Ghost Dad

By Donald Morrison

AS I SAW IT by Dean Rusk, as told to Richard Rusk

Norton; 672 pages; $29.95

As the public face of U.S. diplomacy in the Vietnam era, dour, obdurate Dean Rusk never apologized, rarely explained and, after leaving office in 1969, even declined to write his memoirs. Alienated by that flintiness -- and by the war -- Rusk's son Richard fled home in 1970 for a succession of dead-end jobs in Alaska. He returned 14 years later with a tape recorder and a determination to make his father talk. The result is an affecting mix of diplomatic memory and filial rediscovery.

Richard writes a preface to each section of the book but otherwise lets his father do the recollecting. A clay-poor Georgia farm boy, Dean Rusk tells with self-effacing charm how he hustled to get an education (Davidson and Oxford) and endured World War II service as an infantry staff officer. John Kennedy surprised Rusk, and most everyone else, by making him Secretary of State, and Lyndon Johnson kept him on. The cold war convinced Rusk that free nations must hang together in a nuclear age. So when Communist forces threatened South Vietnam, the Secretary saw no alternative but to send help. "Our honor as a nation was at stake," he says, though he admits, "I overestimated the patience of the American people."

He underestimated his son's patience. After five years of taping and editing, the Rusks still disagree over the war. But the father Richard allows to emerge from the minutiae of diplomacy is a role model for any boy: modest, confident, quietly effective and loyal to his bosses and his principles. "I won't be around for history's verdict," says Rusk, now 81 and ailing in his Georgia retirement, "and I am perfectly relaxed about it."