Dean Rusk Oral History Collection

Rusk DDDD: Part 1 of 2

Dean Rusk interviewed by Richard Rusk, Thomas J. Schoenbaum, and Louis Bruno Sohn

circa 1985

The complete interview also includes Rusk EEEE: Part 2.

RICHARD RUSK: We're talking this morning with Dean Rusk. The interview is on the United
Nations, and doing the interviewing is Professor Louis Sohn, Tom Schoenbaum, and Rich.
SOHN: One of the issues you had to face when you came back to the State Department in the
1960s was the [Hubert Horatio] Humphrey proposal for the establishment of ACDA, the Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency, and the touchy question of the division of work between the
new agency, the State Department, the autonomy of the agency, and the kind of concurrent
problem of [John J.] McCloy being also involved as kind of a sad view of false views dealing
with arms control and negotiating with [Valerian A.] Zorin.

DEAN RUSK: I suppose that there was a problem in precise legal terms because there was a
little confusion around the edges. But the head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
took the rank of an Undersecretary of State, and it was clear that in things like negotiations he
would be working with the advice of the Secretary of State. Now we were fortunate in having
William [C.] Foster as the new head of that agency because he and I were old friends from
earlier service and we had the same general views toward arms control. We wanted to make
some headway. So with the Arms Control Agency keeping in very close touch with the Arms
Control Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of which Hubert Humphrey
was chairman, we worked out relationships very well. Now we did have in those days what we
called a Committee of Principles. That was a group composed of the Secretary of State, the
Secretary of Defense, the chairman of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the head of
CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And we spent a
lot of time in that committee, not through delegates, but ourselves--we ourselves at that level.
And we soon developed a pretty strong consensus there about how we might make some
headway in the arms control business. We didn't always succeed; we had some disappointments;
but we did achieve the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and one or two other things. But the working
relationships, although theoretically complex, were really quite easy because of the personal
relations among the individuals involved.

SOHN: What was your view on the McCloy and Zorin Agreement?

DEAN RUSK: Remind me of what that was.

SOHN: There was an agreement in the summer of '61 that the United States and the Soviet
Union would work together on a treaty on general and complete disarmament. The United States'
insistence at that time was in particular that there would be two things in addition to
disarmament, namely effective control and adequate peacekeeping machinery, something that
already Chris [Christian Archibald] Herter developed in one of his last speeches. Just those three

points and then you emphasized those points in your later speeches. There was a superficial
agreement between McCloy and Zorin, at least on a piece of paper which had then been
approved by the United Nations and reapproved a few years ago in connection with the First
Special General Assembly Session on Disarmament. It is kind of a sacred document for the
disarmers, but I don't know whether the State Department really paid much attention.

DEAN RUSK: Well the Soviets from time to time have come up with resolutions calling for
general and complete disarmament. But we always had great skepticism about the content of any
such phrase as far as the Soviets were concerned. For example, we did not believe that the
Soviets would withdraw their forces from Eastern Europe because if they were to do so they ran
the risk of losing the loyalty and allegiance of the countries of Eastern Europe. And we did not
believe that they would demobilize to an extent that would expose them to the masses of the
People's Republic of China. So what we tried to do was to find some way to take some important
steps within the general rubric of general and complete disarmament that at least would get going
down this trail toward limitation of arms on a practical basis where one could. But that McCloy-
Zorin agreement was one of those kinds of agreements in principle kind of thing. Secretary
George [Catlett] Marshall used to tell us never to agree in principle because all that means is you
have not agreed yet; wait until you get the fine print spelled out before you know whether or not
you have a meeting of the minds. A little bit like the later agreement in principle between
President [Gerald Rudolph] Ford [Jr.] and Mr. [Leonid Ilich] Brezhnev at Vladivostok where it
took two or three years before we found that we were not going to agree on the details. So I
wouldn't attach too much importance to the McCloy-Zorin agreement as far as actual moves in
the field of arms Imitation were concerned.

SOHN: One of the proposals at the time that it seems both the State Department and the Defense
Department agree upon was that you can disarm about one- third without anybody really
suffering much. And therefore when the draft treaty was--When the General Complete
Disarmament was written in the beginning of '62 it really was a treaty for one set of disarmament
plus one set--second part was perhaps a second one-third, and in the far, far future, the third onethird.
But it really was a treaty for one-third disarmament, something that the Russians have
proposed since the 1920s though it was not thought in Washington that it might be possible.

DEAN RUSK: Yes, that is correct. The idea was that we would do this by stages and that each
stage would then be tested thoroughly to see whether it was adequate for purposes of peace
before moving on to the next stage. Now we were prepared to take a one-third reduction,
certainly in nuclear as well as in conventional forces. But when you got around to taking the
actual steps necessary, we found the Soviets more reluctant than their rhetoric would suggest that
they might be.

RICHARD RUSK: Pop, in view of your comment about George Marshall's reluctance to agree
in principle to the details that were spelled out, what was your specific position with respect to
this reply? Were you advising the President to go ahead?

DEAN RUSK: I think it was clearly in the field of rhetoric, propaganda, theory and that it would
not mean very much until you put arms and legs in it with some specific agreements on some

specific measures of arras reduction, or at least limitation. Now I didn't object to it, but I just
didn't think it was going to produce much of a result standing by itself.

