Our Secretary of State

When Arthur Schlesinger Jr. let loose his thunderbolt against Dean Rusk last Sunday, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party at last found its target. The assault began on February 17th when Senator Robert Kennedy criticized the Johnson Administration for a lack of realism in refusing to negotiate directly with the NLF, and the attack continued when John Kenneth Galbraith appeared before the Fulbright Committee and called for a "new generation" of statesmen. Schlesinger's salvo, however, cleverly emphasized party unity by dissociating the President from the Administration's foreign policy and resting the blame squarely on the Secretary of State.

In truth, no one can assess for certain the extent of Rusk's influence on Johnson. Schlesinger claimed that Johnson has followed Rusk's policy against his own "instincts and goals;" other observers believe that the President has used Rusk as a "hard-liner" to buttress himself against criticism. In either case, Rusk was calling for a militant policy towards the Viet Cong as early as 1961. Whatever his effect on the President, Rusk's "doctrine" is distinctly his own.

That doctrine rests firmly on the basis of eighteenth century Newtonian science. According to that conception, there are certain laws in nature which man can learn through experiment. For Rusk, the experience at Munich in 1938 represents a "laboratory exercise in the anatomy and physiology of aggression" from which certain "eternal truths" emerged, namely, that "aggression" must be stopped by force. Modern scientific thought would hardly call its laws "eternal truths," yet Rusk continues to pride himself on the scientific nature of his thinking.

Rusk, in this respect, resembles his Southern predecessor, John C. Calhoun, who believed that political affairs were "subject to laws as fixed as matter itself." Like Calhoun, Rusk grew up in the back country of the rural South yet still adopted the ways of a Southern gentleman.

One can better understand the Rusk doctrine if one recalls that Rusk, like Calhoun, underwent a complete reversal of his political position. Just as Calhoun began his career as a nationalist. Rusk started out as a doctinaire isolationist on the State Department China Desk just before World War II. Pearl Harbor, apparently, had the same traumatic effect on Rusk that the tariff of 1828 had on Calhoun, for today Rusk has re-emerged as the champion of "globalism." Rusk believes that the effect of personalities must be eliminated from international affairs and that the affairs of men must be managed without passions. And yet, like Calhoun, his head-over-heels reversal of policy indicates that he has reacted to the events of his lifetime rather than thinking them through.

Rusk, in short, displays this kind of one-track thought which we have come to associate with Southern Senators. Compromise does not exist for such high minded gentlemen: honor will not permit it. Furthermore, Rusk tends to identify his personal honor with the national honor. "I am honored to have my name associated with the doctrine that the United States must honor its pledged word," Rusk has said repeatedly. What appears to bother Rusk most of all about the war in Vietnam, one suspects is the lack of chivalry on the other side.

Rusk seems incapable of viewing a situation empirically. Not only does he insist on transposing the "eternal truths" of Munich onto the conflict in Vietnam, but he refuses to question his interpretation of Chamberlain's failure. For example, Rusk claims that it was "necessary" for President Kennedy to "inform Mr. Khrushchev that the United States would not yield to an ultimatum concerning Berlin" in 1962, just as England should have demonstrated that it would not yield to the German ultimatum over Czechoslovakia in 1938. If Khrushchev had not believed that ultimatum, according to Rusk, "there would have been war."

But Rusk fails to observe the fact that Khrushchev, in a thermonuclear age, was operating under different conditions than Hitler. Had Chamberlain opposed Hitler at Munich, there very likely would have been war just the same. There may be important lessons to be learned from Munich, but Rusk's superficial analysis does not supply them.

In fact, one can argue that Rusk is ironically repeating Chamberlain's very mistake, that of believing that it is possible to deal with a hostile great power by adjusting the territory it wishes to annex. Chamberlain believed that he could stop Germany by giving her part of Czechoslovakia, while Rusk is presently trying to halt China by denying her South Vietnam. Neither Rusk nor Chamberlain believe in confronting their enemy directly. Chamberlain, of course, may have come to power too late to effect much change on Nazi Germany, but, as several China scholars recently demonstrated in a signed statement, Rusk has several options to employ to soften the militancy of Chinese Communism and create more cordial relations between the two countries. Yet in 1966, one still finds Rusk referring to the capital of China as "Peiping"--its name under the Nationalist regime--a senseless insult to the present day Chinese.

It is Rusk's failure to look at the Vietnamese war empirically which particularly irks Senator Fulbright. The contrast between the two men became apparent during their public exchange at the Senate hearings two months ago, when Fulbright responded to the Secretary's legalistic interpretation of the war by describing the North Vietnamese as "poor, confused, and ignorant people." According to Sorenson's Kennedy, President Kennedy was forced to choose Rusk over Fulbright for the Secretaryship because of objections to Fulbright's position on civil rights. Future historians may well point to the irony of the decision by which J. William Fulbright remained a Southern Senator and did not become Secretary of State, while Dean Rusk became Secretary of State and not a Southern Senator.