Word: rusk
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When Dean Rusk was Secretary of State during the Viet Nam years, he angered the press by asking a persistent reporter, "Whose side are you on?" In a deposition he made in General Westmoreland's libel suit against CBS (it was not quoted directly in court), Rusk was asked whether the Johnson Administration deliberately minimized the war's bad news and emphasized the good. His answer...
Iowa's new Democratic Senator Tom Harkin, barely introduced to the rituals of the cloakroom, was bumping along the back roads of Nicaragua a fortnight ago accusing President Reagan of "deception, distortion and duplicity." Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk may have had a point when he said, "Give a member of Congress a junket and a mimeograph machine, and he thinks he is Secretary of State." When Harkin and his fellow freshman Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts got home brandishing a cease-fire proposal from Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega Saavedra, the venerable Republican Barry Goldwater said they both...
...than he was willing to fight. As late as February 1968, at the height of the Tet offensive, one poll found 53% favoring stronger U.S. military action, even at the risk of a clash with the Soviet Union or China, vs. only 24% opting to wind down the war. Rusk insists that the Administration was right not to capitalize on this sentiment. Says he: "We made a deliberate decision not to whip up war fever in this country. We did not have parades and movie stars selling war bonds, as we did in World War II. We thought that...
...best-known Viet Nam figures still rate headlines. General William Westmoreland fought his war against CBS for 18 weeks in federal court, emerging with a stalemate at best; Henry Kissinger's voice remains influential in Washington; former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, a law professor at the University of Georgia, was feted in the capital last year. Some of the home front's angriest protesters have reached a separate peace with society: Weather Undergrounders William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, fugitives until December 1980, are married and live in New York; last year Dohrn passed her bar exam. Other veterans...
Still, says Rusk, we need more "pointless talk" at the highest levels of diplomacy. Out of such seemingly aimless moments come feelings that at first are formless but can change the world some day just as surely as the strongest armies. Something could start this week. Stranger things have happened at lunch in the White House...