title: Hydraulic fluid

text: As aircraft performance increased in the mid-20th century, the amount of force required to operate mechanical flight controls became excessive, and hydraulic systems were introduced to reduce pilot effort. The hydraulic actuators are controlled by valves; these in turn are operated directly by input from the aircrew (hydro-mechanical) or by computers obeying control laws (fly by wire).


title: Hydraulic fluid

text: Hydraulic power is used for other purposes. It can be stored in accumulators to start an auxiliary power unit (APU) for self-starting the aircraft's main engines. Many aircraft equipped with the M61 family of cannon use hydraulic power to drive the gun system, permitting reliable high rates of fire.


title: Hydraulic fluid

text: The hydraulic power itself comes from pumps driven by the engines directly, or by electrically-driven pumps. In modern commercial aircraft these are electrically-driven pumps; should all the engines fail in flight the pilot will deploy a propeller-driven electric generator called a "Ram-Air Turbine" (RAT) which is concealed under the fuselage. This provides electrical power for the hydraulic pumps and control systems as power is no longer available from the engines. In that system and others, electric pumps can provide both redundancy and the means of operating hydraulic systems without the engines operating, which can be very useful during maintenance.


title: Hydraulic fluid

text: These synthetic fluids are compatible with mineral-base hydraulic fluids and were developed to address the low flash point draw back of mineral based hydraulic fluids.


title: Hydraulic fluid

text: Special, stringent care is required when handling aircraft hydraulic fluid as it is critical to flight safety that it stay free from contamination. It is also necessary to strictly adhere to authorized references when servicing or repairing any aircraft system. Samples from aircraft hydraulic systems are taken during heavy aircraft maintenance checks (primarily C and D checks) to check contamination.


title: Hydraulic fluid

text: The ISO fluid contamination scale assigns a contamination category based on particle size count and distribution.


title: Madge Oberholtzer

text: Madge Augustine Oberholtzer (November 10, 1896 – April 14, 1925) was a white American woman whose rape and murder played a critical role in the demise of the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. In March 1925, while working for the state of Indiana on an adult literacy campaign, Oberholtzer was abducted by D. C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan. Holding her captive in his private train car, Stephenson raped and tortured her. Oberholtzer died from a combination of a staphylococcal infection from her injuries and kidney failure from mercury chloride poisoning, which she took while held captive in an attempt to commit suicide.


title: Madge Oberholtzer

text: Following the suicide attempt, Stephenson's men returned Oberholtzer to her home, assuming her injuries would soon prove fatal and believing their influential leader was immune to any prosecution. However, Oberholtzer regained consciousness long enough to give a signed statement to police. She described Stephenson's assaults which led to his conviction at trial and led to the rapid decline of KKK membership in Indiana.


title: Madge Oberholtzer

text: Born to German-American parents, Madge Oberholtzer grew up in Indianapolis, where her father worked as a postal clerk and her family belonged to the Irvington Methodist Church. Oberholtzer studied English, mathematics, zoology and logic at Butler College in Irvington, but she dropped out at the end of her junior year without saying why. Through her life, she lived with her parents in Irvington. By the time she met Stephenson, Oberholtzer was the manager of the Indiana Young People's Reading Circle, a special section of the Indiana Department of Public Instruction. However, she heard rumors that her job and the Reading Circle program were about to be eliminated due to budget cuts.


title: Madge Oberholtzer

text: Oberholtzer met Stephenson while attending Governor Edward L. Jackson's inauguration party at the Athletic Club in Indianapolis on January 12, 1925. In her dying statement, Oberholtzer claimed he asked her for a date several times after the banquet, but she refused; she eventually agreed, though, and they had dinner together. Following that date, Stephenson called Oberholtzer on the phone several times. She finally agreed to meet him for dinner at the Washington Hotel.


title: Madge Oberholtzer

text: The two began seeing each other more frequently, and Oberholtzer acted as Stephenson's aide during the 1925 session of the Indiana General Assembly, carrying messages from his office to his friends. She also helped him write a nutrition book, "One Hundred Years of Health". Using her Reading Circle connections, Oberholtzer intended to help Stephenson sell the book to school libraries throughout the state. She ended their relationship after attending a party at his mansion. They did not meet again until Sunday, March 15.


title: Madge Oberholtzer

text: About 10:00 pm on March 15, Oberholtzer returned home after an evening with a friend. Her mother told her that Stephenson's secretary had called and said he was leaving for Chicago, leaving a message to call him before he left. Oberholtzer called Stephenson, who told her he would try to protect the Reading Circle program and her job if she agreed to see him. She changed into a black velvet dress, and a bodyguard she identified as "Mr. Gentry" arrived and escorted her to Stephenson's mansion a few blocks away. When she arrived, Stephenson, Gentry, and another bodyguard Oberholtzer identified as "Clenck" took her into the kitchen and forced her to drink whiskey until she became sick. The four men then took her upstairs, and Stephenson took a revolver from a dresser drawer and forced her to approach him at gunpoint.


title: Madge Oberholtzer

text: Oberholtzer said the men took her to the garage and forced her into Stephenson's car. Before they left, Stephenson told Clenck to stay behind and tell his associate, Claude Worley, that he was going to Chicago for a business meeting. When they reached the railroad station, Stephenson and Gentry forced Oberholtzer onto Stephenson's private train to Chicago. No sooner had they entered the train's compartment coach than Stephenson grabbed the bottom of her dress and pulled it over her head. He then grabbed her hands, tore off the rest of her clothes, pushed her into the lower bed, and raped her repeatedly. He also bit her all over her body; an examination later revealed deep bite wounds on her face, neck, breasts, back, legs, ankles, and tongue. Oberholtzer, still intoxicated and unable to resist, eventually passed out.


