David Dean Rusk (1909-1994) was a diplomat on the world stage during the turbulent cold and hot war decade of the 1960s. Yet little is known about this reserved and very significant public servant and North Georgia son.
Dean Rusk spent his early years on a modest farm on Arnold Mill Road in the Lickskillet community just north of Roswell in Cherokee County. His father Robert Hugh Rusk (1868-1944) and his mother Elizabeth Frances Clotfelter (1875-1959) lived a hardscrabble life as tenant farmers until Dean was 5 years old. His family moved to Atlanta where his father took a low paying job with the postal service as a mail carrier. Dean was the only one in his high school class to graduate in knickers because his parents could not afford long pants. Determined to receive an education, Dean worked his way through Davidson College in North Carolina where he played center on the basketball team. In 1932, he attended Oxford University in England on a Rhodes Scholarship where he received a master’s degree in international relations in 1934. That same year, Dean accepted a position teaching international relations at Mills College in Oakland, California, where he remained until 1940. At Mills, he met a student, Virginia Foisie (1915-1996), whom he married in 1937. While at Mills he studied law at the University of California at Berkeley, although he did not complete a degree there until 1940.
Anticipating U.S. involvement in World War ll, Dean joined the Army in 1940 first in the Third Infantry Division and then in the Military Intelligence Service. From 1943 to 1945 he served in the China-Burma-India theater. He became deputy chief of staff to Gen. Joseph Stilwell and the protege of Gen. George Marshall who would become Secretary of State and author of the Marshall Plan for post-war European recovery. Rusk planned on a military career…
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