00:00:00SCHOENBAUM: I have the chronology of your ancestors. I wanted to
ask about the story of your great-grandparents coming to this country. You
said they came through Charleston. Who told you this and how do
you know this? Can you supply any details of the voyage?
DEAN RUSK: Apparently, three brothers came over from northern Ireland. They
were Scotch-Irish. They came over from northern Ireland at about the turn
of the century, from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century: early 1800s.
My family thinks it has a rat-gnawed log of the ship on
00:01:00which they came over, but that log does not mention them in
any way so we don't know. In any event, the word passed
along from generation to generation that they landed in Charleston. Then one
or another of them moved up to the Pendleton district of South
Carolina, up in the John [Caldwell] Calhoun area. And as a matter
of fact, a Rusk built up the old stone church over at
Pendleton. It's still standing.
SCHOENBAUM: Was that your great-grandfather?
DEAN RUSK: I am not sure; I think it might have
been a brother of his. But then my great-grandfather, David Rusk, moved
from there and staked out some land in Cherokee County, a considerable
amount of land which was still Indian country. He and my great-grandmother
00:02:00are buried in the little family cemetery in Cherokee County. Their stones
are still there and I was intrigued to see that my great-grandmother
was born in 1776 in Ireland. But at least four of us
have spanned the entire life of this country as an independent country,
which means that we are either very old or our country is
rather young. My sister [Margaret Rusk] had accumulated family trees and you
can have access to those. My brother Parks [Rusk] has those. There
is an historian of the Rusk Family Memorial Association who is gathering
this sort of material together and there are other groups of the
00:03:00Rusk family in California and other places who have done some of
the same thing. As far as our background on this side of
the Atlantic is concerned, it's reasonably complete. We have never been able
to establish any contact with members of our family on the other
side, back in Ireland. My great- grandfather established the land on which
our family started off, and his son, my grandfather James Edward Rusk,
continued on that land and had eleven children. And then with the
death of my grandfather, this land was broken up into different pieces
for members of the family.
00:04:00
SCHOENBAUM: What was your grandmother's name? Your grandfather was named James
Edward Rusk. Do you remember your grandmother's name?
DEAN RUSK: Oh, dear.
SCHOENBAUM: You didn't have that. I could find it.
DEAN RUSK: It's in the family records. It would be easy
to find. The first thing I remember in my life was her
funeral. I was three years old and the funeral was in Cherokee
County. And her sons sang at the funeral. I remember that very
well.
SCHOENBAUM: Was it an old country church?
DEAN RUSK: Yeah. No, I think the funeral may well have
been at the old home place and then she was buried there
in the family graveyard.
SCHOENBAUM: Your father [Robert Hugh Rusk] and your mother [Frances Elizabeth
Clotfelter] were very well educated, especially for that time.
DEAN RUSK: This has happened to families all over the country.
00:05:00My father was the only one of eleven children who went to
college. He went to Davidson College and then to Louisville Theological Seminary.
SCHOENBAUM: Is that in Kentucky? Louisville, Kentucky?
DEAN RUSK: He was headed for the Presbyterian ministry. Three of
my fathers five children went to college and all of his grandchildren
went to college. But that is happening all over the country.
SCHOENBAUM: It was unusual for your father to do that much
education at that time. He must have been a very special, distinct
person.
DEAN RUSK: Well, he was expecting to be a Presbyterian minister
and the Presbyterian Church all along has insisted upon an educated ministry.
So he felt that if he wanted to be a Presbyterian minister
he would have to go to college. Davidson was the college he
00:06:00selected. We have some records of him at Davidson: class of 1894.
He was center on the football team. He played the violin in
those days. But then when his father died, I am not sure
that he actually took a degree at Davidson. I think he might
have left in his senior year because of the death of his
father. But when the time came to divide up my grandfather's lands,
the other brothers and sisters decided that since my father had gone
to college that that was his share of the estate. And so
00:07:00my father did not get any of the lands bequeathed by my
grandfather. Then my father had a throat problem which made it difficult
for him to speak out: a very soft spoken man all of
his life. In those days, to be a preacher you had to
be able to shout, particularly here in the south. So he left
the ministry, did some school teaching, and then finally found his way
back to Cherokee County where he started farming on a little forty-acre
farm that actually belonged to one of his sisters.
SCHOEBAUM: He didn't have lands himself. That's why he had to rent
it from his sister.
DEAN RUSK: That's right.
SCHOEBAUM: What kind of throat problem did he have?
00:08:00
DEAN RUSK: I don't know what it was. But it was
something that limited the power of his voice. He had it all
of his life. It wasnt cancer or anything because he wouldn't have
survived as he did. But he just couldn't--he was a very quiet-spoken
person.
SCHOENBAUM: Then he got a job at the post office in
Atlanta and moved to Atlanta?
DEAN RUSK: Yes, that little forty-acre farm in Cherokee County was
a man-killing place to make a living on. He had an annual
cash turnover of maybe a hundred dollars a year: maybe a few
bales of cotton, eggs sold to the country store, and a few
things like that.
SCHOENBAUM: Was there a market in Cherokee County where you went
to market?
