Dean Rusk Oral History Collection  
 
Rusk DD  
 
Dean Rusk interviewed by Richard Rusk and Martin Hillenbrand  
 
circa 1985  
 
DEAN RUSK: Well, on Berlin: Let me just say that I first became involved with the Berlin  
question when I was in the Operations Division of the General Staff, beginning in June 1945.  
Although then, we looked at Berlin more or less as a part of the general German question on  
which we were having great problems with the Soviet Union relating to the occupation of  
Germany. Then, I was in charge of the United Nations affairs in the State Department under  
George [Catlett] Marshall at the time of the Berlin Blockade of 1948. That was a very strenuous  
time and very much before the United Nations, both in New York and when the U.N. went to  
Paris for its General Assembly meeting of 1948. The Security Council had also been in Paris and  
the Berlin Blockade was very much alive and on the agenda. I came back to it in a major way in  
'6l and '62 when Chairman Khrushchev gave JFK an ultimatum on Berlin and the Vienna  
Summit meeting. I was with the Berlin question well into 1963, although the Cuban Missile  
Crisis tended to dampen down the intensity of that problem. So I have been involved with Berlin  
at different stages and in different ways along the way. All right Marty, go along with your  
questions.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Incidentally, you were ambassador to Berlin or West Germany in what  
years?  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Oh, that came later, that was '72 to '76.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: You were head of the Task Force?  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Part of the time. From '6l to '63 I was Deputy Director and then I became  
Director when Foy [D.] Kohler went to Moscow.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Some of this background may be a little repetitious, but it will set the stage  
for the questions I need to ask specifically. After the Vienna Summit meeting between President  
Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev, the U.S. [United States] government went through an  
intensive internal process of preparation for the next round with the Soviets over Berlin. This led  
to Four Powers meetings at senior officer level, and in August a meeting in Paris with French,  
British, German Foreign Ministers and the American Secretary of State. Among various U.S.  
objectives, one was to warn the Soviets and to probe their position as to whether any  
opportunities might exist to move towards some sort of arrangement on Berlin which would be  
acceptable to us. At the Paris Foreign Ministers meeting, [Maurice] Couve de Murville, the  
French Foreign Minister, opposed any discussions with the Soviets as long as the Allied Powers  
were still under the threat of the Soviet Peace Treaty with the GDR [German Democratic  
Republic-- East Germany], with all of the implications the Soviets claimed this would have for  
the western position in Berlin.  
 
  
 
 
Now the specific questions in this context. First, what do you recall as Couve's principal motives  
for the position which he took? Did he indicate to you, outside of what he said in long speeches  
at plenary sessions of the Foreign Ministers, what his problem was? Specifically, did he mention  
what President De Gaulle's position was?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Well, it was very clear that President De Gaulle simply did not want to have any  
part of any further discussions with the Russians on Berlin and Couve was reflecting President  
De Gaulle's own position. He told me privately that was De Gaulle's position, and indeed, in at  
least one private talk with De Gaulle, he told me that was his view. I think De Gaulle had the  
feeling that if the Russians moved on Berlin, they would only do so if they wanted a general war;  
that they were not going to move on Berlin; therefore there was no point in talking about it.  
There was some--It was not a wholly irrational point of view of De Gaulle's because he knew,  
just as we knew, that there was no real basis for any new agreement on Berlin that would be  
agreeable both to us and to the Russians. We and the British particularly felt that we at least  
ought to talk about it further with the Russians and try to talk some of the fever out of the  
problem, because we were under a kind of ultimatum, in terms of time, from Khrushchev. The  
Germans were willing for us to have those talks, but they were very nervous about it and rather  
reluctant bystanders in the talks that Alec Douglas-Home and I had with [Andrei Andreevich]  
Gromyko. There is no question that Couve's attitude was determined by De Gaulle's very firm  
position that we should not enter into any negotiations with the Russians over Berlin.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Why did the U.S., and you specifically, insist on going ahead with what were  
called "exploratory talks?" To determine if the basis for negotiation existed, that was the formula  
that was used, I believe, despite this French opposition?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: We felt that although we could not see clearly any basis for a reasonable solution  
to Berlin by agreement with the Russians, that nevertheless we ought to talk about it further. And  
Alec Douglas-Home and I decided we would talk just as long and just as repetitively as would  
Gromyko. So I do not know how impatient Gromyko got with us because he was not used to that  
kind of conduct by the West. So Alec Douglas-Home and I just talked, and talked, and talked.  
We repeated ourselves and made the same arguments over and over again and just decided to  
talk the matter to death. We did not really believe that there was any basis for a fresh agreement  
that would meet both our and Soviet k demands, and so when we called it "exploratory talks" we  
tried to signal that we did not necessarily expect a successful conclusion.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Pop, wasn't the search to see whether or not a basis for negotiations existed,  
wasn't that sort of a trade-off position where John Kennedy, on the one hand, was more or less an  
action-oriented president who wanted to find the solution, open up negotiations; and you didn't  
really think there was any possible basis for negotiations, and so you more or less took this other  
route: go ahead and talk and see if they search for a basis of negotiation, realizing there was  
probably not a solution?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: If the Soviets had come back with some major changes in the views expressed  
by Khrushchev at Vienna, then it is possible that something might have opened up. You see, we  
based ourselves on the position that we, and the British, and the French were in Berlin on the  
same basis on which the Russians were in Germany and in East Berlin. That is, we were  
 
 
victorious powers in WWII, and that our rights in Berlin were ours by reason of that fact, and  
that the Russians could not give away something that they themselves did not have: namely,  
rights over our position in Berlin. We made that point very strongly with Gromyko more than  
once. The Russians could not, as we looked at it, give to the East Germans anything that  
impinged upon our rights on Berlin because those rights in Berlin were not at the disposal of the  
Russians; they were ours by right of conquest.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: In reacting to the French position, you at times, as I recall, expressed the  
view that they simply did not understand or comprehend that there was a nuclear issue involved  
somewhere in the background: that one had to, in good faith, explore every possibility of at least  
delaying any possible confrontation which might graze nuclear issues?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Well, De Gaulle was completely sure in his own mind that the Russians would  
not seize Berlin by force. We were not so sure because Khrushchev had gotten himself way out  
in front on a major public commitment on this issue. And so we did not think that we could  
simply sit tight and rest on the assurance that they would not seize Berlin. You see, Berlin is  
there, one hundred and something miles inside of East Germany, surrounded by East German  
and Russian forces, that has only a token force of British, French, and American soldiers in it. It  
looked like a tempting target from the point of view of the Russians. It looked like something  
that should be easy to squeeze off, and since it was a thorn in their flesh, there in Germany, as a  
kind of island of freedom which had demonstrated rather extraordinary abilities to recover.  
Berlin was an embarrassment to them, and indeed we ourselves used Berlin for certain  
broadcasts into East Germany and the Eastern Bloc. It was a nuisance and it looked very  
vulnerable from a military point of view. And one of the points that Alec Douglas-Home and I  
had to make with Gromyko was that it was not vulnerable because the U.S., France, and Great  
Britain were there, and they should forget any idea of considering Berlin a vulnerable place. De  
Gaulle was relying wholly on his conviction that they would not seize Berlin by force. We felt  
that one cannot be all that sure of it, and so we undertook the talks.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Now a related question would be whether, during that crisis, or perhaps  
afterwards, did you ever hear any hints from the Soviet's side, perhaps Gromyko, of perhaps  
swapping Cuba for Berlin?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Not at that stage, no.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Did that come afterwards?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: There was a little trace of a hint of that when Gromyko met with President  
Kennedy on the Thursday before Kennedy's speech on the Cuban Missile Crisis, but we did not  
pick up on that and go down that trail because we could not trade West Berlin for Cuba.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Before you actually got involved in the exploratory talks, the wall went up in  
August of 1961 separating the eastern sector of Berlin from the western sector. Did you share the  
view of some advisors to President Kennedy that the wall would relieve the need for Soviet  
pressure on Berlin? And how did you react immediately to the building of the wall?  
 