title: Madge Oberholtzer

text: Upon waking, Oberholtzer confronted Stephenson and said, "The law will get their hands on you!" Because Stephenson's connections to the Indiana Klan gave him tremendous political power, he laughed and replied, "I "am" the law in Indiana." Gentry and Stephenson dressed Oberholtzer and told her they would be stopping in Hammond, where the three checked into the Indiana Hotel. Stephenson forced Oberholtzer to say that she was his wife so they could share the same room. He forced her to write a telegram to her mother, saying she had decided to go to Chicago with him. While Stephenson was sleeping, Oberholtzer grabbed his revolver to kill herself but changed her mind, fearing it would dishonor her mother. Instead, she decided to commit suicide by taking poison. The next morning, Oberholtzer convinced Stephenson to contact another chauffeur, whom Stephenson nicknamed "Shorty", and tell him to come to the hotel so she could purchase a black silk hat.


title: Madge Oberholtzer

text: Upon purchasing the hat, Oberholtzer asked Shorty to drive her to a druggist to buy some rouge. She bought an entire box of mercuric chloride tablets. Oberholtzer returned to her room but, still weakened from the wounds Stephenson had inflicted on her, only managed to swallow three tablets. She vomited blood throughout the remainder of the day. Stephenson insisted that he would not take her to a hospital unless she agreed to go to a nearby chapel and marry him; however, he panicked and ordered Shorty to drive them back to Indianapolis. When he was asked what had happened, a bodyguard said she had been in a car accident.


title: Madge Oberholtzer

text: Oberholtzer's parents immediately called a doctor, but nothing could be done to save her. On March 28, Oberholtzer explained what had happened to her in a signed statement. She died on April 14, 1925, from a staph infection from the bites, plus kidney failure from the mercury poisoning. She was buried at Memorial Park Cemetery in Indianapolis.


title: Madge Oberholtzer

text: Stephenson was indicted on charges of rape and second-degree murder. The doctor who had examined Oberholtzer testified that the injuries she received were sufficient to have killed her, as her wounds developed an infection that reached her lungs and kidneys.


title: Madge Oberholtzer

text: Stephenson's attorney claimed Oberholtzer had committed suicide, saying the rapist could not have anticipated her behavior. The prosecution countered to the effect that, based on medical testimony, prompt medical attention might have saved her life. During closing statements, the prosecutor decried Stephenson as a "destroyer of virtue and womanhood". The jury found him guilty of second-degree murder, rape, and kidnapping, and the court sentenced him to life in prison. The Indiana Supreme Court rejected his appeal. This case is still taught in law schools as showing an enlargement of the causal relationships that define homicide.


title: Madge Oberholtzer

text: The brutal attack on Oberholtzer so outraged most members of the Indiana Klan that entire lodges quit "en masse", and membership dropped by the tens of thousands. The scandal destroyed the Klan in Indiana, and in the following two years, the KKK lost more than 178,000 members, nearly disappearing.


title: Madge Oberholtzer

text: Denied a pardon in 1926, Stephenson started talking to the "Indianapolis Times", giving the names of officials who had accepted bribes and payments from the Klan, prompting an investigation by the newspaper. The state of Indiana finally indicted several high-ranking officials, including Governor Jackson and the head of the Republican Party in Marion County. Other local officials resigned when facing charges. The "Times" investigation revealed widespread political corruption, which helped destroy the Klan in Indiana and nationwide. By February 1928, Indiana Klan rosters had dropped to just 4,000, from a peak of more than 250,000 members in 1925.


title: Madge Oberholtzer

text: Stephenson was paroled on March 23, 1950, but he violated the conditions of his parole by disappearing around September 25 of that year. He was captured in Minneapolis on December 15, and was ordered by the court in 1951 to serve another ten years. He was paroled on December 22, 1956, on the condition that he leave Indiana and never return.


title: Madge Oberholtzer

text: In 1961, Stephenson was arrested in Tennessee at age 70 on charges of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl, but the charges were dropped on grounds of insufficient evidence. He died five years later.


title: Kwara State

text: Kwara State (), is a state in Western Nigeria, bordered to the east by Kogi State, to the north by Niger state, and to the south by Ekiti, Osun, and Oyo states, while its western border makes up part of the international border with Benin Republic. Its capital is the city of Ilorin and the state has 16 local government areas.


title: Kwara State

text: Of the 36 states of Nigeria, Kwara is the ninth largest in area, but the sixth least populous, with an estimated population of about 3.2 million as at 2016. Geographically, Kwara state is split between the West Sudanian savanna in the east, and the Guinean forest–savanna mosaic ecoregion in the rest of the state. Important geographic features of the state include rivers, with the Niger flowing along the northern border into Lake Jeba, before continuing as the border, while the Awun, Asa, Aluko, and Oyun rivers flow through the interior. In the far northwest of the state is the Borgu section of the Kainji National Park, a large national park that contains populations of grey heron, kob, hippopotamus, African bush elephant, olive baboon, and roan antelope, along with some of the last remaining West African lions on Earth. In the far southwest, a small part of the Old Oyo National Park contains crowned eagle, martial eagle, African buffalo, oribi, and patas monkey populations.


title: Kwara State

text: Kwara state has been inhabited for years by various ethnic groups, primarily the majority Yoruba people that live throughout the state, but there are sizeable minorities of Nupe people in the northeast, Bariba (Baatonu) and Busa (Bokobaru) peoples in the west, and a small Fulani population in Ilorin, moving through the state as nomadic herders.