DEAN RUSK: There was a country store about three miles away
on the little river which is still there and run by the
00:09:00same family. And then we went either to Roswell or to Woodstock
for our shopping, usually trading. You would take something in and trade
it for salt and sugar and things that you needed. We grew
our own food on that little farm: a few hogs, chickens, a
cow, one horse. And we, in fact, grew a fair amount of
our own clothing or used flour sacks out of which my mother
made underwear and things like that.
SCHOENBAUM: Did she spin? Did she take the cotton and spin
the cotton?
DEAN RUSK: She did a lot of quilting. There was some
of that but not a great deal. You could buy yard goods
00:10:00in those days quite inexpensively at Roswell or Woodstock.
SCHOENBAUM: Were shoes homemade at that time or were they made
by a cobbler in town?
DEAN RUSK: Well, we were barefooted when the weather permitted it.
But father always cut our own hair and cobbled our shoes. Of
course, as the third son I got hand-me-downs, almost never got anything
new. But my father himself built the little house in which I
was born with his own hands. I have a picture of it:
a two-bedroom house with a kitchen/dining room area in it, wooden clapboards;
one of the first houses in that area to have had glass
00:11:00windows. Most of the others simply had shutters. But that life was
very hard on my mother. She was in poor health a good
deal of the time because she was working so hard and doing
so many different things. So about 1912-13 he came to Atlanta and
got a job in the post office on the last day before
he would have become too old to go to work for the
post office.
SCHOENBAUM: What did he do for the post office?
DEAN RUSK: First, he was a mail carrier. For years he
carried mail on foot, walking sixteen miles a day, covering the same
route twice a day. And I have many memories of him coming
home and putting his feet in a big tub of water to
soak them out after a sixteen-mile march with a load on his
back. Then he moved from letter carrying to a clerk's job in
00:12:00the post office: first there in West End where we lived and
then over the Inman Park area, little Five Points in Atlanta. From
West End, as my older brother Parks bgan to earn more, my
brother built a little place out on Hudson Drive, off Highland Avenue,
and we moved there most of the time that I was in
high school. Then my father built a house on Morningside Drive which
is still standing, in which my older sister lived almost until her
death. It was one of the first houses to be built in
the Morningside area, which is now fully built up. But in those
days there were only two or three houses out there. And so
00:13:00I graduated from high school while we were living in Morningside Park.
My parents wanted me to have a new suit to graduate from
high school in, but when you move from the knickerbocker boy's style
into the long trouser men's style, the prices jumped considerably. And so
the new suit they bought me was one of the old knickerbocker
style suits. So I was the only boy in class who graduated
in a knickerbocker suit. We read everything that came to hand. My
father had a few books and we devoured things like the Farmer's
00:14:00Almanac, and various weekly publications, and Sears Roebuck catalogue, and of course,
the Bible. We studied the Bible intensively.
SCHOENBAUM: Did you have readings out loud of the Bible? You
speak in a distinctive speaking style that very flows very well. You
know how to use words. Did that come from reading the Bible?
So many people did learn from that. Was it a King James
Version?
DEAN RUSK: You see, on Sundays we were not permitted to
play games like "cowboys and Indians," "cops and robbers," things like that.
About the only thing we could do on Sunday would be to
go for walks or to memorize the Bible, and I memorized a
lot of the Bible in those days. And I got some--they used
to call them pearls. The church would give you a little pearl
00:15:00for various pieces of the Bible which you had memorized. And I
had a long chain of pearls for things that I had memorized:
excerpts from the New Testament such as the thirteenth chapter of I
Corinthians, and several of the psalms, things like that. But I have
read the Bible through several times in my life. But then we
had a lucky break. When we moved to West End in 1912
or '13, the Joel Chandler Harris Library was two blocks away. That
was a children's library, the Uncle Remus/Joel Chandler Harris. But they had
a lot of other books for children and we just absorbed all
sorts of things.
SCHOENBAUM: Do you remember what your favorite books were specifically or
what heroes you had in those days? Who you admired? What authors
you admired?
DEAN RUSK: As kids we were interested in the adventure stories
00:16:00for kids, like the Tom Swift books, and the Swiss Family Robinson,
Robinson Crusoe, the Rover Boys, and things like that. But there was
also some other serious reading.
Alongside of that was, again, a lucky break in elementary school. Lee
Street School, which I attended, was the teacher training school for elementary
teachers in the Atlanta School System. So, we not only had a
select group of classroom teachers regularly assigned but they had fifteen to
twenty of these teacher candidates around at all times to help out
in a classroom with projects and things of that sort. Then, in
retrospect, one of the best breaks I had was in the fourth,
fifth, sixth, and seventh grades each year we had a Carpenter's Geographic
00:17:00Reader. Each volume concentrated on a particular area of the world. One
would be on Latin America; one would be on Asia; one would
be on Europe; one would be on whatever it was. And our
projects and activities were built around that particular theme for that year.
So at that early stage we learned a lot about the rest
of the world.
SCHOENBAUM: That was the time of World War I. Were you
acutely aware or did that all seem far away? I suppose Washington--far
away.
