Written in 1980, this was the first full length assessment of Dean Rusk. Since then, there have been only three other books published on Rusk. This is surprising for a man who was the second longest serving Secretary of State and a key actor in the Vietnam War. At the time, Cohen's book filled a gap in the literature and it remains an important work for anyone seeking to understand Rusk, his approach to foreign policy, and his role in the Vietnam War.

Cohen begins his book with a short chapter on Rusk's early life. The next fourteen chapters cover Rusk's rise from Under-Secretary of State in the Truman administration to Secretary of State in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The main part of the book, chapter six through chapter fifteen, focuses on the Kennedy and Johnson era with particular attention on the Vietnam War. Other important foreign policy events, such as the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the 1967 Mideast War, are covered, but the Vietnam war is central. While still an important book, it now shows its age. Broadly speaking, this can be seen in two areas: its historical context and its historical scholarship. I will address each of these concerns in turn.

By historical context, I mean that the war is still fresh in Cohen's mind. Although his scholarship is excellent, there are moments where his interpretation of the Vietnam War contends with the objectivity of his scholarship. Fortunately, these moments are rare. As Cohen said in his preface, he rarely touched on matters of interpretation and neither he nor Rusk sought to coner the other to his way of thinking regarding the Vietnam War. Even with thse infrequent issues of interpretation, the book's scholarship is still solid.

In the central part of the book, Cohen examines Rusk's approach to the Vietnam war. His work in this area is quite good. This is noteworthy considering he did not have access to recently released documents on the Vietnam War or the latest scholarship on American policy. Cohen uses the term liberal exceptionalism to describe Rusk's view of American foreign policy. Roughly understood, Rusk believed America should uphold a decent world order based upon liberal principles found within the UN Charter and the American regime. Although he is in broad agreement with these principles, Cohen argues that they led to the mistaken commitment to South Vietnam. America became immoderate in pursuit of these ideals. On p. 128 Cohen shows that Rusk extended the promise of the Truman Doctrine to include South Vietnam. A regional doctrine was now global. Cohen argues that Rusk's belief in America's liberal exceptionalism blinded him to the imprudence of defending South Vietnam. In the end, this liberal exceptionalism and the post World War Two foreign policy consensus, ruptured over the Vietnam War. Americans confronted with the horrors of an undeclared war in South Vietnam began to question the exceptionalism that jusitified the war. Rusk committed to liberal exceptionalism, could not see the error of his ways. Cohen ends with the following judgement.

"Rusk, however, remained loyal to his President and to an earlier vision. He thus betrayed his own better instincts, the interests of his country, the principles of the UN. Much may be said in mitigation, but never enough" (p. 330)

With the end of the Cold War following the Soviet Union's disintergration, Rusk and America have been vindicated to some extent for their stand in Vietnam. (See for example Michael Lind, The Necessary War, 1999). While the war and its effect on American society will be debated for years to come, Rusk's stand in the 1960s appears justified to some extent by developments since the war ended.

The second area where the book shows its age is in its historical scholarship. New material on Rusk has ben released and new scholarship has emerged on the Vietnam War. Three books on Rusk hae been published since Cohen's book. Rusk's early life is discussed more fully in Thomas J. Schoenbaum, Waging Peace and War, 1988 and Dean Rusk's own book As I Saw It, 1990. Moreover, these books offer a better understanding of Rusk's time as Under Secretary of State in the Truman administration. Thomas Zeiler draws on this material to develop a fuller understanding of Rusk's approach to the Vietnam War. See Dean Rusk: Defending the American Mission Abroad, 1999.

Scholarship on the Vietnam War has also developed since Cohen's book was published. Recent works, drawing on the latest Foreign Relations of the United States volumes concerning the vietnam War, offer a more detaild understanding of events in the era. An exampole of how the literature has changed since Cohen's book was published can be seen in chapter seven. There he relies upon Roger Hilsman's To Move a Nation, for the events and policy concerning the Diem coup. Hilsman's work, which now appears more self-serving, rather than an objective assessment, has been eclipsed by more recent scholarship. See for example David Kaiser's An American Tragedy, 2000. Althought such examples can be distracting for those interested in specific policy decisions, the overall scholarship and assessment of Rusk's approach to foreign policy remain relevant.

