A PROFILE IN COURAGE: J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP70B00338R000300030019-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 8
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 1, 2005
• Sequence Number: 19
• Publication Date: June 1, 1966
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

Approved For Release 2005/11/2 T CIA-RP70B00338R000300030019-2
RAMPARTS. June 1966.
A PROFILE IN COURAGE: J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT (from cover of magazine)
in
` Let us ever .: 1sc ~ nate between fab Y:l and truth, a peep our
rr ' ~. s i n the:: r e subjection with respect to whatever surprises
asto, . ' Re st"1003 aV& -4 9 8P t 1~-onf or-
Je to their circumscribed and narrow views." -Voltaire
 Approved For Release 2005/11/21 : CIA-RDP70B00338R000300030019-2
era of the Cold War. In response to the
challenges, real or imagined, of the past 20
years, America had created the most power-
ful military-industrial system the world had ever known.
It flexed its muscles and the rest of the world looked
with awe upon the enormous power and versatility of
the young colossus. It was not just tat the American
military had planted its impressive installations in ev-
cry corner of the world. Americans had also demon-
strated their finesse in the arts of international per-
suasion and influence. Americans spread out all over
the world. Whether it was a CIA agent subverting an
established government in Lalin America or a Peace
Corps volunteer showing a peasant in Afghanistan how
to purify his drinking water, Americans were leaving
their imprint everywhere.
But power does not always have its way. It atrophies
from misuse and from insensitivity to the surroundings
in which it is applied. It was to have been the "Amer-
ican Century," but something went wrong. Somehow
at the beginning of the third decade of Cold War, with
American power at its pinnacle, the gears no longer
meshed. The machine began to break down.
The crisis for American power stemmed from the
desire of other peoples to make their own histories and
revolutions. Because America itself had begun to lose
hope in new beginnings, it defined the world in such a
way as to preclude the possibility of a popular revolu-
tion for others. But the crisis was due also to the
dnmeCtl( h hits an(I atfitiirlLC r1P,iA1nr r.A lrrr 1n
years of Cold War. A myth became dogma: that com-
munism, the unchangeable, aggressive enemy, must be
fought everywhere if American well-being and security
were to be ensured.
War requires a rigid system of political priorities, and
the Cold War imposed such a system on America. The
name of the system was the bipartisan consensus. The
minimum condition for inclusion in the system was the
acceptance of America's Cold War mission, a posture
Fiat for 20 years had gone virtually unchallenged.
American liberalism might have stimulated debate
and consideration of alternative policies, but from the
beginning the liberals chose to move with the consensus.
The liberals, who might have challenged the consensus
who might have refused to serve power, were instead
excited by the it pfrpwct Ecct 11 bMse 00 1al4?1
to big, history-making decisions.
MERICA HAD ENTERED THE THIRD DECADE Of the
URING THOSE YEARS of Cold War there were
sufficient warnings. Even President Eisen-
hower, sounding like C. Wright Mills,
warned Americans of the danger of aliow-
ing the Cold War to become institutionalized and the
danger of the military-industrial complex that these
institutions had spawned. But the drift continued. In
1960 a young man came to the White House with a
sense of history and style, and liberals flocked to the
seat of power hoping that their pragmatism had paid off.
It was a pleasant interlude, with intimations of possible
change. But fate soon put a Texan in the White House
toresolveall doubts in favor of the Cold War verities. And
one day America woke up to find itself bogged down in
a senseless and brutal war in a small Asian country.
Many persisted in seeing that war as an unfortunate
aberration, as an accident that America had stumbled
into and was now perpetuating only because of the
special obtuseness of the Texan in the White House.
But it was not an aberration. The Texan was the very
embodiment of the consensus. His almost religious
compulsiveness in pursuing the elusive victory in Asia
was, like Captain Ahab's pursuit of the white whale,
consistent with the dominant American political char-
acter. He and his mates, Rusk and Humphrey, could
tell their critics with some justification that they were
merely acting on the basis of assumptions that had
guided the American ship of state for the past 20 years.
