Word: rusk
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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State is still no giant among bureaucracies-it is the second smallest department in personnel (after Labor) and budget (after Justice)-but it is now quite large enough to flabbergast Thomas Jefferson. From the seventh floor of a granite building of fluorescent-glaring corridors and scarred desks, Dean Rusk rules over 24,200 employees (down a bit from 1950) and a budget of $383,948,000. State has 110 embassies, two legations (Hungary and Bulgaria), 68 consulates general and 84 consulates. Reporting to Rusk are two Under Secretaries, George Ball and Tom Mann, two deputy Under Secretaries, and no less...
...pouch, cable and phone, the reports pour into Washington; State's "copy and distribute" section makes 70,000 copies a day. Some ambassadorial reports shoot right through to Secretary Rusk, like neutrons through a brick wall. Some are pigeonholed, perhaps to be of use to businessmen or scholars. The bulk of the reporting is supposed to help, in small measure or large, to form U.S. foreign policy...
White House than they do in six months in the State Department." Even Dean Rusk, while describing his administrative problems to be those "of any large organization," fears that the system "leaves dangling vetoes all over town...
When State's distilling process works as it should, the best of the reporting lands on Rusk's desk, and thereby reaches the top of the department's globally based pyramid. His responsibility at this point is much misunderstood. Columnist James Reston, for example, took the department to task because it "has not developed for the President any guiding strategy of foreign policy or any order of priorities in that field." To such criticism, Rusk says: "While Mr. Truman's remark that 'the President makes foreign policy' is not the whole story, it serves...
Such a role precisely fits Dean Rusk's personality. He has a quiet charm, exercised mostly in private; few find him brilliant, but on occasion, before an audience he deems especially congenial or knowledgeable, he is remarkably illuminating. He gives the impression of being bland, and many of his admirers just wish he would lose his temper once in a while. He is a student of foreign affairs, not an innovator; a reflective man allowed little time for reflection by the pace of his present position...