ATHENS, Ga. -- Former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who rose from the poverty of a tiny tenant farm in Georgia to the heights of American diplomacy only to come under savage attack for his role in the Vietnam War, has died at the age of 85.
The University of Georgia, where he had taught international law since 1970, announced yesterdaythat Mr. Rusk died Tuesday night of congestive heart failure at his home in Athens. His wife, Virginia, and other members of the family were at his side.
Mr. Rusk, a man of impressive intellect and a skilled negotiator, was selected by President John F. Kennedy as his chief Cabinet officer after only one meeting and one interview. He held the post under two presidents through eight turbulent years that encompassed the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, the signing of a nuclear nonproliferation treaty with the Soviet Union and the Vietnam War.
As preparation for the foreign policy job, Mr. Rusk could cite his previous nine years as president of the Rockefeller Foundation and various high State Department posts. He also had some influential boosters, including the late Dean Acheson, secretary of state under President Harry S. Truman.
Mr. Rusk, who was 51 at the time, took office as the nation's 54th secretary of state on Jan. 20, 1961. Despite criticism in later years from anti-war protesters, as well as difficult financial problems, he held the post until Jan. 20, 1969, when Mr. Kennedy's successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, left office.
In the ensuing years, Mr. Rusk never wavered in his position on Vietnam.
"I have been offered occasional opportunities to present a mea culpa on Vietnam, but I have not done so," he said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 1982. "There is nothing that I can say now that would change in any way my share of responsibilities for the events of those years.
"I thought at the time that the key decisions made by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson were right. They are not here to speak for themselves, so I will live with it. . . . I accept and live with my share of the responsibilities."
Some of Kennedy's White House advisers had been critical of Mr. Rusk, calling him too cautious and bland.
"His mind, for all its strength and clarity, was irrevocably conventional," Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a White House special assistant, wrote in his book on the Kennedy administration. Mr. Rusk, he wrote, "was a superb technician: This was his power and his problem. He had trained himself all his life to be the ideal chief of staff, the perfect No. 2 man."
Mr. Rusk initially was reluctant about sending U.S. troops to South Vietnam when Communist activity increased there in mid-1961.
Instead, he favored sending more military advisers to help improve the performance of the Saigon government's army. When that modest effort failed, Mr. Rusk went along with other Kennedy advisers who insisted that the cause could not be abandoned.
Mr. Rusk paid a high price for his loyalty and his convictions. Because of the war, he became the target of scorn in a liberal-dominated academia, where his own career had begun. It reached the point where he could venture onto a college campus only at the risk of physical harm.
A man of modest means, Mr. Rusk had existed on his Cabinet salary of $35,000 a year. He was broke when he left office, and it was almost a year before he found an acceptable job -- at the University of Georgia Law School.
David Dean Rusk was born on a poor, rented 40-acre farm in Cherokee County, Ga., on Feb. 9, 1909. His father, Robert Hugh Rusk, was an ordained Presbyterian minister, but a throat ailment forced him to leave the ministry for farming.
The family moved to Atlanta in 1913, and Mr. Rusk attended public schools there. In high school and later at Davidson College in North Carolina, he compiled an outstanding record as a student, athlete and cadet in the Reserve Officer Training Corps. In his senior year at Davidson, he won a Rhodes scholarship which enabled him to attend Oxford University for three years.
Mr. Rusk returned to the United States from England in 1934 at the height of the Depression and was hired by Mills College in Oakland, Calif. At Mills, Mr. Rusk taught government and international relations and became dean of the faculty.
As an Army captain In World War II, he became deputy chief of staff to Gen. Joseph W. "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell in the China-Burma-India theater.
In 1947, Mr. Rusk joined the State Department, then headed by George C. Marshall, whom Mr. Rusk revered as a role model.
Mr. Rusk later became a top aide to Mr. Marshall's successor, Mr. Acheson.
In addition to his wife and daughter, Mr. Rusk is survived by two sons, David of Washington and Richard of Bishop, Ga.; a daughter, Peggy Smith of Stafford, Va.; and six grandchildren.