Style, too, had helped to define the consensus. The
dominant political style still stressed the importance of
working from within, of not rocking the boat, of muted
debate that scarcely questioned basic assumptions.
Congress, having long ago acquiesced in. the new style,
had been transformed into a transmission belt instead
of a center of debate.
What was desperately needed was someone of impor-
tance and influence to break with the system and propose
alternatives that challenged the Cold War assumptions.
That was what J. William Fulbright did at a time
when events were spiraling almost out of control. At a
time when most people were still playing the consensus
game according to the rules, Fulbright stepped dramat-
ically forward and went into political opposition to
voice unspeakable thoughts about American foreign
policy. It was a crucial moment in American history.
The country was being stampeded into a war with
Someone
had to step forward. This is his story.
 Approved For Release 2005/11/21: CIA-RD
[Chapter X111
R eleven extraordinary afternoons this winter, out of
the same little box that fouls American living rooms with
Peyton Place and old Tom Mix movies, flickered the
;rim visage of the high priest of intellectuality of the Senate of
the United States. Taciturn yet righteous, affable yet obviously
frustrated, fidgeting under the kleig lights, J. William Fulbright
Air.ansas had taken to television, and daytime television at
that, to lecture the President of the United States, the secretary
of state, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the
Congress, the Washington press corps, and some 23 million
housewives in various stages of undress and comeliness, on the
con-.summate madness of American foreign policy in Asia.
it was a difficult and no doubt disagreeable experi-
e ace for the senator. A Southerner who maintains his
gentle native mountain mannerisms, Fulbright is a
conservative, modern-day patrician, who shuns the
limelight and would no more grab for newspaper space
tian a fork at dinner. A serious scholar learned in
history and law, he was prepared, by training, to be
rather the sage of the Establishment than its gadfly.
but there he was, the afternoon soap operas and
miduie-brow quiz shows suspended, his shell-rim glasses
riding down his nose, peering with a winsome gaze into
the cameras hastily installed in the hearing room of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The red eye on
the cameras went on and the Arkansas senator began a
historic series of hearings in which he questioned the
legitimacy of United States interests in Asia, the logic
and indeed the rationality of a fellow Southerner and
Rhodes scholar, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and.
i mpugned the honesty and at times seemed quizzical
about the sanity of the Asian policies of his old friend
and political colleague, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
It was not a mark of his personality, but rather a
quirk of American history at mid-century, that cast
Senator Fulbright in the role of dissenter. Fulbright,
the conservative, the Southern Democrat who knew
well the traditions and the prerogatives of consensus
politics, had broken with his reserved style of operating
and had taken the lead in a bitchy, quixotical and per-
haps hopeless fight to limit America's Empire abroad.
irony to the conservative Fulbright, his foils were those
populists, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey,
the men of the people turned Empire builders. ' hey
used the satisfying and inspiring prosody of American
populism to justify the slaughter, in the name of de-
mocracy, of a yellow people removed from America
and its democratic traditions, not only by thousands of
miles and a great ocean, but by cen.uries of an alien
culture. In the unsettling politics of the Cold War con-
sensus, the liberal democrats of his party and the con-
servatives of the opposition party had formed an
alliance whose unquestioned assumptions seemed to be
moving America inexorably and without any significant
debate towards the military occupation of Asia and
impending war with China.
Not only did Senator Fulbright decide to break wit;.
this consensus, but he chose to use his great public pres-
ence to legitimize criticism of the war, and in so doing
the man from Arkansas found himself, unexpectedly, in
the mainstream of native American radicalism.
ENATOR FULBRIGHT'S ACT must be couched with-
in the twin cycles of penance and redemption.
For it was Fulbright, more than any other m m,
who was responsible for the Senate's perfunc-
tory passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution - a
legislative blank check upon which the President has
drawn as if there were a run on the bank.