One point where Cohen is wrong must be noted. In the preface, he states that there are no Rusk papers. the papers that do exist are held in the Richard Russell Library at the University of Georgia. While these are not official appaers in the sense of private memos and correspondence during his time in office, they do shed light on Rusk's early life as well as the period after he left Washington.

Warren Cohen's book is over twenty years old, but it remains a good starting point for understanding Rusk.

As a chronic pain sufferer for the last 15 years, learning about what might be causing my pain, how to reduce the pain, how to minimize its affect on my life and perspective, and how to eliminate the causes of pain have been a top priority. In my search, I have found relatively little help from the medical profession. They are sympathetic, but primarily good at eliminating potential causes of pain through diagnostic testing. The pain goes on. My road has led me through many alternative ways of diagnosing causes of pain and treating it. The lesson for me is that pain has many contributing causes and a wide range of things you can do to help.

Having learned that much in 15 years, I was pleased to see these same lessons spelled out in Erasing Pain. Not only that, but the authors have taken 77 categories of diseases and described their causes, typical pain associated with them, and outlined some potential forms of relief.

The authors work at the Rusk Institute in New York City where a holistic approach is taken to the patient's pain. This includes looking at emotions, psychology, social needs related to ailments and disabilities, as well as how the patient's life environment may be contributing. One man in pain was jogging with a large dog on a leash. When he stopped taking the dog along at the doctors' suggestion, his pain eventually went away.

The book is designed to help patients in pain communicate with their physicians. "We believe that the medical profession treats patient pain very inadequately, sometimes badly." "Most doctors are poorly trained to deal with the phenomenon . . . ."

To make the material more accessible, it is in a question-and-answer format. The questions are the ones that patients in pain answer the most often.

The book also gives the patient new ways to communicate about pain, including how intense the pain is on a scale of one to ten and its exact analogy in other experiences with pain that are widely occurring (burning, stinging, raw, sensitive, throbbing, or sharp as some examples).

Best of all, the book is very open to exploring alternative therapies, and explains why they may work.

In my case, one cause of pain was in a place where I felt no pain. People in pain typically only notice the source of pain that is most intense at the moment. I have very flat feet, and needed orthotics. With them, my back stopped putting pressure on my sciatic nerve and most of my leg pain went away after some chiropractic treatments. After eliminating many sources of pain in this sort of indirect way, I finally got to the point where I could feel the pain in my feet. With self massage, I can get a lot of relief from that pain. Exercise, reading, music, and meditation all help (as the book suggests they usually do).

My only complaint about this book is that it definitely over does describing what can be treated at the Rusk Institute. Much of the beginning of the book reads like a marketing brochure for the institute. Although it is good to know about the credentials of those who are writing a book, I prefer books that do so much more unobtrusively than this one. I graded the book down one star for this. On pain-related content only, this is definitely a five-star book.

If you have pain and cannot go to the Rusk Institute, definitely read this book and apply its lessons. It could make all the difference in how much pain you experience!

May you live in pain-free peace!

October 2000

"METROPOLITICS: A regional agenda for community and stability" (1997) by Myron Orfield presents a convincing solution to a surprising array of problems. Americans hate sprawl, but they hate even more anything that they can find a way to label socialism. Orfield describes a system of regional government -- tried and tested by himself and others in Minnesota -- that promoters of corporate profit will have a difficult time pinning the pinko label on. Much of what Orfield thinks promotes sprawl are government regulations and projects of an undesirable sort.

Regional planning reduces competition among towns, counties, and neighborhoods that hurts them all. Without regionalism, taxpayers end up subsidizing sprawl and ghettoization. Companies play one locality off against another to find the biggest giveaways. Developers lobby successfully for publicly funded infrastructure in the hinterlands, and affluent (largely white) residents move out of downtown. Schools in the city become dominated by poor students, taxes are raised to subsidize the wealthy suburbs, and white flight escalates.

Orfield's book concentrates on the example of Minneapolis/St. Paul, but is applicable around the United States, and presents useful strategies for improving schools, creating affordable housing, and numerous other projects in addition to protecting the environment and quality of life. Orfield maintains that higher spending on schools in areas of concentrated poverty is pointless. What's needed, he says, is (aside from the elimination of poverty, and as a step in that direction) a redistribution moving some of the poor to the suburbs and some of the wealthy downtown. He wants to fight sprawl, in fact, by building affordable housing in the suburbs. This is because he sees a primary promoter of sprawl as ghettoization and white flight.

