I couldn't spend too much in Germany or wherever I was going.

HAAG: You were obviously a very prudent Rhodes Scholar because the 1927 manual for perspective Rhodes Scholars says the following: "With a Rhodes scholarship at its present value of four hundred pounds a year, while it is not impossible for a Rhodes Scholar occasionally and with great care to make ends meet; it is difficult to do so."

DEAN RUSK: Yeah.

HAAG: And you made it.

DEAN RUSK: That's true. That's true. It was difficult.

HAAG: You watched every ink penny.

DEAN RUSK: I had to watch my pennies very carefully.

HAAG: Every farthing probably.

DEAN RUSK: Yeah.

HAAG: (laughter) I think this is still true in Britain, but it's got quite its share of eccentrics. Did you meet any genuine British eccentrics while in Oxford? And who were they? Or were there so many that you couldn't really define anyone as eccentric? (laughter)

DEAN RUSK: Well, you know, there were a good many eccentrics around Oxford, particularly among the dons who sat at high table. But discussion is very lively 00:03:00at Oxford because, to exaggerate a little, it was considered infra dig to agree with anybody else. So that led to some very lively conversation. Well, there were eccentrics. The president of our own college, Dr. James, whom we called "The Bodger," was such a man. He was in his eighties and had the long flowing white beard. I think that this might have been a process of hazing by my English fellow students. But in my first year there they appointed me as chairman of a committee of undergraduates to go to The Bodger, the president of the college, to petition for a ladies' powder room in college. There was no such thing in my day. If you had a lady guest and she needed to go to the powder room, you took her outside the college and down into an underground place outside the college, 00:04:00and you dropped a penny in the slot and she was able to go in there. Well, I remember we waited upon the president of the college, and as spokesman I made the plea for a ladies' room in college. And after we were through, he turned to us and said, "What a monstrous proposal!" And that was the end of that. (laughter) But no, eccentrics were rather popular around Oxford. People got to be known for their strange and curious ways, and what they said. It was taken for granted that there would be people like that around.

HAAG: My information tells me that women were not admitted to full membership at Oxford until 1919. So they were newcomers.

DEAN RUSK: Yes. Then only at certain women's colleges: Lady Margaret Hall, St. Hilda's. Now most of the colleges at Oxford are coeducational. But in those days they were rigidly separated. Of course, the women who were members of these 00:05:00women's colleges attended regular lectures and sometimes would participate in seminars that might be held for a group of students. But it was still very much of a monastic situation when I was there.

HAAG: There were no female dons at the time, probably.

DEAN RUSK: There were some over at the women's colleges.

HAAG: Oh, yeah. But not--

DEAN RUSK: But not in the other colleges.

HAAG: That probably would have--

DEAN RUSK: And I don't remember attending a lecture given by a woman professor at Oxford. There might have been a few here and there, but I just don't remember.

HAAG: And they weren't worried about that. I mean there was no concern that this was keeping talent from rising to the surface or anything like that.

DEAN RUSK: It was not a major issue of public discussion in those days.

HAAG: Coming from the United States, basically the frontier of the Anglo-Saxon world, what were the biggest what might be called cultural clashes that you had 00:06:00in Britain? In other words, what seemed to you to be totally strange or totally inexplicable or totally impossible to really understand? You might be able to accept it as a guest, but really ultimately not being able to understand it.

DEAN RUSK: Well, to begin with there were a good many differences in the language. One had to develop one's own glossary of equivalent terms. What we called trucks they called Lorries. What we called a hood they called a bonnet, (laughter) And you had to get use to those things pretty quickly. I remember when I got to London, on my way to Oxford, and went into a British underground, there was a huge billboard there: very large, big advertising sign. And on it was a picture of a stork with its beak pointed up to the sky. And in very large letters it said, "Guiness's Stout Keeps Your Pecker Up!" Well, one had to adjust 00:07:00to those differences of language pretty quickly. (laughter)

RICHARD RUSK: That's funny! We know what it means in this country! They're talking about the stork's pecker.

