Nation: The Quiet Man

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When Rusk first got the news, he was 35,000 feet over the Pacific, flying to political and economic talks in Tokyo with five other members of Kennedy's Cabinet. For five minutes afterward, there was stunned silence in the cabin. Then Rusk, the ranking officer present, took command. He ordered the plane back to the U.S. and, with cerebral precision, led the others—Treasury's Douglas Dillon, Interior's Stewart Udall, Agriculture's Orville Freeman, Commerce's Luther Hodges, Labor's Willard Wirtz—through a somber colloquy on the problems that Kennedy's successor would face. "There was absolutely no doubt of who was in charge at that tragic moment," said one official who was there.

Georgia Fat Boy. On Johnson's first full day as President, his first official caller at the Executive Office Building was Rusk, who spent 40 minutes with him in a second-floor suite that General "Black Jack" Pershing once used. From then on, Johnson and Rusk were in touch half a dozen times a day, and Rusk sat in when the President held his series of brief private meetings with foreign leaders.

"These are men who understand each other," said an official who watched them operate. "They are relaxed in each other's company." In some ways, they are markedly different. Each has trouble keeping up his staff's morale, but Rusk's trouble grows out of his often icy detachment and Johnson's out of his demands and temper. Johnson has spent most of his life among politicians and Southern tycoons, Rusk among Foggy Bottom types and the sophisticated Easterners of the Rockefeller Foundation, which he directed for 81-years before becoming Kennedy's Secretary of State.

But there are many bonds between them. Johnson, 55, was born in a three-room clapboard house on a small farm in Texas. Rusk, 54, was born six months later in a three-room clapboard house on a tenant farm in Georgia. Johnson likes men who get along with Congressmen, and Rusk excels at that, carefully cultivating the Hill's foreign-relations experts. Georgia's late Senator Walter George, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was especially fond of Rusk, affectionately called him "the Georgia fat boy" (at 195 lbs., Rusk actually has little lard on his 6-ft. 1-in. frame, though his moonface makes him look plump).

Both men are "prudent"—one of Johnson's favorite words. To Rusk, "there is a time to act and a time to wait." In more homespun language, Johnson says the same thing: "Let's get our ducks in a row before we move."

A year or so ago, when people were asking, "What ever happened to Dean Rusk?", Vice President Johnson, often the object of the same question, noted how Rusk stuck to his job. "That," he told an aide, "is the mark of a really great man."