Dean Rusk

The Rusk ancestors had emigrated from Northern Ireland around 1795.

His father Robert Hugh Rusk (1868–1944) had attended Davidson College and Louisville Theological Seminary.

He left the ministry to become a cotton farmer and school teacher.

Rusk's mother Elizabeth Frances Clotfelter was of German and Irish extraction.

She had graduated from public school, and was a school teacher.

When Rusk was four years old, the family moved to Atlanta, where his father worked for the U.S. Post Office.

Rusk came to embrace the stern Calvinist work ethic and morality.

Like most white Southerners, his family was Democratic; young Rusk's hero was President Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern president since the Civil War era.

The experience of poverty made him sympathetic to black Americans.

As a 9 year old, Rusk attended a rally in Atlanta where President Wilson called on the United States to join the League of Nations.

Rusk grew up on the mythology and legends of the "Lost Cause" so common to the South, and he came to embrace the militarism of Southern culture as he wrote in a high school essay that "young men should prepare themselves for service in case our country ever got into trouble."

At the age of 12, Rusk had joined the ROTC, whose training duties he took very seriously.

Rusk had an intense reverence for the military and throughout his later career, he was inclined to accept the advice of generals.

David Dean Rusk (February 9, 1909 – December 20, 1994) was the United States secretary of state from 1961 to 1969 under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, the second-longest serving Secretary of State after Cordell Hull from the Franklin Roosevelt administration.

Rusk married Virginia Foisie (October 5, 1915 – February 24, 1996) on June 9, 1937.

They had three children: David, Richard, and Peggy Rusk.

He was educated in Atlanta's public schools, and graduated from Boys High School in 1925, spending two years working for an Atlanta lawyer before working his way through Davidson College, a Presbyterian school in North Carolina.

He was active in the national military honor society Scabbard and Blade, becoming a cadet lieutenant colonel commanding the Reserve Officers' Training Corps battalion.

Rusk's experiences of the events of the early 1930s decisively shaped his later views, as he told Karnow in an interview: "I was a senior in college the year that the Japanese seized Manchuria and I have the picture still etched in my mind from the newsreel of the Chinese ambassador standing before the League of Nations, pleading for help against the Japanese attack. I myself was present in the Oxford Union on that night in 1933, when they passed the motion that 'this house will not fight for king and country' ... So one cannot have lived through those years and not have some pretty strong feelings ... that it was the failure of the governments of the world to prevent aggression that made the catastrophe of World War II inevitable."

He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1931.

While at Davidson, Rusk applied the Calvinist work ethic to his studies.

He won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University.

He studied international relations, taking an MA in PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics).

He immersed himself in English history, politics, and popular culture, making lifelong friends among the British elite.

Rusk's rise from poverty made him a passionate believer in the "American Dream", and a recurring theme throughout his life was his oft-expressed patriotism, a place in which he believed that anyone, no matter how modest their circumstances, could rise up to live the "American Dream".

While studying in England as a Rhodes Scholar at St. John's College, Oxford, he received the Cecil Peace Prize in 1933.

Rusk taught at Mills College in Oakland, California, from 1934 to 1949 (except during his military service), and he earned an LL.B. degree at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law in 1940.

He is cited as one of the two officers responsible for dividing the two Koreas at the 38th parallel.

Born to a poor farm family in Cherokee County, Georgia, Rusk graduated from Davidson College and was a Rhodes Scholar at St John's College, Oxford, where he immersed himself in English history and customs.

After teaching at Mills College in California, he became an army officer in the war against Japan.

He served as a staff officer in the China Burma India Theater, becoming a senior aide to Joseph Stilwell, the top American general.

He had been a high government official in the 1940s and early 1950s, as well as the head of a leading foundation.

As a civilian he became a senior official in 1945 at the State Department, rising to the number three position under Dean Acheson.

He became Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs in 1950.

In 1952, Rusk left to become president of the Rockefeller Foundation.

After Kennedy won the 1960 presidential election, he asked Rusk to serve as secretary of state.

Rusk was a quiet advisor to Kennedy, rarely making his own views known to other officials.

He supported diplomatic efforts during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and, though he initially expressed doubts about the escalation of the U.S. role in the Vietnam War, he became known as one of its strongest supporters.

Asked to stay on by President Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy's assassination in 1963, Rusk was known to be a favorite of Johnson's. He left the Secretary role in January 1969, and taught international relations at the University of Georgia School of Law.

David Dean Rusk was born in rural Cherokee County, Georgia.