Word: rusk
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...Johnson directed that "premature publicity be avoided by all possible precautions" and that steps be taken to "minimize any appearance of sudden changes in policy." The whole question of introducing ground troops into South Viet Nam was so cloaked and confusing that Ambassador Taylor cabled Secretary of State Dean Rusk: "I badly need a clarification of our purposes and objectives." Taylor was especially angry at the fact that though he had sharply opposed the introduction of more U.S. troops into the area, his ostensible subordinate, General William Westmoreland, had been assigned an airborne brigade without Taylor's knowledge...
...bear out Johnson's claim that he rejected several requests to authorize retaliatory strikes after the election, finally yielded only when a devastating Viet Cong raid on Pleiku airfield in February 1965 destroyed or damaged numerous U.S. planes. "Mr. President, this is a momentous decision," Secretary of State Dean Rusk told Johnson at the time, and Johnson agrees that it was. He approved Rolling Thunder's sustained air attacks a month later...
Lyndon Johnson, of course, is the principal figure in the published articles. He feels strongly that the documents do not tell the true story because they are mostly contingency plans, some of which neither he nor Secretary of State Dean Rusk ever heard of. In 1964 Johnson sincerely hoped to be able to negotiate his way out of a major war in Viet Nam. At one point, he told his advisers not to come to him with any plans to escalate this war unless they carried with them a joint congressional resolution...
...solidly based. A certain amount of privacy is necessary both in dealings between agencies in Washington and in diplomatic negotiations with other nations. Officials may be less likely to be candid even in private if they are afraid that their remarks will be published. Many more will adopt Dean Rusk's practice of communicating orally and putting very little in writing. Says longtime Public Servant Averell Harriman: "If governments can't have private papers kept in confidence, I don't know how you can do business in government...
...thousand of Lyndon Johnson's friends and not a few of his old enemies, along with Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew and dozens of the other men who took over Washington when L.B.J. went home. There, in Johnson's considerable embrace, were Barry Goldwater and Hubert Humphrey, Dean Rusk, William Westmoreland, Abe Fortas, Billy Graham, Luci and Lynda, Edmund Muskie, Walt Rostow, secretaries, plumbers, Congressmen, phone operators and, perhaps fittingly, a few hundred antiwar demonstrators near...