Mike Pompeo is listed as the 70th secretary of state. Dean Rusk was the 54th in the long list that goes back to Thomas Jefferson. And Rusk was the first Secretary that I covered. I was working at that time in the 1960s for the Washington Evening Star, then the leading afternoon newspaper in D.C. Rusk had been chosen by John F. Kennedy after having served as head of the Rockefeller Institute. I began covering the State Department full time in 1964.
For Rusk, the Vietnam War hung like an albatross around his neck. He was the only secretary of state for President John F. Kennedy, and after his assassination in November 1963, for President Lyndon B. Johnson. As a result, Rusk was present at the very beginnings of the war, when the fighting was modest, and the American involvement was initially several hundred military advisers. But in early 1965, shortly after Johnson had been reelected president, North Vietnam began sending its regular military forces across the demilitarized zone, and they attacked American outposts in northern South Vietnam.
McGeorge Bundy, who was the national security adviser to both Kennedy and Johnson’s early years, had been on a mission to Vietnam for Johnson at that time. He was present when North Vietnamese regulars entered the war in a dramatic way, shelling an American outpost at Pleiku. Upon his return to Washington, Bundy met with a large group of top advisers to Johnson, and strongly urged a more militant response by the United States. At that meeting, Bundy was strongly supported by Robert S. McNamara, the defense secretary, who was also advocating a strong U.S. response. Dean Rusk initially had been opposed to any large-scale U.S. military intervention in Vietnam. During the Kennedy administration, Rusk was focused on the situation in Laos, where the North Vietnamese were trying to take over the country, thereby creating an easy path into South Vietnam. In a meeting with outgoing President Eisenhower in January 1961, Eisenhower urged the Kennedy administration to send troops into Laos, but Kennedy decided not to. Instead, the United States and the Soviet Union both participated in negotiations on the future of Laos. The agreement was signed in 1962, but the North Vietnamese did not adhere to it. This led Kennedy to increase the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam from 685 administrative and logistical personnel to 18,000 military advisers between 1961 and 1963.
Rusk, in his memoirs done with his son and published only in 1990, recalls that Kennedy had hoped that American economic aid and advisory support would enable the South Vietnamese to deal with the North Vietnamese themselves. Rusk recalled that Kennedy did not want to “Americanize” the conflict or send large numbers of U.S. forces to help South Vietnam deal with what Rusk called in his memoirs, “a relatively low level of infiltration from North Vietnam.”To Rusk, the issue at stake was collective security. In 1961, the United States had a SEATO treaty commitment to South Vietnam and 42 other allies. For the officials in Washington, the situation in South Vietnam worsened. Diem had allowed his brother, Ngo Diem Nhu and his wife, Madame Nhu, to become his chief advisers, and this troubled Washington a great deal. The Diem government began in 1963 to crack down on Buddhist opposition. Rusk wrote that “it was clear in the wake of the Nhus brutal suppression of the Buddhists that the Nhus would have to go if Diem’s government were to survive.
on August 24, 1963, a Saturday when President Kennedy, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Rusk were all out of town, a cable was drafted by Undersecretary of State George Ball, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Roger Hilsman, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Averell Harriman, and White House specialist on Vietnam Michael Forrestal drafted a cable to the U.S. Ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, in effect saying that if Diem did not get rid of his brother and sister-in-law, “we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved.”
Rusk says he had been led to believe that Kennedy had already approved the cable, and Kennedy had believed that both Rusk and McNamara had signed off on it.
In any event, Lodge went ahead and alerted some Vietnamese military people, and despite Rusk’s unhappiness, a coup took place and although Ambassador Lodge offered Diem a safe escape out of the country, he and his brother were captured and killed by some soldiers on November 2, 1963. And of course, President Kennedy was assassinated himself in Dallas three weeks later by Lee Harvey Oswald.
There has always been an unknown in American policy toward Vietnam. If Kennedy had not been killed, would he have decided to withdraw from the country if he had been reelected in 1964? Rusk seemed to feel that Kennedy himself felt very strongly about persevering in Vietnam. Rusk recalled that in a press conference in September, 1963, Kennedy said, in regard to Vietnam: “We want the war to be won, the Communists to be contained, and the Americans to go home. That is our policy.I am sure it is the policy of the people of Vietnam. We are not there to see a war lost.”
For the first ten months of Johnson’s presidency, he kept to the war levels in Vietnam that Kennedy had followed, even though as Rusk noted, there was growing concern in Washington about the inability of the Saigon government to pull itself together. All this changed on August 2 and 3, 1964, when Washington was alerted that the USS Maddox and USS C Turner Joy , American destroyers operating in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of North Vietnam, had been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in two separate incidents. In Washington, the first attack was brushed off —the American ship was not hit–but when the second report was received, there was concern, Shultz says, that Hanoi might have decided to challenge the American presence in the Gulf of Tonkin.
