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Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I know. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah, Yeah, I think we can Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh huh. From Gainesville, Florida. Mhm. Yeah. Hello. I'm Mike Cannon. And this is conversation. Dean Rusk is a former United States secretary of state in the administrations of President John F.

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Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Born in Cherokee County, Georgia, he became a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and later taught government at Mills College in California. During World War Two. As a colonel, he was deputy chief of staff for the China Burma India Theater. In the post war years, he served in various posts in the State Department until 1952 when he became president of the Rockefeller Foundation, from which position President Kennedy chose him for his Cabinet.

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As secretary in two administrations, he had to contend with numerous crises, including the abortive invasion of Cuba, the erection of the Berlin Wall and the escalating war in Vietnam. In these and other events over the course of eight years, he became known for a calm, rational approach to international problems and for a personal dignity maintained in the face of often obstreperous critics.

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Since 1970 he has been Sibley, professor of international law in the College of Law of the University of Georgia. Mr. Rusk's expertise and experience in foreign affairs provide him with a unique insight into world events of the present day. We shall have an opportunity to learn from these insights when I return in a moment for a conversation.

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Mhm, Mr Rusk. Welcome to the campus of the University of Florida. And welcome to conversation. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. The question that I would like to ask you straight away, if I may, sir. Yes. When you read the reports coming out of El Salvador and read and see the reports coming out of Washington about El Salvador, do you have a sense of deja vu?

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I ask that because many people see a parallel between the El Salvador case, which is developing and the early years of American involvement in Vietnam. Do you see such a parallel? Well, if you were to make a checklist of the so called objective factors in those two situations Location, size of country, population, internal problems, nature, the the opposition, the strength of the opposition, the objective factors would be very different indeed.

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Now I suppose that the two are linked somewhat politically because the very idea that people would think no more Vietnam's is a linkage. But there's some other linkages we ought to have in mind. For example, in the summer of 1964 the foreign ministers of the Organization of American States met in Washington to take up the question caused by the landing of Castro men and arms on the coast of Venezuela.

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And at that time, the Organization of American States imposed upon Castro all of the sanctions that are available under the Rio packed with the exception of the use of armed force. Um, but at that time also, they warned Castro that if these activities were to continue, the OS would not exclude the use of armed force.

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Now, to me, this problem in El Salvador is one for the hemisphere as a whole to take a look at to study. The facts, I think, are not entirely clear about exactly what is happening there. But this is a hemisphere problem, and I hope very much that we would not let it become a unilateral problem for the United States.

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The rhetoric that one finds in the press seems to resemble the same kind of reporting or analysis that was done during the middle and final years of the Vietnam War. There's this show, a certain defensiveness about the American nation. Are we concerned, as expressed through our media, that we are getting into the same kind of problem that we found ourselves in and into China?

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Well, the media are out there boring in for the story. And if they can find stories that, uh, when Pulitzer Prizes or Peabody Awards, they'll go for them. Very seldom do you find these things shown in context. The Lieutenant colonel the other day who was pictured carrying an M 16 rifle.

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He wasn't in field uniform. He had no ammunition around him. He had no battle gear on. He was carrying a briefcase, on the other hand and the fighting with some 20 kilometers away. But I got to be a very big story, so it isn't easy for the for US private citizens to get the detailed facts that we really ought to have to make a considered judgment.

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But we're free to make a judgment without those if we want to are you surprised by the size and vigor of popular resistance to American involvement in El Salvador? I'm thinking particularly of polls that have been taken within the last two weeks, would show a significant number of American people opposed to any escalation of our involvement in that troubled country.

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And I'm thinking of as well of the number of announcements that have been made by major religious leaders, including the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church. Does this surprise you? It doesn't surprise me because the American people are are peace loving people. They're very reluctant to become involved in armed conflict, and they're very impatient about bringing armed conflicts to a conclusion as quickly as possible.

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But at the heart of it is an unanswered question. My generation of students was led down the chute to shoot into the catastrophe of a World War two, which could have been prevented. One of the contributors to that war was the sense of pacifism and isolationism that was so widely and deeply spread through this country in the 19 thirties.

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So we came out of World War Two, thinking that collective security was the key to the prevention of world War three. But that idea has eroded, and we should understand why that should be true among the American people. We've taken over 600,000 casualties and dead and wounded since the end of World War Two in the name of collective security.

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So when someone says to me, Look, if collective security requires 50,000 dead every 10 years and it's not even collective, maybe it's not a good idea. I have profound respect for that reaction. That still leaves us with a question. How do we propose to prevent World War Three?