title: Kwara State

text: In the pre-colonial period, majority of the area that is now Kwara state was part of the Oyo Empire, with part of the western portions in the Borgu Kingdoms peopled by the Bariba, Boko and Bissa people, and Nupe Kingdom (1531-1835). In the mid 1800s, the Fulani jihad annexed some part of what is now the state of Kwara and placed the area under the Gwandu sphere of the Sokoto Caliphate. In the 1890s and 1900s, British expeditions occupied the area and incorporated it into the Northern Nigeria Protectorate. The Northern Nigeria later merged into British Nigeria in 1914, before becoming independent as Nigeria in 1960. Originally, the modern-day Kwara state was a part of the post-independence Northern Region until 1967, when the region was split and the area became the West Central State. In 1976, the state was renamed Kwara state and the name remained until the 1990s, when its southeast was split off to form a part of Kogi state and its far northwest Borgu division was annexed into the Borgu division of Niger state.


title: Kwara State

text: Economically, Kwara state is largely based around agriculture, mainly of coffee, cotton, groundnut, cocoa, oil palm, and kola nut crops. Other key industries are services, especially in the city of Ilorin, and the livestock herding and ranching of cattle, goats, and sheep. Kwara state has the joint-twentieth highest Human Development Index in the country and numerous institutions of tertiary education.


title: Kwara State

text: Kwara state was created on 27 May 1967, when the Federal Military Government of General Yakubu Gowon broke the four regions that then constituted the Federation of Nigeria into 12 states. At its creation, the state was made up of the former Ilorin and Kabba provinces of the then Northern Region and was initially named the West Central State but later changed to "Kwara", a local name for the River Niger, in the Hausa language.


title: Kwara State

text: Kwara state has since 1976 reduced considerably in size as a result of further state creation exercises in Nigeria. On 13 February 1976, the Idah/Dekina part of the state was carved out and merged with a part of the then Benue/Plateau state to form Benue state.


title: Kwara State

text: On 27 August 1991, five Local Government areas, namely Oyi, Yagba, Okene, Okehi and Kogi were also excised to form part of the new Kogi state, while a sixth, Borgu Local Government Area, was merged with Niger state. The major populated local governments are Ilorin and Offa.


title: Kwara State

text: Kwara state has numerous mineral resources such as tourmaline, tantalite, and many mineral deposits in the northern part. Cocoa and Kolanut in the Southern parts Oke - Ero, Ekiti and Isin LGA.


title: Kwara State

text: The climate of the Kwara state capital, Ilorin, is tropically wet and dry and it has an annual rainfall, which ranges between 990.3 mm to 1318mm mean value. The city has a varying temperature of 33C to 37C, with the third month of the year, March, being the hottest. The minimum and maximum temperature, as well as the relative humidity of the state capital, are on the rise between years 1978 and 2017. The wind that blows in this region constitutes both South-East and North-East continental wind.


title: Kwara State

text: As at 2006, the population of Kwarans was 2.37 million, based on the Nigerian 2006 Census. This population size constitutes about 1.69% of the nation's total population having relied upon immigration for population growth and socioeconomic development. The principal ethnic groups are Yoruba, Nupe, Fulani and Baruba.


title: Kwara State

text: The current governor of Kwara State is Governor Abdulrazaq Abdulrahman, who emerged victorious in the March 9, 2019's governorship election, with the political party APC. AbdulRahman AbdulRazak was sworn in on May 29, 2019, making him the 4th democratic governor of Kwara state and the 20th governor of Kwara state overall.Kayode Alabi is serving as the deputy governor of Kwara state under AbdulRahman's administration.


title: Kwara State

text: Kwara state has a federal university, the University of Ilorin, a state university, Kwara State University and seven other privately owned Universities: Al-Hikmah University, Landmark University, Summit University, Crown Hill University, Thomas Adewumi University, Ahman Pategi University and University of Offa. Kwara state also has five approved polytechnics; a federal polytechnics, Federal Polytechnic Offa, a state owned polytechnics, Kwara State Polytechnic and three privately owned: The Polytechnic Igbo Owu, Lens Polytechnic and Graceland Polytechnic. Of the fifteen Colleges of Education in Kwara state, eleven are owned by private establishments: College of Education Ilemona, Muhyideen College of Education, Kinsey College of Education, Ilorin, Kwara State, Moje College of Education, Erin-Ile, Imam Hamzat College of Education, ECWA College of Education, College of Education Offa, Nana Aisha College of Education, Adesina College of Education and Pan African College of Education. Four colleges of education in Kwara state are funded by the star government: Kwara State College of Education Ilorin, College of Education Oro, Kwara State College of Education (Technical) Lafiagi and one federal government's institution offering NCE, the Nigeria Army School of Education. There is also a navy school, Nigerian Navy School of Health Science, Irra Road, Offa and an aviation college, International Aviation College, Ilorin.


title: Kwara State

text: Important tourist attractions in Kwara state include Esie Museum, Owu waterfalls, one of the highest and most spectacular waterfalls in west Africa. Imoleboja Rock Shelter, Ogunjokoro, Kainji Lake National Parks, now in Niger state and Agbonna Hill-- Awon Mass Wedding in Shao. There is also Sobi Hill amongst other, which is the largest landform in Ilorin, the state capital. A huge natural reserve also divides the state into East and West. Ero Omola waterfall is also tourist attractions


title: Kwara State

text: The Nigerian Railway Corporation extends services from Lagos through the state to the northern part of the country. Ilorin Airport is a major center for both domestic and international flights and has now been built up into a hub for transportation of cargoes.


title: Kwara State

text: Agriculture is the main source of the state's economy and the principal cash crops are: cotton, cocoa, coffee, Kolanut, tobacco, beniseed and palm produce. Kwara state is home to Shonga Farms, a product of the Back-to-Farm project of one of the past administrators of the state, Dr. Abubakar Bukola Saraki. Shonga Farms is made up of 13 commercial farmers. Mineral resources in the state are Petroleum, Gold, limestone, marble, feldspar, clay, kaolin, quartz and granite rocks.