SOHN: Another problem, of course, that people thought you were going to have coming into
Secretary of State was the fact that the same time Adlai [Ewing] Stevenson was appointed the
head of the United States Mission to the United Nations with Cabinet status and people were
worried how that could really work.

DEAN RUSK: When President [John Fitzgerald] Kennedy telephoned me--I have described this
in another tape--to tell me he wanted me to take on the job, I told him that there were many
things we should discuss before he made any such decision. So he asked me to come down to
West Palm Beach the next morning and we could have a long talk. And I did; and we spent all
morning going over a variety of things. But particularly, I hoped that he would call Adlai
Stevenson and insist that he take the United Nations job. He was one of our most distinguished
Americans, standard bearer in two elections for the Democratic Party, well-known
internationally; he had been involved in the birth of the United Nations. And so I thought it
would be a great thing if we could get him to take the U.N. job, whatever he might have wanted
to be as far as the Presidency was concerned or even possibly Secretary of State. I had talked to
Kennedy earlier about Adlai Stevenson as a possibility for Secretary of State; but it was clear
that he shied away from that, possibly because of Adlai Stevenson's behavior in the Democratic
Convention of 1960, possibly because he did not want someone as Secretary of State who might
forget who was President. And Adlai might have been a person who would readily do that. But
anyhow, I was there in the room with Kennedy when he telephoned Adlai Stevenson that
morning to take on the U.N. job, and I must say Kennedy did quite a selling job on Adlai. When
Kennedy got through describing the role of our Ambassador to the United Nations, I had to
wonder what was left for the President and the Secretary of State to do. (laughter) Every
President builds up that job up there when they're trying to recruit somebody to take it. But
anyhow, Adlai, rather reluctantly, did take it on and he made us a very good representative up
there.

SCHOENBAUM: There are some accounts that say, referring to that conversation, that say that
you talked to Stevenson at that time and that you sold Stevenson on the job.

DEAN RUSK: Oh, I might have had a few words with him. No, it was Kennedy who carried the
burden. But anyhow, I per--

RICHARD RUSK: Did he ever forget who was President and who was Secretary of State?

DEAN RUSK: No. No. Not when he was at the U.N. He did, however, underline the interest of
the new administration in the United Nations. And I feel, myself, we should always have one of
our most distinguished Americans on that job up there to do just that and also to see to it that the
U.N. is given adequate and careful consideration in Washington.

SOHN: How did it work? Did he actually come to meetings with the Cabinet?

DEAN RUSK: He would come to Cabinet meetings and occasional meetings of the National
Security Council, and came down frequently when there were ad hoc meetings to take up
particularly important questions, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis for example. But the person at
the U.N. cannot participate in policymaking in New York. That person has to get down to
Washington because of the different departments and agencies involved and all the cumbersome
procedures we have to go through in forming policy. So we had an office for him in the State
Department Office and a secretary and a car so that he would feel comfortable when he came to
Washington to present his views and to take part in policymaking. And he did a good deal of
that. Of course it was easy to consider him a member of the Cabinet; he had been the standard
bearer of the Democratic Party for two campaigns. So he was considered a member of the
Cabinet, and indeed second in rank to me, for some reason. When the Cabinet would enter a joint
session of Congress, I would be leading the parade of the Cabinet officers and he would be at my
side, rather than have the secretary and the treasurer be the number two men.

SOHN: How was it later when Arthur [Joseph] Goldberg took that job? Was it more difficult?

DEAN RUSK: Let me say about Adlai first that Adlai sometimes grumbled to his friends about
getting so many instructions from the Department of State, and I understood that. But it seemed
to me that no one was more glad to get instructions than Adlai. He was such an intelligent and
imaginative person that he could see the disadvantages of any course of action and often would
find it difficult to make up his mind. And these instructions helped in that process. But he was
brilliant in advocacy. If law students want to see a brilliant piece of advocacy they can look at
the handling of the Bay of Pigs for us in the United Nations by Adlai Stevenson. He hated every
bit of it, every word of it--

RICHARD RUSK: Didn't have a leg to stand on for any of it.

DEAN RUSK: --and a very poor case to handle, but he handled brilliantly what was almost an
impossible case. But there was an interesting contrast between Adlai Stevenson and Arthur
Goldberg. Adlai was not a good negotiator. If you gave him a position and then sort of indicated
where a fallback position might be, he would be at the fallback position in five minutes because
he was so anxious to get an agreement with anybody on anything. Now Arthur Goldberg could
make some dull speeches. Compared to Adlai's they were certainly dull. But he was a brilliant
negotiator: that lifelong experience as a labor negotiator. If you gave him an opening position
and then a fallback position he would take the opening position and he would gnaw at it and
work at it and badger the opposition and do everything he could to move the opening position
along before he would give any thought to the fallback position. So if you could find someone
with the forensic skills of an Adlai Stevenson and the negotiating skills of an Arthur Goldberg,
you would have an ideal representative at the United Nations.

RICHARD RUSK: Pop, can I follow up your one comment on Adlai Stevenson being almost
too cerebral a man to be able to come to a decision on things? Did you run into that with other
people? Is it possible for a man to be almost too intellectual in positions of real leadership?

