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By Root 1060 0

young, very low man in our embassy there, who'd been attached to the Secret Service, who learned all the Berber languages and everything—had been there two years and he was going to be transferred to the Caribbean or something, and he wanted so to go to that part of the world—Algeria or something. Well, when I told Jack that, he was really mad because he said, "I wrote Rusk a memo about that six months ago, that you shouldn't have this policy of moving everyone every two years. That it's so much better to let them build up some knowledge," or something. And he used to say that sending an order to Rusk at the State Department was "like dropping it in the dead letter box." And the one thing he was thinking of—you asked me once what he was planning to do after the election? It was to get rid of Dean Rusk.37 But yet he so hated to hurt anyone. And I said, "Well, can't he go back to the Rockefeller Foundation?" And he said, "No, no"—so sadly. "You know he's given all that up. He really burned his bridges." And I think he was sort of toying with the idea of putting McNamara in there, but it really wasn't firmed up because I don't know if he thought exactly McNamara would be right for foreign policy. And he didn't want to let Bundy go because he needed Bundy with him. But he wanted someone in there, you know, almost like McNamara or Bobby, who could just flush out all those— And it was so funny, one day three ambassadors came in to say goodbye to him, and he said they all had on striped shirts with the white collar and cuffs—you know, very English, with umbrellas on their arms—and two of them had on what he called slave bracelets. I don't know if he meant identification bracelets or elephant hair.

These are our U.S. ambassadors, about to go overseas.

Yes. And one was going to Africa, and one was going to the Near East—I don't know, Lebanon or Turkey or somewhere. And these sort of precious flits came in his office and he was just so—you know, it was the wrong idea of the kind of people he wanted to be sent out there anyway. He wanted a more rugged America sent. And he called up Rusk the minute the last one had left his office—I guess there weren't three in a day, but say, three over a week—and said, "I want you to send out a memo to everyone in the Foreign Service that not one of them can wear a slave bracelet anymore."38 But, you know, those were the kind of people who took Rusk over in the end. And he cared so about the little—like where was Rusk? He wasn't in on either part of the missile crisis or something terribly important because he'd have to go to a—

Nassau—

Oh, Nassau—

He did not go to Nassau because he had to go to a dinner for the foreign ambassadors—the annual diplomatic dinner for the foreign ambassadors in Washington.

Yeah, well, little things like that, I mean, he turned into—I mean, Jack said one terrific thing about Angie Duke, who he was so proud of in a way, because Angie does have the most beautiful manners in the world and did so much helping all that way. But Angie wanted to get out of being chief of protocol, and Jack was so surprised where Angie wanted to go. It was Tanganyika. And Jack thought he would have wanted—

Denmark.

Yeah, that he was—sort of wanted to be a Bill Blair, going to eternal parties. He was rather disillusioned at Bill Blair for that, by the way. But you know, he said, "I'm not sure Angie's quite up to Tanganyika." But he was very impressed that he wanted to go where life could be rugged, and as I said, "What about Africans?" And another thing about Dean Rusk. You know, Jack was very formal. He never called anyone by their first names until he really knew them well. And Dean Rusk was the one member of his cabinet—probably because he was older and he hadn't known him before—who he called "Mr. Rusk," right up until the last year. And suddenly one day, they broke down and he called him "Dean." But people don't know that he was that. It was part of his English—admiration for things English. He never liked it if anyone called you "Jack," or me "Jackie," or—except in