  
 
 
DEAN RUSK: We had thought, back in the summer of '6l, that the East Germans and the  
Russians would have to do something about the rapidly increasing mass flow of people from  
East Germany to the West, not only in numbers but also the quality of people who were coming  
across: their professional people, their engineers, and people like that. This hemorrhage would  
bleed them to death and they would have to take some steps to change it. Now the actual means  
they used, the building of the wall, caught me, personally, somewhat by surprise. But when it  
occurred, it was clear to me that they had built the wall to keep their own people in, they did not  
build the wall to keep us out or anything like that, and that it was a startling demonstration of the  
nature of their society. We early came to the conclusion, as far as the U.S. was concerned the  
wall itself was not an issue of war and peace between us and the Soviet Union. There was a good  
deal of excitement, particularly in Berlin, but also in Germany, about the wall and our acceptance  
of the wall. So there was a political and psychological problem of considerable dimensions there.  
We did not seriously consider using tanks or any other form of force to try and knock the wall  
down. Had we done so, either we would have had an immediate confrontation with Soviet forces  
or they simply would have moved the wall back maybe fifty yards, one hundred yards.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: That was never a serious option?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: We never seriously took up the question--  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: The fact that the Soviets put that wall up gradually, was that an indication?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: No, the wall itself went up instantaneously in the form at least of barbed wire  
and things like that. They later then built it into a much more substantial wall.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: While these things were going on, the U.S. was engaging in a military  
buildup. We called up the Reserves and we sent additional forces, or planned to send additional  
forces, to the Federal Republic and to Berlin. So after your first rather inconclusive round of  
talks with Gromyko in September on the margin of the General Assembly session, did you and  
the President feel that these U.S. military measures that were being taken, would over time  
significantly affect the Soviet position?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Well, it is true that President Kennedy, in direct response to the Berlin Crisis,  
asked for several billion dollars more money for our defense budget, and called up some of our  
National Guard and Reserve units, and we began beefing up our forces in West Germany. We  
did that partly to impress upon Mr. Khrushchev that we considered this an utterly serious  
problem, and to try to get him to realize that a move on Berlin would be the gravest possible kind  
of crisis. After all, in Vienna in June 1961, when Khrushchev said that if we interfered with what  
he was going to do with the East Germans in Berlin that there would be war, Kennedy looked at  
him at one point and said, "Then Mr. Chairman, there will be war. It is going to be a very cold  
winter." So one of our problems was to convince Mr. Khrushchev that there was a high  
probability that those damn fool Americans might do something about it if he put through his  
plans on Berlin, and that buildup of forces there was part of that procedure.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Did Kennedy's measures with the Reserve call-ups, and the arms buildup,  
and the draft increase, was that more or less in accordance with your advice?  
 
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: I was in agreement with it.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: The NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] administerial meeting in  
Paris in early December led to further complications with the French, both in the drafting of the  
communique and in their general opposition to any further exploratory talks on your part with  
the Soviets. Do you recall any interesting sidelights of that Paris meeting which would throw  
further light on the French attitude? Was Foreign Minister Couve being kept on a tight line by  
De Gaulle? And were the British and West Germans generally supportive of your position?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Well, the NATO Foreign Ministers, with the exception of the French, were  
unanimous that we should continue these talks with the Soviet Union, but we got locked-up on  
one word in the communique having to do with the talks. Couve would not accept it; all the  
others insisted upon accepting it. We spent most of a day on that one word, and I got Couve in  
the corridor and asked him why he did not telephone President De Gaulle and clear the way to go  
along with the overwhelming majority. At that moment he said, "One does not call President De  
Gaulle." But later I learned that, in fact, he had talked with President De Gaulle on the phone,  
and his instructions had been confirmed. As a result of that experience, I told my NATO Foreign  
Minister colleagues that thereafter I would not spend more that fifteen minutes on a  
communique, and if it took longer than fifteen minutes I would absent myself.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Were you working with English as the draft language there?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Well, English and French.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: I do not recall the precise word, but it obviously had to do with the question  
of whether these exploratory talks would go on or that they would cease?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: That's right.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Did you have any--as a result of your talks with Gromyko in the early fall  
and the subsequent communications with the Soviets--did you leave any impression that the  
Soviet position was changing in any way.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Well, the talks with Gromyko started off with Gromyko taking a very hard  
boiled line, such as Khrushchev had taken in Vienna. And he repeated this statement that  
Khrushchev had made that if there was interference from the West there would be war. Well, at  
that point I said to Gromyko, "Well now wait a minute, if you want war, you can have war in  
five minutes. All you have to do is start one. But if you do not want war, then we better talk  
about this some more. But those talks at the beginning were rather tough. But then the rest of the  
time we simply explored the possibility of various alternatives. But we could not find any that  
seemed to be attractive to both sides. And I would think, rather than the Soviets agreeing to  
anything, they simply modified and backed away from their ultimatum and sort of petered out as  
an issue. I still have in my mind, and I do not know when you want to get into this, that somehow  
the missiles in Cuba were related to their views on Berlin. I mentioned that in his talk on the  
Thursday before Kennedy's television speech Gromyko rather hinted that there might be some  
 
 
basis for some agreement involving both Berlin and Cuba, but we did not go down that trail. And  
then later on, we were told by a fairly senior official that they were going to tell us about these  
missiles in Cuba sometime after our elections in November of that year, because they were going  
to put those missiles in Cuba privately and quickly, and then return to the Berlin question later in  
the fall, and at that time tell us about the missiles in Cuba as a further bargaining weight with  
respect to Berlin.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Now, where did that information come from?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: From a high Russian official.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: How accurate that story is, I have no way of knowing. Whether that impression  
we got from that Russian official was the accurate one, I do not know.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: The fact that you had cordial and personal relationships, not only on an  
official basis, with Gromyko and some of these fellows, did that type of thing come out because  
of the relationship you had there? I am sure this was not communicated by the--  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: No, cordiality is not the word. They were not warm in a personal sense. To begin  
with they were correct from a diplomatic point of view. Both sides treated the other with  
impeccable personal courtesy. But I would not call it the kind of cordiality and warmth that is  
rooted in genuine friendship.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Was that--that was fairly closely handled. Obviously you told Kennedy.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: I do not think it has been told. I have not seen it anywhere.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: I have not seen it anywhere either.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Had you ever heard it?  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Well I heard it from you. That is all. Well as you will recall, the first few  
months of 1962 were devoted to intensive but inconclusive discussions in Moscow between  
Ambassador [Llewellyn E.] Thompson [Jr.] and senior Soviet officials leading up to your  
meetings with Gromyko in Geneva in late winter, I believe.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: That might have been either at the opening of the Disarmament Conference in  
Geneva or the Laos talks.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: It was the Laos talks. On the American side, the State Department was  
developing a so-called "principles paper." Was there any reason, as you recall, to think that the  
Soviet position might have changed to the extent of actually making this "principles paper" a  
subject of discussion, a serious subject of discussion?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: No, I do not. We never tabled such a "principles paper" with the Soviets or  
anything like that.  
 