DEAN RUSK: Yeah, that's right. The word "pecker" doesn't mean anything like the same thing over there.

HAAG: I don't think they used that one during the Second World War when all those American troops were there.

DEAN RUSK: But I was a little miffed when, on my way home from Oxford, after three years in England, I had dropped by a Lion's Coffee House in London to have a snack before I got the boat/train. And for three years my hair had been cut by an English hair dresser. Every stitch of clothing I had on was British. My shoes were British. My tie was British. And a little waitress came up and said, "What do you want besides some ice water? I know you want ice water because you're an American." And she had spotted me as an American despite the fact that 00:08:00everything about me was British except whatever it was she detected.

HAAG: Do you have any idea what it could have been? The way you walked?

DEAN RUSK: I don't know whether it was the shape of my face or what it was, but she spotted me immediately. (laughter)

HAAG: Island nation: they know who the foreigners are.

DEAN RUSK: First, in the early thirties there were the important regional differences within the United Kingdom: people from the midlands and from the Lake District and from Cornwall and, of course, Wales and Scotland. There were quite a few different accents. But just as in this country, the language has become more homogenized with the BBC [British Broadcasting Company] and movies and things of that sort. One impression I had when I first got there was that many Britains' picture of the United States came from movie. They still thought of us in terms of cowboys and Indians and things of that sort.

RICHARD RUSK: That's true today.

DEAN RUSK: They just had the kind of mythological picture, just as we have in this country about Mexicans and Indians, and people of--that is, Hindu Indians. These stereotypes were very prevalent in those days.

HAAG: What kind of elements did you see in the early thirties--let's call them strengths--in Britain that were surfaced again under Churchill in 1940? In other words, what kind of--You know, Britain, when she was alone fighting [Adolf] Hitler, defying seemingly impossible odds, what kinds of elements that surfaced again years later in the early forties did you notice there in the early thirties?

DEAN RUSK: Well, the British are somewhat deceptive in this regard. I remember that Herbert Cameron, this teenager from a family that I lived with in Germany, 00:10:00came over to Oxford to visit me after I came back to Oxford. And he was there for two or three days. And he saw these young English fellows walking around with their baggy slacks and an old blazer, with a pipe in the corner of their mouth and their hands in their pockets, and kind of hunched over. I remember one day he said to me with some scorn, "These people can't fight." So the British are a little deceiving in this regard because they are so laid back in their personal demeanor, their personal lives. But I agree with Churchill about Britain's finest hour there. And to me one of the greatest cartoons every drawn was by [Sir David] Low, the British cartoonist, after the fall of France. The cartoon showed a British Tommie standing on the cliffs of southern England 00:11:00looking out across the Channel, with his head up, his rifle at port arms. And he was saying, "Well then, alone." Now there is something in the British character that rises to the necessity of an emergency in a very impressive fashion.

HAAG: To me that was one of the great mysteries of the thirties, that Britain seemed really to be exhausted, to be demoralized in the early thirties. You know the Oxford peace pledge which you were present.

DEAN RUSK: Yeah.

HAAG: Within a decade, you know, obviously there were these hidden strengths. And I think you made a very clear and interesting point there.

DEAN RUSK: Well, you see, we all owe a great debt to the British because of those centuries through which they generated the institutional structure of 00:12:00human freedom: the Common Law, Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, the Habeas Corpus Act, the British Bill of Rights, all preceding our own Constitution. And they really worked out, with a good deal of sacrifice and violence over the years, constitutional restraints upon the exercise of raw power by those who govern. And it's something to which all of us in the constitutional democracies are deeply indebted.

HAAG: What was the British attitude toward the French?

RICHARD RUSK: Pop, when you were there in the thirties at Oxford, did you think of the British--Did you hold the same amount of, not reverence, not awe: What's the word?

DEAN RUSK: Respect?

RICHARD RUSK: Respect for them then, before the Second World War experience and 00:13:00before your own study of their constitutional history? Did you have the feeling when you were there that this was really a rather incredible country with an incredible group of people?

