Nation: The Quiet Man

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Dean Who? With his passion for anonymity, Rusk came to be known as "the quiet man" of U.S. diplomacy, the administrator of a policy that bore none of his imprint, and the commander of a bureaucracy that included a slew of men more widely known than he—Adlai Stevenson, Averell Harriman, Chester Bowles, "Soapy" Williams. In Rome, when asked what he thought of the U.S. Secretary of State, Italian Deputy Emilio Pucci (better known as the high-fashion designer of high-priced women's slacks and blouses than as a member of the free-enterprising Liberal Party) began enthusiastically: "He's one of the greatest. He's a man with a keen understanding of European problems. He's . . . Oh, excuse me, you asked about Dean Rusk? I'm sorry. I was thinking of Dean Acheson."

For a time, Rusk's days in the Kennedy Administration seemed numbered. Unlike so many New Frontiersmen, he had no talent for shooting off ideas like a Fourth of July sparkler. He preferred instead to examine each policy as "a galaxy of utterly complicated factors."

"Ideas are not policies," he said. "Besides, ideas have a high infant-mortality rate." Veteran officers complained that he was a sloppy administrator, had failed to galvanize the department's lumbering, 25,000-man bureaucracy.

Soon there was talk that "Rusk is going," and Kennedy was said to have asked one reporter in exasperation, "How do you fire a Secretary of State?"

Besieged by rumors, Rusk remained calm, continued to work twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week (in 34 months, he has had one week off). Eventually, his patience paid off. "I was disappointed in him during the Bay of Pigs," said Kennedy a few months later, "but he's coming back. He's tough now." Though the two were never close (Kennedy always addressed Rusk as "Mr. Secretary"), the President came to hold the highest professional regard for Rusk, declared warmly in the end, "I wouldn't want to make a final decision on a vital matter involving our security until I'd heard his view. He sits on my right."

The Last Half Hour. It was largely thanks to Rusk that Johnson got more of an insight into the mechanics of foreign-policy making than any previous Vice President. To keep Johnson abreast of State Department debates and decisions, Rusk assigned a briefing officer to him fulltime. He recommended that Johnson go abroad often, helped arrange his itineraries. In addition, the Vice President regularly sat in on Cabinet and National Security Council meetings, was a member of the "ExComm" that handled last fall's Cuba crisis. In that capacity he was, in Rusk's words, one of the handful of men involved in "the half hour when we didn't know whether there was going to be another half hour."

Johnson watched Rusk closely during that crisis, admired his forceful argument that the U.S. had no choice but to respond to the challenge of Soviet missiles in Cuba. In the aftermath of Kennedy's slaying, Johnson got further proof of Dean Rusk's mettle.