DEAN RUSK: Well, I wondered since I strongly supported Adlai Stevenson both in '52 and '56
to no avail, I sometimes wonder what kind of a President he would have made because of this

problem of reaching a conclusion and making a decision. Now contrast that a bit with Harry [S ]
Truman. You could present Harry Truman all the elements in a very complicated question, and
they would build up there like a heap of jackstraws all linked together, intertwined, pointing in
different directions. Harry Truman would study that heap of jackstraws and then reach into it and
pull out the one that he thinks is the decisive element to him in that problem and he'd pull that
jackstraw out of the pile and make his decision and go home and never look back. Now I
personally believe--I can't document this--that successful decision-makers have to be capable of
oversimplification at the moment of decision. They have to find what seems to them to be
critically important. Another example: Harry Truman asked me to head the delegation to
negotiate the first administrative agreement with Japan that had to do with the stationing of
American forces in Japan after the peace treaty. Well the bureaucracy had built up a foot-high
stack of papers about all the things that ought to go into that agreement. We went over and
briefed President Truman on it and he listened and then dismissed us. Then he called me into the
oval office and said, "Now Dean, don't worry about all this crap. I want you to go out there and
get an agreement like the NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] agreement that does not
discriminate for the Japanese, does not discriminate against the Japanese. Now those are your
instructions. You go on out there." So I went out there as head of that delegation and sometimes
my own staff did not completely understand what I was doing when I was insisting on one point
and giving away another one, but that is the simplification that a decision-maker has to have if he
is to be successful. You see, another thing about that is that someone like an Adlai Stevenson
who sees all the elements and can worry about all of them might tend to try to balance these
things off and find a middle ground or even the least common denominator. And very often the
least common denominator is the worst decision. So one has to be careful with that.

SOHN: Another subject I would like to raise relates to relations between United Nations and the
Organization of American States in your period.

RICHARD RUSK: Pardon me. The relations between the United Nations and the Organization
of--

SOHN: Of American States.

DEAN RUSK: O.A.S.

SOHN: You remember early in your tenure there was the Punte del Este conference and
exclusion of Cuba from the Organization of American States. Immediately Cuba and Russia
brought it to the Security Council and tried to get Security Council to overrule it or at least ask
for an advisory opinion of the International Court on the subject. And that was one of the first
important crises between the U.N. and the O.A.S. But there were some others since.

DEAN RUSK: Louis, you were at San Francisco and you will remember that it was the Latin
Americans who insisted upon that section of the charter that deals with regional arrangements.
There was some reluctance in the American delegation on that. But with a lot of help by Nelson
Aldrich Rockefeller and others, the United States delegation finally came around to it. But the
underlying idea there was, among the Latin American states, that they wanted the international
law of the western hemisphere to be determined in the western hemisphere. And they did not

wish problems in the western hemisphere to be subject to the activities of the U.N. Security
Council where the Soviet Union was sitting there with a veto. So that was the beginning of the
attitude in the O.A.S., that the affairs of the western hemisphere would be handled in the O.A.S.,
not in the U.N. Now once in a while when some member of the O.A.S. is disgruntled about what
has happened in the O.A.S. on a particular matter, they might themselves take it to the U.N. And
on certain occasions the O.A.S. must report to the U.N. on what they have done in particular
matters. In any event, what the O.A.S. does is full public knowledge and any member of the U.N.
can bring it before the U.N. Security Council if they wish to do so. But if the O.A.S. is prepared
to take charge of and handle a particular problem, then it is not easy for the United Nations to
take it up and try to deal with it in the United Nations. That's been a pretty strong position of the
Latin American countries as far as the U.N. is concerned.

SOHN: After the Cuban crisis, because another case that caused a lot of trouble on that subject
was the Dominican Republic in 1965. There were several Dominican Republic crises before, but
going the other way, when [Rafael Leonidas] Trujillo was trying to stir up trouble in Latin
America, trying to assassinate the President of Venezuela and things like that. At that time again-
-I think that was very probably the first case in which the O.A.S. and U.N. clashed slightly
because the Soviet Union said the O.A.S. cannot make sanctions against Dominican Republic.
That was before the Cuban case.

DEAN RUSK: Without the permission of the Security Council. SOHN: Without the permission
of the Security Council and Article 53.

DEAN RUSK: Yeah.

SOHN: And the United States went there trying to defend the O.A.S. action by saying that those
are not sanctions, those are only economic sanctions and economic sanctions are permissible. It's
only the military sanctions--