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Because now there's a difference. Throughout, human history has been possible for people to pick themselves up out of the death and destruction of war and start over again. We shall not have that chance after World War Three, because if that war should come, not only will eliminate all the answers, it would eliminate all the questions.

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Now we still have open with us. When we think about Vietnam or we think about the attitude of the bishops and others about Nonviolence. We still have the question before us. How do we propose to prevent World War Three? And that's a very complicated and difficult question for which each generation must find its own answer.

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At this present juncture in the nation's history, we seem to perceive strains and stresses within the NATO alliance. I would venture to guess that there were similar strains within that alliance during your time secretary. You know, it's curious to me that when you mentioned the word NATO these days, the very next word that comes to mind is disarray.

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This despite the fact that NATO has brilliantly achieved the purpose for which it was organized. No member of NATO has been subjected to external aggression since 1949. But the very success of an alliance of this sort tends to cause a sagging public interest. Gives us a chance to enjoy the luxury of quarreling with each other on lesser matters, things of that sort.

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And then I think in Europe there are some illusions growing up, similar to some of our own illusions. For example, I gather that in Europe for a good many people who look upon themselves as innocent bystanders and a great struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union.

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And they say, Oh, dear me, isn't this too bad? They're not innocent bystanders. They are the issue between us and the Soviet Union. We're not going to fight the Soviet Union about polar bears in the Arctic. If Western Europe were genuinely safe, it would be very hard to imagine a situation that would bring the United States and the Soviet Union into nuclear war with each other.

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Do you consider the state of Western Europe in a safer condition now that it was a 20 years ago? Well, I, uh, commented recently on a little piece for one of the Eastern newspapers that I thought that we were further away from a nuclear war today than we have been in 30 years.

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But I had some rather indignant calls, some three or four reporters who called and said, How would you dare make such a statement? I asked them to look at the real world as distinct from their flights of fancy, to point to a single issue in the real world, which they thought could lead us into a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and they were unable to do so.

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You see it Sometimes things are great importance escape Our notice last August 9th was the anniversary of the dropping of the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki because many people noted that. But also no one here are in Western Europe or Japan. Take note of the fact that on last August 9th we had put behind us 36 years since a nuclear weapon has been fired in anger.

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Now that's the important thing to say about August 9th, particularly when you look at all the crises we've had since 1945. So there is an asset of the greatest importance on which these young people can build as they think about their own lives. The world is simply not full of crazies.

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When you get into this business of nuclear weapons, that's a very hopeful statement about the condition of the world generally and about Western Europe in particular. I want to ask if I may your reaction to the Reagan administration's approach to the Middle East. The question has been asked of late.

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Is there really a Middle East policy in the Reagan administration? It seems to many critics that Middle East policy is the result of decisions made on an odd hoc basis from week to week, just within the last three weeks, for example, two secretaries in the administration Caspar Weinberger of Defense and Alexander Haig of State, have gone to the Middle East.

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It appears that Secretary Weinberger made statements which encouraged the Arab states, and Secretary Haig made statements, if not in contradiction, at least designed to encourage Israel. Uh, do we have, in the face of the apparent divergence of these two secretaries, a coherent Middle East policy? As you see it, it's very hard to be coherent about an incoherent situation.

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I think we start from the fact that peace can only be made by those people who live out there in the area it cannot be made in Washington, are at the United Nations, are between Moscow and Washington combined. It can only be made by those who live there now.

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For many years, I'm afraid I felt that the feelings on both sides are so strong and so deep that the governments of the area cannot make the concessions necessary to make peace and remain in power on the Arab side. They will talk to you about assassination curator.

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You can't tell them they're wrong. We know that the Knesset can throw out an Israeli government with a snap of the finger. So I profoundly hope that I'm wrong. But I felt for a long time that it may be that real peace is beyond the reach of those who live in the area.

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And yet they are the only ones who can make peace. Now we tried general to find some balance between the two sides. Um, we have some important differences with Israel on territorial questions on the Old City of Jerusalem. Questions of that sort. Um, but perhaps all we can do at the moment is to do what we can to prevent another major round of fighting to see if in time, longer thoughts might prevail and give these people out there a chance to make some peace with each other.

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There seems to be some growing feeling among young people on both sides that the time has come to find a way to live together. Now, if members of an administration seemed to be saying different things, acting like unguided missiles in this rather turbulent scene, only a president can get that straightened out.

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The first sentence of article to the Constitution is apparently a mystery to most people it reads. The executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America, Period. Now it's up to the president to be sure that Cabinet officers are speaking or singing the same tune.