DEAN RUSK: Well, aware of it to a degree because a
good many of our relatives had gone off to the war, and
we were interested in that part of it. And also nearby where
we lived in West End was the old huge [Asa G.] Candler
warehouse which had become a war supply storage area, and they brought
00:18:00German prisoners of war in there to labor in this big warehouse.
SCHOENBAUM: Did you meet any of them?
DEAN RUSK: Sure. I would go down and stare through the
fence. One or two of them came to our home once for
a meal. We were near Ft. McPherson, and I spent some time
near Ft. McPherson as a kid watching them drill and so forth.
SCHOENBAUM: What were these German prisoners doing? Were they just doing
laboring jobs?
DEAN RUSK: Doing labor around the warehouse.
SCHOENBAUM: Were they enclosed or kept? As prisoners they were allowed
to--
DEAN RUSK: They were enclosed behind a big fence and there
were a handful of guards, but there was no problem with them.
SCHOENBAUM: How did you happen to invite them to your home
for a meal?
DEAN RUSK: Struck up a conversation with them. I think the
real formative years for me were there in West End, circumstances that
00:19:00greatly stimulated my imagination. For example, we were half a block away
from Old No. 7 Firehouse, of the Atlanta Fire Department. And when
we first moved there these fire trucks were pulled by horses, and
it was fascinating to go down there. I spent a lot of
time around the firehouse watching them train the horses and see the
automatic way they got their harness on in case of a call.
And the boiler which ran the pump to pump the water was
simply a big furnace standing upright on a cart drawn by horses.
And we could see the firemen stoking that furnace on the way
to a fire. And at night it was a very spectacular sight.
We also lived right alongside of the Central of Georgia Railroad, the
00:20:00main line between Atlanta and Macon. And that was a source of
a lot of interest, because a half a block in the other
direction was a railroad switching tower. And we could go up there
and sit around watching the man pull his levers and route the
trains. We learned how to anticipate how far away the train was
by sticking our ear on the railroad track and listening for the
sounds. Just after World War II there was a very severe coal
shortage. It was very difficult for poor people to pay the prices
of coal. So we learned when the coal trains came through that
if we kids, we were very small at that time, got out
and threw rocks at the men on the train, they would throw
coal back at us. So we would gather a bucket full of
coal that way. The cop on the beat would normally be sitting
00:21:00dawn at the firehouse chewing the fat with the firemen, and he
would watch us and laugh because he knew we were not trying
to hit anybody. We were just trying to pick up some coal.
Then right cross the railroad track, almost literally a stone's throw away,
there was a huge ice manufacturing plant. And we went over there
a lot, sat on the rafters sucking ice while we watched them
make these huge blocks of ice. Of course, I delivered ice to
a lot of people, when I was young, in my little red
wagon. We had iceboxes in those days instead of mechanical refrigerators, and
they had to be stoked with ice.
SCHOENBAUM: You mention the firehouse, the icemaking plant, and the railroad.
What did they stimulate in your imagination?
00:22:00
DEAN RUSK: Well, I think it sort of expanded the range
of your imagination. Next door to the fire plant [sic], there was
a Karo syrup factory. We would go in there and suck on
pieces of sugar cane and watch them boil up the Karo syrup.
Behind these two plants was an industrial dump, and we could go
over there and find the most amazing things which we could make
things out of: out of the things that were thrown away in
that industrial dump. Then when I was about seven or eight years
old, I went to work for a little grocery store just across
the railroad tracks, run by a man named [Claude] Leatherwood. My job
was to go out and take orders from his customers and then
come back and we would fill them, and I would go back
and deliver them in my little red wagon. That little store served
00:23:00both the poor whites and the poor blacks. I spent a lot
of time in the miserably-housed black community just across the railroad track
from me.
SCHOENBAUM: Was that your first contact with black people? You said
there were no blacks in Cherokee County.
DEAN RUSK: Yes, that's right.
SCHOENBAUM: You got to know of some them as people?
DEAN RUSK: Yes. When we were small it was rather amusing:
twenty-nine days out of the month we would play together as friends.
But then about once a month we would choose up sides for
"cops and robbers" or "cowboys and Indians." And of course they were
always the Indians and they were always the robbers. It was natural
to select on a racial basis when you divide up like that
because you could identify who was on which side. And we progressed
from flips, slingshots, to bows and arrows, finally to BB guns. I
00:24:00remember once going home with a homemade spear about four feet long
in the lobe of one of my ears to have my mother
take it out. It's lucky we survived all of that. But then
when we started to high school, high schools were segregated and we
more or less lost contact.
SCHOENBAUM: The Lee Street School was also segregated?
DEAN RUSK: That's right. But in the neighborhood at home we
saw a lot of the blacks.
SCHOEBAUM: In high school you had a remarkable teacher, Preston [H.] Epps.
What did he look like then, and why did he--
DEAN RUSK: Well, in those days, the high schools in Atlanta
were differentiated. Boys High School and Girls' High School were the college
preparatory schools. Then they had Tech High or Commercial High for those
who weren't planning really to go on to college. So Boys High
00:25:00School in those days was very much like the Boston Latin School.