DEAN RUSK: Oh, yes. I think my respect and affection for Britain stems in part from three years' experience in which I found the things about them that I didn't like and the things that I did like. And the things that I did like greatly outweighed the other. No, I was conscious of that at the time. Now I did not consider myself a colonial. I mean, I was proud of being an American. And I didn't give away anything in that regard. But no, I had great respect. Well, a lot of little things. I was on a camping trip in the Lake District of England up in the Wordsworth country with a group of English undergraduates plus a Hindu friend of mine. And some of the fellows went out rock climbing in this Lake 00:14:00District. They had a good many mountains around there. And I remember over the campfire one evening they were talking about the hazards of rock climbing and the importance of each person in the party roped together, doing his part to ensure the safety of the other members. And one English fellow said, at a moment of indiscretion, "You know, I don't really know what I would do if I had to belly-up and save a comrade above me on the rope, who was falling." He said, "I don't really know what I would do." And you know, they never took him rock climbing again.

RICHARD RUSK: Is that right?

DEAN RUSK: Yeah, he was just out, because there's just an instinctive commitment to certain things that have to be done. And he had broken the rule. 00:15:00So he was out as far as rock climbing was concerned. Well, there is something beneath the surface there in that direction: You did your duty. And this was a very important element.

RICHARD RUSK: What didn't you like about the British?

DEAN RUSK: Oh, some of the food. They are miserable at cooking beef, for example. A kind of superior and supercilious attitude toward a lot of other non-British people. There were various things. The stodginess of some of their institutions, including their religious institutions. I think I told you about my own college, which was very, very High Church of England. They had compulsory 00:16:00chapel every morning at seven-thirty. Every morning! Well, in my first week there the dean of the college called me in and said, "Mr. Rusk, I see from your papers that you are a Presbyterian." And I said, "Yes, sir." He said, "Well, I hope you won't be offended, but you are not particularly welcome at morning chapel." And so I escaped compulsory morning chapel for three years. It was great! (laughter)

HAAG: It shows what a few, well-chosen words will get you.

DEAN RUSK: Oh, but you know, the dons of my college gave us a party at the end of our examinations: one of the two times in my life I ever got pretty stewed. And I remember my own don made some remark about the excellence of the lecturers at Oxford. Well, I said, "That's not universally true. Look at this lecturer in [David] Hume." The lecturer was a young man who came in, and instead of facing 00:17:00the class, he faced the wall and mumbled. And the first day he had about two hundred students at his lecture. The second lecture he has about seventy-five. And the third lecture had dropped to about twenty-five. I said, "He was a miserable lecturer." And my don said, "Well, then what did you do about Hume?" I said, "I had to work him up on my own." Whereupon my don said, "Then he might have been the best lecturer you had." (laughter)

HAAG: Who did the British, at the time, consider to be perhaps the most decadent people in Europe? Was it the French? What were their attitudes toward the French?

DEAN RUSK: It would be hard to generalize about that. I suppose maybe the 00:18:00Italians and the Germans would come ahead of the French. As a matter of fact, there were those who would say how fortunate we were that the Italians started off on the other side. (laughter)

RICHARD RUSK: Is that right?

DEAN RUSK: I suppose that those people had that confirmed to them in World War II.

RICHARD RUSK: Yeah, that's cute. Hey, Pop, before I forget, put that story on tape about [Alfred] von Schlieffen's son in that German tavern.

DEAN RUSK: When I was living in Neubabelsberg, I would quite frequently go down to a neighborhood pub, coffee house, after dinner to have a cup of coffee and to chew the fat a little bit. And a regular patron there was an elderly Colonel von Schlieffen, who was the son of the General von Schlieffen, who developed the 00:19:00famous von Schlieffen Plan for World War I. And I noticed that at a certain time every evening he would simply withdraw and go into an adjoining room. And you could hear the striking of a bell. Then he would come out very erect and go home. And I became curious as to what was going on in this room. Was he in there going through some kind of ceremony about German heroes or something? So one evening I was brash enough to peer in. And he was simply setting his watch by the time signal on the radio. Yeah, he wanted his watch to be exact. But he was a very imposing-looking figure, one of the old aristocracy there in Germany. And he was greatly respected in the neighborhood.