title: Kwara State

text: The government of Nigeria is increasingly aware of problems emanating from poor environmental sanitation, and Kwara state is working on improving its environment and sanitation. On September 22, 2020, Kwara state governor officially commenced the 'Clean Kwara' Campaign to end open defecation and promote good hygiene in the state. The state government is working to fix all the roads and waterways to ensure free water flow, putting in efforts to ensure water sanitation, building toilets and making clean water accessible. This is also to promote Sustainable Development Goals 3 & 6 (general access to safe and affordable drinking water and access to adequate and equitable sanitation, hygiene for all, and end open defecation by 2030)


title: Kwara State

text: Sporting activities are managed by the State Sports Council. The importance attached to sports led to the construction of a stadium, named-- Kwara State Stadium Complex. The facilities available at the stadium complex are mainbowl, indoor sports hall, hostel, recreational press center as well as an Olympic size swimming pool. The state is actively represented both in football and basketball. The state is the home to the Kwara United Football Club, ABS FC and Kwara Falcons Basketball Club.


title: Snipex Alligator

text: The Snipex Alligator is a bolt-action, magazine-fed anti-materiel rifle chambered in 14.5×114mm manufactured by XADO Holding Ltd.


title: Snipex Alligator

text: The Snipex Alligator long-range large-caliber magazine-fed repeating rifle is designed to engage moving and stationary targets: vehicles, communications and air defense systems, aircraft in parking areas, fortified fixed defensive positions, dugouts, etc. The box magazine is detachable and holds five rounds of ammunition. It is designed to penetrate of armor plate at a distance of .


title: Snipex Alligator

text: The rifle was designed to take into account all the requirements for high-precision shooting. Barrel locking is achieved through a rotating bolt. The rifle demonstrates an acceptable level of recoil during shooting. Recoil is suppressed by the muzzle brake, the recoil isolator, an elastic multilayer shoulder pad, and optimally balanced weight.


title: Snipex Alligator

text: The rifle has a height-adjustable cheek rest, which can be positioned for right- or left-handed shooting. For ease of aiming, the rifle is equipped with a folding bipod and an adjustable rear support, allowing for fine adjustment. It has a Picatinny rail with a 35 arc minute gradient on which various sighting devices can be mounted.


title: Snipex Alligator

text: The Alligator rifle was first introduced in June 2020 on the official Snipex Facebook page. In July, the first presentation video appeared on the official YouTube channel of XADO. Based on the state examinations results, the 14.5×114 mm caliber Snipex Alligator rifle was unofficially adopted by the Armed Forces of Ukraine in 2020; it was officially adopted on 2 March 2021.


title: Dean Rusk

text: David Dean Rusk (February 9, 1909December 20, 1994) was the United States Secretary of State from 1961 to 1969 under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, the second-longest serving Secretary of State after Cordell Hull from the Franklin Roosevelt administration. He had been a high government official in the 1940s and early 1950s, as well as the head of a leading foundation. He is cited as one of the two officers responsible for dividing the two Koreas at the 38th parallel.


title: Dean Rusk

text: Born to a poor farm family in Cherokee County, Georgia, Rusk graduated from Davidson College and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he immersed himself in English history and customs. After teaching at Mills College in California, he became an army officer in the war against Japan. He served as a staff officer in the China Burma India Theater, becoming a senior aide to Joseph Stilwell, the top American general. As a civilian he became a senior official in 1945 at the State Department, rising to the number three position under Dean Acheson. He became Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs in 1950. In 1952, Rusk left to become president of the Rockefeller Foundation.


title: Dean Rusk

text: After Kennedy won the 1960 presidential election, he asked Rusk to serve as secretary of state. Rusk was a quiet advisor to Kennedy, rarely making his own views known to other officials. He supported diplomatic efforts during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and, though he initially expressed doubts about the escalation of the U.S. role in the Vietnam War, he became known as one of its strongest supporters. Asked to stay on by President Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy's assassination in 1963, Rusk was known to be a favorite of Johnson's. He left the Secretary role in January 1969, and taught international relations at the University of Georgia School of Law.


title: Dean Rusk

text: David Dean Rusk was born in rural Cherokee County, Georgia. The Rusk ancestors had emigrated from Northern Ireland around 1795. His father Robert Hugh Rusk (1868–1944) had attended Davidson College and Louisville Theological Seminary. He left the ministry to become a cotton farmer and school teacher. Rusk's mother Elizabeth Frances Clotfelter was of German and Irish extraction. She had graduated from public school, and was a school teacher. When Rusk was four years old, the family moved to Atlanta, where his father worked for the U.S. Post Office. Rusk came to embrace the stern Calvinist work ethic and morality.


title: Dean Rusk

text: Like most white Southerners, his family was Democratic; young Rusk's hero was President Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern president since the Civil War era. The experience of poverty made him sympathetic to black Americans. As a 9 year old, Rusk attended a rally in Atlanta where President Wilson called on the United States to join the League of Nations. Rusk grew up on the mythology and legends of the "Lost Cause" so common to the South, and he came to embrace the militarism of Southern culture as he wrote in a high school essay that "young men should prepare themselves for service in case our country ever got into trouble." At the age of 12, Rusk had joined the ROTC, whose training duties he took very seriously. Rusk had an intense reverence for the military and throughout his later career, he was inclined to accept the advice of generals.


title: Dean Rusk

text: He was educated in Atlanta's public schools, and graduated from Boys High School in 1925, spending two years working for an Atlanta lawyer before working his way through Davidson College, a Presbyterian school in North Carolina. He was active in the national military honor society Scabbard and Blade, becoming a cadet lieutenant colonel commanding the Reserve Officers' Training Corps battalion. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1931. While at Davidson, Rusk applied the Calvinist work ethic to his studies. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. He studied international relations, taking an MA in PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics). He immersed himself in English history, politics, and popular culture, making lifelong friends among the British elite. Rusk's rise from poverty made him a passionate believer in the "American Dream", and a recurring theme throughout his life was his oft-expressed patriotism, a place in which he believed that anyone, no matter how modest their circumstances, could rise up to live the "American Dream".