It had a very rigorous program of English and Latin, Greek, mathematics,
science, and so forth. And I was very fortunate to have been
in a high school like that because when they later made all
of the high schools all purpose, I think they lost a good
deal of the cutting edge of the rigorous discipline they had at
Boys High School.
SCHOEBAUM: What kind of discipline? For instance, I went to a high
school where the priests administered corporal punishment. They used to hit us
over the chest.
DEAN RUSK: Oh, there was corporal punishment in those days. As
a matter of fact, my mathematics teacher in high school, O. K.
[Othma K.] David, had a paddle in his classroom. And if somebody
goofed up, didn't do his homework or failed a question, he would
put it to the class to vote, thumbs up or thumbs down,
00:26:00whether that guy should get an application of that paddle which was
called Sternonium. Usually, most of the thumbs went down, so we had
some good whacks across the bottom. Then in high school from the
very first I was in ROTC [Reserve Officers' Training Corps], beginning at
the age of twelve. ROTC met at 7:30 in the morning. In
those days everybody took ROTC unless they had a doctor's excuse. It
was just taken for granted that everybody would take ROTC.
SCHOENBAUM: You mentioned a Sergeant Short who was a remarkable person.
Was he a classmate or--
DEAN RUSK: No.
SCHOENBAUM: Why was he remarkable?
DEAN RUSK: Well, he was detailed to be the principal regular
army instructor at the Boys High ROTC, and he was very good.
00:27:00There was a major in charge of all the high schools in
the area and Sergeant worked under him, but he got us to
where we could drill very effectively, and we did some marksmanship, and
we did a few other things like that: much too much attention
paid to drill, as such, in those days. I became the commandant
of the high school ROTC when I was a senior at the
Boys High School. Once a year they would have a parade at
Piedmont Park of all the ROTC units in all of the high
schools in Atlanta and Fulton County. It was a very big affair,
brigade, strength. And I was designated to be the cadet commander of
that brigade exercise in my senior year. It was there that I
00:28:00had my first brush with the press. At one point in the
ceremony the cadet commanders were to come forward and present flowers to
their respective sponsors, their girlfriends whom they had designated as sponsors. Well,
when I moved forward to present the flowers to my sponsor, the
Atlanta Journal and a photographer came in and wanted to substitute Miss
Atlanta for my girl and let Miss Atlanta receive the flowers, you
see. And I refused right there in front of all this big
crowd. Miss Atlanta was Estelle Bradley who went on from there to
do a little acting in Hollywood afterwards.
SCHOENBAUM: Why did you refuse?
DEAN RUSK: Well, it was my girl, my sponsor, and I
wasn't going to have it. Also I was fortunate in my last
00:29:00year in high school to get to be the school page editor
for the Atlanta Journal. Each week they would run a full page
of letters from school kids all over the city. Each class would
designate its correspondent, and they would write in. And it would be
my job to go down to the Journal and sort through those,
paste them together, and make up the full page for the Journal.
And I got forty dollars a month for that, which was big
money in those days. And I sat there in the Journal editorial
room just right under the rail of the City Editor, Harlee [W.]
Branch [Jr.] and I knew most of the named writers of Atlanta
in those days working there on the Journal and Constitution.
SCHOENBAUM: That didnt stimulate you to a career in journalism? What
00:30:00did you want to do with your life at that time?
DEAN RUSK: Up through high school I was giving some thought
to the Presbyterian ministry. We had been very active in the church
when I was growing up. On Sundays we went to Sunday School,
morning service, then young peoples organization late in the afternoon, called Christian
Endeavor, and then Sunday evening service. So we spent most of Sunday
at church. And I had been very active in the young peoples
organization called Christian Endeavor. As a matter of fact, when I was
about twelve, I think, I was president of the state Christian Endeavor,
the Junior Christian Endeavor. I traveled around different towns for meetings in
an old T-Model Ford. I drove it myself. They didnt have driving
licenses in those days.
SCHOENBAUM: So, religion meant quite a bit to you.
DEAN RUSK: Religion was a considerable part of our lives when
00:31:00we were growing up. For example, on Sundays we were not permitted
to read "funny papers." We had to put them aside and wait
'til Monday to look at them.
SCHOENBAUM: This is the influence of your parents?
DEAN RUSK: Yeah. No cards in our house.
END OF SIDE 1
BEGINNING OF SIDE 2
SCHOENBAUM: When you were in high school did you go on
trips to Washington or--?
DEAN RUSK: Not outside of Georgia. Families in those days visited
each other a great deal. So each summer I would always visit
on the farms in Cherokee County with relatives and also in Rockdale
County where my mother had grown up. And I always thoroughly enjoyed
that time on the farm.
SCHOENBAUM: So, your boyhood was primarily concerned with family and friends
and that particular geographical area, that very tight-knit circle?
00:32:00
DEAN RUSK: Well, all of us first cousins in my generation
got to know each other very well. We spent time with each
other. My children don't know their first cousins. Things have changed considerably
on that-- don't really know them.
