Dean Rusk interviewed by Richard Rusk and Uri Ra'anan. ca. 1985

QUESTION: Could you briefly compare the decision-making processes of the various administrations with which you have served? How are major decisions reached? How are they monitored?

DEAN RUSK: First, when I left in 1969, I brought no official papers, aside from my date books and my tax returns, both of which are publicly available. Everything else is the property of the U.S. [United States] government. So I do not have materials to refresh my memory. Second, a warning to the historian. When he is looking at official documents, he is only looking at a very small part of the picture. These documents are surrounded by a great deal of discussion which does not appear in the record.

Bipartisanship is very important in the conduct of our foreign relations. We need to strive for a national policy that will have broad support. Beyond that, the two parties do not have any distinct differences in their view of foreign policy. One thinks about the working relationship between President [Harry S.] Truman and Republican Senator Arthur [Hendrick] Vandenberg in the 80th Congress, or of the relationship between President [Dwight David] Eisenhower and Senator [Lyndon Baines] Johnson, or between [John Fitzgerald] Kennedy and Johnson and Senator [Everett McKinley] Dirksen. It strengthens our relations with other countries to have it on as broad a bipartisan basis as possible.

To that end, I spent a great deal of time with the Congress. I met with them very often. The problem is that the pressure of time upon senators and congressmen is so great that it is difficult to get their time to sit down and discuss foreign policy at length. The separation of powers is central to our system of government, but the late Chief Justice Earl Warren said that if each branch of the Federal Government were to pursue its powers to the end of the trail, the system would freeze up like an engine without oil. Cooperation is essential if we are to avoid the impasses which are the principal threat in our system.

But cooperation cannot always be obtained. For example, during the Truman period, even with the help of Mr. John Foster Dulles, we could not get bipartisanship on the China question because the Republicans felt that they had an issue there and would not yield to a bipartisan approach. However, since the end of World War II, our foreign policy has been bipartisan, even under Mr. [Ronald Wilson] Reagan. If you contrast what he does with what he says, his actions have been pretty close to the mainstream. Bipartisanship seems to weaken every four years with elections and then makes a rebound.

QUESTION: It seems that it was easier before because neither the White House nor the Congress went in for micromanagement. Does that make the professional job of the department much more difficult?

DEAN RUSK: It is a growing problem. But a great deal of foreign policy is determined by law. The first sentence of Article Two, which many people ignore, states that executive power shall be vested in the president. Period. It is only the president who is elected by the people to execute the laws. The secretary of state has a five-foot shelf of statutory law organizing his department and setting forth many of the policies that he is expected to pursue. That by itself tends towards bipartisanship because it is law.

Now in recent years the oversight function of the Congress has almost run wild--the growth in staff. And when these people learn that they have to earn their brownie points from their superiors, they do it by tinkering with something. They are constantly intruding into the executive branch under the cover of the oversight function of Congress. Sometimes that can be wasteful and troublesome.

There is another factor. During my time, the General Accounting Office [GAO] had the job of seeing that money spent was done in accordance with appropriations. But in recent years, it has grown into an organization which has tried to evaluate all sorts of policies at the request of any member of Congress. In its evaluation it delves into matters which are not its responsibility. I heard that a GAO team went out to SAC HQ [Strategic Air Command Headquarters] and asked for a copy of our nuclear bombing programs. Fortunately the general turned them down. But they are getting to be a fourth branch of government without any responsibility to anybody.

Every member of Congress tends to think of himself as a secretary of state. Congress is so powerful in the foreign policy field that they can usually find ways to give expression to their interests. Sometimes you get members such as Senators Vandenberg or Dirksen who understand that the power is given to the Congress as a corporate body and not individually. They must make adjustments in their individual views to come to a congressional point of view. But sometimes some of them overlook that.

I believe that the Foreign Service of the U.S. is second to none. It is the most professional in the world. But we do not insulate our officers from the political process as do the British. Their civil service supports one political party at a time. Under our Constitution, it is our civil service's duty to take direction from the people put there. That is not always understood.

The conduct of our foreign policy is a mass business. Three thousand cables a day go out of that department. The secretary might see six or seven of them before they go out; the president maybe one or two. The rest go out on the basis of responsibility delegated to hundreds of officers throughout the department. Otherwise it could never get its work done. In eight years, out of 2,100,000 cables that went out with my name on them, only four or five had to be pulled back and rewritten because the person who had written them had missed the point of policy to be followed. That is an extraordinary level of performance. The officers respond to the direction that they receive. I have never seen any examples of officers revolting against the policies of their superiors.

QUESTION: Could you say that the insulation that existed in the service was enhanced because it was leak-proof?