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: I think you gave it to them informally. You gave it to Gromyko. You handed  
it to him.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Did I? Okay. All right.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Well, actually while you were meeting with Gromyko in Geneva you will  
recall that we were having problems in the air corridors to Berlin. The Soviets were dropping  
chaff in the air corridors. They were trying to preempt altitudes, and so on. Did this become part  
of the discussions you had with the Soviets?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Oh yes, indeed. And I recall one session very vividly because Sir Alec Douglas-  
Home, who is normally kind of a mild-mannered kind of man, turned to Gromyko on this  
dropping of the chaff in the air lanes and other kinds of harassments--  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: That would disrupt radar?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: No, it would disrupt our air flights into Berlin, and it could disrupt radar. Alec  
Douglas-Home gave Gromyko unshirted hell on this matter, and just hit him right between the  
eyes. He said, "This has got to stop. This must stop. You just must not, and cannot, do this." I  
even think Gromyko was even a little startled at the intensity of Alec Douglas-Home's remarks.  
But that was very much a part of our discussions with Gromyko.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Did we lose any airplanes over there?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: And they dropped it fairly soon thereafter.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: It was, as you recall, quite noteworthy that flights continued, both civilian  
flights and military flights, without any real disturbances, despite the dropping of the chaff and  
the preempted attempt to put Soviet planes at altitudes below ten thousand feet where we were  
flying. General [Lauris] Norstad was, of course, very much involved.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Was there Soviet fighter plane harassment?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Not really.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Close passes but no (unintelligible) runs. Prior to your first session with  
Gromyko in Geneva you met with German Foreign Minister [Gerhard] Schroder in a villa  
outside of the city to try out the principles paper on him. Do you have any thoughts about his  
reaction?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: No, I found Schroder a very agreeable colleague. He was pretty sophisticated  
and he apparently was personally not as nervous as some of his own German colleagues were  
about what might happen in these talks. He wanted to be kept informed as to what was  
happening in the talks, and Douglas-Home and I agreed to do that. I think Schroder knew that  
we, the British and the Americans, were not going to sell out the Germans in Berlin. I think that  
 
 
was the basic source of his relaxed view and his contentment on the matter. But you during this  
period I did something that the French, again, did not like very--much. It had been customary for  
the French, British, and American Foreign Ministers to meet in connection with every NATO  
Foreign Ministers Meeting: have their own meeting about German and Berlin questions. Well, I  
insisted that the German Foreign Minister be asked to join that group. The French did not like  
that very much. I insisted, so the German Foreign Minister regularly became a member of that  
special meeting of Foreign Ministers over Berlin and Germany.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Pop, I have a related question to that. Were you convinced, in your own  
mind--and perhaps this is not the kind of thing you want to read into any oral history--but there  
has been some speculation that John Kennedy was "soft on nukes," that he worried that his  
policy actions with respect to Berlin and other issues might take this country into a nuclear war  
which we would not survive as a country. How far, in your own mind, were we willing to go,  
was John Kennedy willing to go to defend American interests?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: No one can answer that question. Only he could have answered it, and he did not  
have to face the problem. Now when people call him "soft on nukes" they're abusing the English  
language. Soon after he took office, John F. Kennedy spent much of the day with three or four of  
us going through the total effects of a full nuclear war, both direct and indirect. So we knew  
something about what the use of nuclear weapons would mean. So he was not itchy to use  
nuclear weapons. Now if that means being "soft on nukes," all right. Anybody who is not "soft  
on nukes" ought to go to an insane institution and have themselves treated.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Coming back to your meetings with Gromyko: First of all, in reference to the  
harassments in the air corridors, did he react at all when you raised the subject with him, as you  
said you did?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Well, Gromyko does not visibly react to almost anything that is said. He has a  
genuine poker face, and things like that. I have no doubt that he reported his conversations with  
us on that point back to Moscow, and Alec Douglas-Home's blow-up might have had some effect  
in Moscow in getting them to come off that kind of nonsense.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Do you recall how he reacted when you informally gave them a copy of the  
"principles paper?"  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: No, I just do not remember that.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Pop, for the purpose of this oral history, do you recall what the principle  
points of that paper were?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Ask Marty.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Well, I have not seen the paper for over twenty years, the text of the paper.  
As I recall, it tried to create a framework for a modus vivendi on Berlin. In fact I think the word  
"modus vivendi" was used. And it tried to create that framework by first of all establishing the  
inviolability of the Allied position of the three western sectors of Berlin, but then offering what  
 
 
might have seemed to be face-saving little concessions with regard to the role of the GDR. This  
question had come up before. Even during the Eisenhower administration there was a so-called  
"Solution C" which was supposed to be the ultimate fallback position of the Allies if we ever got  
into serious negotiations with the Soviets. Solution C contemplated letting the East Germans act  
as agents at the check points, even as far as Allied military traffic was concerned, if the Soviets  
specifically said they were acting as agents of the Soviets. Well, obviously this "principles  
paper" did not go into any details of that kind, nor did it refer to Solution C. But the path was at  
least, by implication if not by direct mention, left open for some sort of a compromise on the  
actual procedures at the checkpoints.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: I think access was the main issue.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Access was the main issue. That's right.  
 