International incidents, taken as a category of events,
In what ml~st have sedeed ~n ur~stli~~I~~l: e4e16~~~~~o~gulfofTonkin
pprove
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 Approved Fo- r WeTease 20U51 f f f a- 0B00338R0003OOd
incident went beyond the ludicrous to the phantasma-
gorial. Fulbright's later anguish at having given Johnson
sanction to "take all necessary steps" in what proved
to be a full-scale, undeclared war is most understand-
able in view of what now appears to be the unreal na-
ture of the events of Tonkin Gulf in August of 1964.
.~ late July of 1964, a brash, moustachioed South
Vietnamese Air Force commander, Nguyen Cao Ky,
boasted to a New York Times correspondent that the
Air Force, led by himself, had dropped "combat teams"
inside North Vietnam three years befgfe, well before the
heralded "infiltration" of North Vietnamese combat
units into South Vietnam. Ky's American advisor, Air
Force General Joseph H. Moore, tried to shut him up.
Moore, according to the same correspondent, sug-
gested that Commander Ky "did not have a complete
command of English and might be misinterpreting
questions." But Ky unabashedly admitted that he had
down a combat mission in North Vietnam recently,
and that the United States was training South Viet-
namese pilots for "large-scale" attacks. This was in
absolute contradiction to American policy at the time,
and-remains an embarrassing disclosure in view of the
State Department's insistence that it was the North
which extended the war.
Then the strange chronology that was later to hound
Fulbright unfolded: On July 31 and August 1, South
Vietnamese commandos, under cover of a naval barrage,
attacked the North Vietnamese islands of Hon Me and
upon Ngu in the Gulf of Tonkin. The destroyer U.S.S.
: iaddox was either 30 miles away from North Viet-
namese territory at the time (according to the State De-
partment) or ten miles away (according to Admiral
Robert B. Moore) or three miles away laying the bar-
rage (other sources). At any rate, the next morning the
Maddox, in official Navy language, "became aware"
that three PT boats were trailing it. After several hours,
according to Time magazine, the Maddox fired "three
warning shots across their bows," a difficult feat of gun-
manship since the PT boats were due astern. "Warning
shots" haven't meant anything but a serious shoot-out
since the days of Hornblower, and after a futile exchange
of torpedoes and shells, the ships went their own ways.
The next incident, two days later, had Hornblower-
ian qualities bordering on the epic. The Pentagon
account of the "attack" at high sea on August 4 had
even William F. 'Buckley Jr. shaking his head in in-
credulity: a group of North Vietnamese PT boats
sought out destroyers of the United States Seventh
Fleet at the outrageous distance of 65 miles at sea, and,
after cruising near the U.S. warships for three hours,
launched a three-hour major sea battle in rough seas
and bad weather during which no damage or evidence
of the attack was recorded by U.S. vessels. Two PT
boats were reported sunk. But there were no survivors
and no debris collected from the torpedo boats, and
sailors aboard the U.S. destroyers, to this day, are
under strict orders not to talk about the incident. The
North Vietnamese government said the incident simply
never occurred, and as Washington pundit James Reston
mused why North Vietnam would dispatch hit-and-run
torpedo boats to prompt a three-hour sea engagement
that could only give an enormous propaganda advan-
tage to the United States, American planes began bomb-
ing North Vietnam in a "retaliatory action" that has
been continuing, in mounting intensity, to this very day.
The ghostly action at Tonkin Gulf proved of extreme
utility. Americans always unite when attacked, even in
miniature, and Johnson rushed into Congress a reso-
lution that made a national cause of a distant war of
heretofore uncertain motivation.
The bizarre detail and doubtful legitimacy of the
alleged events in Tonkin Bay are important. They
evoked in Senator Fulbright a skepticism about the
accuracy of government pronouncements. He was to
conclude, later, that the Administration was lying not
only to the public, but also to him, and probably
even to itself.
