Richard Rusk
Richard "Rich" Geary Rusk was an American environmental activist and the founder of the Moore's Ford Memorial Committee.
From Washington to Nome
Rusk was born in Washington DC, the son of U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Virginia Rusk. About his famous father, Rusk stated: "He really loved this country, in part, I supposed because he came off a 40-acre farm in Cherokee County, Georgia. And never forgot it. He was astonished that a boy from that background could go on and be Secretary of State." Rusk grew up in Washington and in Scarsdale, New York. As his father was busy with various governmental functions and then as serving as the director of the Rockefeller Foundation, his son recalled: "'I remember from childhood a sense of aloneness, a hunger that was constant and rarely satisfied. It seemed that as a child I could never retain more than a fraction of my father`s attention. Even when he was home, it often seemed that he was away."After graduating from the Woodrow Wilson High School where he excelled at football, he enlisted in the Marine Corps, where he was trained as a sharp-shooter. Rusk did not serve in Vietnam. After completing his military service, he attended Cornell University, studying political science. In September 1967, when his sister Peggy married a black man, Guy Smith, making headlines in the newspapers, Rusk supported his sister's marriage, later saying in 2014: "They had a terrific marriage. Guy died two years ago. He went from that marriage to fly a Huey Helicopter gunship in Vietnam."
Rusk came to be opposed to the Vietnam War, which caused him to come into conflict with his father who was serving as Secretary of State. Dean Rusk came to serve as the principal spokesman for the Johnson administration's policies in Vietnam, assuming a sternly professorial image as he travelled across America defending the war. Richard Rusk recalled: "...I’d bring home classmates from Cornell University. Everyone I knew at Cornell was against the war and they would be coming down to Washington for some massive, anti-war rally and oftentimes they would stay right at our house. And my dad would see them coming down the sidewalk and he’d say ‘Well fellas, you’re welcome to stay here but you park your signs in the umbrella rack at the front door.'" Despite the expectations of his family, Rusk refused to volunteer for what he called the "growing horror of Vietnam". Rusk was involved in an anti-war group at Cornell that printed pamphlets criticizing the war, and found his loyalties torn in March 1967 when his father arrived at Cornell to give a pro-war speech. Rusk decided not to join a group of about 50 activists who during the speech of the secretary of state donned white death masks and turned their backs on Dean Rusk.
Out of love for his father, Rusk refused to attend anti-war demonstrations, but he believed that the strain caused him to suffer a nervous breakdown. In the same 2014 interview, Rusk stated: "I became so obsessed with all the death and the destruction. All ended with me in a nervous breakdown at Cornell in January 1970." A psychologist told him: "You had your father`s nervous breakdown."" One friend of Rusk's recalled: "Rich then and for the rest of his life hated what his country had done in Vietnam, and because of his father felt a deep personal responsibility for the damage we inflicted on the Vietnamese people."
In 1970, Rusk had a break with his father over the Vietnam war and did not speak to him for the next 14 years. Rusk came to feel that his father was "the architect of that murderous human tragedy". Rusk decided to move to Alaska because "It was as far away as I could get from Washington, D.C, and still keep my American citizenship." From 1970 to 1984, Rusk lived in Nome, Alaska, where he worked in construction and edited the local newspaper The Bering Straits. An adventurous character, he once walked across St. Lawrence Island alone just to explore one of the remotest parts of the United States. Additionally, Rusk taught English to the local Inuit children. Rusk spent much of his time in Alaska hunting and fishing, and fathered a son, Ryan, with his girlfriend Linda Gologergen. Subsequently, he married Frances Louise Mitchell, by whom he fathered two children, Andrew and Sarah.