  
 
[Deletion at Mr. Rusk's request]  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: If you will recall, bringing the U.N. into the Berlin problem periodically  
came up as a possibility or as an option, but it was never seriously put forward?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: The Berlin question was before the Security Council for some very strenuous  
sessions there during that period of the blockade, both in New York and in Paris. I remember a  
famous meeting in Paris of the Security Council over Berlin. The hall was absolutely crammed  
with onlookers, and Philip [C.] Jessup was our representative.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: What year was this?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: That was '48. George Marshall later, at a luncheon in Paris, expressed his great  
appreciation for our having someone like Phil Jessup to represent us at this dangerous time.  
During that session, in this crowded hall, Mrs. [Lois Walcott Kellogg] Jessup was in the public  
audience listening. While Phil was speaking, she was knitting. A French usher came down the  
aisle and looked over at her very severely and said, "You must not knit, it is disrespectful to the  
speaker." Mrs. Jessup said, "But I am his wife. The speaker is my husband." The usher sort of  
stiffened up and went back up the aisle, and a few moments later came back down the aisle and  
bowed to her and said, "You are to knit."  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: She did not say, "I always knit when he speaks."?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Well, in one of these sessions in New York on the Berlin Blockade, the  
American and Soviet representatives, Gromyko being the Soviet representative, [were] going at  
each other hammer-and-tongs. And a friend of mine was sitting next to Mrs. Gromyko in the  
public audience, listening. At one point my friend turned to her and said, "What do you think of  
these proceedings?" She said, "These men are playing such childish and dangerous games." I will  
never forget that remark. Here this peasant hausfrau wisdom came to the front in her remark:  
childish and dangerous games. I've thought of that often.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Coming back once more to the so-called "principles paper" because, as you  
 
 
recall, it leaked out, or at least a version of it leaked out, and caused quite a furor in Germany  
with the German press. Chancellor [Konrad] Adenauer was unhappy, and all of this to the great  
embarrassment of Foreign Minister Schroder, who had more or less given his approval to it.  
Then, after all this happened, did Schroder ever communicate to you privately or in any way  
indicate that he was put in a difficult position by the leak?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: I do not recall whether he ever mentioned it to me or not. I know that it did. I do  
not quite know--where did that leak initiate?  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: It came out of the Germans--probably out of the German Foreign Ministry  
because there were always people in the Ministry who were opposed to what they thought was  
too soft a line. They were systematically leaking things out which they thought would first of all,  
get the chancellor excited, and secondly would lead to unfavorable press comments.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Adenauer was always inclined to take a very hard view on these German issues  
in principle, but we have some reservations about how deeply he meant them. He always insisted  
that we proclaim our dedication to the idea of the reunification of Germany. Well, I do not  
believe that Adenauer wanted the reunification of Germany, for all sorts of domestic, political,  
and other considerations. The Germans were always nervous as cats on these issues, so we had to  
keep an eye on that. Adenauer was a very great man and rendered a great service, both to  
Germany and to the West, in the postwar period. He was not the most accomplished diplomat.  
Everytime I called on him, for example, he would spend the first ten minutes reminiscing about  
the good old days of John Foster Dulles. I found this very amusing because I had known Dulles  
very well, and during the '50s, Dulles use to talk to me about the problems he was having with  
Konrad Adenauer. (laughter)  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Although you met again with Gromyko when he came to New York for the  
General Assembly session in the fall of '62, it was clear that your talks with him on Berlin had  
pretty much reached a dead end. Moreover, the Cuban Missile Crisis was on the imminent  
horizon. Looking back now, what do you think that your rounds of discussions with him over a  
year accomplished within the general context of American and Allied handling of the Berlin  
Crisis?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: I think the principal result was that we talked the fever out of the problem. I  
think the basic approach that Alec Douglas-Home and I adopted worked to a considerable  
degree, that we would just talk, and talk, and talk, and talk, and talk the problem to death. Well, I  
remember talks I had with [Anatoly] Dobrynin about Berlin during that period. We got to a point  
where we would refer to each other's arguments by the numbers. If a question came up one of us  
would say, "Well, that is our argument number four. Should we go over it or should we just pass  
on to another subject?" Well, even then you were making some progress in terms of talking the  
fever out of the matter. But I had a good many talks with Dobrynin about Berlin, underneath the  
talks with Gromyko. I think we finally, at least for that period, talked the fever out of it. Now, it  
may be that the Russians would have returned to Berlin if they had succeeded in putting the  
missiles into Cuba. Who knows? One interesting question to me to which I have no answer, is  
why Khrushchev did not seize Berlin during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Had he done so, then our  
European allies would have looked at us in dismay and said, "Now look what you damned  
 
 
Americans have done. You have gotten us into all this trouble over Cuba." And there would have  
been considerable disarray in the NATO Alliance had he done so.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: That raises an interesting question. As you know, there was some concern in  
the White House and the State Department that the logical place where the Soviets would react  
would be Berlin. There was a task force working in the White House planning for such a possible  
Soviet reaction in Berlin. Was this purely a logical deduction on our part or was there some  
evidence that the Soviets ever considered reacting in Berlin?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: We never had any evidence that the Soviets were about to move on Berlin during  
the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a deduction, both from that hint that Gromyko had made in his  
talk on that famous Thursday, as well as simply of the logic of the situation. We had  
overwhelming superiority in conventional forces in the vicinity of Cuba. Florida was about to  
sink under the ocean with the weight of military power we had assembled there. They had  
similar overwhelming conventional capabilities in the area of Berlin, so we had to look at it as a  
real possibility.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: And were the choices really--was our conventional position so weak over  
there, not only American forces but NATO forces as well--that we were really facing problems  
down there?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: The forces that were actually located in Berlin had no capability of resisting the  
weight of power that the East Germans and Russians could have thrown against them. And the  
forces that we had back in West Germany were not of a scale that could have driven through to  
Berlin, through the Soviet divisions that were there. So it would have led very quickly to general  
war had that situation developed.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Although many writers on the Berlin crisis have said that the crisis actually  
ended more or less with the resolution of the Cuban missile situation, the fact remains that as late  
as September of 1963 the Soviets harassed and blocked American military access to Berlin on  
the Autobahn.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Let's see, was that over the issue of tailgate inspections?  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Tailgate inspections. That's right. And at least at the time it seemed like it  
was a major crisis.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: I can remember that as a kid.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: It may have been only the last gasp of Mr. Khrushchev, but--  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Issues involving Berlin got to be a little like the dance of the gooney birds on  
Wake Island. There was a good deal of posturing on both sides. Every little thing got to have a  
symbolic character. Such issues as the height of the tailgates on our trucks and whether or not we  
would lower them to let the Russian people at the check points look into the trucks and things  
like that--those took on a most absurd political significance at the time. Yet we were very much  
 
 
concerned about the possibility that the Russians would simply, by a succession of such things,  
nibble us to death there in Berlin, not through some big, single dramatic move, but by constant  
erosion of our position there. So we had to watch those things pretty carefully.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Known as slicing the salami.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: That's right.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Were there flashpoints in that crisis: moments when you thought war, if not  
inevitable, was at least extremely likely?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: During the Berlin crisis?  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. The tank confrontation, for example, would that have been one of  
them?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: At the time of the building of the wall?  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Yeah.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: I don't think that the Berlin crisis ever reached the high point of danger that the  
Cuban Missile Crisis did. It was a serious crisis, because we could never know what this fellow  
Khrushchev was going to do. He was impulsive, unpredictable. He was a passionate Russian and  
dedicated communist. One thing that we did not know and we have never known about the  
Russians is the relationship among the various figures in the Politbureau. That is a crucial piece  
of information that we have just never known. The Russians have an extraordinary capacity to  
keep their mouths shut on such things.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Did you have the feeling that Khrushchev was really in control of his  
position.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Oh, yeah. He was in control until he left office.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: You don't see his handling of the Berlin crisis, and Soviet responses, in any  
way influenced by domestic Soviet politics?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Oh, I don't know. Who knows about motivations? I think it's possible that his  
inability to get what he wanted in Berlin, plus the Cuban Missile Crisis helped to bring him down  
when he was removed from office. But I suspect a good part of that was his one-man rule and his  
colleagues in the Politbureau reached a point where they just didn't want to take this anymore.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: I've got one question, and while you're here I'll ask it. Ted [Theodore  
Chaikin] Sorensen [Jr.] reports John Kennedy was "highly pleased with your performance." In  
the aftermath of all this there were some times when he was a little irritated with the smoothness  
of the State Department response and all that. Did Kennedy ever personally talk to you about  
your performance and convey this message to you?  
 
