1 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign ...

support to the secretary. The Executive Secretary, at that time, was Ben Read, a fine man,
very astute, very well connected to the White House. Read was a lawyer and had come to
the State Department from the Hill. He was Senator Joe Clark’s legislative assistant and
like Senator Clark, was from Philadelphia.
The organization of the Executive Secretariat was fairly straightforward. It was organized
into bureaus, a line officer for each bureau or two bureaus, as in my case. I had Middle
East and Southeast Asia. There were several people working on Southeast Asia. Our
duties were to read all of the incoming material in those areas, all of it, the complete
coverage on a daily basis, all press, and all the outgoing cables. We had to edit the
outgoing for the Secretary’s signature. So anything that would go to the secretary or the
undersecretary would go through SS for clearance. What “clearance” meant was vetting
all written material.
Q: I would think that, given the time you were doing this, that you would have been
swamped by the “era of reframing” thing. The ’67 war came around at that time.
MILLER: Of course, yes, there were a lot of things going on – Vietnam, the ’67 War, the
extreme pressures from the Soviet Union on Europe. Then ’68 comes along with the
Prague uprising in Czechoslovakia. So yes, it was a heady time, very active. Dean Rusk,
who was the Secretary of State, was a very vigorous, active secretary, with very decided
views and great experience. His views on Vietnam, of course, were very doctrinaire, and,
I would say, very contrary to the views of most of his associates, certainly to those of
George Ball his deputy and I’d say the junior officers as a whole, even in the pertinent
bureaus. But we were loyal to him, and he treated his staff very, very well. We all had
great respect and admiration for Dean Rusk despite our belief that he was dead wrong on
Vietnam.
Q: Did you find yourself – did you end up on trips at all?
MILLER: Yes, I went to Vietnam, and the Middle East, for a number of long trips with
the secretary. My function was to give staff support – at the minimum, physically carrying
the bags, at the maximum, writing the speeches that the secretary was giving at the
various places we were visiting, and handling the same duties in an airplane or in a hotel
or the headquarters that we were doing in the Department.
Q: How did – you were with your colleagues, and I realize that you were both loyal to the
secretary and also, you didn’t have much time for anything but to do your job, but what
was, sort of, your feeling and the feeling of others when you had a chance to talk to each
other about Vietnam at that time?
MILLER: We had a lot of time to talk, and to be exposed to it, because the working
conditions of SS then, and I’m sure something like it now, was a poop deck on a man-owar.
Little stalls, crammed close to each other, a lot of noise, and constant pressure of
work.
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