Word: rusk
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...bombing of North Viet Nam was ineffective. NUCLEAR THREAT. According to the Pentagon papers, the U.S. was considering the use of nuclear weapons in the event of Chinese intervention in Viet Nam. In a conversation with South Viet Nam's then Premier Nguyen Khanh, Secretary of State Dean Rusk said that if the planned U.S. military buildup triggered Chinese intervention, "we would not allow ourselves to be bled white while fighting them with conventional weapons." Rusk, however, was relatively restrained in comparison with many other ranking U.S. officials. Time and again, the Pentagon papers show that Washington...
Commenting publicly for the first time on the Pentagon papers, Rusk observed, "I never saw or heard of the study until I read about it in the New York Times. I don't know the analysts or how they did their writing. I'm amused at some things, a little irritated at others...
...surprising author of that cable was former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, the same Rusk of the hawkish eyeball that never blinked, the Buddha whose monotonously repeated mantra of justification seemingly never changed through the years of escalation. Contrary to his historic image, did he oppose the first loop in the endless spiral into Indochina? In an interview from his home in Athens, Ga., Rusk broke his long silence. He told TIME Correspondent Jess Cook that he had "no present recollection" of the cable, but "I might well have written...
...Rusk continued: "In 1961 we were in the middle of the negotiations on Laos. Our hope then, especially after the apparent agreement Kennedy had with Khrushchev in Vienna, was that everyone would get out of Laos, a major step toward peace in Southeast Asia. So I was very reluctant at that period to see us go gung-ho in the area until we saw how that worked out." Moreover, Rusk said, the level of infiltration was "still very low," and the Berlin crisis made "a number of us reluctant to make additional commitments in South Viet Nam during that episode...
...last contact any American had with Diem before his assassination the following day. WITHDRAWAL ADVICE. In an August 1963 session of the National Security Council, State Department Expert Paul M. Kattenburg recommended that the U.S. withdraw from Viet Nam completely. The suggestion was spurned by Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; in the months that followed, the Diem coup and the deteriorating ability of the South Vietnamese to thwart the Viet Cong insurgency carried America into a deepening involvement in Southeast Asia. Kattenburg, then head of the State Department's working group on Viet...