I can still remember the excitement in Washington in those first days of August. Johnson had called together about 30 congressional leaders to be briefed, and he felt that it would be smart to introduce a resolution to seek Congressional support for the U.S, actions. Johnson asked the congressional leaders if now was a good time to seek passage of a joint congressional resolution. He was told to go ahead. The resolution passed 88-2 in the Senate and 416-0 in the House. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed, of course, at a time when there was virtually no opposition to the then limited American military involvement in Vietnam. It was eventually revoked in 1971 by the Nixon administration in the face of widespread opposition to the war effort in Vietnam. In fact when the War Powers Resolution was being discussed on the Senate floor, one senator asked the Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright if this resolution would permit dispatching large numbers of American forces to South Vietnam. Fulbright waid he hoped it wouldn’t be necessary to take such steps but if this proved necessary, the resolution would allow it.
As Haynes Johnson and I reported in our biography of Fulbright, “Fulbright: The Dissenter,” Fulbright actually believed at the time of the resolution that Johnson was trying to keep the American role in Vietnam limited.
Johnson at this time in the summer of 1964 shared Fulbright’s hope that there would not be an escalation of the war. Rusk says in his memoir that after McNamara had testified before his committee, Fulbright told him “that this was the best resolution of its sort he had ever seen presented to the Senate.”
Rusk was not readily available to the regular correspondents, like me, who covered the department on a regular basis. He had very occasional press conferences, and did try to have regular Friday afternoon ‘briefings” which rarely produced much news. In his memoirs, written with his son, years after leaving office, he reiterates that he was opposed to bombing North Vietnam before February 1965. He quotes President Johnson, who wrote in his own memoirs, “Rusk opposed air attacks and sustained reprisals in August, September and December 1964.” Rusk says “I believed we should persevere with our policy of advising and assisting the South Vietnamese and playing for the breaks, rather than risk a major escalation if one could be avoided.” He says that his conviction “that the war would be won or lost in the South also led me to oppose U.S. retaliation against North Vietnam in response to the November 1 Viet Cong attack against Bien Hoa air base and the December 24 Viet Cong bombing of an American billet in Saigon.”
But as 1965 opened, the military situation in South Vietnam “was dire indeed,” Rusk says in the memoirs. And at a White House meeting in January 1965, McGeorge Bundy and Secretary of Defense McNamara both argued for a much stronger use of American power to force a change of Communist policy or to achieve a negotiated withdrawal. Rusk says “I did not agree with this.” He kept hoping that diplomacy somehow will work.
In February 1965, the Vietcong attacked a U.S. installation at Pleiku, killing seven Americans. I retaliation, Johnson ordered air attacks against North Vietnamese barracks and staging areas. Rusk at that time was recuperating from a bad case of the flu. He wrote in his memoirs that “although I Had some reservations about the bombing raids, I did not oppose them.”
Rusk himself had concerns about the way the Vietnam war was being fought. He would have preferred a unified U.S. military command, instead of having each branch direct its own forces. But his greatest frustration was the inability to negotiate a peaceful settlement of the war.
“Our inability to negotiate a peaceful end to the war was an immensely frustrating experience and exceedingly painful to everyone involved,” he wrote in his memoirs. “In retrospect, considering the incompatibility of objectives in Hanoi and Washington, the failure of negotiations was almost inevitable.”
“During my eight years as secretary of state, I cannot recall a single initiative from North Vietnam that could genuinely be called a peace initiative,” Rusk said.
In his memoirs, Rusk tried to do a Vietnam “retrospective.”
“Could the Vietnam War have been won? I think so, if we could have maintained solidarity on the home front and if we could have accepted ‘winning’ as defined by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations preventing North Vietnam’s takeover of South Vietnam by force.
But Rusk acknowledges that the U.S. public had soured on the war, and he says the peace agreement negotiated finally by the Nixon administration in 1973 was in effect a surrender because it allowed North Vietnam to keep troops in South Vietnam.
Summing up, Rusk says”I made two serious mistakes with respect to Vietnam. First, I overestimated tge patience of the American people, and second, I underestimated the tenacity of the North Vietnamese. They took frightful casualties. In relation to our own population their total casualties throughout the war were roughly equivalent to ten million American casualties. I thought North Vietnam would reach a point, as happened with our adversaries during the Korean War and the Berlin blockade of 1948, when it would be unwilling to continue making those terrible sacrifices, come to the conference table, and either negotiate an end to the war or make some concessions we could live with, perhaps postponing a final settlement for another day/” Rusk said he had hoped that after the Tet offensive of January 1968, which was a severe military setback for the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese, I thought Hanoi might come to the conference table and call the whole thing off. I was wrong.”
Even though I covered Rusk for The Star and briefly for The New York Times, I cannot say we knew each other well. I think we both respected each other, and I was sorry that his memoirs did not appear until 1990, 21 years after he had left office.