title: Dean Rusk

text: Rusk married Virginia Foisie (October 5, 1915 – February 24, 1996) on June 9, 1937. They had three children: David, Richard, and Peggy Rusk.


title: Dean Rusk

text: Rusk taught at Mills College in Oakland, California, from 1934 to 1949 (except during his military service), and he earned an LL.B. degree at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law in 1940.


title: Dean Rusk

text: While studying in England as a Rhodes Scholar at St. John's College, Oxford, he received the Cecil Peace Prize in 1933. Rusk's experiences of the events of the early 1930s decisively shaped his later views, as he told Karnow in an interview: I was a senior in college the year that the Japanese seized Manchuria and I have the picture still etched in my mind from the newsreel of the Chinese ambassador standing before the League of Nations, pleading for help against the Japanese attack. I myself was present in the Oxford Union on that night in 1933, when they passed the motion that "this house will not fight for king and country" ...So one cannot have lived through those years and not have some pretty strong feelings ... that it was the failure of the governments of the world to prevent aggression that made the catastrophe of World War II inevitable.


title: Dean Rusk

text: During the 1930s Rusk served in the Army reserves. He was called to active duty in December 1940 as a captain. He served as a staff officer in the China Burma India Theater. During the war, Rusk had authorized an air drop of arms to the Viet Minh guerrillas in Vietnam commanded by his future enemy Ho Chi Minh. At war's end he was a colonel, decorated with the Legion of Merit with Oak Leaf Cluster.


title: Dean Rusk

text: Rusk returned to America to work briefly for the War Department in Washington. He joined the Department of State in February 1945, and worked for the office of United Nations Affairs. In the same year, he suggested splitting Korea into spheres of U.S. and of Soviet influence at the 38th parallel north. After Alger Hiss left State in January 1947, Rusk succeeded him (as director of the Office of Special Political Affairs), according to Max Lowenthal.


title: Dean Rusk

text: Rusk was a supporter of the Marshall Plan and of the United Nations. In 1948, he supported the Secretary of State George Marshall in advising Truman against recognizing Israel, fearing it would damage relations with oil-rich Arab states like Saudi Arabia, but was overruled by Truman's legal counsel, Clark Clifford, who persuaded the president to recognize Israel. When Marshall was asked to explain why he did not resign over the recognition of Israel, he replied that the secretary of state did not resign over decisions made by the president who had the ultimate control of foreign policy. Rusk, who admired Marshall, supported his decision and always quoted the remark made by Truman: "The president makes the foreign policy". In 1949, he was made deputy Undersecretary of State under Dean Acheson, who had replaced Marshall as secretary of state.


title: Dean Rusk

text: In 1950, Rusk was made assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, at his own request, arguing that he knew Asia the best. He played an influential part in the US decision to become involved in the Korean War, and in Japan's postwar compensation for victorious countries, as shown in the Rusk documents. Rusk was a cautious diplomat and always sought international support. Rusk favored support for Asian nationalist movements, arguing that European imperialism was doomed in Asia, but the Atlanticist Acheson favored closer relations with the European powers, which precluded American support for Asian nationalism. Rusk dutifully declared it was his duty to support Acheson.


title: Dean Rusk

text: When question arose as to whether the United States should support France in maintaining control over Indochina against the Communist Viet Minh guerrillas, Rusk argued for support of the French government, stating that the Viet Minh were just the instruments of Soviet expansionism in Asia and to refuse to support the French would amount to appeasement. Under strong American pressure, the French granted nominal independence to the State of Vietnam in February 1950 under the Emperor Bao Dai, which the United States recognized within days. However, it was widely known that the State of Vietnam was still in effect a French colony as French officials controlled all of the important ministries and the Emperor bitterly remarked to the press: "What they call a Bao Dai solution turns out to be just a French solution." In June 1950, Rusk testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "This is a civil war that has been in effect captured by the [Soviet] Politburo and, besides, has been turned into a tool of the Politburo. So it isn't a civil war in the usual sense. It is part of the international war ... We have to look at in terms of which side we are on in this particular kind of struggle ... Because Ho Chi Minh is tied with the Politburo, our policy is to support Bao Dai and the French in Indochina until we have time to help them establish a going concern."


title: Dean Rusk

text: In April 1951, Truman sacked General Douglas MacArthur as the commander of the American forces in Korea over the question about whether to carry the war into China. At the time, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar Bradley, called war with China "the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy". In May 1951, Rusk gave a speech at a dinner sponsored by the China Institute in Washington, which he had not submitted to the State Department in advance, where he implied the United States should unify Korea under Syngman Rhee and should overthrow Mao Zedong in China. Rusk's speech attracted more attention than he expected, as the columnist Walter Lippmann ran a column reading "Bradley vs. Rusk", accusing Rusk of advocating a policy of unconditional surrender in the Korean war. For embarrassing Acheson, Rusk was forced to resign and went into the private sector as the director of the Rockefeller Foundation.


title: Dean Rusk

text: Rusk and his family moved to Scarsdale, New York, while he served as a Rockefeller Foundation trustee from 1950 to 1961. In 1952 he succeeded Chester L. Barnard as president of the foundation.


