Mr. Secretary of State
BY his choice of Dean Rusk as Secretary of State, Mr. Kennedy has not only con- firmed what everybody already knew, that the President will from now on conduct his own foreign policy—that the days of Acheson and Dulles are over; he has also solved his Stevenson problem. Adlai Stevenson is too big a man to fit easily into the role of merely carrying out some- body else's ideas; probably, too, the very dif- ferent temperaments of the two men would have made difficult the close working relationship demanded of a President and a Secretary of State. It was therefore desirable that Mr. Stevenson should not be given the State Department. In the Ambassadorship to the United Nations he would have a 'freer hand, but Mr. Stevenson's stature is such that it would have been embarrassing 10 put any other politician over his head. Mr. Kennedy has well solved the difficulty by choos• ing a non-political figure as Secretary of State.
As well as great ability, Mr. Rusk has the advantage of being unexposed. It used to be an advantage for Presidential candidates to be com- paratively obscure. If little was known about them, little could be held against them. This no longer true of Presidential candidates; nvost of the Democratic possibles this year - were Senators, who inevitably had to make stands and expose themselves on a great number of issues. But it seems now to be true of the Department of State. There was opposition to Mr. Steven- son's appointment because some people thought his speeches rei,ealed, him to be a potential appeaser; a rather similar objection was made to Chester Bowles; and Senator Fulbright's vat' nerability on segregation, along with his brave and sensible speech on the Arab-Israeli question, made him anathema to the Negroes and the Jews, both of which groups voted overwhelm- ingly for Senator Kennedy last month. Apart, however, from a stand on China in 1950 and some cogent remarks about summitry last spring, Mr. Rusk is in the happy position Of having said practically nothing for anyone t° take hold of. A happy qualification for a Mall most likely to succeed.
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