HAAG: Who were your heroes during these years? I don't know if that's the proper term, but who did you really respect? Which people? Either living or 00:20:00deceased, in the early thirties?

DEAN RUSK: Well, in those days my own personal hero was Robert E. [Edward] Lee. I read everything that I could possibly find about him. He was a hero to many southerners at that time. He was a man of honor. He was a gentleman. He was a great field commander. As a matter of fact, I grew up thinking that in the Civil War, Robert E. Lee and his men got so tired winning battles that they finally lost the war. But this was before I had experienced an association with George [Catlett] Marshall. He later became a second hero to me. But there were not all that many heroes in the thirties for people to admire and respect. After all, in this country it was a little hard to make a hero out of a [John] Calvin Coolidge 00:21:00or a Herbert [Clark] Hoover. Franklin [Delano] Roosevelt did stir a good deal of imagination in Britain when he came into office. But there was not too much hero worship in those days.

HAAG: One has the impression from most of the books written about the generation growing up in the late twenties that they really were, in a way, the lost generation. Not too many heroes, social and economic environment that was not very promising.

DEAN RUSK: Yes, and the flapper age and F. [Francis] Scott [Key] Fitzgerald and jazz music and all that sort of thing. No, it was a kind of unoriented generation in many respects.

HAAG: A sense of drift.

DEAN RUSK: I escaped some of that because of elements in my own family and my experience in my own church, things of that sort. So I never felt footloose and 00:22:00fancy free. I say with great gratitude to the fact that in my seventy- seven years I've never had a dull moment. I've never been bored. And I am grateful for that.

HAAG: Were people at Oxford--were there some who drank a lot? Did they experiment with drugs? This would be--looking back from our perspective, you know, kind of a drug culture.

RICHARD RUSK: One of your colleagues wrote to say that you had the reputation of having the smelliest cigar at Oxford.

DEAN RUSK: I never smoked a cigar.

RICHARD RUSK: Pipe? Smelliest pipe at Oxford.

DEAN RUSK: Oh, I tried a pipe for a while, but I didn't like it because it was too much gear to carry around. And the pipe does become smelly if you don't work on it a lot. No, there was a fair amount of drinking. But see, Oxford in those days did not take the in loco parentis attitude toward you and your personal life. If you wanted to drink yourself to death, whatever, that was up to you. They didn't give a damn. They expected you to meet your academic appointments and to pass your final exams. But if you wanted to carouse around and drink 00:23:00yourself to death, that was very much up to you. And they didn't give a damn about whether or not you were going to get a job when you got through Oxford. There was none of that kind of personal attention to each undergraduate. He was on his own. There was a fair amount of drinking. My college, St. John's, was rather famous for having the best wine cellar in Oxford because the dons spent a good deal of time sampling wines. But Scotch, yes. But I never heard of drugs when I was at Oxford: not even marijuana, and certainly not cocaine, heroin, and things of that sort. There might have been a little of it there, but I just never came across it.

RICHARD RUSK: There would have been opium back in your day.

DEAN RUSK: It's possible, but I was not aware of it.

HAAG: So actually, in some ways this was still, in many ways, a kind of a nineteenth century environment. It was a nineteenth century world: Sense of 00:24:00honor, gentlemen, integrity, and so on.