But in August of 1964 the senator from Arkansas
had other considerations on his mind. He was con-
sumed with the fear of a strong Goldwater showing in
the coming presidential election. Goldwater, to Ful-
bright, represented the very antithesis of rationality.
And reason, to Fulbright, is everything - the golden
rule, the means, the end. The Arkansas scholar recoils
from missionaries and visionaries - his style is facts
first; from the facts he will reason, usually slowly, to a
conclusion, even if the conclusion proves opposite to a
position he previously held.
When he dwelled, sometime later, on the facts of the
Tonkin Gulf incidents, he was mortified. He retracted
his earlier stance and made his public rnea culpa on a
national television show: "I have to say to myself," he
said in the dull, almost toneless drawl that can er:.~y
the Senate galleries, "that I have played a part in t.,.~
that I am not at all proud of, that at the time of the fay
of Tonkin I should have had greater foresight in the
University for his tApp over or Release ZUd`j~e~~71 have been
 Approved For Release 2005/11/221: CIA-R P i
a good time to have precipitated a debate and a. re-
examination, a re-evaluation of our involvement ... I
went along with the urging, I must say, of the Adminis-
tration ... I made the mistake ..."
Fulbright's failure to recognize the significance of the
Tonkin resolution bothers him all the more because it
was not just a case of mistaken fact; it embodied a
fundamental error of judgment. The Arkansas senator
had set up an arbitrary polarity - Goldwater was the
madman, Johnson the man of reason. Anything he
might do to split the party, asserting his prerogatives
as the Senate watchdog of foreign policy, picking apart
the Tonkin resolution, might aid Goldwater. Besides,
and this is where Fulbright now realizes he made his
greatest miscalculation, the senator from Arkansas put
his trust in the former senator from Texas. The two
.-n we.on-time friends, their wives even closer.
u.nright had supported Johnson against Kennedy for
the Democratic nomination in 1960, and Johnson had
let it be known that he felt Fulbright would have been
the best choice for Kennedy's secretary of state. Ful-
bright viewed Johnson as a humane, intelligent and
dynamic man and believed the President when he said
he had no desire to widen the war and would use his
mandate moderately.
HAT FULBRIGHT DID NOT foresee, indeed,
could not foresee, was what the frustra-
tions and the temptations of the Vietnam
war would do to Mr. Johnson. Where
Johnson's attributes served him admirably in domestic
politics - they became monstrous in foreign affairs,
outside his native milieu. His humaneness turned easily
to self-righteousness, his intelligence to scheming, his
dynamism to impulsiveness. Johnson as a congressman
and senator was always an active proponent of a mas-
sive and growing military establishment, afirm advocate
of quick and effective retaliation against any "enemy"
who might dare to cross America's path, When the
sticky Vietnam situation proved infinitely more com-
plex than getting a housing bill through Congress, John-
son became increasingly frustrated, acting out of
instinct to punish those who thwarted him. The punish-
ment went, necessarily, to the Vietnamese people,
Johnson assumed a public posture of moderation
and patience, but his quiet, deliberate words clashed
with his deeds. His pledge to Fulbright to not act rashly
proved empty. And Fulbright could only reluctantly
conclude that the frustrations of Vietnam were de-
priving
HE TELEPHONE RANG AT 10:45 A.M. in Senator
Fulbright's private office in the sterile new
Senate Office Building. He was reading a
book taken from the low bookcases that line
his walls. He picked up the receiver with a gesture
indicating distaste. Telephones are for activists, for
operators; Fulbright prefers quiet, leisurely conversa-
tions over dinner with intellectual equals. The call was
from the White House. The familiar voice with the
soft flow of the Pedernales River was coming over the
wire: "Ah'm sho glad to have got yo' advaas, Bill."
