Your Christmas Shopping Consultant: Recommending A Book for Christmas – Dean Rusk – Extraordinaire

CHRISTMAS SHOPPING WITH STEPHENY ON MONDAY – DECEMBER 17

This post is partially about a used book I bought. A paperback. You are familiar with how the cheap paper turns brown with time. (This is why that happens: Paper is made out of wood that consists of cellulose and the wood component lignin. Both these components are prone to oxidation, and are responsible for the paper to turn yellow and eventually brown.) This book published in 1990 has reached the brown stage. Otherwise, in good enough shape to get away with listing the book as – ‘Good Condition’ I now own a copy of As I Saw It as told to Richard Rusk by Dean Rusk. It’s a 627 page book in tiny print. I had to dig in a drawer to find a pair of magnifier glasses.

Do you know about Dean Rusk? A nice smile, but nothing that indicates the depth or list of long accomplishments he contributed to this world.

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 administration. He had been a high government official in the 1940s and early 1950s, as well as the head of the Rockefeller Foundation. He is cited as one of the two officers responsible for dividing the two Koreas at the 38th parallel.

The book is well written, one I will hate to finish, about the life and times, of a likable, bright, man. He managed in one lifetime to cover a lot of ground at the center of government; a significant time in our history. He was a soldier, teacher at Mills College, Rockefellow Foundation president and diplomat. He worked his way through Davidson College and was a Rhodes Scholar.

Giving books at Christmas time is one of my favorite things to do. I highly recommend this one to those who have an interest in such things.

I want to return to the previous owner of this book: I have concluded that this paperback has had only one owner, a student, a male, guilty of turning the corner of a page back to mark his place. Something you do not do to a book and especially in this instance, out of respect for this American leader of Rusk’s caliber. You know the saying, a good man is hard to find, well Dean Rusk is one such man. From the opening line of the Preface…when I joined President Kennedy as his secretary of state in January 1961, I announced I would never write a memoir – to this moment when I am writing about buying this book, I am struck anew that the layers of a person are not easy to penetrate. You have no idea looking at a picture of Rusk, for instance, the magnitude of his life that accomplished so much and left a mark on the history of his era.

I can tell you that it took until page 125 for the previous reader to get serious about Dean Rusk. He started underlining. The sentence read, During the war the United States shipped lend-lease supplies through Iran to the Soviet Union. Which, I may add, wasn’t the point of this particular section. I fear this student enrolled in the wrong class for his interests. I doubt it turned out well. Why do I say a male student? Because on the end paper of the book, in carless writing, there was a note with a short list of things to remember for a test?

I, on the other hand, am enthralled with this memoir that Rusk did finally write. I feel privileged to be in his company. His contributions and heart cannot be contained within the pages of a single book. I understand now why I have encountered him in half a dozen books that speak of him with respect and remembrance.

NINE DAYS LEFT TO CHRISTMAS SHOP