DEAN RUSK: Right. There's another little tradition at Oxford that I found interesting and amusing. You hoped to do well on your final exams, but the tradition was you must not get caught studying. You must not be a bookworm. And one effect of that was that when you went on vacations, which were pretty liberal--almost half the year was taken up at Oxford in vacations--you would take your books off with you on vacation and bone up during vacation time so that when you were at Oxford you could enjoy the life of Oxford: the bull sessions, the debates, the archery club, the inter-college sports, and things of that sort. We played a fair amount of bridge at Oxford; not much poker. That was an American frontier game. But it was still honorable to get a first or second 00:25:00in your final exams. And there was respect for learning, as such. And there was a good deal of the leisure at Oxford that goes along with learning. I had worked my way through both high school and college here in this country, and I was always running breathlessly from one commitment to another. And Oxford was my first experience in having some of the leisure that goes along with learning. And that, I found an invaluable experience for me.

HAAG: What happened to some of your friends and colleagues at Oxford? Did some of them--

RICHARD RUSK: That we've pretty well got.

[break in recording]

HAAG: -- and their lives in the war?

DEAN RUSK: One lad from Scotland who was with me when I attended that famous debate in the Oxford union, that "This House Will Not Fight for King and Country." Have I commented on this in other tapes, Richard? In that debate the 00:26:00motion was moved by C.E.M. [Cyril Edwin Mitchinson] Joad, the philosopher. And he was eloquent, brilliant, witty. And his patriotic opposition were rather leaden in their handling of the debate. And so he carried the day in the final vote. Most people don't understand that at Oxford, for union debates, the votes very often turn on the quality of the debaters rather than the merits of the issues. Well, anyhow, they voted for that resolution, and that helped to give rise to the Oxford pacifist movement, which you mentioned earlier. Well, in the Oxford union that evening was a friend of mine from Scotland, who a few years later was in that battalion of the Black Watch, which at Dunkirk charged Nazi panzers with nothing but naked bayonets in their hands, trying to help a few more of their buddies get off the beach. And several of my Oxford classmates were lost in World War II. My American friends-- Grady Frank spent his life in 00:27:00the bowels of one of the most secret agencies in Washington, and I had very little contact with him. As a matter of fact, when I was Secretary of State I tried to call him on the telephone once, and couldn't even get through to him by telephone.

RICHARD RUSK: Has Grady Frank heard that story?

DEAN RUSK: Yeah. David French became--well, he was my successor at Mills College, when I left Mills College to report back to duty as a reserve Army officer. And he later became dean of the new branch of the University of Michigan. And [William Everett] Derryberry became president of a college in Tennessee. They had a variety of careers ahead of them. As far as I know, my American Oxford college mates survived World War II. [Charles Hartwell] Tick Bonesteel became a four-star general commanding our forces in Korea. He had come 00:28:00to Oxford from the military academy. Of course, we envied the fellows who came to Oxford from West Point and Annapolis because they were there on active duty. So they not only got the Rhodes stipend, they got their active duty pay as officers of the Army and Navy. So they had a little extra to live on.

RICHARD RUSK: Pop, what about your Mom's side, the German side of her? Did you ever, while in Germany, spend any time trying to trace back any of the Clotfelters?

DEAN RUSK: No, not really. I have already told you about my unhappy experience with the Rusks in Northern Ireland. But Clotfelter and Clotfelter apparently are the same family in the general Black Forest area of Germany. But we've never made any effort to establish any ties with my grandfather's family on my 00:29:00mother's side.

RICHARD RUSK: Did your mother keep in touch? Did she tell you at all about anything?

DEAN RUSK: No, she had not inherited from her father very much information about Germany. You see, my grandfather himself was a second generation German, and somehow they did not pass down family tradition.

HAAG: I have a question here. Some social historians or sociologists have argued that the south, the American South, is the most English part of the U.S.A. Is there any truth to that? When you arrived in Britain were there some mores or traditions that seemed fairly close to what you were brought up with?

DEAN RUSK: Well, we southerners had remembered that during the Civil War, Britain came awfully close to recognizing the Confederacy. And we continued trade with Britain throughout that war. We sent them cotton and they sent us things back. But also there was a cultural lag, if you want to call it that, in 00:30:00the South which--after all, there were a lot of Tories in east Tennessee and in those mountain areas of east Kentucky and western North Carolina.

