Races: A Marriage of Enlightenment

(3 of 9)

"Stand Down, Monkey." The State Department received a few hundred nasty letters and calls, just as here and there around the country the kooks and bigots relieved themselves of excess bile at Rusk's expense. An American Nazi Party captain in El Monte, Calif., declared: "I'd probably kill any of my children before I'd let them do such a thing." His reaction was echoed by a respectable businessman lunching at the Westmoreland Country Club in Glenview, Ill.: "If I were Rusk, I'd be inclined to shoot the guy." A grande dame at the Orlando Country Club in Florida gloated: "It will serve the old goat right to have nigger grandbabies."

And there was the inevitable round of tasteless gossip and sick jokes. "Do you know what Smith said to Rusk at the altar?" runs one gibe. " 'Awright, now stand down, honkey!'" In New York, Black Power Agitator Lincoln Lynch denounced Rusk as a "subconscious racist" and added, only half in jest: "I wonder to what lengths Dean Rusk has to go in order to gain support for his and Johnson's war in Viet Nam." Studs Terkel, a Chicago writer and radio commentator, had nothing against the wedding, but as an Administration detractor could not resist a crack: "L.B.J. is at work again. The next thing you know, we'll be reading that the bombing of China was led by a Negro." And a Boston psychiatrist detected L.B.J.'s heavy hand of consensus behind it all. The next Cabinet bride, he said, will exchange vows with "a Navy officer who is half Jewish and half Italian with kin in New York and California. The ceremony will take place in a helicopter over Haiphong."

Campus Calm. Literary Critic Dwight Macdonald, an indefatigable adversary of current foreign policy, had to admit: "Well, I guess it restores my faith in Dean Rusk—there's something good in everyone." Editor in Chief Chris Friedrichs of the Columbia College Daily Spectator detected little campus excitement over the wedding. But he observed that it was an embarrassment to liberals: "They had all these negative feelings toward Rusk, but now they have this charming story to contend with."

With some vocal exceptions, students generally took the marriage more calmly than did their elders. Even at the University of Texas in Austin, Lloyd Doggett, president of the student body, seemed to speak for the majority when he said: "Everybody has a right to marry whom he wants." Joel Connelly, a Notre Dame junior, thought: "Everyone will stare at them. But I think they can make a go of it. They had the guts to take the biggest step." A participant in a Grinnell College seminar reported: "Everybody thought it was wonderful."