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And otherwise, sometimes these people will stray from an agreed path. I want to return to that particular problem at the moment. But before I do and staying with the Middle East for a moment, do you think that Secretary Weinberger has much of a chance to unite the Arab nations with the United States in an anti Soviet strategic consensus?

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I don't think so, because for those countries such problems as exist with the Soviet Union are not the uppermost problems on their minds. They've got very insistent internal problems, and most of them, and also they have their longstanding problem with Israel. I think it would be a mistake for us to think that 160 other nations in the world are going to snap their heels and salute and fall into our particular pattern of our concept of relations with the Soviet Union, because these other nations have a great many more things on their mind and they will not in effect become our puppets in this relationship.

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They're all individuals. They're all unique nations. And we got to deal with each one other uniquely. Do you think that there is, in the long view, likely to be a major Soviet thrust towards the oil fields in the Middle East? I would doubt it very much because they must surely know that that would precipitate a extraordinarily dangerous crisis not only with the United States but with the Western Europe.

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It will be very fool hardy on their part to make it in such move. And the effort that they would make, or that we would make would cost more oil than we would get in the Middle East after we got there. So I would be very surprised.

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But I could be wrong. I've been wrong before. I'd like to return now to the problem of administration, speaking with a single voice, and I'd like to address the question of the place in government of the national security adviser going back to your own tenure in office as secretary of state.

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When your counterpart at the White House was McGeorge Bundy, he was, if I remember correctly special assistant to the president for national security affairs, and you may have had a very good working relationship with him, and I'm sure you will tell me if that was the case.

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But the popular image of the relationship was one of conflict. I think, for example, of such works as David Halberstam's. But following your time in office, there were similar arrangements, which Presidents formed, where Kissinger was the White House counterpart of Rodgers and Brzezinski, the White House counterpart.

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Advance and today, uh, in the Reagan administration, we have Clark and before him, Allen, who were counterparts to Secretary of State Haig. Is this a healthy relationship overall to have, as it appears to the general public, two secretaries of state? Well, there can't be two secretaries of state as it appears.

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I said Yes, as it were. You see on any working day throughout the year, 3000 cables will go out of the Department of State, burying the secretary's signature. The handing of foreign relations is a massive business. On any working day, we may be attending anywhere from 12 to 25 multilateral intergovernmental meeting somewhere in the world, ranging from the control of nuclear weapons to the control of hard cholera.

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Mhm. The role of the national security advisor in the White House seems to me to be to assist the president in organizing the president's own part in this process. Um, there's a constant flow of paperwork. There are differences of views among departments of government which that person in the White House can help resolve by mediation or negotiation or whatever it might be.

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But the president has to organize his own time to look at the paperwork, to receive callers to confer with members of his own administration. So, uh, that person should be a staff person now. I'm biased on this, of course, because of my lurid past, But I do not think that White House staff people ought ever to be put in the chain of command.

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Mm, because it is. It is the Cabinet officer who's testifies before congressional committees who conducts most of the discussions with foreigners who goes out around the country making speeches and taking questions who holds press conferences and takes questions. Um, it is the Cabinet officer who helps the president to bear the constitutional burdens of the executive branch of the government.

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These White House staff people don't do that sort of thing. Um, we didn't have problems with this start during the during the sixties. I wouldn't take Mr Halberstam as as a witness because an authority on that question put a lot of words in my mouth and thoughts in my head that but while he was writing his book, he didn't try to confirm any of this with a postcard or a telephone call or anything else.

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I mean, that was not a very good job of reporting, among other things. Well, that's an interesting response. And it does clear up in my mind at least a problem that I think has worried many people in the United States when the media has tended to present conflict as larger than I suppose it actually was.

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Let me tell you a secret about the media. They need the stories, and one of the best ways to get the stories is to use the second fiddle technique. And there's nothing they like better than to stir up a feud somewhere because that means stories. And so they play their own role in this kind of thing.

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Speaking of sick, um, and fight. Um, the United Nations has come in for hard criticism within the last week. First or the last two weeks, I should say first from Jean Kirkpatrick, the United States, U N delegate chief U N delegate and from New York Mayor Edward Koch.

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I wonder what your reaction is to that criticism and what you would say about the role and value of the United Nations in world events today. We'll have that kind of passing criticism, I think, is relatively trivial. But as far as I'm concerned, the United Nations is an utterly indispensable organization.

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We couldn't do without it. Um, now it's changed in some respects, particularly the General Assembly. We started out with 51 members. It now has 157. They're taking in new members now with the population of Gainesville, Florida with the full same vote in the General Assembly, as has the United States, less than 10% of the world's population and less than 2% of the financial contributions to the U.

