Word: rusk
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...State, but finally installed him in a cluttered basement office in the White House that came to be known as "the little State Department." Under Kennedy, who cared little for rigid protocol or strict administrative lines of organization, Bundy often had more influence on foreign policy decisions than Dean Rusk himself. He nonetheless disclaimed any interest in power for power's sake. "I'm no man's competitor," Bundy said recently, "I'm everybody's catalyst...
Inevitably, the job lost some of its ego-tingling excitement in Johnson's White House. Whereas Kennedy had sometimes bypassed his Cabinet members if he felt it would speed a decision, Johnson punctiliously works through the chain of command, and has increasingly sought the advice of Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara on foreign policy. However, despite columnists' occasional claims that the President and Bundy could not get along, the two seldom disagreed on major decisions. Bundy was picked by Johnson to go on a fact-finding mission to Saigon last year, was later dispatched to the Dominican Republic...
...Buddha. Coming from a man who is at once an avowed partisan and a direct participant in the events he chronicled, the book was bound to create a stir. Schlesinger hardly realized how great the stir would be. Mostly, it was over his treatment of Secretary of State Dean Rusk...
...Schlesinger relates it, Kennedy had grown "increasingly depressed by [Rusk's] reluctance to decide." In meeting after meeting, "Rusk would sit quietly by, with his Buddha-like face and half-smile, often leaving it to [McGeorge] Bundy or to the President himself to assert the diplomatic interest." By the autumn of 1963, Schlesinger declares, "the President had reluctantly made up his mind to allow Rusk to leave after the 1964 election and to seek a new Secretary of State...
...public, Rusk kept his silence except to assure that when people "deal with me on the basis of confidence, that confidence will be respected." To a visitor he said, "Only two men know about my relations with President Kennedy. One of them is dead and the other won't talk." Nevertheless, he is known to be particularly resentful of Schlesinger's claim that Kennedy considered Viet Nam his own "great failure" in foreign policy because "he had never really given it his full attention." Schlesinger simply had no way of knowing of all the hours that the President...