END OF SIDE 1

BEGINNING OF SIDE 2

DEAN RUSK: Up until fairly recently, if you wanted to hear Elizabethan English spoken you could go up into the hill country of the Appalachians, and you could still hear Elizabethan English. That I think has pretty much faded away with the radio and television and all that kind of thing, and the broad based education.

HAAG: The idea of the gentleman and the gentlemanly behavior--

DEAN RUSK: Well, there's been a certain amount of that in the southern tradition, although that's been in the process of disappearing. I think the English Royal family is popular in the South, as in other parts of our country. 00:31:00There's a streak of royalist sentiment among the American people which is evident when we get visitors from the Royal House coming to this country.

HAAG: Prince Charles seems to do quite well here, doesn't he?

DEAN RUSK: Yes.

RICHARD RUSK: Were you aware of all the concentration camps in Germany, apparently that Hitler had started right when he took office?

DEAN RUSK: Well, I was not aware of those at all. But that ended, my presence ended in Germany in 1934 when I returned home. No, I was not aware of those camps and never heard about them. I think really those got underway a little bit later basically. There might have been a few of them, but I don't think Hitler started at the very beginning in exterminating the Jews. I think that came a little later.

RICHARD RUSK: Pop, you came back to this country and gave your talk. And your feeling was, "Well, let's just wait and see. See how things develop." John has a question here. Did your sixth sense ever tell you something was very wrong in Germany? Did you have a feeling that things were getting unstuck over there? 00:32:00Were you nervous at all?

DEAN RUSK: Yes, I was concerned after having read Mein Kampf to the possibility that Hitler really did mean what he had written in Mein Kampf. And this kind of mystical view that you found in [Alfred] Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century and other kinds of writing, that was a matter of concern. The attitude of the Nazi storm troopers in suppressing, during the political campaigns, other parties in Germany: they simply took the streets away from the Socialists and the more conservative parties and denied them the right to hold political rallies and speak peacefully from public platforms and things of that sort. That was very disturbing. But well, go ahead with your follow-up if you want to. Let 00:33:00me remind you here of Konrad Adenauer's remark at the time of Kennedy's famous visit to Berlin. There, as far as the eye could see in 360 degree directions, was just a mass of people. And their response to Kennedy was almost unbelievable: tremendous excitement and crowd response. And I was standing with Konrad Adenauer just after that event and I said, "What did you think of this today?" And Konrad Adenauer said, "I am worried. Does this mean that Germany could have another Hitler?" And Kennedy himself later had the impression that maybe he had overdone it on that occasion because the crowd reaction was so powerful.

HAAG: I was there about two or three weeks after that. And people I talked to were still very stirred up by it. Very emotional.

DEAN RUSK: Yeah.

HAAG: There is a potential in German culture, or at least was until recently, for this kind of emotionalism, which of course, you wouldn't have in Britain.

DEAN RUSK: That's right.

HAAG: There is a distinct cultural difference.

DEAN RUSK: Well, there is a kind of built-in skepticism in the Anglo-Saxon tradition that I think would militate against something like that.

HAAG: We're not true believers like--

DEAN RUSK: The closest I've ever seen us come to this was the response of the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial when Martin Luther King, Jr. made his famous speech. That also was powerful crowd-response getter.

RICHARD RUSK: Or Kevin [Gregory] Butler kicking that field goal against Clemson. (laughter)

HAAG: Bringing it closer to home.

DEAN RUSK: Yeah, that's right.

HAAG: Cecil [John] Rhodes wrote something in his Last Will and Testament. He 00:35:00said here, "I contend that we are the first race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race." Were some of these attitudes pretty dominant at Oxford at the time?