DEAN RUSK: To a degree. Some of the leaks come from the top. There are many stories that appear to be leaks that are simply the result of highly informed and energetic reporters who figure out for themselves what is going on. There are times when someone leaks to try and frustrate a policy he does not approve of. That is the type of discipline that we cannot have in our system. I never floated trial balloons. That is the only sound policy. The real managers of the news are the media. There is such a mass of information that no newspaper or TV [television] station can use more than a small output of the wire services. Selecting what to use is a part of the management of the news.

QUESTION: You said professionalism of the service was demonstrated by their ability to write cables within policy. To what extent is it possible to generate strategic policy?

DEAN RUSK: When people take high office in our government they do not come in with a clean slate. They have a firm mindset. Dean [Gooderham] Acheson once said that you can only think in action when you think about foreign policy. He was opposed to the notion that you can ponder your navel and come up with great foreign policy. There is something to that. But there are occasions when a searching review of ongoing policy comes about.

For example, President Kennedy was very conscious of the fact that he was the first president to have been born in this century. He looked on himself as a new generation, and he wanted to ask fresh questions about ongoing lines of policy to see if they were adequate to the new world he felt was coming into existence. For example, the impression in the 1950s was that neutrality and nonalignment were immoral. President Kennedy thought that if any country was secure and cooperative, this was in the interest of the U.S. The distinction between neutrals and allies had become greatly exaggerated. We thus made a special effort to improve our relations with the nonaligned leaders [Josip Broz] Tito, [Jawarharlal] Nehru, [Gamal Abdel] Nasser, [Kwame] Nkruma, Sukharno. We did not always succeed because some of those people turned out to be rascals. But we made the effort. We worked out a multimillion dollar, three-year program to feed Egyptians. But Nasser would tell the people to throw the aid into the Red Sea and the Congress did just that.

One must always be willing to rethink patterns of policy. I established the Open Forum for young Foreign Service officers to stand aside and challenge traditional assumptions and raise new ideas. The world changes.

QUESTION: Some critics charge you with having followed the traditional patterns of policy.

DEAN RUSK: Well, the law of the land included the Southeast Asia Treaty [SEATO]. It stated that if those under the treaty were attacked, the U.S. would respond. I belonged to that generation of students that was led down the road of catastrophe of World War II, which could have been prevented. We came out of that war thinking that collective security was the key to preventing World War III. Collective security was part of the UN [United Nations] Charter, the Rio Treaty, and NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] and was very real to my generation. The idea has eroded in recent years. The U.S. alone has taken almost six hundred thousand casualties in defense of collective security since the end of World War II, and it has not been very collective. We put up ninety percent of the non-Korean forces in Korea and eighty percent of the non-Vietnamese forces in Vietnam. I can understand why the American people do not think collective security is a good idea. I can understand that. But if not collective security, how do we prevent World War III? It must be prevented because of its destructive potential. That requires a great deal of thought. Those of us who lived through the 1930s and 1940s had some very fundamental ideas in that respect. Forty-one years have passed since a nuclear weapon has been fired in anger. I am not pessimistic at all that the prospects are very good for avoiding World War III.

The other danger is fumbling and bumbling. Foolish men allowed the assassination of an archduke to move step by step into World War I. We have to be very careful so that events do not take control. Keep them insulated so that they can be controlled.

QUESTION: How does one institutionalize policy-making? The Executive Committee of the National Security Council was essentially a crisis management body. Is it possible to institutionalize policy-making in a non-crisis form?

DEAN RUSK: If you think about the presidents we have had since World War II, the differences between them are extraordinary. Each of them is going to want to handle his office in a manner with which he is comfortable. President [Dwight David] Eisenhower wanted a system of committees. President Kennedy swept it away. It was [a] more streamlined and ad hoc kind of organization. During Eisenhower's administration, a manual was prepared on American national security policy. When President Kennedy came in, the policy planning staff tried to get him to keep it. He could not approve it because he felt that these generalizations did little to help you solve the problems that you run into on Monday morning. Every important problem has locked up in it dozens of secondary and tertiary questions. These are changing day by day. Generalizations do not help. All sorts of questions must be taken into account. The complexity of that process is enormous. We have in the Department of State a section that is dedicated to read everything that they could get their hands on that was put out by academics and to call important material to the attention of policy-makers. Rarely do you come across a book or an article that is applicable to your immediate problems because of time factors and other factors. That material does not point to a decision.

QUESTION: Some have said that it was very difficult for you to work in the policy planning capacity.

DEAN RUSK: I think that it is appropriate that the department have such a group. But every policy officer must also be a planning officer. He must always be thinking about the long run and the general aspects of the policy that he is considering. Planning cannot be the monopoly of the planning staff. Planning people are often called upon to help with immediate problems. They are not left alone that much if they are any good.