Of course, Orfield also wants to see denser construction, and argues that competition among localities drives the desire for less dense construction in hopes that it will produce more tax revenue than it produces demand for services. Regional planning can avoid this vicious rivalry, and -- by mixing housing of various prices -- can allow people to live nearer their jobs, thus cutting the costs of transportation throughout the region.

I think Orfield's point about schools is worth quoting a few passages. I, for one, am immediately suspicious of any assertion that what struggling schools need is not money. But this one I find persuasive:

"Schools are the first victim and most powerful perpetuator of metropolitan polarization."

"Few people realize that the central-city schools spend $7,060 per pupil. 15 percent more than any other group of districts in the Twin Cities. Spending on central-city schools is also high in Chicago, Atlanta, and many other cities throughout the United States. No matter where it occurs, higher spending does little to attract or retain middle-class students. The existing level of poverty and student diversity are overriding deflectors."

"'If you just fix the schools so the middle class will be comfortable, the city will stabilize,' reform advocates often say. This claim would be true if anyone knew how to fix monolithically poor schools. School reformers, like reform advocates for cities, rarely take into account the effects of concentrated poverty on schools -- effects that are fundamental to how attractive these schools appear to the middle class."

Rusk comes to some good conclusions, such as the necessity of reducing needless tiers of government, the need to consolidate city/county/regional management, and so on, but he arrives at some of these conclusions using flawed logic.

He invests a lot of time and space in the book to go over the theory of "city elasticity", by which he means the city's ability to expand its boundaries by annexing unincorporated areas or smaller municipalities. Instead of citing the work of others who use this theory, he instead has decided to omit a necessary component for supporting or debunking the theory -- a bibliography.

In effect, the city elasticity theory can be in most cases nothing more than the "Polish blanket trick" -- sawing off part of a city and sewing it onto another. Gobbling up ineffectively designed or managed municipalities is a net loss for a city, yet this is not reflected adequately in his findings. Worse, he fails to come to terms with the inequities of city/suburban design, instead taking the moral low road by accepting the inevitability of suburban design. In addition, he fails to arrive at any useful conclusions about how to solve the problems of urban blight except through the city elasticity theory and engages in a sort of governmental political correctness by failing to address root causes.

Ray Suarez's book "The Old Neighborhood" addresses many of the root causes of urban blight better than Rusk's work, while "Suburban Nation" by DPZ and Speck covers many of the flaws related to the inefficiency of suburban design. Finally, Jane Jacobs' "The Economy of Cities" does much to debunk some of the assumptions made in the city elasticity theory, based on economic models and history. There are other works to be cited to support or refute the basic thesis, essentially making this shortcoming inexcusable.

Despite the flaws, including how some of the effects of the data points are in fact mere echoes of the causes, he comes up with a coherent set of points about reasserting the role of government in an environment that accepts sprawl growth as an inevitable path. It's just that the lack of a sizeable bibliography and the waving of hands over certain topics detracts greatly from the inevitable right answers.

"Cities Without Suburbs" promises to create cities from suburbs, simply by pulling them into the city's framework. It's at best a last-resort solution for a situation where you're unwilling to admit you've lost control of events. It doesn't hold much promise for being useful in cases where the essential city fabric is more or less solid.

David Rusk, former mayor of Albuquerque, NM, puts his experience and research to work in this compelling report. In it, he connects the economic and practical success of America's urban centers with the degree of socioeconomic and racial segregation present in each. The result is a blueprint that local, state and federal officials can use to reverse the troubling trends in our cities. Specifically, he calls for metro-wide planning councils, city-county consolidation, aggressive annexation by older central cities, and changes to state and federal laws to create unified cities without suburbs. The text also includes numerous interesting case studies that demonstrate what, when practiced, his ideas are capable of. Easy-to-read, fascinating, and enlightening. David Rusk is talking. Are America's city officials listening?

This book relies quite heavily on the authors own personal experience (indeed his own mind traps are revealed early in the text) which is both good and bad. It is good in a sense that it makes the guide more believable and somewhat easier to relate to, as it based more on personal experience than scientific technicalities. As with most self help books, if we simply follow the authors guidelines we will achieve everything that we want and more. This book is an interesting read and most people will probably identify with many of the 'mind traps' that Rusk refers to. It is an interesting guide and the aforementioned 'mind traps' theory is very interesting, but it is essentially another of the many self help books that are published each year.