Word: rusk
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...opinion at the uppermost levels of the Johnson Administration. According to widespread chatter at Washington cocktail parties and in the corridors of Government buildings, the disagreement put Defense Secretary Robert McNamara on one side, plagued by doubts about the value of the bombing, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk on the other, supported by the President, the State Department and McNamara's own Pentagon...
...make the American position more palatable to its critics at home and abroad. The job has had its rewards. The responsibility for delivering the encouraging speech at Howard University, asking Hanoi to clarify the ambiguities in its statements on negotiations, fell to Goldberg. If McNamara or Rusk had delivered that statement, diplomats might not have been able to believe their own ears; but it should be disconcerting for Goldberg to realize that only McNamara's or Rusk's making such a declaration could possibly convince anyone that America is really serious about a negotiated peace...
Unfortunately, everyone has come to expect statements of this sort from Goldberg--followed a few days later by a Rusk statement declaring that nothing much had really changed, and that the bombing must therefore continue...
This is not to imply that Goldberg serves no good purpose. There is little doubt that whatever advice he gives the President is of a different sort than that offered by Secretary Rusk. There is no reason to believe that Goldberg has been able, like Rusk, to extrapolate from the theory of containment a paralytic, fervently anti-Communist demonology...
...there is, after all, a slim chance that Hanoi will respond affrmatively to one of Goldberg's conciliatory statements before Rusk can once again dash cold water on peace prospects. --JOHN A. HERFORT