Book Description

The collection consists of 185 oral history interviews relating to Dean Rusk's life and career from the 1910s through the 1980s. Interviews began as an endeavor to provide Dean Rusk's son Richard Rusk and Thomas Shoenbaum, former Director of the Rusk Center at the University of Georgia, with material for their respective projects: Richard Rusk's biography of his father, As I Saw It (1990), and Shoenbaum's book, Waging Peace and War: Dean Rusk in the Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson Years (1989). Interviews commenced in Alaska with Richard Rusk in 1984, and Schoenbaum later joined him as an interviewer at the Rusk Center through the project's completion in 1989. Dean Rusk is the principal interviewee, although several of his collegues from the State Department and other contemporaries also participated in the interviews. The interviews contain information on Rusk's service as U.S. Under Secretary and Secretary of State during the administrations of Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson and his involvement in foreign relations including the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War. Interviews also document his position as head of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950s.