SCHOENBAUM: What is your impression of your father now? What was
your impression then and what is your impression now of your father?
He died during the Second World War when you were in India.
[Sigmund] Freud says that the most traumatic time for any man is
the death of his father. Can you tell me a little bit
about that?
DEAN RUSK: Well, my father was a very intelligent, quiet kind
of person. He was devoted to family. He married an educated woman,
00:33:00relatively educated. My mother had gone to, I think it was a
state Normal school at Milledgeville for a time, and became a school
teacher. So she was also very much interested in reading. As a
matter of fact, I learned to read and write at home before
I started school, when I was too young to go to school.
When I entered Lee Street School I took an exam from a
teacher and started in the second grade rather than in the first
grade. I remember on this exam the only question I missed was
when she asked me to spell "girl" and I spelled it "gal."
I remember now her smiling. When I started o school at Lee
Street School, we had an experimental open air school out in the
00:34:00backyard of the school. That was a square building divided into four
schoolrooms, divided by inner walls. But the outer walls were all open
to the weather.
SCHOENBAUM: On four sides?
DEAN RUSK: Yeah. Well, you had two inner walls because they
faced the other classrooms. Then you had the two outer walls. We
were in those outdoor school throughout the year, including the bitter cold
winter. We had a big curtain we could draw up in case
of rain. And in cold weather they provided big woolen bags that
we could step into and pull up around our waists. And in
really cold weather we would heat some bricks at home and bring
them wrapped up and put them in the bottom of the bag
to keep our feet warm. Then about every couple of hours the
00:35:00class would pause and have cocoa--the teacher would serve hot cocoa. Well,
we all loved it. I went through three years of that. I
remember on one occasion going down with two or three others to
testify before the Atlanta Board of Education in behalf of continuing this
outdoor school. But they finally closed it up. I think it was
too hard on the teachers. But I had some marvelous classroom teachers
in elementary school and some fine teachers in high school.
SCHOENBAUM: Was Epps the finest?
DEAN RUSK: Well, he was the vice-principal and taught, among other
things, Greek. And I was in his Greek class for three or
four years. And he just brought our minds alive by getting us
into these great questions and great ideas that the ancient Greeks had
come up with.
SCHOENBAUM: You were reading the original Greek? Anaxagoras?
00:36:00
DEAN RUSK: Sure, sure. The Anaxagoras and Plato and Homer. I
remember one year in his Greek class, that was made up of
teenage, normal fellows, went out to his house once a week to
read the Odyssey because in class we only had time for the
Iliad. And Mrs. [Preston] Epps would serve cookies and hot chocolate. He
was an inspiring teacher. He later, after he finished his Ph.D. at
Chicago, began teaching and wound up as the Kenan Professor of Classics
at the University of North Carolina. He died only a year ago.
SCHOENBAUM: His second wife [Miriam Epps] is apparently still living in
Chapel Hill?
DEAN RUSK: Yes, and I kept in touch with him throughout
his life by visits and correspondence. I always looked upon him as
00:37:00being one of the great men in my life.
SCHOENBAUM: Can you define why he was an inspiration at that
time in your life in a particular way, other than he was
an inspiration and a good teacher? Is there any specific thing that
stands out in your mind? Any ideas?
DEAN RUSK: Well, when we would read dialogues of Plato or
things of that sort we would come across these aphorisms or ideas
and sayings. And he would pause and we would talk about those
ideas and what they meant in terms of what life is all
about and so forth.
SCHOENBAUM: So his technique was not only to teach the language
but also the ideas?
DEAN RUSK: That's right. But in the process we learned the
language. I was a sort of freak when I got to Oxford
as far as American Rhodes Scholars are concerned because I arrived over
there with eight years of Latin, and seven years of Greek, and
00:38:00that was very unusual for Americans over there at that time. And
I found myself fitting in easily into the classical schooling of these
English boys who went to Oxford from their public schools.
SCHOEBNAUM: In high school, what else did you take besides Greek
and Latin? You took mathematics?
DEAN RUSK: English. And we also emphasized spelling, which to this
day I am almost a nut about, because I do think that
people ought to be able to spell, particularly professional people. But we
used to have regular classes in spelling. We'd have spelling bees and
things of that sort. It is sort of amusing though, my spelling
teacher one year was a big fellow called [William E.] Bill Fincher,
who actually had been an All American football player at Georgia Tech.
In those days every coach had to teach something, so they put
him to teaching spelling. Well he didn't know how to spell, but
00:39:00he could at least follow the letters with his finger in the
spelling book. And so we learned to spell. He was fascinating for
us boys because he had one glass eye, and once in a
while he would take that eye out right there in class and
polish it off and put in back in. We thought this was
something. The principal of Boys High School was [Herbert] H.O. Smith, one
of the truly great educators of all time. He had been a
Harvard man and he really insisted upon good performance. He just wouldn't
tolerate sloppiness and laziness and things like that. We had a pretty
well -disciplined high school experience.
SCHOENBAUM: When you graduated you went to work for Augustus [M.]
Roan in the law office.