QUESTION: It would appear that the ability of an officer to immerse himself in a certain area, to learn everything he can about it to the exclusion of everything else, has been impossible due to the increased pace of communication.

DEAN RUSK: That is correct. Among other things, the communications explosion causes a ripple effect. All the geographic bureaus get involved in most major policy decisions. Sometimes they are in competition with one another for influence. The most senior officers seek to define the national interest in terms of their geographic bureau. During the decolonization process, the European section was not responsive to the African and Asian sections. That has to be reconciled, sometimes by the president. In the [Harry S.] Truman administration I was a deputy under secretary. My job was to coordinate the various views of the geographic bureaus. Sometimes this became difficult.

QUESTION: Policy towards the Soviet Union has been plagued by two problems: We assume that it is unknowable or we engage in mirror imaging. However, through Kremlinology it is possible to understand to some degree what is going on inside the Soviet Union. You had some good analysts--Chip [Charles Eustis] Bohlen and Tommy [Llewellyn E., Jr.] Thompson. To what extent was there a serious discussion over what the U.S. was capable of knowing about the Soviet Union and how we could take advantage of internal differences?

DEAN RUSK: We should understand that relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union are of the utmost importance because we are locked in mortal conflict for survival. We share a basic, common interest in the prevention of nuclear war. We also share a common responsibility to the entire human race due to the destructive power that we possess. But the bottom line is that whatever they think of us or we of them, somehow at the end of the day we must live together on this planet.

We have never been well-informed about the relations between the members of the Politburo. They keep their mouths shut. We study it. They play the good cop/bad cop game--make concessions to strengthen the hand of those who want good relations with the U.S. It is used as a diplomatic gambit. We come back with a similar gambit--we have to have the approval of Congress. We trade such things. We simply do not know some of the central things that it would help us to know.

For example, the invasion of Czechoslovakia occurred on a Tuesday evening. We thought that the decision to invade had been made the preceding Saturday. When we asked our Soviet experts a week before about whether the Soviets were going to invade, they said they had the capabilities and assets deployed but as to whether they would use them, we did not know. Our experts could not know because the Soviets had not decided yet. Sometimes you would like to have information which simply does not exist. I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to inform the Soviet elite how the U.S. constitutional system works, and I wish they would be a little bit more forthcoming on how their system worked.

QUESTION: Some thought at the time that there were two groups--one which argued that the invasion had to be done and would meet little resistance, and another arguing that the West might act. The decision was made to fly a trial kite, and from that the first group saw evidence to support their position.

DEAN RUSK: The attitude of the West since World War II has been that however disagreeable we find these regimes in Eastern Europe, whatever they do to their own people, it is simply not an issue for war between East and West. They can easily deduce that actions that they take against the people of Eastern Europe are not an issue of war and peace in the West.

QUESTION: But what about the possibility of deterrence?

DEAN RUSK: It's very important not to bluff in these situations. When the Soviets moved we immediately took another step to deter an expansion of that attitude to Rumania and Yugoslavia. We had some military talks with the Yugoslavs about supplies that they might need.

In Czechoslovakia one of the key issues came to be the monopoly on power by the Communist party. That was a point that the Russians were very sensitive about. Rumania, while slightly independent, had a tight Communist regime. The Yugoslavs had demonstrated that they were able to fight in World War II.

I think that the Soviets have a major problem with the peoples of Eastern Europe. One sees increasing signs that these peoples have strong nationalist feelings and strong cultural links with the West. This is a difficult problem for Moscow to overcome.

QUESTION: Back to the question of policy formulation and monitoring of policy implementation--can that be institutionalized?

DEAN RUSK: There are certain guidelines for policy which do not require much monitoring from the top. For example, it is known throughout the Department of State that the U.S. prefers disputes to be settled peacefully. It is known that we comply with treaties. It is known that if there is a major natural disaster somewhere, it is our inclination to offer aid. There are many more. They operate routinely, without monitoring.

The secretary of state usually will have a meeting every morning with his senior staff. We would take up a lot of these questions about the status of certain decisions at these meetings. Each morning I would get forty-five to fifty of the more important cables that had gone out the day before. It gave me a chance to keep my eye on things. The process is not institutionalized in terms of a staff of permanent functionaries to monitor, but it does occur on a regular basis.

QUESTION: But is there any thought about how our actions and words are being looked at by the other side? For example, President Kennedy's speech in Berlin did not expressly rule out the building of a wall, much like Dean Acheson's speech left out Korea.

DEAN RUSK: In 1960 and 1961 the movement of people through the gateway of Berlin East to West became a hemorrhage. The East Germans were losing a great deal of their skilled people. It was our judgment, from our point of view, that the East Germans and the Russians had to do something to stop that hemorrhage. We did not know what they would do to close this hole in the Iron Curtain through which people were voting with their feet. We were not surprised when it occurred. We would not have expressed the body language to resist the building of the wall because you don't make promises you cannot keep.

