Word: rusk
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...opinion at the uppermost levels of the Johnson Administration. According to widespread chatter at Washington cocktail parties and in the corridors of Government buildings, the disagreement put Defense Secretary Robert McNamara on one side, plagued by doubts about the value of the bombing, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk on the other, supported by the President, the State Department and McNamara's own Pentagon...
Talk of the subterranean rift within the Administration was so persistent that both McNamara and Rusk decided to issue statements at week's end denying that any such differences existed. Despite "the apparent divergence of opinion" between him and Rusk, said McNamara at a hastily convened news conference, the Administration is completely united in its support of the bombings. Rumors of discord were "amusing," McNamara declared, maintaining that over the past two years he could not "recall a single instance when the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense have differed on bombing policy." Echoing McNamara, Rusk called their...
Unfortunately, everyone has come to expect statements of this sort from Goldberg--followed a few days later by a Rusk statement declaring that nothing much had really changed, and that the bombing must therefore continue...
This is not to imply that Goldberg serves no good purpose. There is little doubt that whatever advice he gives the President is of a different sort than that offered by Secretary Rusk. There is no reason to believe that Goldberg has been able, like Rusk, to extrapolate from the theory of containment a paralytic, fervently anti-Communist demonology...
...there is, after all, a slim chance that Hanoi will respond affrmatively to one of Goldberg's conciliatory statements before Rusk can once again dash cold water on peace prospects. --JOHN A. HERFORT