From former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, now dead at 85, there would never be any apology for Vietnam, no mea culpa, no weaseling away from responsibility, no convenient personal revisionism, no retreat from his belief that the U.S. commitment to the defense of South Vietnam was inviolable and that any retreat could lead to more wars of aggression and eventually World War III.
His was a mind that never forgot democracy's fecklessness in the face of Hitler or the steel nerves needed to face down the Kremlin when the Cuban missile crisis threatened nuclear holocaust. As he entered his eighth decade and the Soviet superpower fell apart, he remarked: "I never thought I'd live to see this day." Left unspoken, of course, was what this event had to teach him about a lifelong obsession with the Communist menace.
It was Dean Rusk's fate to head the State Department during the most turbulent years of this half-century. Selected first by John F. Kennedy, he stayed on through all the years of the Johnson administration. Often he would raise questions, especially over Vietnam, but only once would he concede he objected to policy -- this about widespread bombing of non-military targets in Hanoi and Haiphong. Always the good soldier, he supported President Johnson once the decision was made.
Yes, he told his son, Richard Rusk, in a book they co-authored, there had been mistakes. "First, I overestimated the patience of the American people and, second, I underestimated the tenacity of the Vietnamese." He also said the administration might have erred in its gradual escalation of the war instead of intervening massively early on. Pressed by his son to explain why the North Vietnamese fought so hard against overwhelming U.S. power, his only answer was ideological, totalitarian discipline. Pushed for a fuller answer, he could not bring himself to discuss the patriotism and ethnocentrism that infused the Vietnamese.
That Dean Rusk was a selfless public servant cannot be disputed even by his myriad detractors. Because he so rarely registered emotion, one can only imagine how tortured he was to be denounced by his children's generation or how contemptuous he was toward senators who switched positions on the war without admitting so.
He said at one point that reliable judgments on Vietnam could not emerge for decades. Now, 30 years after the event, the intellectual leap required to interpret a far off struggle in an unstrategic country as a global test of U.S. resolution seems almost archaic. Yet some issues endure, not least in Bosnia, where nations struggle to contain Serb expansionism without reigniting American-Russian rivalry. This era, too, will have to live with policies and perceptions that will seem skewed only in retrospect.