You mentioned Acheson's speech. When we withdrew our last regiment from Korea in 1949 it is possible that the North Koreans and the Russians took that as a signal that they could move on South Korea. When we flew troops in from Japan, the North Korean troops simply stopped for about ten days to evaluate the political consequences.

QUESTION: You said that the Chinese intervention was at the request of Moscow. You were criticized for that. We now know that you were correct.

DEAN RUSK: Some of the comments that I made were to point out that the PRC [People's Republic of China] acted on Moscow's orders. In Korea we captured a considerable number of North Korean and Chinese prisoners. In interrogation, we found out that they had combed the Chinese army for people of Korean origin and sent them to join the Korean forces.

QUESTION: The Sino-Soviet conflict tended to make the Chinese the main enemy of the U.S. during this time even though they did not have the capability to harm us. Was there any realization that the most radical elements who were in charge of the PRC during the Cultural Revolution were also the most isolationist?

DEAN RUSK: We never substituted China for the Soviet Union as our number one problem. We had in the Kennedy years dealt with Moscow in two very deadly crises. But we set in motion actions to move U.S.-Soviet relations away from open hostility with the Test Ban Treaty, the civil air agreements, etc. We sought to find areas of common agreement which could reduce the range of issues on which violence might occur. With China, getting along with Mao [Tse- tung] was very difficult. They choose the U.S. as enemy number one. We did not think that they were going to move into Southeast Asia unless we approached their borders by invading North Vietnam. As a matter of fact, there were a number of signs that the Chinese had taken their losses in Korea very seriously. We did not replace the Soviets with the PRC as problem number one.

When I first joined the administration, President Kennedy and I had a long talk about China. He had in front of him a congressional resolution that had been passed two years earlier strongly opposing the recognition of the PRC. Just before his inauguration, President Eisenhower told Kennedy that he would try and support him as much as possible on foreign policy questions. But he said he would oppose him over recognizing Peking and allowing it to join the UN. President Kennedy decided that there was not enough advantage to change our China policy. So he told us not to think about changing our policy. I went back to the department and I did not even tell anyone about our meeting. I always supported the normalizing of relations with Peking. Chiang Kai-shek forced us to support a great diplomatic burden--the great myth that they would one day reclaim the mainland.

QUESTION: Could you discuss the events surrounding the multilateral force?

DEAN RUSK: Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and I were not prepared to throw the full weight of the U.S. behind the MLF to impose it upon our allies. We felt that it was up to them to make that decision. They were capable of doing what was good for NATO. When Britain and Germany could not agree, then MLF died. There was one element in MLF that complicated the problem. No American president is going to delegate to anyone else the decision to fire American nuclear missiles. That was an inherent limitation on MLF or any other cooperative venture for the handling of nuclear weapons. There did result the establishment of the Nuclear Committee in NATO. In that committee our allies were given much more information and there was much more discussion about nuclear problems than before. But MLF died because our allies could not agree on it.

QUESTION: Was Skybolt a complicating factor?

DEAN RUSK: Skybolt was misunderstood. Secretary [Robert Strange] McNamara saw Skybolt was in deep trouble and that it was not going to work. He discussed that with the British. But when the announcement came about the cancellation of Skybolt, it took the British by surprise. Now whether the surprise was a tactic is something else. I felt that we would make some arrangement with the British concerning nuclear weapons. During World War II we had considerable help from the British and the Canadians in the building of the atomic bomb. But at the end of the war that kind of cooperation was interrupted by the passage of the McMahon Act [1948]. I always felt badly about that because we harmed two nations very close to us.

When President Kennedy met with Prime Minister [Maurice Harold] MacMillan in Bermuda, I did not go. I had the Diplomatic Corps dinner. I sent George [Wildman] Ball. I knew that they would come out of that meeting with an agreement. It turned out to be the submarines. We offered the same arrangement to General [Charles Andre Joseph Mario] de Gaulle that we had offered to the British, but he turned it down because he did not want the implied cooperation on policy matters with the U.S. In the process he showed his resentment with Prime Minister MacMillan. He used it as a pretext to create some complications over Britain's entrance into the Common Market.

QUESTION: Was it the case that de Gaulle thought Kennedy was hostile to France because of his support for the Algerians when he was in the Senate?

DEAN RUSK: I have no doubt that Kennedy's support for Algeria made an impression on de Gaulle. But there were other factors. De Gaulle had a passionate desire to see the position of France restored. It was a mystical view of France shaped by Joan of Arc and Louis XIV. He saw France as the center of Europe. Europe was France.