title: Dean Rusk

text: On December 12, 1960, Democratic President-elect John F. Kennedy nominated Rusk to be Secretary of State. Rusk was not Kennedy's first choice; his first choice, J. William Fulbright, proved too controversial. David Halberstam also described Rusk as "everybody's number two". Rusk had recently written an article titled "The President" in "Foreign Affairs" calling for the president to direct foreign policy with the secretary of state as a mere adviser, which had Kennedy's interest after it was pointed out to him. After deciding that Fulbright's support for segregation disqualified him, Kennedy summoned Rusk for a meeting, where he himself endorsed Fulbright as the man best qualified to be Secretary of State. Rusk himself was not particularly interested in running the State Department as the annual pay for secretary of state was $25,000 while his job as director of the Rockefeller Foundation paid $60,000 per year. Rusk only agreed to take the position out of a sense of patriotism after Kennedy insisted that he take the job.


title: Dean Rusk

text: Rusk took charge of a department he knew well when it was half the size. It now employed 23,000 people including 6,000 Foreign Service officers and had diplomatic relations with 98 countries. He had faith in the use of military action to combat communism. Despite private misgivings about the Bay of Pigs invasion, he remained noncommittal during the executive council meetings leading up to the attack and never opposed it outright. Early in his tenure, he had strong doubts about US intervention in Vietnam, but later his vigorous public defense of US actions in the Vietnam War made him a frequent target of anti-war protests. Just as had under the Truman administration, Rusk tended to favor hawkish line towards Vietnam and frequently allied himself in debates in the Cabinet and on the National Security Council with equally hawkish Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.


title: Dean Rusk

text: Against the criticism made by Edward Lansdale of the embassy in Saigon, Rusk defended the performance of the State Department, saying South Vietnam was a difficult assignment. On 9 March 1961, the communist Pathet Lao won a notable victory on the Plains of Jars, and a for a moment the Pathet Lao seemed on the verge of seizing all of Laos. Rusk expressed considerable disgust when he learned that neither side in the Lao civil war fought very hard, citing a report that both sides had broken off combat to go celebrate a water festival for ten days before resuming their battle. Rusk, who had much experience of Southeast Asia during World War Two, expressed much doubt if bombing alone would stop the Pathet Lao, saying it was his experience that bombing only worked with ground troops to hold the ground or advance.


title: Dean Rusk

text: The Undersecretary of State, Chester Bowles, wrote to Rusk in late March 1961, saying he heard rumors that Cuban emigres were being trained by the CIA for an invasion of Cuba, which he asked Rusk to stop, saying it was against the rules of the Organization of American States. Rusk did not pass on the memo to Kennedy nor did he himself speak out against the Bay of Pigs invasion, even when his own military experience had convinced him that a single brigade "did not stand a snowball's chance in hell" of toppling's Cuba's government.


title: Dean Rusk

text: In April 1961, when a proposal to send 100 more American military advisers to South Vietnam to make a total of 800 appeared before Kennedy, Rusk argued for acceptance even as he noted that it violated the Geneva Accords of 1954 (which the United States had not signed, but promised to abide by), which limited the number of foreign military personnel in Vietnam to 700 at a time. Rusk stated that International Control Commission consisting of diplomats from India, Poland and Canada which was supposed to enforce the Geneva Accords should not be informed of the deployment and the advisers "be placed in varied locations to avoid attention". Rusk favored a hawkish line on Laos. Kennedy decided otherwise, on the grounds that Laos had no modern airfields and there was a risk of Chinese intervention. Rusk opened the Geneva conference on neutralizing Laos and predicted to Kennedy that the negotiations would fail.


title: Dean Rusk

text: Rusk continued his Rockefeller Foundation interest in aiding developing nations and also supported low tariffs to encourage world trade. Rusk drew the ire of supporters of Israel after he let it be known that he believed the USS "Liberty" incident was a deliberate attack on the ship, rather than an accident.


title: Dean Rusk

text: On March 24, 1961, Rusk released a brief statement saying his delegation was to travel to Bangkok and the SEATO nations' responsibility should be considered if peace settlements were not realized. In 1961, Rusk disapproved of the Indian invasion of Goa, which he regarded as an act of aggression against NATO ally Portugal, but was overruled by Kennedy who wanted to improve relations with India and who also noted the Portuguese had no other option but to be allied to the United States. Earlier in 1961, a major rebellion had broken out in the Portuguese colony of Angola, which increased Portugal's reliance upon its largest supplier of arms, the United States. In regards to the West New Guinea dispute about the Netherlands New Guinea, Rusk favored supporting the NATO ally Netherlands against Indonesia as he saw Sukarno as pro-Chinese. Rusk accused Indonesia of aggression by attacking the Dutch forces in New Guinea in 1962 and believed that Sukarno had violated the United Nations charter, but was again overruled by Kennedy. In a case of "realpolitik", Kennedy argued the Dutch had no choice, but to be allied with the United States, meaning they could be taken for granted whereas he was highly concerned that Indonesia, which he called "the most significant nation in Southeast Asia", might become communist. To improve relations with Sukarno, Kennedy decided to support the Indonesian claim to Dutch New Guinea; Rusk later wrote he felt "queasy" about the way that Kennedy sacrificed the Dutch to win over Indonesia and had strong doubts that the "consultation" scheduled to determine the future of the territory in 1969 would be a free and fair one.