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Kennedy didn't waste breath on that sort of thing. We just went on with a day's  
work. I did in the summer of 1963 tell him privately that if he wanted to make a change in my  
job, to get ready for the election of '64, that it was perfectly agreeable with me and he would  
have no problem with me if he wanted to do that. He said, "No." He said, "Don't bring that up  
again. I like your guts. I don't have many people around me here that have any guts."  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Was the Foreign Service more or less behind Dean Rusk and his handling of  
the crisis there, or do you remember fights within the--  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: No. There were no fights within the bureaucracy. Things were handled a lot  
more cleanly than in subsequent years. And the responsibility for making Berlin policy was  
pretty much left to the Secretary of State and the people who were advising him. There were  
intergovernmental or interdepartmental groups, most notably the Berlin Task Force, which  
served as a coordinating body. But the diffusion of responsibility which has characterized some  
later administrations simply didn't exist there. I think the State Department was solidly, to the  
best of my knowledge solidly, behind what the Secretary was doing. There were a few dissenters  
in the Legal Adviser's office and so on, but that didn't play a major role.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: You know, this raises an interesting little point. Since I never expected, in the  
world, to be Secretary of State, I didn't have any team with me when I went into the State  
Department. So my constituency was the Foreign Service. I knew a lot of the leaders of the  
Foreign Service. I had great confidence in them, and we used the Foreign Service very heavily.  
We had fellows like Martin Hillenbrand and Llewellyn Thompson, [Charles E.] Chip Bohlen,  
[James W.] Jimmy Riddleberger, a real top generation of professionals in the Department in my  
time. That was a great source of strength throughout the whole period. I once told a Foreign  
Service luncheon that, "You are my constituency." And it was generally true. I didn't have any  
other constituency--political or otherwise.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Since you raised this question of delays in the State Department in  
responding to the Soviet note--  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Let me introduce your account of this with one quick remark. We thought that  
the reply to Khrushchev's ultimatum ought to be on a Four-Power basis. When you try to  
negotiate such a document, that itself takes time. People have to keep going back to their  
governments, their governments keep coming back suggesting changes, so its not an easy  
problem. Some delay was inevitable under the circumstances, but Marty, you go ahead with your  
account.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: We produced the draft, which the Secretary signed off on, and went over to  
the White House within about a week or ten days at the most. Then there was absolute silence for  
a period. And when we began to make inquiries as to where the draft was and whether it was  
satisfactory, we got embarrassed evasions from the White House. Finally someone, rather  
shamefacedly, admitted they had lost the draft. Well, we immediately sent over another copy, of  
course. And again there was dead silence from the White House. Then we found, somewhat to  
our own amazement, the second draft had been locked up in the safe of one of the White House  
 
 
staff members, who had then gone off on a two-week holiday and no one could get into the safe.  
Well, in the meanwhile, of course, we had circulated the draft to the French, the British, and the  
Germans as an informal draft, because we knew there would be some changes requested. At that  
point, obviously, people in the White House were trying to cover their tracks to the President,  
who was expressing impatience.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Do you think they ever explained to John Kennedy?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Oh, for crying out loud!  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: No, no, no. Because you can see, if you read both Sorensen and [Arthur  
Meier] Schlesinger's [Jr.] account, they blame it all on the State Department.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: They sure do. Do you remember who the staff person was that locked the  
thing up?  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: It was a fellow who later became active in New Jersey politics: Tom Dungan.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: It wasn't Arthur Schlesinger?  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: No. No. It wasn't Arthur Schlesinger.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Oh, Arthur Schlesinger was not in the "chain" over there in the White House. He  
was sitting over there with the social secretaries in the East Wing of the White House.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: The worst was yet to come because--well, I won't say the worst--there was  
more to come. Finally--  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Did you ever tell, did you know that? Did you know this story?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: I didn't know about the--I don't recall that I remember that the document was  
lost.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Well, you signed a memorandum explaining some of this. It was rather gentle  
because it was all rather embarrassing. And then you will recall perhaps that after the draft had  
finally been resurrected and people had had a chance to go at it--the French, and the British and  
the Germans also had to have a chance to go at it--the White House didn't like the style because  
it was to factual. Then they let Ted Sorensen redraft it. It came out with very flowery language,  
but not language that you could use in sending a note, a formal document to the Soviets. The  
French, the British, and the Germans would never have accepted it. So that led to further delays  
as that flowery language got toned down a little bit. And then of course, the compromise, you  
will recall, was that the President used some of the flowery language in the speech which he  
made. And the response to the Soviet Aide Memoire, was in a tone which was more  
conventionally diplomatic, rather than oratorical.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: You see, long experience teaches you that in writing notes and Aides Memoires,  
 
 
official communications; you try to keep the purple adjectives and adverbs out of it as much as  
you can. You just use very measured tones.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: When John Kennedy expressed irritation at the delay for the State  
Department response, and I'm sure he did that to you personally--did he?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Oh, he might have. He might have.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: You never bothered to inform him about this--  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Well, there was a memorandum that the Secretary sent over there, but I think  
it was diverted from-- (laughter). There is no evidence that Kennedy ever saw that memorandum.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Were you and John Kennedy eye-to-eye on the need and your wishes to  
develop a multilateral approach and to try to work with the U.N. where you could take time and  
not try to rush out there and commit ourselves to an action?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Well, he knew and we knew that we had to work with the British, the French,  
and the Germans on this matter. He wasn't resistant to that idea. He could be impatient at the  
delay that was required at times, but--  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: When you were in accord on it, did you agree on it or did you use the  
slowness of the response itself--you know, the delays caused by the bureaucracy--in going to  
these powers as a means of influencing policy?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: No.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: You didn't do that?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: No. No.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Marty, do you have any more?  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: I think that exhausts the questions I had.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Well, I can always go on.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Now, Marty, were you involved in the Russian negotiations in the early  
seventies that led to the new Four-Power agreement--  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Yes. As Assistant Secretary of State, I was in charge of the  
Intergovernmental Coordinating Committee.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: I might say, Richard, that during the Berlin Crisis of '61-'62, I was asked by a  
reporter what my hopes were with regard to Berlin. I said, I hope to be able to pass this problem  
along to my successor." Now, that itself was quite an accomplishment--to pass it along rather  
 