DEAN RUSK: Or they are not measure as intended by the charter. Well that's always been a
thin point for us to skate on when the O.A.S. takes action. Now that was also true with the
unanimous resolution on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Was that resolution lawful without the
approval of the U.N. Security Council? And it takes a good deal of leger de main for our lawyers
somehow to distinguish actions of that sort from measure as contemplated in the U.N. Charter.
And I'm not sure that we've always been successful in doing so. Now in the Dominican affair one
has to, if one understands it, one must think of two phases--two phases that were really quite
separate as far as Washington was concerned. Juan Bosch had been elected president in the
Dominican Republic; we had supported him; we wished him well; we had him to Washington on
a visit. But some of his key friends in the hemisphere, like Governor [Luis] Munoz Marin of
Puerto Rico, [Romulo] Betancourt of Venezuela, [Jose] Figueres of Costa Rica, said that Juan
Bosch would not last a year, that he was a poet, a dreamer, a writer, and he had no idea whatever
about how to organize an administration and run a country. Well we tried to get those three to
give Juan Bosch some real advice because they had all three had experience in administering a
country; but he wouldn't take it, he wouldn't listen to them, he wouldn't give them much time.
Well he lasted just less than a year, I believe. There were outbreaks of violence throughout the
country and heavy fighting in the area of the capital, Santo Domingo. The Bosch government

collapsed and he fled. Now in that turmoil, the head of the military forces and the head of the
police forces both told us that they could not accept responsibility for the safety of American and
foreign nationals in Santo Domingo. It looked as though these American and foreign nationals
were in very serious danger there. A good many of them had collected at a hotel outside of the
city and some very drastic reports were coming in about the internal situation. So at the urging of
our ambassador, then President Johnson, using a contingency plan which had been prepared on
the personal direction of President Kennedy, landed the Marines for the purpose of securing
American foreign nationals. The Foreign Diplomatic Corps in Santo Domingo was strongly in
favor of this. A few days later we got a message of thanks from the Papal Nuncio, who was the
dean of the Diplomatic Corps, for doing this. So we landed the Marines. Well as soon as we
established a position ashore, various elements began coming out of the city, Santo Domingo, to
tell us what was going on in the city. One of those was the Secretary General of Juan Bosch's
own political party. They seemed to agree that there would be a blood bath; that as a result of
that blood bath there would be either a Trujillo-type dictatorship or a [Fidel Ruz] Castro-type
dictatorship; and they urged that something be done about it. Now that led to phase two. So we
decided to get the OAS involved, to try to negotiate an interim government which would be in
charge during elections. There was an OAS peace force with some elements from other countries
joining American forces on the island. Then we had elections. Juan Bosch did not return to the
Dominican Republic to campaign. He was fearful of his own life, perhaps with some reason. He
would not return to campaign without American military escorts. Well we couldn't, we feel,
escort a particular candidate around the country while he was campaigning, so we turned that
down.

RICHARD RUSK: Does Juan Bosch acknowledge these things?

DEAN RUSK: Oh, I'm not sure that Juan Bosch's account would be exactly the same as mine.
My own hunch at the time was that had he come back to the Dominican Republic and
campaigned, then he might well have been reelected. He might well have been elected. But he
didn't do that and wouldn't do it without American security escorts.

RICHARD RUSK: Can I raise one point here? That is, former Ambassador [William] Tapley
Bennett [Jr.] will be here June 17, and we've saved this whole Dominican Republic situation in
an interview for him. I'd like to invite you to sit in with us if you're here and are available. That
would be a lot of fun. We plan to devote an entire interview of [sic] the Dominican Republic.

SCHOENBAUM: That's June 17 at 11:30.

RICHARD RUSK: That's right.

DEAN RUSK: Well, let me say that when--

RICHARD RUSK: What we could do for the purpose of this interview is, if possible, rather than
get into the detail of this, stick to the United Nations aspects of it.

SOHN: Yeah. That's what I want to do.

DEAN RUSK: I must say that where the members of the Organization of American States feel
strongly about it and they take the view in the United Nations that the United Nations should not
get into a particular issue, they should leave it to the Organization of American States; well that
plus the United States establishes a very powerful position in the United Nations because there
are a good many other members of the United Nations who are very sympathetic to that view. So
it was very difficult for the Soviet Union to push the United Nations into a matter where the
Organization of American States was opposed to their participation. Now always; sometimes it
would come before the U.N. Security Council or something of that sort.

SOHN: In this case when one of the later incidents occurred in which quite a number of people
were killed, some fighting, the matter went back to the Security Council. The Security Council
adopted the resolution and authorized the Secretary General to send his representative to the
Dominican Republic. At that time it was a nice group of people because it was special
representative of the Secretary General of the Organization of American States, special
representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations, and Mr. McGeorge Bundy went
on his mission as well. So there were three people trying to advise the various local people who
were involved in trying to solve the problem from three different points of view. The O.A.S.
people got so angry that they resigned and said they cannot do their job of trying to find a
solution if United Nations and United States would be interfering later. I wonder whether they
came to you to try to smooth the feathers.

DEAN RUSK: Well that particular enterprise simply produced no results. It really didn't amount
to very much. That was the one instance during the sixties that I can recall where we called on
the Assistant to the President for National Security to undertake any negotiation. And the results
were not good so we didn't do it again.

RICHARD RUSK: Talking about McGeorge Bundy?

DEAN RUSK: Yeah. But--

RICHARD RUSK: That's not always his best role, I understand.

DEAN RUSK: (laughter) But in any event, the representative of the U.N. Secretary General was
simply not in touch with the real forces at work in the Dominican Republic. You see, when we
were faced with this possibility--

END OF SIDE 1

BEGINNING OF SIDE 2

DEAN RUSK: --very much mindful of the fact that the Organization of American States had
imposed both sanctions, both on Trujillo and on Castro. So there was a disposition in the
Organization of American States to avoid either type of dictatorship in the Dominican Republic,

and a good deal of feeling that we ought to give the Dominican people a chance to decide for
themselves what kind of government they wanted. But, no, at that time the interest taken by the
United Nations had very little to do with the outcome on the island itself in the Dominican
Republic. This was largely done through O.A.S. functions and forces.

