The Testament of Dean Rusk : AS I SAW IT by Dean Rusk as told to Richard Rusk <i> edited by Daniel S. Papp (W.W. Norton: $22.95; 672 pp.; 0-393-02650-7) </i>

John Kennedy’s and Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of state had such a well-developed sense of privacy, so unlike diplomatic celebrities such as Henry Kissinger, that in the last of his eight years in office, an Esquire profile by Milton Viorst could be given the title, “Incidentally, Who Is Dean Rusk?” Rusk insisted that like one of his heroes, Gen. George Marshall, he would never write his memoirs. His main reason was that heads of government and other leaders would not fully trust a secretary of state who might later embarrass them by spilling their private conversations into a book. Rusk was certainly also moved by his gentlemanly and perhaps Georgia-Presbyterian aversion to the public disclosure and celebration of self.

Thus it comes as something of a surprise that the 81-year-old Rusk, now at the University of Georgia, has relaxed his prohibition with an “as-told-to” collaboration with his younger son. In a preface, he writes, “In June, 1984, our son Richard came home to Georgia after many years in Alaska, years spent, I now realize, attempting to understand and make peace with the events of his youth and of my public service. He could not do this, could not reforge the broken chain, without me. Thus, together, we have explored the memories and have written not a formal memoir or a book based on documents but a human story, father to son.”

The book is written in the senior Rusk’s voice, with occasional introductory passages by his son, who writes that in 1984, he “parked myself” on his father’s doorstep, “said in a brave voice, ‘We’re going to write a book, Pop,’ and turned on the tape recorder. . . . He warmed to the project as we became involved with each other. I think he secretly welcomed our excursion into the past, touching once again the events of his career and the dreams of his youth.”

In yarn-spinning fashion, Rusk narrates his life from birth in 1909 to a genteelly impoverished former minister and his handsome wife in Cherokee County, Ga., living mainly on pork, wearing hand-me-down, hand-sewn flour-sack drawers and memorizing Webster’s “Blue-Backed Speller” (“I always loved learning, even at age three”). The family moved in 1913 to the West End of Atlanta, which was “not only antiblack but also anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic and antiforeign,” cheering “The Birth of a Nation” when the Ku Klux Klan appeared onscreen. Rusk writes that a boarder in the family house “was gone the day and night Leo Frank was lynched” in the famous 1915 case, “and when he came home, he showed me what he claimed was a piece of the rope used to hang Frank.” A half-century later, Rusk would testify in Congress for civil rights bills and give his daughter in marriage to a black man.

From Davidson College in North Carolina, Rusk went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, startled by notices on urinal stalls cautioning in Greek that “players with short bats should stand close to the wicket” and by a black American woman at an Oxford seminar who insisted, even across the sea from America and its racial protocols, that Rusk must call her “Annie.” He visited Berlin at the moment the Reichstag was burned and saw Hitler shrieking to a field of a million shouting Germans. Returning to the United States in 1934, “believing that international relations was where the action was,” he was rebuffed by the Foreign Service. He instead taught at Mills College in California, where among the students he found himself a wife.

He served as Gen. Stilwell’s war plans chief in the China-Burma-India theater during World War II and in 1946 joined the State Department division that dealt with the fledgling United Nations and soon rose to head of the U.N. desk, where, like Secretary of State George Marshall, he opposed a separate Jewish state in Palestine but “worked hard to implement” President Truman’s insistence on partition into separate Arab and Jewish nations: “It is not easy for Americans . . . to understand what the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine meant to Arabs who had shared that same land for centuries.” Promoted to deputy undersecretary of state at age 40, he forever won Truman’s gratitude by volunteering for a lesser job, assistant secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, where he helped to shield the department from McCarthyism during the Korean War.

Rusk’s account of his relationships with Kennedy and Johnson are circumscribed by a sense of loyalty--and in Johnson’s case, a deep affection--which reduces their edge but is appealing in this time of kiss-and-tell instant memoirs. He does not miss the chance to settle old scores with political foes like Robert Kennedy (“Bobby wanted a commitment to the whole Kennedy clan, not just his brother”) and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (“Not content with his life in the East Room with the social secretaries, Schlesinger liked to play a role in policy matters”).

Historians and the general reader will make use of the new information that Rusk offers on his role in such episodes as the Bay of Pigs, Berlin and the Missile Crisis. From this volume and other historical evidence they will find that during these crises, Rusk was anything but the hawk he has come to represent in the public mind. Nevertheless, like any student of American diplomacy in the 1960s, they will inevitably focus on Vietnam. In one of his interstitial passages, Richard Rusk reveals that his own unwillingness to volunteer for the “growing horror of Vietnam” or embarrass his father by protesting led him to “psychological collapse.”

Of his father’s views on the war, the son writes, “There is candor, confessions of error on tactical matters, and an unspoken sadness that it ended so badly. However, his private views as an old man in the 1980s barely wavered from his official views as secretary of state two decades earlier.” As the father puts it, South Vietnam was linked by the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization “to the entire structure of collective security. . . . In Vietnam, I felt our honor as a nation was at stake. . . . When both my Presidents said, ‘Gentlemen, you are not going to take over South Vietnam by force,’ I felt we had to make good on that pledge.” The senior Rusk argues that Kennedy held this view as strongly as Johnson, “and the so-called Kennedy people who have portrayed him in a different light have missed the point.”

Whatever future historians conclude about American decision-making on Vietnam--and it is unlikely to favor Rusk or the two Presidents he served--they will admire the fact that in this memoir and elsewhere Rusk has made no effort to evade responsibility or distort the record to improve his standing. After leaving Washington, he paid a high price for this in the form of his own near-breakdown, financial troubles and difficulties in finding suitable employment.

Especially in contrast to this age of ambitious political and foreign policy careerists not spectacularly noted for their loyalty to person or principle, future historians will be taken with other evidence of Rusk’s character and integrity, such as his consistent commitment to civil rights and the Calvinist indifference about money so different from other retired public servants. And no one could fail to be impressed by the fact that this reticent man succeeded in rearing a son who could write about him and their relationship with such obvious feeling and sensitivity.