DEAN RUSK: They weren't dominant. But there was a view under the surface that somehow the Anglo-Saxons had a special talent for ruling. After all, the British Empire extended right around the globe, and Cecil Rhodes was very much aware of this. As a matter of fact, he established the Rhodes Scholarships in order to prepare others to, particularly Anglo-Saxons, to rule. You might be interested if you haven't heard it, that when he wrote his will he provided one Rhodes scholarship to each American state, believing that there were thirteen states in this country. And when the will was probated, they didn't have enough money to provide a scholarship for some forty-seven or forty- eight states. And so they went into chancellory court and compromised it to provide thirty-six 00:36:00scholarships for the United States as a whole. But he also provided a Rhodes scholarship to Germany, and, of course, Australia and New Zealand, Canada, and so forth. But his thinking was very much in terms of a master race, the Anglo-Saxons, in those days.

HAAG: In 1891, for example, [Henry] Wickham Steed, a famous journalist at the time, wrote in the Review of Reviews that, "We believe in God, in England, and in Humanity."

DEAN RUSK: Yes, I remember a Quaker friend telling me that the Quakers believe in God and six percent dividends. (laughter)

RICHARD RUSK: Pop, let me try this one on you. What were the most pleasant memories you took with you from Oxford? Which experiences from Oxford were of use to you in later years, especially useful to you during your diplomatic career?

DEAN RUSK: At Oxford I read a great deal. And that was a continuation of a habit which I developed as a boy, but had a chance to give full expression to when I was at Oxford. It was Oxford that really stirred my interest in world affairs, because great things were happening. The Japanese seized Manchuria. Hitler came to power in Germany. World events really drew me to an interest in international affairs. Apart from that, there were not only some top professors at Oxford in such things, but we had, as I said earlier, a procession of distinguished foreign visitors who would come to Oxford, to either participate in the debates in the Oxford union, or to give a lecture, and meet with students 00:38:00on a Sunday afternoon: that kind of thing. When I look back on it, Oxford was a very special experience for me, and from the point of view of my own personal development and education.

RICHARD RUSK: Well, that was the first time you had been out of this country. And you were overseas for three years. They say that even today the best thing you can do for an American is to get him overseas and out of America for a while. What did you realize about this country? What new appreciations or impressions did you have of the United States?

DEAN RUSK: Well, if anything, my respect for the institutional structure of this country deepened and broadened while I was at Oxford. See, I took a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics. And I found myself studying at Oxford a good many things which involved or touched upon the United States. And if anything, my respect for the institutional structure of my own country deepened, even though we were in the depths of a depression while I was at Oxford. I 00:39:00remember on one occasion--I don't know whether I put this on another tape--my political don at Oxford, W.C. Costin, once made a rather snippy remark to me about the political origins of our justices of the Supreme Court. And he clearly turned up his nose at this idea. Well, I went off and did a quick thumbnail biography of the Law Lords for a period of two hundred years, and about ninety percent of those fellows came through the political process. They had been solicitors' generals, junior members of the cabinet, or things of that sort. And when I reported the results of this to my tutor, he was astonished. Because the tradition at Oxford was that the Law Lords come out of the law and they're untainted with political politics and that kind of thing, you see. I learned a fair amount about, additional amount, about my own country because the politics 00:40:00degree at Oxford involves a fair amount of attention to the United States.

HAAG: During the thirties both at Oxford and later, what were the four or five most interesting books you read, besides Mein Kampf?

DEAN RUSK: Well, one thing that I did which not many living people have done was to read [Sir Matthew Hale] Holdsworth's great twelve-volume history of the common law, from beginning to end. And although I found a good deal of it boring, when it got into the common law forms of action on real property and things of that sort, it was a very exciting story of how these old common law judges had built the structure of justice and freedom. And I found that very stimulating I remember one summer I read everything that Shakespeare wrote: all 00:41:00of his plays and other writings. And I enjoyed that. I read a good many of those classics of international law that were pulled together and published by the [Andrew] Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: [Hugo] Grotius, [ ] Vottel, and people like that. So I did read a lot and seriously things which I greatly enjoyed and which I've appreciated ever since.

HAAG: I'm going to, with your permission; mention that to my students next quarter. There are some people around that read a lot of books. One of the biggest problems we have nowadays is there is a real reluctance to read. I think television has played a role. And I don't know whether it is the mood of our culture. Was this generally true at Oxford at the time, that people made believe 00:42:00they weren't reading, but they actually were reading?

