A Cold War diplomat who built containment through international coalitions
“Our United Nations action should be aimed at removing the missile threat; our objective in the OAS would be to persuade other Latin American countries to act with us under the Rio Treaty.”
Dean Rusk was an internationalist who reached the center of American foreign policy through World War II service and the postwar State Department. As secretary of state under Kennedy and Johnson, he helped manage the Cuban Missile Crisis, backing a quarantine rather than immediate attack while using the Organization of American States and the United Nations to defend it internationally. In Vietnam he became an increasingly forceful advocate of intervention, leaving a defining tension between his commitment to international legitimacy and his role in explaining an expanding war. After leaving office, he taught international law and foreign relations at the University of Georgia.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1934–1940Professor of government, Mills College
- 1941–1945U.S. Army staff officer, China-Burma-India Theater
- 1947–1949Director, State Department Office of Special Political Affairs
- 1949–1950Deputy Under Secretary of State
- 1950–1952Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs
- 1952–1961President, Rockefeller Foundation
- 1961–1969United States Secretary of State
- 1970–1984Professor of international law, University of Georgia
Related historical events
- 1955–1975The Second Indochina WarUS secretary of stateStrongly advocated intervention under Kennedy and Johnson.
- 1962The Cuban Missile CrisisSecretary of State who directed blockade diplomacyIn EXCOMM he backed the blockade and led OAS approval and UN diplomacy to defend it internationally.
- 1969–1979Détente and the SALT NegotiationsParticipant opposing détenteIn the 1970s, he joined the hawkish Committee on the Present Danger, which opposed détente.
After Office: A Memoir Without Regret
On January 20, 1969, after his last day as secretary of state, Rusk left Washington quietly and returned to Georgia. In the months that followed he suffered a prolonged depression and psychological exhaustion, was unable to work through 1969, and was carried that year by the Rockefeller Foundation, which paid him as a "distinguished fellow." The eight years in office had cost him heavily.
In 1970 he returned to teaching, joining the University of Georgia School of Law in Athens, where he taught international law until 1984. He found the return to the academic career he had abandoned in 1940 emotionally satisfying, and colleagues remembered him behaving like "a junior associate seeking tenure." Some university regents tried to block his appointment over his daughter's interracial marriage, but were overruled. In the 1970s he joined the Committee on the Present Danger, a hawkish group opposed to detente and distrustful of nuclear arms control treaties, and in 1973 he delivered a eulogy when Johnson lay in state.
Personally, the war had divided his family. His son Richard opposed the war but enlisted in the Marine Corps out of love for his father; the strain caused a breakdown and a rupture between them. The two did not speak after 1970 until 1984, when Richard returned to Georgia from Alaska to seek a reconciliation. By then Rusk had gone blind; he dictated his memoirs to his son, published as As I Saw It (1990). In the book he did not apologize for his role in Vietnam and held to the conviction that the U.S. intervention was justified and necessary. He accused anti-war journalists of "faking" stories and images, derided what he called the "so-called freedom of the press," and was unremittingly hostile toward Robert Kennedy and U Thant. On the Cold War, he said he had seen no evidence that the Soviet Union planned to invade Western Europe and "seriously doubted" it ever would. He died of heart failure in Athens on December 20, 1994, at the age of 85.