DEAN RUSK: Yes, he was a young lawyer with a one-man
00:40:00law office. But he also did a good many other things like
producing the Georgia Tech football program and catalogues for conventions of district
nurses and things like that. So much of my work had to
do with selling advertisements in these things and then getting the copy
and collecting and things like that.
SCHOENBAUM: So, you didn't do legal work: searching titles and things
like that?
DEAN RUSK: No, no, because he didn't have much legal work.
He later became a judge. The idea was that I was going
to work a couple of years and save up some money to
go to college on. But I didn't make enough beyond what I
had to spend to save up very much. So that part of
it didn't work out very well. But it was a very useful
experience. Then one other thing which turned out to be quite important:
In high school I had gone out for basketball and got cut
from the squad on the first day. Well, that sort of made
00:41:00me mad, so during those two years I played a lot of
basketball at the YMCA there on Lucky Street in Atlanta, and we
had a Sunday School league, and I was on the West End
team. Learning that basketball turned out to be important to me later
on because I played four years of basketball on the varsity team
at Davidson, and that had something to do with my qualifying for
a Rhodes scholarship.
SCHOENBAUM: You qualified for the Rhodes on the basis of primarily
your basketball emphasis?
DEAN RUSK: No, primarily on the basis of my grades.
SCHOENBAUM: Oh, right. But Rhodes is a combination of grades--
DEAN RUSK: You're supposed to have a little demonstrated interest in
athletics and sports and that sort of thing.
SCHOENBAUM: Yeah, athletic skills, and the basketball was the sport.
DEAN RUSK: That was the sport that helped at that particular
point.
SCHOENBAUM: Could we turn to Davidson? I know Davidson quite well.
I know my old dean, Dixon Phillips, is on the board there.
00:42:00You probably know him.
DEAN RUSK: Oh, I know Dixon Phillips.
SCHOENBAUM: He's a judge and he's a good friend of mine.
DEAN RUSK: Yeah. He used to be dean at Chapel Hill.
SCHOENBAUM: Yeah. And he and I are still good friends. So
I know Davidson quite well. Is Davidson physically the same as when
you went there? Does it look much the same?
DEAN RUSK: Oh, it has been much developed in terms of
physical facilities. The Presbyterian Church sets a very high standard for education.
So this was a pretty strong liberal arts school, much stronger today
than it was then; but it was good then, relatively speaking. I
arrived at Davidson College with perhaps a hundred dollars, and I had
to work like the dickens to get my way through and borrowed
some money in the process.
00:43:00
SCHOENBAUM: You said in earlier tapes that right from the time
you entered you had your eyes set on a Rhodes Scholarship. That's
kind of unusual that you would point toward it. Did you consciously
think about it?
DEAN RUSK: Well, I had this thirst for education that had
come out of my family, and I had in mind education beyond
Davidson at some point. I didn't know how I was going to
do it unless I got a scholarship and there were the Rhodes
Scholarships. So I had that in mind all along. My German professor
at Davidson, Guy Vowles, himself had been a Rhodes Scholar back at
the beginning of the century: one of the earliest of the Rhodes
Scholars. And he became my advisor and counselor on this whole process.
It turned out that he was on the State Selection Committee when
I came before the State Selection Committee. I did various things to
00:44:00work my way through college. I waited on tables. I was fortunate
in that the year I arrived at Davidson the student bookkeeper and
assistant teller in the little bank in our village was graduating, so
somehow I got that job and held it for four years. And
that experience in that little bank was a very good experience.
SCHOENBAUM: What did you do specifically in the bank?
DEAN RUSK: I was the bookkeeper, in terms of running the
posting machine, and had to balance the books every day. And then
I was an assistant teller and would fill in at the teller's
window.
SCHOENBAUM: You dealt with the public when they came to make
deposits?
DEAN RUSK: Yes, right.
SCHOENBAUM: How long did you work there? Four years?
DEAN RUSK: Right. Four years.
SCHOENBAUM: What hours? How many hours a week?
DEAN RUSK: I would work from about two in the afternoon
until the books balanced, and then on Saturdays. In the summertime I
00:45:00would work there more or less full time.
SCHOENBAUM: So your summers were spent at Davidson too.
DEAN RUSK: At Davidson, although a couple of summers I worked
in a big bank in Greensboro, North Carolina.
SCHOENBAUM: What bank there?
DEAN RUSK: I forget the name of it: one of those
banks that went broke during the Depression.
SCHOENBAUM: Where did you live when you were at Davidson? In
a dormitory?
DEAN RUSK: Yes.
SCHOENBAUM: Is it still there?
DEAN RUSK: The old Georgia dormitory has been torn down now
and, I think, they have a new one there. My senior year
I lived in an old building which had one living apartment in
it. It was the armory for the ROTC people. I lived out
there in that building for one year, no two years maybe. Of
course, I was very active in ROTC at Davidson as well. I
00:46:00was the Cadet Commander my senior year.
SCHOENBAUM: So at Davidson you continued Greek and Latin.
DEAN RUSK: Yes, but I found at Davidson I could pretty
much coast along on my high school Greek and Latin because we
were at least the equivalent of what they were teaching at Davidson.
