Word: rusk
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Spreading the Word. For their part, Fulbright and his antiwar coterie in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee continued their assault on the Administration. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, making his eighth appearance before the committee this year, proceeded to outline-in extensive detail-the legal basis for the U.S. commitment in South Viet Nam. The Secretary's discourse ended in a hot-tempered exchange among Democratic members of the committee...
...Rusk seems incapable of viewing a situation empirically. Not only does he insist on transposing the "eternal truths" of Munich onto the conflict in Vietnam, but he refuses to question his interpretation of Chamberlain's failure. For example, Rusk claims that it was "necessary" for President Kennedy to "inform Mr. Khrushchev that the United States would not yield to an ultimatum concerning Berlin" in 1962, just as England should have demonstrated that it would not yield to the German ultimatum over Czechoslovakia in 1938. If Khrushchev had not believed that ultimatum, according to Rusk, "there would have been...
...Rusk fails to observe the fact that Khrushchev, in a thermonuclear age, was operating under different conditions than Hitler. Had Chamberlain opposed Hitler at Munich, there very likely would have been war just the same. There may be important lessons to be learned from Munich, but Rusk's superficial analysis does not supply them...
...fact, one can argue that Rusk is ironically repeating Chamberlain's very mistake, that of believing that it is possible to deal with a hostile great power by adjusting the territory it wishes to annex. Chamberlain believed that he could stop Germany by giving her part of Czechoslovakia, while Rusk is presently trying to halt China by denying her South Vietnam. Neither Rusk nor Chamberlain believe in confronting their enemy directly. Chamberlain, of course, may have come to power too late to effect much change on Nazi Germany, but, as several China scholars recently demonstrated in a signed statement, Rusk...
...Rusk's failure to look at the Vietnamese war empirically which particularly irks Senator Fulbright. The contrast between the two men became apparent during their public exchange at the Senate hearings two months ago, when Fulbright responded to the Secretary's legalistic interpretation of the war by describing the North Vietnamese as "poor, confused, and ignorant people." According to Sorenson's Kennedy, President Kennedy was forced to choose Rusk over Fulbright for the Secretaryship because of objections to Fulbright's position on civil rights. Future historians may well point to the irony of the decision by which J. William Fulbright...