Monday, Sept. 17, 1962 University Daily Kansan
Page 3
Rusk Doesn't Fit Secretary of State Image
(Editor's note: Another Big Four foreign ministers' meeting may be in the offing this month, possibly to coincide with this week's opening of the United Nations General Assembly. A foreign ministers meeting presents enormous problems for the U.S. secretary of state, who has two strikes against him from the moment he sits down with his counterparts from France, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. In the following dispatch, UPI national reporter Harry Ferguson covers these and other problems faced by Dean Rusk, the man who "looks just like a bartender.")
By Harry Ferguson United Press International
WASHINGTON — An American secretary of state sitting down at a meeting of the Big Four foreign ministers has two strikes on him from the start. Andrei Gromyko of Russia knows exactly what he is going to say and do because he has his orders in his pocket and doesn't have to check with anybody.
The American representative is a member of a coalition. He cannot seize the opportunity to make a bold advance or a quick tactical retreat without getting the agreement of his allies. In June, 1961, Premier Khrushchev handed President Kennedy a memo about Berlin during their meeting in Vienna. Khrushchev waited six weeks for his reply because Kennedy had to consult Britain, France and the members of NATO.
THE DISADVANTAGE of being a member of a committee instead of a free agent is unlikely to ruffle Secretary of State Dean Rusk. He doesn't fit the public conception of what a Secretary of State should look like. He has freckles, a round and honest face, a quick smile and a trace of his native Georgia in his acent. When he walked out to have his first news conference here, a reporter with years of service at the State Department said in amazement: "Why, he looks just like a bartender."
He meant it as a compliment. Rusk has the old-shoe look of a man who would discuss your favorite subject sympathetically while serving drinks, inform you firmly when he thought you had taken aboard enough and then help concoct a plausible story to explain to your wife why you stayed out so late.
RUSK NOT only fails to fit the public conception of an international diplomat with striped trousers, Homburg and a tendency to use a thousand words to expound a simple fact, it must never have crossed his mind that he ever would be secretary of state.
Otherwise he wouldn't have written a magazine article that still comes back to haunt him. He joined the State Department in 1946 and left it in 1951 to become president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Thinking he never again would work for the government (he said so), he burdens himself in an article in foreign affairs quarterly about what was wrong with American foreign policy. He was opposed to summit meetings and his article appeared just before Khrushchev landed in Paris, insulted Dwight D. Eisenhower and torpedoed the meeting of the Big Four heads of state.
WITHOUT MENTIONING Eisenhower or Khrushchev by name, Rusk wrote that it was a gamble to bring together a leader "impulsive in manner . . . possibly subject to high blood pressure" and another leader "with a quick temper and a weak heart." Rusk though summit meetings should be held only to ratify agreements made at lower levels. He thought the President of the United States should stay at home. He thought the secretary of state should not spend his time running around the world but should work through "normal channels"—meaning assign the work to our ambassadors abroad.
All that went out the window a few months after Rusk was sworn in. Kennedy was off to Vienna to
see Khrushchev and Rusk himself began continent hopping in a style that matched the travels of the late John Foster Dulles. When a man becomes secretary of state, everything he has written or said is exhumed and put under the magnifying glass. Rusk has eaten his own words silently and gracefully.
RUSK BELIEVES it is the function and duty of the president to make foreign policy. The duty of the secretary of state is to advise the president to the best of his ability and then go all out in implementing the policy of the chief executive. One of his principal contributions has been to reorganize the State Department so that expert advice is available to Kennedy around the clock.
Any cabinet officer and especially a secretary of state has to be judged on what he did and thought during the crisis and debacle of the invasion of Cuba in April of last year. This is a sore subject in the administration and all the facts will not come out for years. The following account may be incorrect in some details, but it represents the best opinion of many persons who had access to some of the facts:
Rusk did not originate the idea of backing an invasion at the Bay of Pigs. The Central Intelligence Agency was the prime mover. But Rusk was at a meeting where Kennedy was briefed on the final arrangements, and the President went around the room asking everybody to speak his mind. Rusk supported the invasion. The only dissenter, apparently, was Chairman J. William
Isle Ruler Keeps Wheelchair
ISLE OF SARK—(UPI)—An invalid woman who rules this English channel island has crushed a revolt over her wheelchair.
Mrs. Sybil Hathaway, the dame of Sark, has long held that no motor vehicle shall ever disturb the peace of the island's lanes and byways.
The revolt broke out when one
member, James Baker, said the law should be extended so other invalids could drive similar chairs.
But she ran into a problem when she contracted arthritis and decided to buy an electric wheelchair. The wheelchair was brought over from the mainland and last week the island's parliament met to give its ruler the right to drive it.
"I don't agree," said Baker as Mrs. Hathaway looked on, "that the law should be made for one and not another."
Many in the 30-member parliament agreed with him. But the body voted 15-14,with the dame abstaining, to allow her to keep her monopoly on motorized travel.
Two weeks ago the dame's son-in-law, Malcolm Roberts, was fined $5.60 for taking the wheelchair out on an unauthorized spin down the island's main road.
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IT FELL TO Rusk to announce the invasion at a news conference and this probably magnified his role in the mind of the public. He told reporters that there "is not now and will not be any United States intervention" in the military operations. When it was apparent that the project was on the verge of disaster, Kennedy called another meeting. There was a strong demand that the President try to salvage the operation by throwing the U.S. Air Force into action. Rusk argued strongly against that and Kennedy accepted his judgment.
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RUSK'S NAME had not figured in the guessing games as prominently as had those of Adlali Stevenson, Chester Bowles and Fulbright. Reporters said they needed some biographical material on the new secretary of state and Kennedy agreed to furnish it. Rusk had become obscure,
"We'll change the rule," Rusk said, and they did.
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Kennedy and Rusk are not close personal friends and when they meet it is "Mr. Secretary" and, of course, "Mr. President." They had never met before Kennedy invited Rusk to Palm Beach to size him up as a possible secretary of state. Kennedy, backed by some reports from persons he respected, was impressed immediately by Rusk's grasp of international affairs. He announced Rusk's appointment on the front steps of his Palm Beach residence.
At his first news conference, Rusk didn't mention one of his smaller problems — the fact that the controversy over racial integration in this country posed a tough problem for the State Department. Neither did he tell an anecdote about the time he was working here during World War II as an officer in military intelligence. He invited a Negro colleague to have dinner with him at the officers' mess, but the officer advised Rusk there was an unwritten rule against Negroes.
so far as the national scene was concerned, in his job as president of the Rockefeller Foundation. He likes to operate that wav.
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