SOHN: So I gather you feel that between the regional organization and United Nations, regional
organization should get preference normally.

DEAN RUSK: Well I would say that is true as far as the western hemisphere is concerned. I
wouldn't necessarily broaden that judgment to any other regional organization, but it's possible
that the same situation would obtain there. But I think there is a kind of presumption in the
Charter that if regional organizations can handle these problems they should do so. You see,
when you look at Article 33 of the Charter, the exhaustion of other remedies article, it seems
clear to me that those who drafted the Charter thought that debate in the U.N. was a drastic
remedy because questions are not even supposed to be referred to the U.N. unless negotiation,
mediation, arbitration, all regional agencies have all been exhausted. Now some of the strong
supporters of the U.N. more or less overlook Article 33, but if you don't throw something
immediately into the U.N. they charge you with bypassing the U.N. But the U.N. is the last resort
as far as the charter was concerned.

RICHARD RUSK: Pop, you made an earlier statement that the major impetus for the
Organization of American States, the collective security aspects of it, and the idea of matters
relating to the western hemisphere being settled within that regional organization, cane mostly
from other members and not necessarily from the United States.

DEAN RUSK: I think the strong initiative for that came from the Latin American countries as a
group at the San Francisco Conference which drafted the U.N. Charter.

RICHARD RUSK: Okay. But how does that fly in the face of our own Monroe Doctrine, the
action you've just described in the Dominican Republic. The Marine Corps history that I
personally remember as a recruit at Paris Island goes back over the last 150 years? Surely we
were not indifferent to that particular argument. And did we not also play a role in seeing to it
that indeed the affairs of the western hemisphere would be decided by a regional organization
and not necessarily the United Nations? That's certainly been our role.

DEAN RUSK: Some of the members of our delegation at San Francisco who were looking upon
the U.N. as a universal organization and sort of were jealous of any infringement on its
universality--people like Leo Pasvolsky were pretty skeptical about these regional arrangements.
So there was not unanimity in the American delegation. You mentioned the Monroe Doctrine. I
don't know whether the Marines taught you, Rich, that although the Monroe Doctrine has been a
very important part of our foreign policy throughout the 19th century that we have generalized
the Monroe Doctrine into the Charter of the Organization of American States and the Rio Mutual
Defense Treaty. In other words they--

RICHARD RUSK: The Marines only taught me that the Marines landed frequently. (laughter)

DEAN RUSK: Right.

RICHARD RUSK: And with great pride through that century.

DEAN RUSK: Well the Monroe Doctrine has been made in effect the responsibility of the entire
hemisphere through the charter of the O.A.S. and--I never invoked the Monroe Doctrine myself.

RICHARD RUSK: Have we renounced the Monroe Doctrine?

DEAN RUSK: Not necessarily. But we've put it in the back corner because we've created a
hemisphere-wide organization to deal with the issues raised by the Monroe Doctrine. And I think
that's a great improvement on the Monroe Doctrine myself.

SOHN: It goes back to Franklin [Delano] Roosevelt who, in 1933 I guess or something around
that time, declared that the Monroe Doctrine had been replaced by the Good Neighbor Policy.

DEAN RUSK: That's right, which became the charter of the O.A.S. and the Rio Treaty.

SOHN: One other crisis in your early days at the United Nations was, of course, [Nikita
Sergeevich] Khrushchev proposals for a Troika Secretary General after he got very unhappy at
what the United Nations was doing in the Congo.

DEAN RUSK: Well he came in with that proposal for a Triune Secretary General; one from the-
-

RICHARD RUSK: How do you spell that, Triune?

SCHOENBAUM: T-r-i-u-n-e.

DEAN RUSK: Yeah. A three-headed Secretary General. There would be one drawn from the
capitalist countries, one drawn from the Soviet block, one drawn from the neutral countries. And
these three could only act in unanimity. Well we resisted that very hard, partly because the
proposal had come from, as Louis Sohn points out, irritation by the Russians at Dag [Hjaimar]
Hammarskjold, for example. And we managed to beat that back. However, I think the Soviets
did, by pressing for that proposal very hard--and they did press it hard--did tend to water down
the role of the U.N. Secretary General. Because U Thant and those who have followed him have
not been as assertive as Trygve Lie and Dag Hammarskjold were when they were Secretary
General. The charter refers to the Secretary General as the chief administrative office of the U.N.
In the United States we thought that he ought to become, as much as possible, a chief executive
of the U.N.; that there should be a strong Secretary General who would take the charter in his
hands as his Bible and who would fight for the charter and let the chips fall where they may.
Trygve Lie started out fairly effectively in that role. Dag Hammarskjold was that kind of a
person. But this impends pretty frequently upon Soviet policies and interests, and they didn't like
that kind of a Secretary General very much.

RICHARD RUSK: Wasn't U Thant that type of person with respect to the war in Vietnam?