 
than to have it blow up in our faces. And we succeeded in doing that. Then in the early Nixon  
years, with Ambassador [Kenneth] Rush conducting our side of the negotiations partly, the  
Russians, the British, the French, and ourselves concluded a new agreement on Berlin. That has,  
so far, served pretty well to keep Berlin away from being a flashpoint of violence among the  
great powers.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Well, it's had one ironic effect, and that is that it has been, probably, the  
principal reason for the increasing provincialization of Berlin. The Berliners always lived off  
excitement and tension and feeling they were on the front line. Now this agreement has worked  
so well that that tension has left the city and it has had a negative effect on morale.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: We had occasional bits of tension with the Germans over one aspect of the  
Berlin problem. The Federal Republic of Germany wanted to go as far as it could to incorporate  
West Berlin into the Federal Republic. For example, the occasional meeting in which they would  
elect their president met once or twice in West Berlin. The Russians didn't like that at all. We  
had some reservations about how far the West Germans should be allowed to go in this direction  
because, the more they asserted their own authority in West Berlin, the more this undermined our  
authority as victorious powers in World War II, and weakened our position over against the  
Russians. So, we had occasional tensions with the West Germans over that, but we ironed them  
out.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: You will recall that in the Four-Power agreement of '71, the language was  
specifically inserted that the western sectors of Berlin are not a constitutive part of the Federal  
Republic, nor are they governed by it. That was the price the Federal Republic had to pay for  
many of the other concessions which the East was willing to incorporate in the agreement.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Now, the Federal Republic, from time to time, in enacting its own laws has  
extended application of those laws to West Berliners. And so far, that has not created great  
problems.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: But we've always, of course, through what is known as an umbrella  
procedure, every time before a law legally takes effect in West Berlin, it has to be approved by  
the three commandants.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: That's right.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: So that our authority is still maintained there. Those portions of the Basic  
Law, the West German Constitution, that would, in effect, amount to total incorporation of West  
Berlin into the Federal Republic have been suspended ever since 1949 when the Basic Law was  
first passed and remain suspended today. We have certain residual powers as--  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Well, we even conducted a trial over there.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: It turned out to be a fiasco.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: --Federal District Judge--  
 
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: The judge they sent over there was a crusading judge and he was trying a  
hijacking case and the plane landed in West Berlin. And, you know, our normal position would  
be that a hijacker should be punished, but we made exceptions simply because they were  
refugees from Eastern Europe. But the judge took the case in his own hands and ran with it,  
much to the embarrassment of the U.S. government. (laughter)  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: --independence of the judiciary. Pop, my remaining questions more or less  
deal with Vienna and various things before and afterwards. I don't know what your time  
commitments are, yours in particular, and I could work this in at any time.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Fine. I think we've covered the subjects that I wanted to cover pretty well.  
Because I think you've never been given adequate credit by people who have written on the  
subject for the way you handled that year of discussion with Gromyko and the important role It  
played in buying time, and I think in eventually easing the intensive confrontation over Berlin. I  
think it's important to get this on the record.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: I'm not looking for credit.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: No, but I mean it's--  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Pop, here's my problem. When I write my book, I don't want to spend a  
whole lot of time on foreign policy, which can best be done by other people, but I wanted to pick  
out one instance of policy that would be representative of my dad's work out there. It seemed to  
me Berlin would be a good one to write up in some detail and just see how it all worked out--in  
which patient diplomacy can succeed.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: I was hoping to do what was possible to take the fever out of a lot of hot spots. I  
once told some reporters that I would like to see a time when foreign policy news was on page  
twelve of the newspapers instead of page one, when the situation would be so calm and serene  
that they wouldn't even be much interested in it, or to find a time when the Secretary of State  
could cross the Atlantic by ship again instead of by airplane. George Marshall was the last  
Secretary to cross the Atlantic by ship. Now they frantically fly across.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: With the kind of sailor you are, that's something you wouldn't like.  
(laughter) I remember my dad getting sick with a salmon boat bobbing up and down along a  
dock in San Francisco before it even left the dock.  
 
  
 
  
 
END OF SIDE 1  
 
  
 
  
 
BEGINNING OF SIDE 2  
 
  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: --physics investigation with the Russians. We were talking about joining with  
 
 
them to build a very, very modern, sophisticated thing that would take considerable space,  
maybe a few miles, to blow these atomic particles to the ground, and so forth. And some of us  
had the idea that that should be located on the Autobahn to Berlin.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: That was in the sixties.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: If there were some international presences along that Autobahn it would be less  
likely the Russians would head it off and they wouldn't play games with it.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Also, you may recall that there was a proposal which never was put forward  
that the Autobahn be internationalized under general U.N. supervision.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: In retrospect it was a great mistake for us to agree--when was it? In London in  
'43?--when we negotiated with the Russians about where our respective armies would wind up in  
Germany.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: What was the name of that conference?  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: The European Advisory Commission.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: --and our representative--Marty's going to supply the name--the Ambassador  
there, agreed, in working out the agreement for Berlin, did not ask for a land corridor to Berlin.  
And he said later that he didn't because he didn't want the Russians to think that we did not trust  
them. But the purpose of diplomacy is to try to make arrangements where the issue of trust does  
not even arise. We should have asked for--In any event those negotiations, I think, occurred too  
early. We should have waited until--  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Gee. If that was in 1943.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: That was very early. So we pulled back, at the end of the war, we pulled back  
from large areas of Germany--Solingen and down in there--in order to comply with those 1943  
agreements. As a minimum we should have had a pretty broad corridor, land corridor, to Berlin.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Well, we were operating on the basis of different assumptions about what the  
postwar world would look like.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Yes.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt, before he died, had the idea that we would be  
in Germany only a very short time and then we would get out and leave the Germans to their fate  
with the Soviets and with the French, who would take care of them in an appropriate way. Well,  
that obviously--  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Also, the Russians were pressing very hard for such an agreement because they  
were nervous. And one can understand why. They were nervous that otherwise the Germans  
would surrender to the West de facto, rather than wait for the Russians to come in and have to  
 
 
surrender to the Russians. That might well have happened because most of the Germans who  
surrendered much preferred to surrender to the Western Allies than to the Russians. So, the  
Russians were pressing very hard for it. And since we had not yet established the second front, I  
suppose we were inclined to make such an agreement.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Well, I'll give you a ring--your secretary--and tell her the name of that  
ambassador. I think I can dredge it out of one of my books. [note: the ambassador is John G.  
Winant]  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: I would immediately recognize it.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Nice to have an intelligent interview, huh? To have some nice intelligent  
questions and answers for a change. I've been walking into these things just more or less flying  
blind, doing what I can.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: I see you have Alex [Alexander Bryan] Johnson's book there.  
 
  
 
[break in recording]  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: What are we doing putting this on tape?  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: I don't think we have it on tape. If you're going to give it to the Southern  
Center, you can give it to me right here.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: When they announced at Osla that Henry Kissinger had been awarded the Nobel  
Peace Prize, I called Henry and congratulated him. Then I pointed out that the Nobel Prize would  
be tax exempt, because it would be the view of our Internal Revenue Service that he had not  
earned it.  
 