QUESTION: Did not his rise destroy the emerging International of Christian Democrats?

DEAN RUSK: There might have been an element of that in there. But we got off to a bad start with de Gaulle during the war. President [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt did not want to recognize de Gaulle as the leader of France without any participation of the French people. That created deep resentment in de Gaulle. Had he thrown himself into the transatlantic movement he would have become the spokesman for continental Europe. But he chose the opposite course and the NATO allies ignored him. His tactics defeated his goals.

QUESTION: Can you fault de Gaulle for his position on MLF?

DEAN RUSK: I had some sympathy for the idea that France should have its own independent nuclear force. I think, however, that the size of that force created more danger than security for France. He thought that the force de frappe would be able to fire at any and all targets. I asked the French foreign minister if we should take that into account in our targeting and he did not reply. De Gaulle was a bit old-fashioned in his military thinking. He once described for me what the battle in Europe would be like. He was not interested in a forward defense of France starting in Germany.

There is a problem for the heads of state on these nuclear matters. I think that it is in the American interest that Japan not go nuclear. But if I were the prime minister of Japan, I would worry about leaving my defense against nuclear attack solely to the Americans. In the case of India, they see China with a billion people and nuclear weapons. I think that it is in the American interest for India not to go nuclear but if I was the prime minister of India, I might think differently.

QUESTION: Was not the [John Fitzgerald] Kennedy administration very concerned about nuclear proliferation and that played a role in the MLF approach?

DEAN RUSK: Yes. I think that from a variety of points of view, including the Soviet, it would not do to have a German finger on the nuclear trigger. Even our European friends have not forgotten World War II as quickly as we have. They still have that nervousness over a Germany rolling around like a loose cannon the deck.

QUESTION: With the end of the Eisenhower administration did the goal of German unification also fall by the wayside?

DEAN RUSK: The Four Powers still have jurisdiction over the German question. I do not think that German unification is possible in any future that I can see. While [Konrad] Adenauer spoke of unification, he did not want it to come about--too many potential SPD [Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands] votes. The dividing line can become less important by increased trade, cultural exchanges, unification of families, etc. But they will not be unified.

There was a change that was related to Ostpolitik. We saw that this harsh confrontation between East and West in Europe would not help to resolve the German question at all. We thought that there might have been a way of moving it along through another means. There is a powerful fear and hatred of the Germans in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. I felt that we had to reduce that through a series of steps like trade and cultural exchanges.

QUESTION: Did McNamara send a clear signal to the British with respect to Skybolt?

DEAN RUSK: My impression was that he had explained it to them. Now perhaps the British minister of defense read into it what he wanted to hear is a possibility. But I did not think that there was any question as to the clarity of McNamara's message. I was surprised by the intensity of the public reaction in Britain to the announcement, but that was tempered by my feeling that it was staged.

QUESTION: Was there any time in the spring and summer of 1968 when anyone suggested that there were steps that the U.S. could take to convince the Soviet Union not to invade?

DEAN RUSK: I do not recall anything of significance in that direction. If you intrude yourself into an issue of that sort then you are in it and you accumulate responsibility for subsequent events. We were not prepared to stake the prestige of the U.S. on a challenge to the Soviet Union with respect to Czechoslovakia. That may seem disappointing. But the stories that we somehow gave consent to the Soviets are simply not true. We were not informed in advance. We were not in collusion with the Russians.

Let me point out that I do not believe that it is possible for the U.S. to display the necessary body language to the Soviets to convince them that we are willing to undertake a certain action to deter them from doing something. I do not think we can fool the Soviets. I always assumed that we were penetrated. Even at a meeting of the NATO foreign ministers I always assumed that the Soviets would be fully informed. Indeed I once used such a meeting to send a message to Moscow, thinking that it would be more credible if they received it that way than if I had given it to their ambassador.


BEGINNING OF 7D, SIDE 1, APPROXIMATE


QUESTION: But by omission we were recognizing a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.

DEAN RUSK: There is a difference between accepting a theory and being aware of the presence of the Red Army. We were not prepared to challenge it. After the Soviets moved their troops in, they announced the Brezhnev Doctrine. In early October 1968 I made the opening speech to the UN General Assembly. I addressed a series of questions to Mr. [Andrei Andreevich] Gromyko, who was sitting in front of me, about the meaning of the Brezhnev Doctrine with respect to independent members of the UN. Every delegate from Eastern Europe with one exception somehow got me a message, thanking me for making that speech.

There is a kind of de facto division of Europe into spheres of influence because of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. We continue to believe that the people of Eastern Europe have the right to decide their own affairs. But there are limits to what they can do because the Russians have the overwhelming power in that area, but less power today than they had twenty years ago.