DEAN RUSK: Well U Thant, in my judgment, was a weak Secretary General because he did
not attach himself to the charter and say, "Here is where I stand. Here is what I'm fighting for."
He was looking to circumvent problems, rather than deal with them. He was looking for
compromise and things of that sort. Dag Hammarskjold would call the disputing parties into his
own office around his famous coffee table, either one at a time or sometimes together, and really
press them very hard to make some sense out of what they were engaged in.

RICHARD RUSK: Did he ever call you to his coffee table?

DEAN RUSK: And--I've been in there. I've been in there. But U Thant didn't do that. It was
awfully hard sometimes to know where he was, or even what he had said when you'd had a talk
with him. So I, myself, do not think that he helped to strengthen in any way the office of the
Secretary General. Well, when he left office he made a remark that really surprised me. He said
that he had never rejected the nomination of any government for a person to take a post in the
United Nations Secretariat. Well now, to me that's almost outrageous because the U.N.
Secretariat is supposed to be an international civil service recruited, of course, from all, among
its members. But it's the Secretary General's job to be sure that the people who are appointed to
the Secretariat are qualified for the jobs. But he said he had never turned down a national
nomination for a job which was available to the country who was making the nomination. So
that's just another sign of his relative weakness as Secretary General.

RICHARD RUSK: For the record, excuse me Professor Sohn, but do you recall the instance or
the instances where Dag Hammarskjold called you in to press the Americans on an issue of
foreign policy?

DEAN RUSK: Oh, I think he called me in once on the Congo situation. You see, my interest in
the U.N., which had been very strong since 1945, caused me as Secretary of State to go up to the
United Nations for a period of two to three weeks at the beginning of each General Assembly.

RICHARD RUSK: We do have this.

DEAN RUSK: So that I could have a bilateral discussion with every foreign minister or prime
minister who was attending that opening session of the U.N., usually eighty to ninety of them. It
was not necessary for me to go and participate in debate because we had Adlai Stevenson there,
and who was I to take his place? But that included some meetings with the Secretary General
during that period when I was up there. So I got to know Dag Hammarskjold and then U Thant
quite well during those annual visits to the U.N.

SCHOENBAUM: Did you ever have any tense meetings with either Hammarskjold or U Thant?
Or were they friendlier meetings?

DEAN RUSK: Well, I said some very frank things to my friend Ralph [J.] Bunche on occasion
and hope that he modified them a bit if he talked to the Secretary General about them. (laughter)
But U Thant once pretended that he had a message from Hanoi on Vietnam and he made a
proposal more or less allegedly based on such a message. Well we were in touch with Hanoi and

we knew that he did not have any such message from Hanoi. He was probably in one of those
situations where he pretended to each side that he had some indication from the other, you know.
That kind of maneuver. I thought he acted in bad faith in that particular situation because it got to
be a public matter and question of U Thant's integrity over against ours and I didn't like that very
much.

SOHN: You mentioned a minute ago the point about nominating people for the Secretariat.

DEAN RUSK: Right.

SOHN: How did this really work in the United States?

DEAN RUSK: Well this subject which illustrates the point that the answer very often is greatly
conditioned by the way the question is put. At the very end of the war when we were drafting the
U.N. Charter, the question in our minds was did we want the Soviet Union to have a veto over
appointments to the Secretariat from some of those people from the eastern European countries
who had served the League of Nations. There were several individuals we had in mind at that
point. And when we put the question that way, the answer clearly seemed to be no. So we started
out backing and supporting the complete independence of the Secretary General in naming his
own staff. Alright now, during the Eisenhower administration, following the [Joseph Raymond]
McCarthy period, the question was asked in a different fashion: Do we want Americans to serve
in posts in the United Nations if they cannot pass loyalty and security tests in the United States?
And when the question was put that way in the early fifties the answer came out: No, we do not
want such Americans serving in the United Nations. So our representative went to Dag
Hammarskjold and told him that we would want to have the right of approval of any American
citizens hired in the Secretariat and at that point, apparently, Dag Hammarskjold smiled and said,
"Well I've been waiting for this because every other member of the United Nations has already
insisted upon that right." (laughter) So I'm afraid that the quality of the U.N. Secretariat as a
genuine international civil service has been diluted by this necessity for national government
approval of appointments to the U.N. Secretariat. It also reduces somewhat the quality of the
U.N. Secretariat because some of these national nominees would be better off in almost any
other job.

SOHN: I have heard complaints at United Nations that the United States is not suggesting for
appointments good enough people from the United States, that the United States simply passes
when people don't apply otherwise. But when there is a vacancy in an important position like one
of the Undersecretaries, which usually is, one of the, is an American. The United States very
seldom presents really a very strong candidate, presents somebody that, of course, has
acceptance by the State Department for other reasons but not necessarily somebody that's--

DEAN RUSK: Well after all, one can't improve on Ralph Bunche.

SOHN: No, Ralph Bunche was--

DEAN RUSK: And didn't [William B.] Buffum go to one of those positions? And [F. Bradford]
Brad Morse, the head of the U.N. Development Fund for many years?

SOHN: Yes, you named three very good people. (laughter)

DEAN RUSK: Very good people.

SOHN: How many were lesser?