So that was a snap for me. I took Greek under the
same professor with whom my father took Greek when he was there.
This was a very old fellow named [C.R] Harding. We had good
professors in political science, history, and English. I think English is a
very important thing for people to study, develop ones writing ability, and
again, spelling.
00:47:00
SCHOENBAUM: So, that was from 1927 to 131. Were you aware
of--were you a baseball fan, for instance, in the heyday of the
Yankees?
DEAN RUSK: I didn't become a baseball fan until we lived
in New York when I was at the [John Davison] Rockefeller Foundation.
I wasn't much of a fan before that as far as the
major league sports were concerned. But my wife Virginia and I have
always been automatic "hometown" fans. When we lived in Washington we'd root
for the Washington Senators and that didn't do us any good. They
were pretty poor. But, I still have a lifetime gold pass to
Yankee Stadium. I have only used it once, I think, in my
life. I don't know whether it still applies to the new Yankee
stadium. This was for the old one. I played some tennis at
00:48:00Davidson, but I didn't make the team. We had a good many
missionary sons at Davidson, living in places like China and Japan and
so forth. They played a lot of tennis, so we had a
pretty good tennis team. I didn't qualify for that.
SCHOENBAUM: Were you aware of the economic decline? Was that a
big part of your life, or was that pretty much remote from--
DEAN RUSK: Well, it didn't affect us in the family all
that much because we didn't have any resources to lose. I mean,
there was no place to fall as far as we were concerned.
One curious thing: my father when he was a mail carrier, for
some reason which I still don't understand, decided to buy some plots
00:49:00of land at Panama City, Florida. And he would pay about five
dollars a month for this acreage. And many years later my mother,
after his death, was able to sell those plots of land for
a substantial amount of money. Turned out to be a boom. But
imagine my father, with the small income he was on, buying some
plots of land in Florida.
SCHOENBAUM: When you were at Davidson did you seek out certain
subjects, certain professors?
DEAN RUSK: Well, it was at Davidson that I, in effect,
abandoned the idea of going into the ministry. I became very much
involved in political science, international law. We had a lawyer on the
faculty who taught international law, government, politics, things of that sort.
00:50:00
SCHOENBAUM: You said you wanted at that time to be a
professor.
DEAN RUSK: I began to think about college teaching as a
career, and that lasted until I was called to active duty in
1940 by the army. When I studied law at Berkeley my hope
then was to be a college or university professor in international law.
And after a thirty year detour, I finally made it. But, Davidson
was a good experience. We were a student body of about six
hundred in those days, so you knew everybody. You knew everybody in
your class. Those friendships continued over the years. At our fiftieth reunion
we had about fifty of our class back for the fiftieth, which
is quite good.
SCHOENBAUM: In your ROTC at Davidson, was that mainly drill or
00:51:00did that involve--
DEAN RUSK: We had a greater variety of things in ROTC
in college than we had in high school. In between our junior
and senior years we went off to summer camp.
SCHOENBAUM: Where did you go for summer camp?
DEAN RUSK: Anniston, Alabama. The head of ROTC at Davidson through
much of my time was a wonderful army officer, Colonel William R.
Scott, who turned out just to be too old to have a
major part in World War II. But he was handsome, attractive, stern
sense of discipline, good sense of humor, and we all adored him.
He was a really fine officer and served Davidson very well. I
used to visit him in Washington when I was Secretary of State
00:52:00when he was in a rest home of some sort.
SCHOENBAUM: In those days, one didn't think of the military as
a career as one does today?
DEAN RUSK: Not really. When you left Davidson you knew that
you would have a commission and that you would be in the
reserves, but I never gave any serious attention to a full-time military
career. Although I did have all through Davidson a strong interest both
in international affairs and in the Army. That interest continued. I just
barely graduated from Davidson in one sense because I was so busy
I neglected my physics experiments. For about four days before my graduation
I had to spend pretty much almost twenty-four hours a day making
00:53:00up all these physics experiments so I could get my physics grade
and graduate. But in the process, I managed to make Phi Beta
Kappa.
SCHOENBAUM: What was it like growing up in the South? Were
you conscious of the South as a separate geographic region and somehow
different--different culture, as many people in the North think of it?
DEAN RUSK: When I was very small, we were very much
aware of the impact of the Civil War, and particularly the Reconstruction
days. There was still a good deal of regional bitterness about that
experience and black Republicans. If you said Republicans in those days you'd
say black Republicans. And there was a good deal of prejudice toward
00:54:00Catholics, Jews, blacks, foreigners of any kind. In closely-knit communities like that,
there was a very strong sense of "we" and "they." When I
was growing up in Cherokee County anybody from across the river was
a foreigner.
SCHOENBAUM: It's really unusual that you seem to have moved pretty
freely away from any sense of provincialism very early in your life.