  
 
[break in recording]  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Some of my former colleagues have commented--not many, but some--that one  
problem they had with me was not learning from me what my own views were of a particular  
problem. In the army, traditionally, when you have a staff conference, you start with the juniors  
and you work up to the top to ask for their views on particular things. I learned from George  
Marshall that he did not want to formulate his own views until he had heard what others closer to  
the problem thought about it. And he would hold himself back until he had heard the evidence.  
That was more or less my practice. I had the feeling that in a staff conference that if I expressed  
my views too early, then I wouldn't get the best views of other people present. There would be a  
tendency for them to sort of repeat back to me what I, myself, had said. Do you have any  
particular observation on that? Be perfectly frank, no feelings involved.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: I would say that one thing that impressed me was a statement you made, or at  
least I think you made, that when we had been at a White House meeting and we had a position,  
a State Department position, and the President gave you an opportunity to talk, you were sort of  
reticent to express the views that we thought you had accepted. After you left, you were quoted  
 
 
as having said the reason you didn't speak up was that Arthur Schlesinger was present at the  
meeting and if you'd ever spoken up frankly, everybody in the Georgetown cocktail circuit  
would know what you had said by evening. I don't know whether you ever said that.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Arthur Schlesinger, in his book, A Thousand Days, said that I used to sit in those  
meetings like an old Buddha, without saying anything. That was true when there were thirty-five  
people, including Arthur Schlesinger, sitting around the walls. So, typically, I would either see  
the President ahead of time, in addition to one of those meetings, or pass him a note and ask him  
not to make a decision and let me talk with him about it in his office after the meeting. Because I  
did not want the content of such discussions circulated all around to the Washington Post, the  
New York Times, gossip, and so forth. But there was another aspect to it, and that is that I never  
brought back to the Department in any detail the content of my discussions with the President.  
There were times when I would see the President--I would present the Department's point of  
view as well as I could--and in a case where the President's decision went the other way, I would  
come back and give effect to the President's decision. For example, when I first took office, after  
a few weeks or months I learned that as a holdover from the Eisenhower/Dulles period, that  
someone in my outer office would listen in on my talks with the President on the phone and  
make little memos of those telephone calls and circulate them to people in the Department. Well,  
I immediately put a stop to that and immediately installed a phone to my office connected with  
the White House that no one outside could listen in on. Because I felt that there should be  
solidarity between a President and a Secretary of State over against the wide world, including the  
Department of State.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Well, my problem was never that you didn't let me know what you were  
thinking on a specific issue; because as the State Department is structured, with the  
memorandum system and so on, if you signed off on telegrams, obviously that meant that you  
accepted what was in those documents.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Although you had two ways of saying those things: One way suggested that  
you had read it and the other way suggested that you--  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: When I read it for information, I would put "DR" and a stroke through my  
initials, but when I read it and approved it, I would put "DR" without the stroke.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: That's usually been the way--not always, but usually the way Secretaries of  
State either assent or dissent from a specific position. In meetings, head-to-head meetings, I  
never had the feeling that you were holding back essential information. In fact, you were  
involved in drafting some things yourself. I remember when Foy Kohler and I worked directly  
with you in drafting a paper which was supposed to set forth three fundamental interests, vital  
interests, of the United States in Berlin. That went through a number of drafts. I think the idea  
was that you were going to take it up with the President and get his okay on that. That would  
then become sort of a fundamental assumption of American Berlin policy. Now, there were some  
things that made you impatient. I remember--is this being recorded?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Shut it off.  
 
  
 
 
[break in recording]  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Tape's rolling. I ran across this in the literature. I'm glad you brought that up,  
Pop. One of the complaints that people had back then, in conjunction with good remarks, is that  
people had a hard time figuring out your mind, knowing what your mind was.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Well I wanted to know what--  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: What was in your mind? Didn't you fellows in the Department of State, in  
the Foreign Service, over a period of time, develop little techniques for reading the mind of Dean  
Rusk? You know, like the way he would cock his eyebrows in certain situations?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Let me comment a little bit on this matter of delegation. Again, I learned from  
George Marshall the great importance of delegation. Something like three thousand cables a day  
went out of that department with my name signed to them. And of those, I would see maybe six  
or seven in the course of the day. The President might see one or two. But the rest of them had to  
go out on the basis of authority and responsibility delegated to a lot of officers in the Department  
of State. I tried not to--I realize that when you dele gate, you do not abdicate your responsibility.  
It was never complete. But on the other hand, I tried to encourage officers to fill up the horizons  
of their responsibility. You might be surprised, or Marty might be surprised, that on no single  
occasion in eight years did I ever criticize a colleague for exceeding his authority. The problem  
was to get people to fill up the horizons of their responsibility--to go ahead and take it and live  
with the results. I once wrote a little note to Harlan Cleveland on this, because Harlan was a  
fellow to whom you could delegate extensively. He would go ahead and act. He was that kind of  
fellow. I wrote him once and asked him how he figured that out. He said it was very simple, that  
when he thought he knew what I thought about something, he would go ahead and act. If he  
realized he did not know what I thought about something, he would come and ask me. Well,  
that's just an easy way to answer a very complicated question.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: There was a guy back there that claimed that he could read the mind of Dean  
Rusk without really being told what was in his mind. Do you remember who that was?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: No, I don't remember.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: By observing your facial gestures.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: I wouldn't ever claim to--  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Now, Marty is a fellow who could really accept responsibility.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Did anyone ever go to the mat with you and really wrestle with you directly  
on that point? Why don't you--you know, these critics who said that you held too many of the  
cards close to you? Did they ever really fight with you on that point?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Sometimes it worked the other way around. For example, at one time the Iraqis  
were seriously threatening Kuwait with invasion. The British had a very small force there. In the  
 
 
middle of this little crisis our Commander-in-Chief at Norfolk, who had a task force in the Indian  
Ocean, sent a telegram us saying that he had ordered Task Force so-and-so to steam north. [He  
was down in the Indian Ocean at the time.] He said, "Request instructions." So, I sent this to the  
Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and asked them for their recommendation, and they came back  
with a pretty complicated, convoluted sort of thing saying if I thought so-and-so the Admiral  
should do so-and-so; if I thought so-and-so, he should--; if I thought so-and-so; and so forth. And  
I sent it back to them and said, "Look, all the Admiral needs is a compass direction. He can sail  
north; he can sail south; he can sail east. He can't sail west. He'd run into Africa. All I want from  
you is a compass direction." You see, they didn't have the operational sense of what was required  
by the Admiral who wanted to know which way to sail his fleet. I did find, Marty, if I may say  
so, that although I tried to delegate very heavily to Assistant Secretaries, it wasn't that easy to get  
the Assistant Secretaries to delegate to anybody below them. When I would call an Assistant  
Secretary in to talk about a problem, I would try to get him to bring with him his juniors who  
were working on the problem--  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: I always thought that Foy Kohler was very good at that.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Yes.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Partly because we had this task force which threw us together in much closer  
juxtaposition than would normally be the case. Foy Kohler had the Ambassadorial Group to  
worry about. Berlin was a sort of perpetual, daily merry-go-round. You couldn't escape the  
subject. That does not--coming back to the original question, I don't have the impression that we  
ever suffered from your playing cards too close to your chest and were not taking us into your  
confidence and therefore we were sort of floundering around without adequate guidance from  
you. That's not the impression I had.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Some of that talk emerged in the very beginning of the Kennedy  
Administration when there was confusion as to who--  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: There were a lot of hot-dogs in the Kennedy Administration.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Incidentally, did any of the White House people, staff people, get involved  
or interfere or inject themselves into the handling of this Berlin situation in the same way that  
there was some of that for, say, the Bay of Pigs?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: I think they were less involved in the Berlin problem than they were in the--than  
some of them were--in the Bay of Pigs.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: You will recall there was a group which included our Legal Advisor,  
[Abram] Abe Chayes, Schlesinger, Sorensen, and others in the White House--[McGeorge] Mac  
Bundy was never a member--who felt that the approach of the previous administration to the  
Berlin problem had been too hard, that there was a basis for negotiating with the Soviets. Dean  
[Gooderham] Acheson then became sort of their bete noire when he was brought in to make  
recommendations on Berlin. But all that sort of blew away after the confrontation in Vienna,  
because it was quite obvious then that there was not any basis for substantive negotiations with  
 