The President of the United States talked on at the
other end of the wire, but the chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee was barely listening. It
was a conversation he had heard too often. The senator
listened politely until the President was through, then
said goodbye and hung up. The call was put through
to thank Fulbright for sending over a memorandum
prepared by his staff. Fulbright had substituted memos
for frequent calls at the White House. The President
had dominated their conversations, scarcely allowing
Fulbright the chance to say hello, and Fulbright had
simply tired of listening to him. Now another long
mimeographed memo, Fulbright knew, had already
been filed in key wastebaskets at State. He was certain
the President had paid no attention to the ideas con-
tained in the memo - fresh, challenging, dissenting
ideas. Fulbright had, over the years, carefully built up
his staff as a grove of academe in the briar patches of
Washington officialdom. But the people at State and the
new breed in the White House paid only polite, per-
functory notice to their work. The yahoos were riding
high in the saddle: Dean Rusk, who gave Fulbright
shivers, had out-hawked Secretary of Defense McNa-
mara and roosted behind the President's ear. Rusk's
hard line for Asia was backed by Walt Rostow, then
chairman of the Policy Planning Council, recently
moved into the White House; and for South America
by Thomas Mann, a tough-minded Texan who as John-
son's assistant secretary of state for Latin America had
scrapped the official Kennedy policy of support for
constitutional democratic regimes and hitiated a junta
hunt; and by George Ball, the undersecretary of state
and guardian of the status quo in European affairs.
As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee,
Fulbright did not seek to impose his predilections on
the Administration's foreign policy priesthood, but
only to see that this priesthood was not unduly bur-
dened with dogma. Unquestioned dogma, Fulbright
LyndAip1kbv F6hiRettieseli2Q05/11/21 : C1eRp QEaUQ Q QC0Q 1pagent efforts to
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dispel dogma met with growing frustration. It was ap-
parent in his remarkable 1964 speech, "Old Myths and
New realities," when he expressed publicly for the first
time some of the apprehensions he felt about the con-
duct of U.S. diplomacy. He said, "There has always -
a; ii inevitably - been some divergence between the
r\.. ~..;Cies of foreign policy and our ideas aboutit. This
divergence has in certain respects been growing, rather
than narrowing; and we are handicapped, accordingly,
by policies based on old myths, rather than current
realities. This divergence is, in my opinion, dangerous
and unnecessary - dangerous, because it can reduce
foreign policy to a fraudulent game of imagery and
ri,pearances; unnecessary, because it can be overcome
:;y tie determination of men in high office to dispel
p: evailing misconceptions by the candid dissemination
of unpleasant, but inescapable facts."
" HAVE A FEW DOUBTS, GENTLEMEN." Seth Tillman,
h Fulbright's speech writer and intellectual con-
fidant, looked up. When the senator said he had
a "few doubts" it could mean a major policy
decision was forthcoming. Fulbright had asked Till-
man and other members of the inner circle of his
Foreign Relations Committee staff to gather in a Wash-
restaurant for a late lunch. It was a Saturday
1:ernoon in August of 1965. The men did not realize
at the time, but they were to participate in a funda-
.i aI decision that would, in the field of foreign
Doiiey, make their staff the closest thing to a shadow
cabinet the United States has known.
The issue was the Dominican Republic. The Foreign
Relations Committee had been holding hearings behind
closed doors for weeks, and the testimony was both
disturbing and dismaying - so dismaying that the
senators on the committee had become divided over
what should be said to the public, and it was apparent
that no report would be issued. So Fulbright had to
decide if he should speak out; this was a most serious
and anguished decision, for in order to speak at all
candidly about the Administration's action in the
Dominican Republic it was necessary to infer that the
President of the United States was lying.