DEAN RUSK: Well you know, I think maybe that is changing now. There was a time when it
was very difficult to get highly qualified Americans to take these U.N. posts because the pay was
low, and often the service was somewhere abroad, so we set up a section in the Department of
State whose job it was to recruit Americans to fill the posts that were available for Americans in
these U.N. agencies. You see, in the broad sense, it's not exactly accurate, but the posts that are
available are related in a general way to the percentage of contribution you make to the budget.
So the United States as the largest contributor had more posts available to it. But it was not easy
to recruit people for these U.N. jobs. Now that's turned around because these international
agencies base themselves at least on U.S. civil servant pay scales, they are tax-exempt for
practical purposes even though not theoretically in all cases, and they have generous retirement
and allowances, and allowances if you terminate your job and things of that sort. So they are
quite attractive financially to Americans. So today I think the reservoir of people who are willing
to serve is greater than it was, say, during the fifties and early sixties. Matter of fact, there are
heavy complaints now in our Congress about the lavish salary schedules being used in the United
Nations.

SOHN: You mentioned also a minute ago that you liked to go to the General Assembly once a
year to talk to various people. What's your feeling about the Scandinavian proposal that has been
made now many times and recently again that there should be at least annual meetings of the
Security Council composed of foreign ministers or even heads of government to look at the
situation of the world and to get kind of a report from the Secretary General and show their
personal interest in what's going on there rather than just coming just to the General Assembly
making a speech.

DEAN RUSK: I think that's a good idea, myself. The Charter provides, as you know, for--

SOHN: Twenty-eight.

DEAN RUSK: Representatives of ministers of government to sit in the U.N. Security Council.
We have at any one time, normally only two people who are authorized to sit in the Security
Council for us: our permanent representative and his deputy. Of course, it is taken for granted,
everybody knows, that the Secretary of State is qualified to sit if he decided to come and sit. I
never, myself, sat in the Security Council for the United States, but James Byrnes did with the
Azerbaijan question back in 1946. Maybe one or two others have done so. But I think that would
be a good idea if they would maybe take a week for such a meeting for a general review of the
world situation: an exchange of views. Not because they could necessarily settle these questions
but that it would be a fine exercise in order to help each other understand what is in the other
fellows' minds. I think that if they had such a meeting that they ought to have two or three of
those meetings privately and not there publicly in front of all the press, to see what might

happen. Of course, such a meeting would mean that there would be bilateral discussions among
those ministers who turned up for such a meeting and those could be useful. So I would be in
favor of that idea.

SOHN: You just mentioned the problem of private and public meetings. Officially all the
meetings of the United Nations are public. Though sometimes, of course, nobody can stop them
meeting in private as well. The League of Nations had a different procedure. They always met
first in private, talked about a question and tried to decide what are the problems and so on. Then
only they went to the public meeting which sometimes they repeated the same speeches. But
because of the preliminary discussion, it was to some extent modified and coordinated, etc. Do
you think that's a good idea?

DEAN RUSK: I'm not sure I would be in favor of making this a matter of regulation, a
requirement. But I think it's valuable for the Security Council members to consult occasionally
informally and not at a regular meeting. And that has happened occasionally. The Secretary
General might ask for such a consultation. The president of the Security Council might have one.
Of course, the Security Council has a dinner once a month given by the then president of the
Security Council and that gives some opportunity for informal conversation. But I think there's
much to be said for that kind of informal consultation away from the glaring klieg lights and all
the reporters.

SOHN: Of course, in the League, both meetings were later published--minutes of the meetings.
So it was not kind of like--we have a meeting of the United Nations now on the same kind of,
what you say, informal meetings before meeting of the Security Council, and so on: people just
talking in the chamber on what they are going to be discussing later. But this is informal,
completely informal in the sense of no records or anything are kept. In the League, there were
formal or informal meetings or whatever you wish to call it, in which the records were kept, but
they were only published a few months later.

DEAN RUSK: Well I myself think that whatever is done on that there should still be left open
the opportunity for consultation without records and without reporting on what was said. When I
think back over the years in our many, many meetings with Andrei [Andreevich] Gromyko, there
were times when we would, without specific authorizations from our governments, would sort of
box the compass and try on various possibilities to see whether there is anything down that trail
that we might profitably pursue. And I think it would have been unfortunate if those
conversations were recorded and on the record. I should emphasize that Mr. Gromyko always
accurately represented the views of his own government, and it was always clear to both of us
that any such tentative discussions were just that, and nothing more. [But our talks] were very
useful attempts to find possibilities. You can't do that in the atmosphere of a football stadium. If
such conversations are going to be a part of the record, then I think it tends to stifle such
conversations and reduces their usefulness.

SOHN: Don't you have, however, to make a record? Suppose you talked with Gromyko about
something. Don't you, then, after the conversation dictate to your secretary a little summary of
that?

DEAN RUSK: In most conversations with Gromyko we had note takers on each side. But once
in a blue moon, he and I would simply draw off in a corner, just the two of us, since he spoke
very good English. And I can't say that I put on record a memorandum of conversation of each
one of those conversations that was held. I'm sure I did some of them, but not necessarily all of
them.

SOHN: In the Law of the Sea Conference once we ran into trouble, as you perhaps remember,
with our Secretary of State at the time, who--

RICHARD RUSK: Who would that have been?