title: Dean Rusk

text: President Nasser of Egypt was regarded as a trouble-maker in Washington owing to Egypt's alliance with the Soviet Union and his plans for a pan-Arab state that would of necessity require overthrowing the governments of every Arab state, most notably American allies such as Saudi Arabia. In the Arab Cold War between Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Rusk favored the latter. However, at the same time, Rusk argued to Kennedy to Nasser was a spoiler who wanted to play off the Soviet Union against the United States to get the best possible bargain for Egypt, and if he leaned in a pro-Soviet direction, it was because the United States refused to sell Egypt arms out of the fear that they might be used against Israel whereas the Soviets by contrast were willing to sell Egyptians any arms they wanted short of nuclear weapons. Rusk noted the United States still had significant leverage over Egypt in the form of the PL 480 law that allowed the United States to sell surplus American agricultural production to any "friendly nation" in the local currency instead of U.S. dollars. In Egypt, the government subsidized the sale of staple foods like bread at cost or below cost prices, and Egypt's growing population, which outstripped the capacity of Egypt's agriculture, required Egypt to import food. Nasser had become very dependent upon the PL 480 food sales to provide food at cost to his people, and moreover the Soviet Union could not hope to match America's food sales to Egypt. Nasser argued in exchange for PL 480 food sales that he would not start a war with Israel, saying for that for all his fiery speeches he promised to keep the Arab-Israeli dispute "in the icebox". Rusk argued that to Kennedy and later Johnson that they should resist congressional pressure to end the PL 480 food sales to Egypt, stating that ending the PL 480 sales would only push Nasser closer to the Soviet Union and end the leverage that kept the peace between Egypt and Israel. When Nasser sent 70, 000 Egyptian troops into Yemen in September 1962 to support the republican government against the royalist guerrillas supported by Saudi Arabia, Rusk approved of increased arm sales to Saudi Arabia, which were an indirect way of supporting the Yemeni royalists. In common with decision-makers in Washington, Rusk felt that the United States had to support Saudi Arabia against Egypt, but he advised Kennedy against pushing Nasser too hard, saying that it would only drive him closer to the Soviet Union. On October 8, 1962, a "Food for Peace" deal was signed with Egypt under the United States committed itself to sell at cost $390 million worth of wheat to Egypt for the next three years. By 1962, Egypt imported 50% of its wheat consumed from the United States and owing to the PL 480 law was some $180 million per year at a time when Egypt's foreign reserves were almost deleted owing to a heavy level of military spending.


title: Dean Rusk

text: In May 1963, out of anger at being trapped in the quagmire of fighting a guerrilla war in Yemen, Nasser ordered Egyptian Air Force squadrons in Yemen to start bombing towns in Saudi Arabia. With Egypt and Saudi Arabia on the brink of war, Kennedy decided with the support of Rusk to throw America's weight on the side of Saudi Arabia. Kennedy quietly dispatched several U.S Air Force squadrons to Saudi Arabia and warned Nasser that if he attacked Saudi Arabia, the United States would go to war with Egypt. The American warning had its effect and Nasser decided that discretion was the better part of valor. Despite all the tension in American-Egyptian relations, Rusk still argued that it was better to keep the PL 480 food sales to Egypt going than to end them, maintaining keeping the Arab-Israeli dispute "in the icebox" as Nasser phrased it depended upon the United States having leverage over Egypt.


title: Dean Rusk

text: During the Cuban Missile Crisis he supported diplomatic efforts. A careful review by Sheldon Stern, Head of the JFK Library, of Kennedy's audio recordings of the EXCOMM meetings suggests that Rusk's contributions to the discussions probably averted a nuclear war.


title: Dean Rusk

text: In August 1963, a series of misunderstandings rocked the Kennedy administration when, in reaction to the Buddhist crisis, a policy proposal urging the overthrow of President Diem of South Vietnam was presented to Kennedy. He stated he would consider adopting it if Rusk gave his approval first. Rusk, who had gone to New York to attend a session of the United Nations, cautiously gave approval out of the impression that Kennedy had approved it first. When it emerged that was not the case, Kennedy assembled his foreign policy team for a stormy meeting at the White House, with several, such as McNamara, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, and CIA director John McCone, all speaking for standing with Diem, while others like the Undersecretary of State George Ball, W. Avrell Harriman and Roger Hilsman argued for deposing Diem. Much to Kennedy's annoyance, Rusk maintained a stony silence, refusing to take a side. At the end of the meeting, Kennedy exclaimed: "My God, my government is falling apart!" On August 31, 1963, the diplomat Paul Kattenburg reported from Saigon that public opinion in South Vietnam was overwhelmingly hostile to Diem, which led him to suggest it was time "for us to get out honorably". All of the assembled officials rejected Kattenburg's idea, with Rusk saying "we will not pull out ... until the war is won." Rusk reassigned Kattenburg from South Vietnam to Guyana.


title: Dean Rusk

text: As he recalled in his autobiography, "As I Saw It", Rusk did not have a good relationship with President Kennedy. The president was often irritated by Rusk's reticence in advisory sessions and felt that the State Department was "like a bowl of jelly" and that it "never comes up with any new ideas". In 1963, "Newsweek" ran a cover story on the National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy under the title "Cool Head for the Cold War". The author of the story wrote that Rusk "was not known for his force and decisiveness" and asserted that Bundy was "the real Secretary of State". Special counsel to the president Ted Sorensen believed that Kennedy, being well versed and practiced in foreign affairs, acted as his own secretary of state. Sorensen also said that the president often expressed impatience with Rusk and felt him under-prepared for emergency meetings and crises. As Rusk recounted in his autobiography, he repeatedly offered his resignation, but it was never accepted. Rumors of Rusk's dismissal leading up to the 1964 election abounded prior to President Kennedy's trip to Dallas in 1963. Shortly after Kennedy was assassinated, Rusk offered his resignation to the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson. However, Johnson liked Rusk and refused his resignation, He remained secretary throughout Johnson's administration.


title: Dean Rusk

text: In June 1964, Rusk met with Hervé Alphand, the French ambassador in Washington, to discuss a French plan for neutralization of both Vietnams, a plan which Rusk was skeptical about. Rusk told Alphand: "To us, the defense of South Vietnam has the same significance as the defense of Berlin." In response, Alphand stated: "The loss of Berlin would shake the foundations of Western security. On the other hand, if we were to lose South Vietnam, we would not be losing much." By contrast, Rusk argued that the Berlin issue and the Vietnam war were all part of the same struggle against the Soviet Union and the United States could not falter anywhere.