QUESTION: It was a popular theory that we should build bridges to the regimes of Eastern Europe, the idea being that they will come closer and closer to the West. But the Soviets will invade to prevent that, won't they?

DEAN RUSK: We thought that there would be merit in opening more doors to the East. Even in the 1950s John Foster Dulles asked me to help arrange some private scientific exchanges with Poland; it was too early for the government to do it. We did it. I went out to the airport to meet the first group of Polish scientists. They kissed the ground when they got off the plane. We were aware of the fact that if that process went too far too fast the Soviets would break it up.

QUESTION: Didn't a degree of ambiguity contribute to the tragedy of Hungary in 1956?

DEAN RUSK: We had been embarrassed as a nation by the feeling among many that through the Voice of America the Hungarians had been encouraged to revolt on the understanding that we would come to their help. One must not do that unless you mean business. I do not know to what extent we deliberately or inadvertently misled the Hungarians on that particular point, but many Hungarians that I have talked to say that they feel that they were misled.

QUESTION: The Dominican Republic seemed to be in anarchy and that seemed to be the preeminent motive in the U.S. decision to intervene.

DEAN RUSK: When Juan Bosch was elected president of the Dominican Republic, we invited him to come to Washington. We received him with high honors and told him that we wanted to be as helpful as possible. We thought that the Dominican Republic was getting off to a fresh start. But at that time three of his closest friends in the embassy told us that Bosch would not be able to organize a government. He was a poet, a dreamer. He had no concept of how to build an administration. We tried to get him to turn to these friends in putting a government together. He did not do that.

Then there developed the anarchy. The armed forces, the police and various revolutionary groups brought down the government and fell to fighting each other. In that process, American foreign nationals were in real danger. This brought us to the first phase of the Dominican Affair--the concern for foreign nationals. We had been told by the chiefs of the armed forces and the police that they could not be responsible for them.

President Johnson used a plan that had been developed on the orders of President Kennedy. He sent the Marines in to safeguard the foreign nationals. We sent in a lot of Marines because there were pockets of Americans in many different parts of the island. We thought that it might be necessary to organize expeditions into the interior. When we got ashore, various individuals came out to our lines to inform us about the situation inside Santo Domingo. These people included the head of Bosch's own political party. We got the picture that a very violent struggle was taking place that might lead to the establishment of a [Fidel Ruz] Castro-like dictatorship or a [Rafael Leonidas] Trujillo-type dictatorship. Both of those alternatives were unpleasant. The OAS [Organization of American States] had already applied sanctions on both of them.

This ushered in phase two. Through the OAS we helped to organize an interim government, a police force, and elections for a new government. In essence that was what that was all about. We had no problem with international law. We landed Marines for the protection of foreign nationals where no government existed to take such measures.

QUESTION: Was it not true that a Brazilian force was required to make the action more acceptable?

DEAN RUSK: There was an international police force during the second phase but not for the initial landings. Nationals were threatened and so there was no time for diplomatic maneuver. Someone had to act.

President de Gaulle could be magnificent in times of crisis. He blasted us from the rooftops for going in to the Dominican Republic. But privately he asked us to move the Marines over four more blocks to pick up the protection of the French embassy. We did that. He did not thank us and in fact continued to blast us from the rooftops.

During the Dominican election campaign following the crisis, Bosch asked us for American troops to act as an escort if he went back to campaign. We had to turn that down, but my feeling has been that if he had the audacity to return he might have been reelected.

QUESTION: I think that the thing that gave ammunition to President Johnson's critics on this issue was that he exaggerated the numbers, the atrocities, etc.

DEAN RUSK: I do not think that Lyndon Johnson lost anything from exaggeration.

QUESTION: Is there not a great desire for the U.S. to appear to be within the parameters of complete acceptance rather than standing up and saying, "We are preventing the spread of Communism"? Was there not an inherent defensiveness in Johnson because of the way he had been treated by Bobby [Robert Francis] Kennedy during the Kennedy Administration?

DEAN RUSK: I think that it is also a result with his attitude to Congress. At the time, I would have supported action to prevent another [Fidel Ruz] Castro. The OAS threw Castro out on the grounds that Marxism-Leninism was incompatible with the traditions of the Western Hemisphere. During the Cuban Missile Crisis the OAS said that the missiles were a threat to the whole hemisphere and demanded that they be removed. In 1964 Castro was caught red- handed landing men and supplies on the coast of Venezuela and the OAS imposed sanctions on Cuba. There was strong consensus in the hemisphere against the expansion of Castro-type regimes. This is the problem with the current affair in Nicaragua--we have allowed it to become a unilateral affair. Even at the time of the Bay of Pigs--that terrible mistake--my impression was that the hemisphere was not so much upset with the attempt as with the fact that it failed.

