Nation: The Quiet Man

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If U.S. officials seemed to be going out of their way to hammer home the idea, that was only because of the current of apprehension that rippled through the world's capitals on the news of Kennedy's murder. European statesmen feared that Johnson, even though he had helped move the U.S. away from isolationism as a fledgling Representative under Franklin D. Roosevelt, would withdraw G.I.s from the Continent and retreat into a Fortress America. Asians worried that Johnson, even though he had been one of F.D.R.'s most ardent New Dealers, would not be "flexible" and "liberal" enough. Africans fretted that Johnson, although he had outraged Southern conservatives in 1960 when he tacked civil rights legislation onto a minor bill and rammed it through the Senate, would torpedo civil rights. And Moscow was alarmed that Johnson, despite the fact that he had argued recently that it "might be possible to relax some points of conflict" with Russia, would scuttle Kennedy's attempts at achieving a detente.

Thin Dossiers. What most worried foreign leaders was the realization that while Johnson could gamble on domestic issues like civil rights and the tax cut at the risk of a temporary setback, to do so in the arena of foreign affairs might prove disastrous. And in that arena, they considered Johnson an unknown quantity. "The dossiers on Johnson," complained one Soviet official, "are thin."

Johnson has traveled widely, but the image he always projected was of a hearty backslapper who stopped to chat with a sidewalk watermelon vendor in Beirut, who invited a Pakistani camel driver to "come and see us, heah?" and who gave out ballpoint pens wherever he went. "He shakes hands with everybody," said a Thai clerk after Johnson stormed Bangkok, "no matter if they are dirty or what." Johnson knows scores of foreign leaders, but their meetings rarely went much beyond the handshaking technique that he calls "pressing the flesh and looking them in the eye."

Outside foreign offices, Dean Rusk is largely an unknown quantity himself. He has met nearly every Foreign Minister on earth. After the U.N. convened in September, he chatted privately with some 70 of them in a hectic nine-day stretch, kept so tight a schedule that one U.S. official compared his outer office to "a dentist's waiting room." Despite his distaste for "personal" diplomacy, he has logged nearly 100,000 miles a year in trips abroad.

But Rusk's concept of his job has kept him out of the headlines. He wholeheartedly agrees with John Marshall, the great 19th century Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, that "the President is the sole organ of the nation in its external relations." As he sees it, his job is to act as adviser, briefing officer and administrator for the President, not as an initiator of policy in the tradition of John Foster Dulles or Dean Acheson. "It is possible," he once said, "for the President to delegate too much power to his Secretary of State." Under Kennedy, there was no such danger—the late President was in some ways his own Secretary of State, and had assembled a "little State Department" in the White House under former Harvard Dean McGeorge Bundy.