Dean Rusk

Dean Rusk

Dean Rusk (1968)

Dean Rusk in the back, in front President Johnson (center) and Defense Secretary McNamara (1968)

David Dean Rusk (born February 9, 1909 in Lickskillet , Cherokee County , Georgia , † December 20, 1994 in Athens , Georgia) was an American politician of the Democratic Party . From 1961 to 1969 he was Secretary of State under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson . As a proponent of the military pushing back of communism (" roll back "), he supported and defended his country's involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s . Rusk achieved the second longest tenure of any US Secretary of State after Cordell Hull .

Life

The son of a poor Georgia farmer attended public school in Atlanta . After graduating from Boys High School in 1925, he worked for a lawyer in Atlanta for two years and attended Davidson College . He was a member of the Kappa Alpha Brotherhood (Sigma division) and received the Cecil Peace Prize in 1933 during his time as a Rhodes scholar at St. John's College . From 1934 to 1940 he taught at Mills College in Oakland , California. In 1940 he received his doctorate in law from the University of California at Berkeley . On June 9, 1937, he married Virginia Foisie, with whom he had three children.

During World War II , he joined the US Army as a reserve captain and served as a staff officer in Southeast Asia. At the end of the war he was a Colonel, awarded the Legion of Merit . On his return to America, he worked briefly at the War Department in Washington , then moved to the State Department in February 1945 , where he worked in the United Nations Office for Affairs . In the same year he suggested dividing Korea into an American and a Soviet sphere of influence with a dividing line at the 38th parallel. In 1949 he became Secretary of State for matters of international organizations ( Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs ), the following year he took over in the same place the responsibility for the area of East Asia ( Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs ). Rusk was instrumental in the United States' intervention in the Korean War . From 1950 to 1961 he was an agent of the Rockefeller Foundation ; In 1952 he succeeded Chester L. Barnard as President of the Foundation.

On December 12, 1960, the President-elect of the United States, John F. Kennedy , appointed Rusk as Secretary of State to his cabinet . On January 21, 1961, Rusk took over the leadership of the State Department after the US Senate had confirmed the nomination of the president. Rusk was an advocate of fighting communism militarily, but sought a diplomatic solution during the Cuban Missile Crisis . At the beginning of his term in office he had concerns about a military operation by the USA in Vietnam; his rigorous public defense of American actions in war later made him a major enemy of war opponents.

Apart from his fight against communism, Rusk continued the policy he had already pursued at the Rockefeller Foundation of supporting developing countries and strengthening world trade through low tariffs. Rusk drew angry protest from the American Israel lobby when he admitted that the USS Liberty incident in the Six Day War was an Israeli attack and not an accident.

His relationship with President Kennedy was not very good and several of his resignation proposals were rejected. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Rusk offered his resignation to the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson . However, he asked him to stay. The two southerners became friends. When Johnson died in 1973, Rusk gave the eulogy. Rusk also wanted to resign in 1967 after it became known that his daughter Peggy was planning to marry a NASA African American employee, Guy Smith, and President Johnson again asked him to stay in the cabinet . Rusk served as Secretary of State until the end of Johnson's tenure in January 1969.

From 1970 to 1984 Rusk taught international law at the University of Georgia .

Rusk received both the Sylvanus Thayer Award and the President's Medal of Freedom .

He died in December 1994 at the age of 85.

literature

• Thomas H. Buckley: Dean Rusk. In: Edward S. Mihalkanin (Ed.): American Statesmen: Secretaries of State from John Jay to Colin Powell . Greenwood Publishing 2004, ISBN 978-0-313-30828-4 , pp. 443-449.

Web links

Commons : Dean Rusk  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Dean Rusk in the nndb (English)
• Literature by and about Dean Rusk in the catalog of the German National Library
• Dean Rusk in the Miller Center of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia (English)
• Dean Rusk in the online archive of the Austrian Media Library