It was the lying, the reckless fabrications uncovered
the Dominican hearings that so stunned and horri-
iec Fulbright. When pro-Bosch Army officers began
evolt, the Administration said it was sympathetic
to the democratic aims of the revolution, but in reality
aged from the outset to prevent a rebel victory. When
the Marines l adcivtel JrtorDRjdhwgiD~ tjh1i2il:
they were there to protect endangered American citi-
zens, yet the Marines' real mission was to aid the right-
wing anti-rebel forces. When this became apparent, the
Administration justified its action by releasing fantastic
stories about rebel atrocities - Johnson stated there
were "1000 to 1500 bodies that are dead in the streets,"
a body count that later shrunk to six. Then it was an-
nounced that the rebel forces were dominated by
communists - and listed, in an accounting reminiscent
of the late junior senator from Wisconsin, exactly 53
communists. And when even this number was dis-
credited, Secretary of State Rusk solemnly reminded
the nation that there was a time when only "seven
people" sat in a beer hall with Hitler, and Secretary
Mann volunteered, "Look at Cuba. There were only
12 people in the beginning, and yet they took it over."
Fulbright, though outraged by the deceptions he un-
covered, did not act impetuously. This Saturday after-
noon meeting had been preceded by many other
lengthy consultations with his staff - all directed at
one question: should Fulbright publicly expose the
hypocrisy of the Administration? To do so would not
only embarrass his party and his old friend the Presi-
dent, but would effectively cut the senator off from the
White House. That meant a break with the Senate tradi-
tions that Fulbright so cherished. It meant taking the
case for rationality to the people in a struggle that was
certain to be argumentative, confusing and costly to
the careers of those involved.
Seth Tillman looked across the table at Fulbright
and realized that the senator had made up his mind. He
had stretched out in his chair; the annoying pot belly
that had lately provoked the former University of
Arkansas star halfback into regular sessions at the
Senate gym bulged slightly under his well-cut vest. Till-
man, formerly a brilliant political scientist at the Massa-
chusetts Institute of Technology, shared the senator's
fervid regard for the intellectual process. He knew
where the balance scales would tip: to speak out now
was to advocate rationality, to dispel misinformation,
to bolster truth. There was, really, little choice.
A few hours before he stood on the senate floor to
blast Johnson's Dominican adventure, a text of the
speech and a letter of explanation were delivered by
messenger to the White House. The letter has never
been answered. And Fulbright has never received an-
other phone call from the President. He became persona
non grata at the White House. And he was now free to
broaden his criticism of Johnson's foreign policy: there
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Fulbright's glasses are an indistinguishable
part of his personality. He uses them to see
through, but that is a preliminary function
that has become almost atavistic. The tilt of Senator
Fulbright's glasses can express interest, boredom, cha-
grin or disillusion. When held at arm's length off his
face, they may be the first thrust of a Fulbrightian in-
quisition. And on the days that Secretary of State Dean
Rusk testified in the crowded, overheated Senate hear-
ing room, the spectacles were continually poised for
combat. in the televised drama of the first open debate
on United States Asian policy the American public was
his audience. But Dean Rusk was his foil.
The contrast between tusk and Fulbright is sym-
i,lmost archetypal. Rusk is a missionary with a
evously misplaced sense of the inevitable, purveying
the American gospel with a global hard-sell. Fulbright
is the cool man of reason, making decisions on the
basis of practicality, more concerned with what Amer-
ica can do than what perhaps it should do. Their
~I]'ering positions reflect what American foreign policy
is, and what Fulbright wants it to be.
7 e conflict between these two men is all the more
bitter because of the similarity of their backgrounds.
Both are Southerners. Rusk was originally a poor white
and Fulbright a patrician, but both were raised in the
back country of the old Confederacy when memories
of the Battle of Shiloh and the craft of carpetbaggery
were still raw. Both became Rhodes scholars: both
began their career as college teachers. Both have ex-
that America, by bombing the hell out of an Asian
country, is effectively resisting the evil of communism.
There were times during Secretary Rusk's recitation
when Senator Fulbright didn't seem to be listening.