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N. Can now cast two thirds of the votes in the General Assembly. Well, that means that at times the General Assembly is going to be irritating, and we'll be frustrated by angered by. But the work of the N goes ahead in ways that that affect our daily lives.

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They just were able to announce that small parks has disappeared from the human race. We couldn't be having these broadcasts without the proper allocation of frequencies among the nations of the world, the safety of life at air and in the sea, and in these controversial matters affecting war and peace.

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If you look at those problems in the post war world in which the United States and the Soviet Union would not at each other's throats in a fumbling, bumbling kind of way, the United Nations has been able to keep these smaller conflicts from spreading to bring about ceasefires and observation teams and things of that sort.

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But even at the moment when we in the Soviet Union were at each other's jugular veins in the Cuban missile crisis, it was of the greatest importance that the U. N. Security Council be there, to which this matter could be referred for a few days of discussion, within which it was less likely that either side would lash out in fury, giving the principal part is a chance to put their heads together and find a solution.

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And as a veteran of the Cuban missile crisis, I can say that as far as I'm concerned, the U. N Security Council earned its pay for many years to come by the role it played during that crisis. So I think the we're gonna be a little careful about passing criticisms or simply reflect our annoyance because I still believe in the old trite saying that if it was not there today, would have to organize it tomorrow when Kirkpatrick and Koch make the kinds of criticisms that they did.

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Do you think that they are appealing to a growing isolationist temper in American society? It's possible that we're moving somewhat in that direction. But I would deeply regret it if we were, because we're not going to be able to solve our own national problems without a high degree of international effort, whether it's an energy or the or the food problem or our own economy, our trade balances or anything else.

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It's just too late in history for that kind of isolationism. If we started going down that trail, my guess is that we not only will be much poorer as a nation, but we will find ourselves in deadly danger someday. It was recently reported that in 1981 a half million undocumented immigrants entered the United States, including 125 mostly by boat, from Cuba.

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Are you concerned about the size and momentum of that influx? I'm very much concerned about it because we know that by the year 2000, regardless of what has done now, they're likely to be 6.5 billion people on this planet. And before these present college students get to be my age, they face the prospect of from 12 to 15 billions of people on this globe.

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I do not believe that the United States can make itself responsible for this population explosion. We cannot absorb the excess population of other countries. I've had the prime minister of one of our neighbors to the south tell me that unless we could take 30,000 of his people every year, his country would simply sink under the sea.

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We can't do it. Um, we take about 400,000 immigrants under our regular immigration laws. Each year we make special provision for considerable numbers of refugees related to special situations. And then we have, uh, these very large number of illegals coming in. I personally think that we must adopt a clear, simple policy in this matter and do our best to try to enforce it, but that we cannot make ourselves residually responsible for the unlimited population growth of the rest of the world.

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Mr. Rusk Personal question. What's it been like being a professor again? You were a professor of government at Mills College in California for a time, also dean of faculty in that institution. What's it been like returning to the groves of academia? It's a marvelous experience. Teaching international law was what I wanted to do before World War two, and after a 30 year detour, I finally made it.

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But it's also great to be a private citizen again, Uh, without the kind of official responsibility that people in Washington have to carry. The world of opinion is a luxurious world today. I don't have to have an opinion, or I can have one opinion today and exactly the opposite opinion tomorrow.

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Nothing happens. She won't be called to task for there's a there's a freedom and being a private citizen, that after 20 years of government service, I thoroughly enjoyed what kind of seminars or classes do you have. I teach international law at the law school and also constitutional law as it relates to the conduct of our foreign relations.

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These young people we have at the law schools in places like Florida and Georgia, first class young people, anyone who sells them short is making a great mistake. Many critics say that they are interested only in making the big bucks as the phrase runs the interested in their own personal advancement.

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Do you find in them a certain sense of mission to improve society? Well, I think they're very thoughtful and responsible group. Um, I don't think in 10 years I've had any, any one come to me and where I live expressing the hope that they want to practice law on Wall Street, make a lot of money.

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They have other things in mind. But despite the gravity of the problems they have out in front of them, I'm very optimistic in the long run because I think you're gonna make it. You see, people like the two of us. I've gone to special pains too.

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Save some interesting problems for these young people to solve. I'm sorry that we've not been able to solve them all, at least for the moment and within 30 minutes time. But, Mr Rusk, I thank you profoundly for being on conversation and for sharing your thoughts with the audience of this program.

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Thank you very much for being in Gainesville and on the campus of our university. Thank you. I've enjoyed it. Yeah, yeah.