that Chester Bowles was guilty of, few would accuse him of being in style, thought or outlook like Bob Lovett. Not surprisingly, the Rusk-Bowles relationship never became a reality, since Rusk worked under a President with whom he could not communicate, and above an Undersecretary who made the President uneasy; none of the three was on the same wavelength as the others. When Rusk and Bowles did communicate it was not always happily (when Bowles returned from Southeast Asia in 1962 and suggested the neutralization of Vietnam, Rusk turned to him, quite surprised, and said, “You realize, of course, you’re spouting the Communist line”). It ended very badly, with Bowles being driven from the Department with no small amount of humiliation involved, after one attempt to fire him failed and after Bowles staved off another himself, much to the annoyance of Joseph Alsop, one of his headhunters. In his column, Alsop said that this proved that Bowles was a eunuch, since he did not know when he was fired. The second attempt to fire him, in the reorganization of the State Department late in 1961 which subsequently became known as the “Thanksgiving Day Massacre,” was a bit more successful, though just as messy, Rusk telling Bowles that he hated to do it, but that Kennedy was behind it, and Kennedy telling Bowles he hated to do it, but Rusk was behind it. Bowles was shifted to a meaningless post at the White House and eventually to his second tour as ambassador to India, an ideal place in the eyes of the Kennedys, since he could listen to the Indians and they to him. He served once again with distinction, and when he retired in 1969 a small group of old friends and enemies gathered at the State Department to bid him farewell. The last toast was proposed by Dean Rusk, in a speech of extraordinary grace in which he talked about Bowles’s constant, relentless youth, the freshness of his mind, and the fact that he had more ideas in a day than most people have in a year.
The Kennedy years, which were so glittering for everyone else, were a time of considerable pain for Rusk; more than any other senior official he was not on the Kennedy wavelength. There was no intimacy; the President never called him by his first name as he did the other senior officials. The Washington rumormongers, who sensed these nuances with their own special radar, soon turned on him. They claimed that Rusk would go, a rumor mill fed by Kennedy’s own private remarks reflecting doubt upon the Secretary. Even today the photographs of that era bear testimony to the incompatibility: the Kennedy people standing at attention waiting for some foreign visitors, all young and flashy, and Rusk—surprisingly tall—and his wife, both dowdy and older and more tired, looking like the representatives of a previous Administration, or perhaps simply the chaperons at the party. Rusk’s own description of himself, voiced not without some pride, was that he looked like the neighborhood bartender. He knew that Georgetown cut him up, that he did not fit in, and occasionally, when he was relaxed and far from Washington on a trip, a fierce populism would surface against the silky world of Georgetown, the columnists and the writers and the lovely women who did not know the difference between the editorial page and the society page and all of these people who made their living destroying a man’s reputation. There was other, subtler evidence too: Jackie Kennedy’s intimate, graceful letter to Ros Gilpatric, thanking him for a book of beautiful poems and mocking the idea that a gift of such rare sensitivity might have come from “Antonio Celebrezze or Dean Rusk.”
The Kennedy-Rusk relationship failed on more serious levels. Rusk, who always did things through channels and by the book, was never able to adjust to the freewheeling, deliberately disorganized Kennedy system, and was more formal in his view of the world than Kennedy. In almost every sense the relationship was exactly
The Kennedy years, which were so glittering for everyone else, were a time of considerable pain for Rusk; more than any other senior official he was not on the Kennedy wavelength. There was no intimacy; the President never called him by his first name as he did the other senior officials. The Washington rumormongers, who sensed these nuances with their own special radar, soon turned on him. They claimed that Rusk would go, a rumor mill fed by Kennedy’s own private remarks reflecting doubt upon the Secretary. Even today the photographs of that era bear testimony to the incompatibility: the Kennedy people standing at attention waiting for some foreign visitors, all young and flashy, and Rusk—surprisingly tall—and his wife, both dowdy and older and more tired, looking like the representatives of a previous Administration, or perhaps simply the chaperons at the party. Rusk’s own description of himself, voiced not without some pride, was that he looked like the neighborhood bartender. He knew that Georgetown cut him up, that he did not fit in, and occasionally, when he was relaxed and far from Washington on a trip, a fierce populism would surface against the silky world of Georgetown, the columnists and the writers and the lovely women who did not know the difference between the editorial page and the society page and all of these people who made their living destroying a man’s reputation. There was other, subtler evidence too: Jackie Kennedy’s intimate, graceful letter to Ros Gilpatric, thanking him for a book of beautiful poems and mocking the idea that a gift of such rare sensitivity might have come from “Antonio Celebrezze or Dean Rusk.”
The Kennedy-Rusk relationship failed on more serious levels. Rusk, who always did things through channels and by the book, was never able to adjust to the freewheeling, deliberately disorganized Kennedy system, and was more formal in his view of the world than Kennedy. In almost every sense the relationship was exactly
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