QUESTION: What claims can the U.S. make to intervene in another country if we are committed to the principle of self-determination?

DEAN RUSK: As far as I am concerned, we had the background of the OAS that I described before.

QUESTION: Those who opposed the action look to Ambassador [John Bartlow] Martin as the force that opposed the action by the U.S. Was his own position really that important?

DEAN RUSK: I think that he had different views than President Johnson did. He was emotionally inclined towards the Bosch approach, but I think he was modified by the elections. I just do not know what he would have done, but he did have different views on the affair.

QUESTION: President Johnson acted as the American desk officer during the landing and movement of American troops. How would you have handled the affair differently?

DEAN RUSK: I think that I would have taken the same action. I felt very strongly against the spread of the Castro regime to other parts of the hemisphere. When Castro first came to power, he was invited to Washington, and we tried to work things out. But Castro sold out his own revolution.

QUESTION: Does this micro-management by the president prove to be very destructive? Take President [James Earl, Jr. [Jimmy]] Carter, for example, during Desert One.

DEAN RUSK: President Kennedy handled the details of U.S. naval forces during the missile crisis. There was a case where it worked. But I think that President Carter is very lucky that mission aborted where it did, rather than in downtown Teheran. I do not see how that kind of force could possible succeed. But in World War II, President Roosevelt delegated immense amounts of responsibility to the theater commanders.

QUESTION: People forget that President Kennedy was perceived as being the more aggressive in confronting the Communists.

DEAN RUSK: He used that extraordinary sentence in his inaugural address. There were some Kennedy people who tried to brush that aside as rhetoric, but in my association with him it was serious. The family chose that as one of the sentences on the stone at Arlington.

QUESTION: Why did the negotiations with the Chinese take place in Warsaw?

DEAN RUSK: They started in Prague. We met in each other's embassies, so there was a lesser chance of bugging. I am not sure that what we were talking about was that secret. They wanted to normalize relations and that was something we were not prepared to do. We can be sure that the PRC will act in its own interests without any regard for us. The Chinese see themselves as very special people from a very special civilization. We should work to improve our relations with the Soviets and the Chinese bilaterally and not think that we can manipulate them with "the China card."

QUESTION: In the Congo you sought a UN military force. Did not that action irritate [Nikita Sergeevich] Khrushchev more than anything else? Did that not demonstrate that the Soviets had plans for the Congo?

DEAN RUSK: The Congo is a very large area of central Africa. It has major resources. Its neighbors were small and weak. The Belgians had been reluctant to give independence to the Congo.

END OF SIDE 7D, SIDE 1 [APPROXIMATE]


BEGINNING OF 7D, SIDE 2 [APPROXIMATE]


DEAN RUSK: When they did grant independence, they did so rather hurriedly. I had reason to think that the Union Miniere [du Haut-Katanga] finally pressed them to do it and thought that if the Congo became independent then Katanga would secede and the Union Miniere would have its own little empire in Katanga.

But the Belgians had not prepared the Congo for independence. There were only something like twelve university graduates in the whole country. The Belgians had not instituted a significant educational system, particularly higher education. The Congo was without personnel to manage a country. But when it came before the UN there was strong opposition to any secession. This was led by the African nations who live in desperate fear of the break-up of Africa on a tribal basis. The general African position on secession was resistance. The UN forces were organized among the middle powers although the U.S. played a considerable role in giving logistical support to the UN forces. These military operations were a considerable burden on the UN itself. There was no general staff in the UN. Behind the scenes we had to pay quite a bit for these forces. One country asked to be paid fifteen dollars per man per day. And we paid it. That was the only UN force that fought military operations as such. I had some doubt as to whether it had the capability to fight effectively, but it did.

The Soviets looked at the Congo as a great prize if they could establish their influence there because of its sheer size and resources. They participated in the Security Council and General Assembly resolutions which made it possible for the UN force to be there. Then they took a very negative view towards it.

There was a succession of leaders in the Congo of varying talents. It was not easy. But in the longer run and in the prospect of history, I think that the UN role in the Congo will turn out to be constructive.

QUESTION: How soon was it clear that [Joseph Desire] Mobuto was going to be a major figure?

DEAN RUSK: I do not recall the details of the leaders. I was on the negotiating staff that negotiated the military forces provided in Chapter Seven of the UN Charter. I think that on the U.S. side we tried too hard. We came out of World War II with a much stronger Air Force and Navy than the Russians. Our military wanted it so that the U.S. would provide the UN with a disproportionate amount of air and naval power and that the Russians contribute a disproportionate number of the ground forces. But the Russians demanded exact equivalents. Those negotiations did not succeed. Since then, when the UN has needed forces they have come from the middle powers--Canada, Sweden, etc.