DEAN RUSK: One thing that I brought away from my own college experience, both at Davidson and at Oxford, was a habit of daily reading. When I was Secretary of State I would read something for thirty or forty-five minutes every night before going to sleep that had nothing to do with my job: history, biography, prose, novels, poetry or whatever it was. And if you take a little time out every day for that kind of reading, it's amazing what you can cover in the course of a year. And I strongly recommend that to young people who come in to counsel with me about their future. I don't think there's anything that is a substitute for it. Certainly television is not a substitute.

RICHARD RUSK: That's for sure.

HAAG: No, it certainly isn't. What about music?

DEAN RUSK: I'm rather appalled sometimes when I look at the lists of best-sellers in this country: cookbooks, how-to books, and things of that sort.

HAAG: Did you simply not have the time or the money to hear music?

DEAN RUSK: Certainly more than I did in this country. The one great deficiency at Davidson College when I was there was almost no attention to the arts. They have greatly changed that since then. But in my day, the college band and a glee club was about it. And we did not have a systematic program of musical performances of outside groups coming into the campus. But at Oxford there was more of it. In Germany, at the beginning, more of it. I did not attend as much of the musical performances as I would have liked to, simply because I couldn't afford it. But I did go to the opera in Paris. And I heard a good many of the 00:44:00[Sir William Schwenck] Gilbert and [Sir Arthur Seymour] Sullivan operettas in Britain. And I attended a good many concerts in Germany. But my musical experience has been too limited as I look back on seventy-seven years, [interruption] when I was an undergraduate at Oxford I spent a lot of time reading everything I could get my hands on about the League of Nations' handling of the Japanese seizure of Manchuria. And I became almost an authentic expert on all aspects of that problem, including the commissioner reports to the League of Nations, the proceedings in the League of Nations, and things of that sort. As I look back on it, it was almost a waste of time because this turned out to be only an incident, even though the beginning incident and all the events that led to World War II. But I mention this simply to illustrate that I did have a very 00:45:00lively and keen interest as to what was happening in the world.

HAAG: Yeah.

RICHARD RUSK: You sure did. Tom [Thomas J.] Schoenbaum, when he was at Oxford, brought back whatever they had in your file over there. And there was a letter from you to the Department of State asking about work. Do you recall that?

DEAN RUSK: Oh, yeah. I have no doubt I did. I somehow remember it, but I didn't get any response from it.

RICHARD RUSK: You got a response and the response was quite cute in light of what might have transpired.

HAAG: I have one final question.

RICHARD RUSK: Go ahead, John.

HAAG: What would you have done if you hadn't won the Cecil Prize?

RICHARD RUSK: Find yourself in a debtors' prison.

DEAN RUSK: I don't know. It was that prize, which just came like a bolt out of the blue, which made it possible for me to pay off my bills when I left England. But I don't know what I would have done. My family could not have provided any funds, and jobs were very scarce. And so I would have been in some difficulty if 00:46:00I had not won that prize.

RICHARD RUSK: Would your scout have had to intervene on your behalf at graduation day to keep the creditors from mobbing you at the ceremony?

DEAN RUSK: It's possible, but I suspect that tradesmen around Oxford are rather accustomed to the fact that some of the Rhodes Scholars take a little time to pay off all of their bills.

HAAG: You would have had to have done some deficit financing. You would have had to--

DEAN RUSK: But at that time I didn't have any credit. (laughter)

DEAN RUSK: I took a job at Mills College for two thousand dollars a year when I first left Oxford, and I was glad to get it. That was still in the Depression. So there was not much wiggle room financially in those days.

HAAG: On that note, I would like to thank you so much for all the marvelous reminiscences and insights and little gems of stories. I really thank you so much.

RICHARD RUSK: John, I've got to thank you.

DEAN RUSK: Turn that off now.

END OF SIDE 2