The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam

young man on the White House staff, to a reporter who had served in the China-Burma-India theater, a vast area which had contained the then Colonel Rusk. What about Rusk? Well, he was considered a good guy out there, not making enemies with the British like Stilwell, soothing tempers when Stilwell ruffled them, but he disapproved of the way the British treated the wogs. And he had a slight reputation as a ladies’ man. “Great,” said the New Frontiersman, “Kennedy will love that.” The first and last hint of Dean Rusk the swinger. “What about the China thing,” Goodwin asked, “was he involved in any of that?” “They never laid a glove on him,” answered the reporter, which delighted Goodwin, though later, in a very different era, he would note upon reflection that this should have been a tip-off, the fact that Rusk could have lived through those years and not be touched by the great events. An enigmatic figure before entering the government, he was an enigmatic figure during it (not surprisingly, the best article ever to appear about him was written late in his second term, by Milton Viorst in Esquire under the title “Incidentally, Who Is Dean Rusk?”). Luckily for Rusk, the Kennedy people did not check all of Rusk’s speeches made when he was Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs in 1950, for that might have jarred them slightly. There was one which, even given the temper of that particularly rigid time, was a horror, the blood virtually dripping off the teeth of the Chinese-Russian aggressor. It was a speech which might have made the cool Kennedy wince, an affront to his distaste for zealotry.
    By chance, Rusk happened to be with Bowles at a Rockefeller Foundation meeting in Williamsburg when he got his first call from Kennedy.
    “What do you think he wants to talk to me about?” he asked Bowles in a note.
    “He’s going to ask you to become Secretary of State,” Bowles wrote in answer.
    Rusk met with Kennedy the next day and later phoned Bowles.
    “How did it go?” asked Bowles.
    “Forget it,” said Rusk. “We couldn’t communicate. If the idea of my being Secretary of State ever entered his mind, it’s dead now. We couldn’t talk to each other. It’s all over.”
    “I doubt it,” said Bowles.
    They were both right.
    After Rusk had been offered the post as Secretary of State, he retained one doubt about accepting, which was financial. Unlike most good Establishment candidates, he had no resources of his own, neither by inheritance nor by dint of working in a great law firm for six figures a year. (This was a recurrent theme, the financial burden caused by serving in government, and some men, like McNamara’s deputy, Roswell Gilpatric, though not lacking in resources from their New York firms, had to put a sharp limit on the amount of time they spent in Washington in each tour. In Gilpatric’s case the problem was the enormity of alimony caused by two previous marriages.) Rusk, who had just bought a new house in Riverdale, mentioned this problem to Averell Harriman, and while it was not a situation which Harriman had ever faced personally, he enjoined Rusk not to worry. “For God’s sake, man, when you leave State you’ll be overwhelmed with offers, you’ll be rich,” he said. But Lovett was aware of the financial problem, of Rusk’s limited resources, and he moved quickly to bolster Rusk’s position. Rusk, he said, was entitled to some termination allowance in view of accrued pension rights which he would abandon by leaving the Foundation. A very generous settlement was made, and sped by both the Establishment’s connections and resources, Rusk left for Washington.
    On being told that Chester Bowles would be his Undersecretary, Rusk had said again and again how pleased he was with the news. They would, he said, have a Marshall-Lovett relationship—Rusk as the Old Man, Bowles as Bob Lovett. It was an odd idea, for although there were a lot of things in this world