I do not think that we are going to see UN forces fight wars. I do not think that you will have forces volunteer for that purpose. The UN's use of the military will be limited to peacekeeping and monitoring operations.

QUESTION: In June 1967 there was confusion after the war. The Israelis passed a resolution that a partial truce would be declared and the territories returned with the exception of Jerusalem. The president asked what their territorial expectations were. They hinted that practically everything was open for discussion but that what changed that was the Khartoum meeting. How much of this was ever clear in Washington?

DEAN RUSK: When the Israeli cabinet by a divided vote decided to launch military operations, we were not informed. We thought that they were going to give us some time to work out such problems as the reopening of the Strait of Tiran. They launched operations on a Monday, knowing full well that the vice president of Egypt was expected in Washington on the following Wednesday. The situation developed in a rather ominous fashion from Israel's point of view. Nasser had moved major forces into the Sinai and demanded that the UN forces be removed. They were. Nasser's forces stopped Israeli shipping from using the strait.

During the spring of 1967 an Arab high command was formed with an Egyptian general. The propaganda war stepped up with the Soviets spreading rumors of Israeli mobilization against Syria. Two weeks before the outbreak of the war, the Russians became concerned. Our Joint Chiefs had told us that if a war occurred, Israel would prevail in about ten days. The professional soldiers in the Soviet Union might have told their leaders the same thing. We and the Russians began to discuss the hostilities there. We thought we had some time from the Israelis and the Russians thought that they had some time from the Arabs. But they went ahead and started preventive self-defense operations.

We were caught by surprise; the hotline immediately started up because they wanted to know if we had tricked them. We tried to get a cease-fire almost immediately. The Arabs delayed by putting conditions on it. Within eight days, Israeli forces were at Suez, had occupied the West Bank and had seized the Golan Heights. On the first day of the operations, the prime minister went on the radio and said that they had no territorial ambitions. By September they had changed their minds, making the U.S. a liar for twenty years. We did not like that one bit. It is still a problem. Every president since Truman has affirmed U.S. support for the secure existence of Israel. I do not know of any commitment that the U.S. has made to help Israel keep the territories seized in 1967.

QUESTION: The Soviets told Egypt to mobilize to take the pressure off Syria, which was being mobilized against by Israel. That is why Nasser moved his forces. It was a disinformation campaign aimed at intimidating Israel and "saving" Syria.

DEAN RUSK: When Nasser closed the strait, he not only challenged Israel but also the U.S. because of U.S. guarantees of free passage given to the Israelis. We immediately met with the maritime powers seeking a resolution calling for the Strait of Tiran to be recognized as an international waterway. With some reluctance some of them said yes. We then realized that we were going to have to force the issue. When we looked for volunteers, only the French and the Dutch volunteered. It was a very difficult operation because the Egyptians would have the advantage of ground-based air.

Secretary McNamara and I went to Capitol Hill and met with about a hundred key members. We talked about having to force the freedom of passage, and they were in complete and unanimous opposition. Senator [Edward Moore "Ted"] Kennedy said that his Jewish friends wanted to leave it to the UN. The Israelis immediately knew the outcome of this meeting and this contributed to their feeling that they were alone. Also, President Nasser claimed that U.S. planes were participating in the attack on the Egyptian Air Force. He broke relations with us. But the Israelis were flying five or six missions a day with each plane. The Russians had their ships in the area and knew that the U.S. was not involved.

But to your question, there are so many ironies to this situation. By September 1967 Nasser was saying to us privately that there was no problem to reopening the strait. If he had told us that on June 1, there probably would not have been a war. They could have had an Arab state in Palestine if they had accepted the partition of Palestine in 1947.

Resolution 242 was basically an agenda for negotiations. It had in it a number of critical elements to achieve peace. But the trouble was that both sides have been trying to go beyond it. On the Arab side, they are pressing for an Arab state in Palestine, something that 242 does not mention. The Israelis are trying to break through it on the territorial issues. [Resolution] 242 did not consider any territory being gained by Israel as a result of the war. We left some room in there deliberately. It clearly did not have in mind that the West Bank would go to Israel. I still think that 242 presents the agenda for peace if there is going to be peace.

For a number of years all sides have felt that the question of Jerusalem should be left for the end. That will be a very difficult issue because the city is of major importance to both groups. I think that the only solution is to come forward with a package that is so complicated that no one can understand them and won't know what to fight about. The word sovereignty should be left in the clouds. Give the religions free access to their shrines and then eat up the rest of the old city with such things as hotels and leave police and other support functions to some sort of consortium.

I am pessimistic on the possibility on any early agreed solution. I think that we will be fortunate if we can prevent an outbreak of major fighting. Both sides feel very strongly. The presence of religion makes an easy solution almost impossible.