The glasses slid even further than usual down his nose
and his eyes drifted up above the gray horizon created
by cigarette smoke swirling in the artificial light of the
television lamps. This history cannot record what the
senator thought during those moments of introspection,
but it is likely that once, at least once, he ruminated on
the irony of the selection of Dean Rusk as secretary of
state, which was one of the great accidents (Fulbright
would call it a catastrophe) of our times.
Exhaustive investigation by future historians may
prove otherwise, but there is now no evidence to prove
that John F. Kennedy chose Dean Rusk as his secre-
tary of state on other than a transitory, eleventh hour
whim. Despite the pain he had taken to assure a spec-
tacular beginning to his administration, he came
virtually to the eve of taking the Presidential oath with-
out a secretary of state. He had almost tired of the
search when the name of Rusk, a former assistant
secretary of state for the far east, appeared at the top
of the list. Kennedy recalled reading an essay by Rusk
in Foreign Affairs in which he celebrated U.S. power to
get things done in the world. That fit in with Kennedy's
concern at the time for an aggressive diplomacy. Rusk
had both Establishment ties and was noncontroversial;
nobody could find anything bad, or even interesting,
about him, so Kennedy apparently said why not?
tremely reserved, rather dull personalities, and prefer T IS ONE OF THE MYSTERIES of Washington, where
a seminar room to a public platform, even the cleaning ladies have evil memories, why
But there the resemblance ends. Dean Rusk is an no one remembered how Dean Rusk had re-
un`rocked John Foster Dulles, Fulbright an Ozark- signed from the State Department in 1951: He
breed Voltaire. Rusk shares Dulles' evangelistic sense walked out in a snit because we weren't going to bomb
of America's responsibility for the destiny of nations. China. As head of Asian affairs, Rusk was the most
He is convinced that there is good and. evil in the world, outspoken advocate of the MacArthur position on the
and that America is good. Communism is evil. Like any Korean War which, in the nice phraseology of today,
apostle worth his salt, he sees no gray area in between, would be called pro-escalation. Then it was just called
Nor is he particularly troubled by any end-means bombing. Rusk, obviously influenced by his eight years
dilemma. The very apex of morality to Rusk is the in the military, agreed with MacArthur that there was
effort to advance a nation's capacity to repulse evil and "no substitute for victory." Those who know the secre-
render its people freedom, democracy, Coca Cola and tary insist that he is bitter to this day over the treatment
all the other benefits that America can provide. of MacArthur, that he believes it was American diplo-
lt was Dean Rusk the apostle who responded to the matic mistakes, if not duplicity, that "lost" China, and
senator's questions on daytime television. Rusk began actually feels a personal sense of guilt about it.
and ended the hearings with the rote view that the sole The bitterest irony of Kennedy's choice of Rusk as
cau, of the Vietnamese war was the aggression of secretary of state dedic t t " ty to act"
Hanoi and Pekir;~~~i~i~~ 1~6 iIrq tjRpW1S `;21 WCI~ t P70oB00?e8 ~ OO~ himself, in the last
?iKE MR. PICKwACK's short black gaiters, J. William
 _Aj5j roved For ReIease 20 M-121 : - 00338R000 00030019-2
months of his life, coming to recognize and accept the
basic limitations of American power. But if Rusk was
uncomfortable in the atmosphere of detente in the last
period of the Kennedy Administration, he positively
luxuriated in the tougher temper of the Johnson Ad-
ministration. The secretary of state is now head hawk
in a large and growing aviary at the White House.
Johnson is a man of action and Rusk counsels action.
In the face of failure, Rusk counsels more action, more
bombs. it was what he counseled in 1951, but nobody
listened to him, then.
They were listening to him now, with a terrifying
unanimity, at State, at Defense, at the White House.
Fulbright can only probe and challenge both the as-
sum tions and logic of Rusk's brand of fast freight
do,, ao nacy. He hoped, through the unlikely medium of
daytime television, to show that reasonable men could