46 Facts About Richard Rusk

Richard "Rich" Geary Rusk was an American environmental activist and the founder of the Moore's Ford Memorial Committee.

Richard Rusk was astonished that a boy from that background could go on and be Secretary of State.

Richard Rusk went from that marriage to fly a Huey Helicopter gunship in Vietnam.

Richard Rusk came to be opposed to the Vietnam War, which caused him to come into conflict with his father who was serving as Secretary of State.

Dean Richard Rusk came to serve as the principal spokesman for the Johnson administration's policies in Vietnam, assuming a sternly professorial image as he travelled across America defending the war.

Richard Rusk was involved in an anti-war group at Cornell that printed pamphlets criticizing the war, and found his loyalties torn in March 1967 when his father arrived at Cornell to give a pro-war speech.

Richard Rusk decided not to join a group of about 50 activists who during the speech of the secretary of state donned white death masks and turned their backs on Dean Richard Rusk.

Out of love for his father, Richard Rusk refused to attend anti-war demonstrations, but he believed that the strain caused him to suffer a nervous breakdown.

In 1970, Richard Rusk had a break with his father over the Vietnam war and did not speak to him for the next 14 years.

Richard Rusk came to feel that his father was "the architect of that murderous human tragedy".

Richard Rusk spent much of his time in Alaska hunting and fishing, and fathered a son, Ryan, with his girlfriend Linda Gologergen.

Dean Richard Rusk had famously vowed never to write his memoirs, but to achieve a reconciliation with his son, agreed to the project.

Richard Rusk noted that his father's "private views as an old man in the 1980s barely waved from his views as Secretary of State two decades earlier".

About the Bay of Pigs invasion, the elder Richard Rusk told his son that his own experiences in World War Two left him convinced that there was no way that a single brigade of Cuban exiles could overthrow Cuba's Communist government and that he "deeply regretted" not telling Kennedy this, saying it was his belief at the time that the Secretary of State should not question the president's decisions.

The elder Richard Rusk admitted that he underestimated the persistence of the North Vietnamese people while he overestimated the persistence of the American people.

Richard Rusk fils wrote a preface to every chapter in As I Saw It, many quite critical of his father.

Elsewhere, Richard Rusk noted that the year 1968, "the most climactic since the Civil War" was only a "blur" to his father who was drinking very heavily by that point.

Richard Rusk never doubted in public the way the war was conducted; he didn't in private, either.

Shortly after As I Saw It was published, Richard Rusk was interviewed and still maintained his opposition to the Vietnam War, saying "It just seemed like pouring lives down a drain".

On 8 October 1990, following the massive success of the PBS documentary series The Civil War which aired in September 1990, an article "The Civil War and Modern Memory" appeared in Newsweek which approvingly noted that both the grandfathers of Dean Richard Rusk had served in the Confederate Army, and that Richard Rusk himself had served in World War Two in the CBI theater and then as Secretary of State during the Vietnam war.

The historian Lynda Boose objected to this picture, noting that Richard Rusk was passionately opposed to the Vietnam war, and she wrote the mystical "threads that connect" that were said to have started with the Rusk family in 1861 were "broken" in the 1960s.

Richard Rusk came to be obsessed with the Moore's Ford lynchings and in 1997, he founded the Moore's Ford Memorial Committee to commemorate the incident and pressed the state of Georgia to investigate the killers, some of whom were still alive in the 1990s.

Richard Rusk was inspired by hearing the South African Anglican bishop Desmond Tutu say in a speech that the United States needed something similar to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.

George Dorsey was a World War Two veteran who had been denied a veteran's funeral in 1946, and Richard Rusk arranged for the proper military respects to be paid to him.

Richard Rusk's pressure forced Georgia to put up a historical marker to commemorate the incident in 1999 and drew attention to a matter that most had forgotten.

Richard Rusk came into conflict with the black members of the Moore's Ford Memorial Committee over plans to stage a reenactment of the lynching of the two black couples every 25 July, which were first staged in 2005.

Richard Rusk came to expand the work of the Moore's Ford Memorial Committee to investigate all 542 lynchings in Georgia between 1885 and 1930.

In February 2007, Richard Rusk was contacted by a group called Come to the Table in Newnan, Georgia that wanted to commentate the Lynching of Sam Hose in 1899.

Richard Rusk spoke to a journalist, Winston Skinner, from the Newnan Times-Herald about the Hose lynching.

Richard Rusk proposed a memorial service to honor Hose, saying: "We hope something good will come after so many years by paying our respects to Sam Hose".

Skinner replied to Richard Rusk that in Newnan it was accepted as fact that Hose was a murderer and rapist and it was disrespectful to the descendants of his alleged victims, the Cranford family, to present the story any other way.

Richard Rusk admitted that the backlash forced him to reconsider his own views about Hose's innocence, at least about the allegation that he had killed a white man.

On 23 April 2007, Richard Rusk spoke at a meeting at St Paul's Episcopal Church in Newnan about the lynching.

Richard Rusk admitted the Hose lynching was different from the Moore's Ford lynching as Hose had no descendants to champion his memory while the Cranford family were still well respected and known in Newnan, making it more difficult to honor Hose as a victim of injustice.

In November 2007, Richard Rusk led an investigation into a mass lynching in Watkinsville, Georgia in Oconee County where on 30 June 1905 nine men were dragged out of the local jail and eight were lynched.

In particular, Richard Rusk wanted to place tombstones on their graves as reports from 1905 stated that the victims were simply dumped into a mass grave with no markers.

An enthusiastic fisherman, Richard Rusk was active in the Oconee River Chapter of Trout Unlimited and in the Georgia Climate Change Coalition.

Richard Rusk came to believe that climate change was threatening the trout population of the rivers and streams of Georgia, and argued to protect one of Georgia's principal sources of tourism required action on climate change.

Richard Rusk stated that his father, shortly before his death in 1994, had told them that the climate change be the most important challenge facing the generations to come.

In 2011, Richard Rusk protested the efforts of Republican Representative Paul Broun of Georgia, who became chairman of the House of Representatives' Science, Space and Technology Committee's subcommittee on investigation to hold hearings seeking to promote climate denialism.

Richard Rusk did it armed with facts and he always appealed to our better angels.

Richard Rusk was one of those people whose heart was sometimes bigger than his head and I absolutely loved him for that.

On 25 April 2014, Richard Rusk was a speaker at a rally in Washington DCto protest the approval of the Keystone pipeline, saying: "We see the impacts of pollution and climate change on our fish".

In November 2014, Richard Rusk led a group of activists on a mass bicycle ride, the Bike Lanes to Stop the Pipe Lanes, to protest the plans to build the Sabal Trail Natural Gas Pipeline running from Alabama through Georgia to Florida.

Richard Rusk told a journalist: "It's gonna have tremendous impact on their lives, we older people have a huge responsibility to stop kicking that can down the road and get serious about climate change".

In 2018, Richard Rusk committed suicide by driving his car off a bridge.