 
the Soviets.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: See, Arthur Schlesinger would occasionally sort of move in to express views on  
some foreign policy matters, but he was not taken all that seriously by the President. For  
example, he has written, later, about my resistance and Ambassador [Frederick] Fred [G.]  
Reinhardt's resistance, who was ambassador in Rome, to the opening to the left in Italian politics.  
He was all in favor of all this, you see--bring in the Socialists and all sorts of other people. I  
simply took the view that the Italians were grown men, that his was an Italian problem, and that  
we were not going to put pressure on them, on a matter that was so essentially internal and  
domestic of character. Fred Reinhardt and I fully agreed on that, so we resisted Arthur  
Schlesinger's attempt to put pressure on the Italians to move to the left in their politics. I  
remember once sitting with Kennedy, talking about something, and Arthur Schlesinger came into  
the room, and he made some damn fool suggestion to President Kennedy about some foreign  
policy matter, and then he left. And after he left, Kennedy turned to me and said, "Arthur is  
sometimes very interesting in the rose garden." So, he was not a major shaker.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Do you care to reflect on Vienna itself?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Another time.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Good, I would like to hear about some of that.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Vienna happens to reinforce my view and that of other Secretaries of State that  
they should be very skeptical about summit meetings.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: I take it Johnny Kennedy, based on his experience there, was not only a little  
shaken by it, but became less of a believer in personal diplomacy between the heads of state.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Well, that was a meeting that--you see, there is something about the chemistry of  
a president that causes him to think that he can just sit down with the other fellow and that they  
can work things out. But that was a meeting that was without an agreed agenda. It was supposed  
to be a get-acquainted meeting. Kennedy wanted to have it. And in the get-acquainted meeting  
he came away with an ultimatum on Berlin. Although some of the Kremlin watchers would  
criticize Kennedy on one point about that meeting, which I agreed with Kennedy. Khrushchev  
started out with a long ideological diatribe about socialism, and the world revolution and all that  
stuff. When it was over, Kennedy did not respond in kind. I think he said something like, "Well  
Mr. Chairman, you are not going to make a communist out of me, and I am not going to make a  
capitalist out of you, so let's get down to business." Well, some of them, George [F.] Kennan  
among them, thought that Kennedy should have gone back with a long ideological speech of his  
own, you see. Well, I think I rather agree with Kennedy on that; to cut through all this  
ideological malarkey is probably the better way to do it.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: So it was you and Kennedy, and Khrushchev and his foreign minister. Is that  
correct?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Yes. Gromyko was there.  
 
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Did Kennedy make mistakes in the discussions there that you felt--  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: I did not think that he made mistakes. I think that he was startled, and I must say  
I was surprised, that Khrushchev came at him in such a brutal fashion on this Berlin matter. It  
seemed to me that Khrushchev was deliberately trying to intimidate this young, new President of  
the United States.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: In Kennedy's response to that, did he respond in any way that may have  
given Khrushchev the impression that the U.S. could indeed be jocking around?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Not at Vienna.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Because the press reports and comments made of that period suggest that  
John Kennedy was shaken by those events. That would be more a reflection of what happened.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Well, he was shaken by the idea that this fellow Khrushchev thought that he  
could do that kind of thing to the President of the United States. After all, Khrushchev said at one  
point, "If the West interferes, there will be war." Well now, diplomats at that level almost never  
use the word "war." They say such things as "the gravest possible situation," or something like  
that. But Khrushchev hit him with the word "war," and Kennedy went right back in kind. No, I  
am still very skeptical about meetings at the summit: anything that can be described as  
negotiations at the summit. I do not bother about good will visits and so-called get-acquainted  
visits. But on the American side, these meetings tend to build up expectations of a result. And a  
President is under a different kind of pressure than his Soviet counterpart would be. In a sense,  
[George Pratt] Schultz will be under that kind of pressure when he meets with Gromyko in  
January. A curious thing Marty, although when Gromyko accurately and ably represented the  
views of the Soviet government, and there are times when those views were very deceptive in  
character, that caused him, in effect, to lie from our point of view, as he did to Kennedy over the  
Cuban missiles. But in other kinds of relationships which were not directly related to the view of  
the Soviet government I found him, in effect, a professional colleague. For example, when we  
had talks we would agree as to what we would say to the press about the talks. He always abided  
by those agreements. And there were times when I would say something to him on the  
understanding that he would not make it public or transmit it to other governments, and he  
applied to those agreements.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: Including his own government?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Oh, no. No, I never tried to stand between him and his own government. You  
cannot do that.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: What remark did Gromyko make to you on the occasion when you were  
leaving at a social function there in Washington?  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Oh, he spoke quite good English. And frequently when we would meet  
bilaterally there would be four or five of us on each side. But frequently we would, just the two  
 
 
of us, draw aside over into a corner and talk about some things. Those were quite frank talks. But  
when we met for the last time, when he knew that I would no longer be in office, he drew me  
aside and spoke in friendly terms about the eight years' relationship we had had, despite the  
many crises we had to deal with. The old boy relaxed a bit. I appreciated that because I respected  
him as a professional diplomat, although I had to sit at adjoining foxholes and toss grenades at  
him quite a lot.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: He certainly has proved that he is the world's record holder for longevity.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Yes, he is dean of the world's foreign ministers now by considerable. And I think  
one of the principal reasons that he survived in their system is that he is a very competent  
diplomat. He knows the game, both in bilateral talks and in multilateral bodies like the United  
Nations.  
 
  
 
HILLENBRAND: Same as [Anatoly F.] Dobrynin in Washington.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: Yes, they know the business.  
 
  
 
RICHARD RUSK: The Soviets have this capacity for keeping their good people in the same  
spot where they are the most useful.  
 
  
 
DEAN RUSK: There is one fellow they have under used, in my judgment. That is [Supagreth]  
their interpreter. He is a very able fellow, and my hunch is that in terms of his abilities he ought  
long since to have been an ambassador somewhere for them. But he is so good as an interpreter  
that they sort of kept him on the job. At least we promoted Chip Bohlen out of the interpreter's  
job which he had during or just after the war. But they have not done that for Supagreth.  
 
  
 
  
 
END OF SIDE 2