Reconciliation
In June 1984, Rusk and his family moved to Athens, Georgia to seek a reconciliation with his father. Dean Rusk had famously vowed never to write his memoirs, but to achieve a reconciliation with his son, agreed to the project. As Rusk remembered it: "I parked myself on the doorstep, said in a brave voice 'We're going to write a book Pop' and turned on the tape recorder". Rusk pere who had gone blind by this point, agreed to dictate his memoirs to his son who recorded what he said and wrote it down into what became the memoir As I Saw It, which was published in 1990. Rusk noted that his father's "private views as an old man in the 1980s barely waved from his views as Secretary of State two decades earlier".By his own admission, the writing process was tense as the son sought to challenge his father. About the Bay of Pigs invasion, the elder Rusk told his son that his own experiences in World War Two left him convinced that there was no way that a single brigade of Cuban exiles could overthrow Cuba's Communist government and that he "deeply regretted" not telling Kennedy this, saying it was his belief at the time that the Secretary of State should not question the president's decisions. The elder Rusk admitted that he underestimated the persistence of the North Vietnamese people while he overestimated the persistence of the American people. When the younger Rusk asked "Well Pop, what lay behind that persistence? Why did they never stop coming?", the elder Rusk replied about the Communist social control and fanaticism in North Vietnam, leading his son to burst out "Do you really believe what you are saying? Who were these people? Why did they fight so hard?" In response to his son's questions, the elder Rusk answered "I really don't have much to offer on that, Rich". Rusk wrote: "Both of us were emotionally drained. I turned off the tape recorder. There would be no mea culpa." Likewise, Rusk was frustrated with his father's unwillingness to show emotion, asking him about how he felt about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, only to receive the reply "Well, I never tried to put it into words." The younger Rusk responded "Damn it, that's exactly what we're trying to do now. Take a stab at it." Rusk described the writing process as an attempt by his father "to find any ties that might still bind us together."
Rusk fils wrote a preface to every chapter in As I Saw It, many quite critical of his father. About the Vietnam War, the younger Rusk wrote: "With this reticent, reserved, self-contained, emotionally bound-up father of mine from rural Georgia, how could the decision making have gone any differently? His taciturn qualities, which served him so well in negotiating with the Russians, ill-prepared him for the wrenching, introspective, soul-shattering journey that a true reappraisal of Vietnam policy would have involved. Although trained for high office, he was unprepared for such a journey, for admitting that thousands of American lives, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, might have been lost in vain". Elsewhere, Rusk noted that the year 1968, "the most climactic since the Civil War" was only a "blur" to his father who was drinking very heavily by that point. In 1990, Rusk told Newsweek about his father: "Whatever rap he took, he probably deserved. He never doubted in public the way the war was conducted; he didn't in private, either." At the same time, Rusk defended his father against the criticism made by the Kennedy "court historian" Arthur Schlesinger Jr. who said the Rusk pere as "a baffling leader” who had "authority but not command", which Rusk fils suggested was a way of saying his father "wasn’t smart enough for the job."
In Athens, Rusk worked as a truck driver and worked for a local newspaper, the Oconee Arrow. Shortly after As I Saw It was published, Rusk was interviewed and still maintained his opposition to the Vietnam War, saying "It just seemed like pouring lives down a drain". In 1990, the publication of As I Saw It, being the product of the efforts of father and son, attracted much media attention, who presented it as a symbol that the scars caused by the Vietnam War were beginning to heal. In 1990, Newsweek described Rusk as rebellious and rambunctious, a man who dressed in T-shirts and baseball caps, being the polar opposition of his quiet, reserved father who was always dressed formally in business suits. Through the younger Rusk was not formally trained as a historian, the historian George C. Herring praised his efforts at history-writing, stating: "For this invaluable portrait of a complex and controversial figure, we can be grateful that an estranged son made the long trek back from Alaska and persuaded his father, in the interest of reconciliation, to write the memoir he sworn not to write. In getting to know his father, he left a record that will permit others to better understand him and his place in the history of a tumultuous era". In a review of As I Saw It, the historian Michael Beschloss wrote: "And no one could fail to be impressed by the fact that this reticent man succeeded in rearing a son who could write about him and their relationship with such obvious feeling and sensitivity."
On 8 October 1990, following the massive success of the PBS documentary series The Civil War which aired in September 1990, an article "The Civil War and Modern Memory" appeared in Newsweek which approvingly noted that both the grandfathers of Dean Rusk had served in the Confederate Army, and that Rusk himself had served in World War Two in the CBI theater and then as Secretary of State during the Vietnam war. The article presented war as "tests of fire", a glorious, if painful trial of American manhood, arguing that there was a sort of mystical connection linking successive generations of American men who fought in wars starting with those who fought on the "most hallowed ground" of the Civil War with the Rusk family being an especially prominent example of "the line unbroken". The historian Lynda Boose objected to this picture, noting that Richard Rusk was passionately opposed to the Vietnam war, and she wrote the mystical "threads that connect" that were said to have started with the Rusk family in 1861 were "broken" in the 1960s.