DEAN RUSK: Well, I had had that earlier experience with the
black people living across the railroad from roe when I was a
kid, so I didn't have strong feelings of a racial sort at
any time. Of course Davidson, in those days, was segregated. But then
when you got to Oxfod you found people there from every race
and country in the world. I have never been among those Southerners
00:55:00who thinks that he understands the black. I had a long talk
with Ralph [Johnson] Bunche about this once, on the business that a
black in America lived in two worlds: the world in which there
are white people and the world in which the blacks are all
by themselves. And these are just two different worlds. And the white
man finds it very difficult to penetrate that other community where the
blacks are by themselves. I got some taste of that when I
was delivery boy for this little grocery store. I would go into
the black neighborhood to take their orders and deliver the goods. And
they would be sitting on the porch talking, and sometimes they would
simply ask me to sit on the steps and wait a few
minutes. And I could hear the kind of talk they had among
themselves, and I came to sense pretty early that the blacks among
00:56:00themselves are very different people than when there are white people present
because they didn't look upon me as anything. I was just the
delivery boy, so I was able to listen in on some of
this talk. But I think it was the experience at Oxford and
in Europe that erased any possible remnants of any feelings about race
in my experience.
SCHOENBAUM: In those days there was not any trace of a
movement toward integration, was there, in the late twenties in Georgia?
DEAN RUSK: Not really.
SCHOENBAUM: Even the churches?
DEAN RUSK: No, the churches were segregated.
SCHOENBAUM: Did it ever cross your mind that the changes that
we have today would ever occur? Did it ever cross your mind
00:57:00at that time that these changes would occur?
DEAN RUSK: Well, I sometimes thought that it was too bad
that the [Oliver] Brown against Board of Education decision did not come
in 1945 rather than in 1954, because at the end of World
War II millions of Americans were coming home from experiences in which
they were working and fighting alongside of people of all races. In
India, for example, we were completely dependent upon the Indians for our
very survival out there as a military organization. And had the Brown
decision come at that point, I think many more people would have
accepted it readily. But by 1954 a lot of these people had
come home to the South and had gotten reacculturated into the old
attitudes, so it became difficult in some places.
SCHOENBAUM: But at that time, in the twenties, this was kind
00:58:00of always the way it had been and always the way it
would be.
DEAN RUSK: Just taken for granted. We didn't even play inter-
high school sports with black schools or in elementary school. We played
volleyball against other schools, but we never played against black volleyball teams.
SCHOENBAUM: Was there a sense of "we" and "they" against the
North too? I suppose there was among the general--
DEAN RUSK: To a degree. There was still, again, the hangover
from the Reconstruction days. It is too bad that [Abraham] Lincoln and
[Robert Edward] Lee did not live longer to work together for the
reconciliation of North and South and avoid much of the bitterness of
Reconstruction because a lot of the things that happened during Reconstruction, military
government in effect, got tangled up in the racial issue and that
delayed the time when these racial problems were subject to easy resolve.
SCHOENBAUM: You don't subscribe to the theory that Reconstruction was actually
00:59:00a beneficial time to the Civil Rights Acts in 1970's at that
period of time?
DEAN RUSK: No, those are just a bunch of damn Yankees
imposing their views on us. But indeed, it was that radical Yankee
group in the Congress that was largely responsible for the character of
Reconstruction. Had Lincoln lived, I think that would have been different. No,
you see, our theory growing up was that Robert E. Lee and
his men got so tired winning battles they finally lost the war.
We were very proud of Robert E. Lee as a general and
as a tactician. He was one of my early heroes, and still
is to a considerable degree. He and George [Catlett] Marshall have so
many things in common.
SCHOENBAUM: Was Lincoln a hero of yours growing up?
01:00:00
DEAN RUSK: No. Robert E. Lee was much more the hero
in those days. Some time ago I somehow got hold of the
senior oration which my father made at Davidson, and I was very
struck with the fact that his senior oration was very much along
the lines of Henry [Woodfin] Grady's famous speech on the reconciliation of
North and South. He was a very forward looking man, my father.
SCHOENBAUM: Sounds like your father had every right to be more
of a leader in the community than perhaps he was. I don't
01:01:00mean that he wasn't a man of substance, but it sounds like
his career was very much tilted by his throat problems, and that
he had the capacity to be much of a leading political figure
or--
DEAN RUSK: Well, my grandfather was a leading political figure in
the community. He was, although not a lawyer, the Justice of the
Peace for that area. And when two neighbors bad a dispute, he
would meet with them out under an oak tree somewhere and they
would settle it. Very rarely did problems in our neighborhood go down
to the County Courthouse at Canton. My grandfather was a colonel in
the Confederate Army, I think largely because when he went to join
the Confederate forces he took a hundred men with him.
SCHOENBAUM: Do you know where he fought? Do you know any
of the details about his--he fought in the East, not in the
01:02:00West? In Virginia?
DEAN RUSK: That's right. Yeah. I just don't know anything about
his experience. There might be some military rolls over in the archives
in Atlanta showing what units he was with. We never looked into
that. My grandfather [David Felix Clotfelter] on my mother's side was also
in the Confederate Army as a bugler. He died before I was
born, but he carried a dumdum bullet with him the rest of
his life. And after my own experience in the army with buglers,
I sometimes wonder if one of his own men did put that
dumdum in him.
END OF SIDE 2