SOHN: Henry [Alfred]Kissinger, who in a very touchy point of negotiation decided to
participate. So he went and talked to a group of the developing countries about trying to solve the
crisis about seabed mining. But he refused to take anybody with him to that meeting and did not
make a record of what was considered. And we were faced later with the problem that from time
to time one or the other of the participants would say, "But Henry Kissinger promised us to do
this next and you are not doing it." Or, "He offered, as quid pro quo or something, certain
concessions and now you are refusing to make those concessions." We couldn't get out of Henry
what he actually said and whether the record supposedly quoted by the others was correct or not.

RICHARD RUSK: That's interesting.

SOHN: And that makes your life difficult.

DEAN RUSK: That's correct.

RICHARD RUSK: What was his response to your efforts to get that information?

SOHN: That this was a private conversation and that if anybody was disclosing something that
happened from it, he's not going to participate in that kind of disclosure. It may or may not be
true, but he wouldn't say one way or another.

DEAN RUSK: Well I never did have private talks with Gromyko about anything that was a
matter of ongoing negotiations which could have in any way distorted those negotiations.
Anything of that sort I would report to my own colleagues about.

DEAN RUSK: But you know, Louis, when matters are before the General Assembly and the
Security Council, very often the most important part of it will be conversations in the corridors
among delegations: that is, discussions, negotiations away from the table. And I think we ought
to keep those channels wide open and give them every possible facility. Now there are times
when you have to maybe gain a little time, even an hour or two. And so there usually were
people at the United Nations that you could call on to make a speech for an hour on any subject
whatever. And they were invaluable members of the U.N. (laughter) (multiple people talking
simultaneously)

RICHARD RUSK: Do you recall an instance?

DEAN RUSK: Oh yes. [Jamil] Baroody of Saudi Arabia was one of those. What's the name of
that man from Peru, the old fellow who could do that?

SOHN: [Victor Andres] Belaunde?

DEAN RUSK: No. There was somebody else there. And there was a fine old man from Lebanon
once who could do that.

SOHN: Charles [Habib] Marik?

DEAN RUSK: But it was great too, because you needed that time and you didn't want to say,
"Now let's suspend here because we want to sneak out in the back and have some talks," so you
just got one of them to make a speech.

RICHARD RUSK: Sort of like an American filibuster.

DEAN RUSK: Of course in the old days in the Security Council you had consecutive
translation. Every speech was translated into English and French as the two working languages.
And sometimes that took a very long time. Sir [Mohammed] Zafrulla Khan of Pakistan and--Oh,
what's his name from India? I'll get his name in a minute. But anyhow, they made the--

SOHN: [V.K.] Krishna Menon.

DEAN RUSK: Krishna Menon. They made the record speeches in the U.N. on Kashmir: over
seven hours each one. Well it took three meetings of the Security Council to hear those speeches
and the interpretations. Now generally interpretation is waived so that they don't do that
consecutive translation because they've got the simultaneous translators that are giving it through
the earphones. It'll be a matter of the written record anyhow. Oh, one little incident about the
U.N., Louis, I'm not sure you ever heard: The U.N., just after the war, met out at the Sperry
Gyroscope Plant on Long Island as an improvised meeting place while we were waiting to get a
new headquarters. At that time we had seven channels on the headphones. Five of the channels
were in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese. The sixth channel was for the speaker,
whatever language he was speaking. And the seventh channel was soft music, so that in the
middle of long debates you could always turn to soft music if you wanted to. (laughter)

RICHARD RUSK: Just kind of doze off for a while, huh?

DEAN RUSK: But when they came to the new headquarters in the U.N. they decided that was
not up to the dignity of the United Nations and so they dropped the soft music channel. (laughter)

SOHN: I used to work at the Sperry Plant. In fact, I lived in Glen Oaks next door and that's how
I got involved in the Korean crisis because I was the nearest member of the Secretariat available.
A fellow called me in to help him prepare the Secretary General for the meeting.

DEAN RUSK: There's one interesting point about that Sperry Plant that some might find
amusing. During the war the Sperry Plant was tax exempt as a war industry, but when the U.N.
came out there and occupied those quarters--This is before the headquarters agreement between
the United Nations and the United States. So this plant suddenly turned up on the tax rolls. But
we didn't want the U.N. to pay taxes on this thing, so we declared the United Nations to be a war
industry, (laughter) We got by the tax problem that way.

SOHN: One interesting point about that plant, however, was that everything was horizontal. So
when you have a problem you'd simply walk to somebody and it was kind of the usual way to do
it. Well I got to the United Nations because I was--the first year when we moved to the United
Nations--I was also still at the U.N. Everything was vertical. And to get from one office to
another sometimes you had to change elevators, in addition. And somehow that cut down the
number of face-to-face communications.

DEAN RUSK: I think that's true. It's true on a university campus where we sprawl all across the
place and there's a shortage of parking space and that tends to get in the way. But also I think that
in those early days, Louis, the numbers of people were much smaller and responsibilities in the
Secretariat were somewhat more concentrated, and you knew with whom to talk. You knew who
had that thing on his or her agenda. But communication in those early days was much easier,
faster, and much more common than I suspect that it is now.

SOHN: It was kind of completely different atmosphere, those years. Lake Success, we called it,
before we went to--

END OF SIDE 2