title: Dean Rusk

text: Rusk quickly became one of Johnson's favorite advisers, and just before the Democratic National Convention the two had a discussion about Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who was angling to be Johnson's running mate, much to the president's discomfort. Both Johnson and Rusk agreed that Kennedy was "freakishly ambitious" with an obsessive desire to one day be president. Rusk told Johnson: "Mr. President, I just can't wrap my mind around that kind of ambition. I don't know how to understand it."


title: Dean Rusk

text: On August 29, 1964, amid the ongoing presidential election, Rusk called for bipartisan support to ensure that the US's foreign policy have both consistency and reliability and said Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater was creating "mischief". The following month, at a September 10 press conference in the main auditorium of the State Department, Rusk said that Senator Goldwater's critiques "reflect a basic lack of understanding" of a U.S. President's handling of conflict and peace.


title: Dean Rusk

text: On September 7, 1964, Johnson assembled his national security team to seek a consensus about what to do about Vietnam. Rusk advised caution, arguing that Johnson should embark on military measures only after diplomacy had been exhausted. In September 1964, Rusk grew frustrated with the endless infighting amongst South Vietnam's junta of generals and after a failed coup d'état against Nguyễn Khánh sent a message to Maxwell Taylor, the ambassador in Saigon, on September 14, stating he was to "make it emphatically clear" to Khánh and the rest of the junta that Johnson was tired of the infighting. Rusk also instructed Taylor to say: "The United States has not provided massive assistance to South Vietnam, in military equipment, economic resources, and personnel in order to subsidize continuing quarrels among South Vietnamese leaders." Reflecting the general vexation with South Vietnam's chronic political instability in Washington, Rusk argued to Johnson: "Somehow we must change the pace at which these people move, and I suspect that this can only be done with a pervasive intrusion of Americans into their affairs." Increasingly, the feeling in Washington was if South Vietnam could not defeat the Viet Cong guerrillas on its own, the Americans would have to step in and win the war that the South Vietnamese had proved incapable of winning. On September 21, Rusk said the US would not be pushed out of the Gulf of Tonkin and that the prevention of it becoming a "communist lake" would be assured by the continued presence of American forces there.


title: Dean Rusk

text: In September 1964, a peace initiative was launched by the UN Secretary General U Thant who tried to set up secret peace talks in his native Burma, which were supported by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who pressured Ho Chi Minh to take part in the projected peace talks, saying he would only increase Soviet aid to North Vietnam if the North Vietnamese took part in a diplomatic effort to end the war first. U Thant reported to Rusk that the Soviet pressure seemed to be working as North Vietnam's other arms supplier, China, could not match the hi-tech weaponry that only the Soviet Union could supply. Rusk did not press on this information on Johnson, saying to take part in the planned talks in Burma would have signaled "the acceptance or the confirmation of aggression". In October, the peace initiative was ended by Khrushchev being ousted and his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, was not interestd in U Thant's plan.


title: Dean Rusk

text: On 1 November 1964, the Viet Cong attacked the American airbase at Bien Hoa, killing 4 Americans. Rusk told Ambassador Taylor that with the elections occurring in less than 48 hours, Johnson did not want to act, but after the election there would be "a more systematic campaign of military pressure on the North with all implications we have always seen in their course of action".


title: Dean Rusk

text: On December 23, 1964, Nasser decided to up the ante in his relations with the United States by delivering a violently anti-American speech in Port Said in which he called Iran "an American and Zionist colony" and claimed Johnson wanted to reduce Egypt to the status of Iran. Through Nasser was hoping that his speech might force the United States to reduce military aid to Saudi Arabia, it had the opposite effect. Johnson, who was more pro-Israeli than Kennedy had been, was furious with the speech. Rusk later recalled: "We didn't expect Nasser to bow, scrape, lick our boots, and say 'Thank you Uncle Sam', but we did expect to at least moderate his virulent criticism of the United States. Instead, he got up in front of those big crowds in Cairo and shouted such things as 'Throw your aid into the Red Sea!'" On January 5, 1965, Johnson suspended all PL 480 aid to Egypt, an action that immediately plunged the Egyptian economy into a crisis. Nasser realized what he had done and began to lobby for the resumption of PL 480 food sales, but got nowhere. Through Nasser knew the best way of ending the crisis was to pull out of Yemen and seek a rapprochement with Saudi Arabia and the United States, he instead turned towards the Soviet Union to seek support for the rapidly contracting Egyptian economy.


title: Dean Rusk

text: In April 1965, Senator Robert Kennedy during a visit to the White House advised Johnson to sack Rusk and replace him with Bill Moyers. Johnson at first thought this was a joke, saying that Kennedy's brother had appointed him Secretary of State, and was astonished to learn that Kennedy was serious. The president replied: "I like Bill Moyers, but I'm not about to remove Rusk."


title: Dean Rusk

text: In May 1965, Rusk told Johnson that the "Four Points" presented by the North Vietnam premier Dong as peace terms were deceptive because "the third of those four points required the imposition of the National Liberation Front on all South Vietnam". In June 1965, when General William Westmoreland requested of Johnson 180, 000 troops to Vietnam, Rusk argued to Johnson that the United States had to fight in Vietnam to maintain "the integrity of the U.S. commitment" throughout the world, but also wondered aloud if Westermoreland was exaggerating the extent of the problems in South Vietnam in order to have more troops under his command. However, despite his doubts about Westmoreland Rusk in a rare memo to the president warned that if South Vietnam were lost "the Communist world would draw conclusions that would lead to our ruin and almost certainly to a catastrophic war". At another meeting, Rusk stated the United States should have committed itself to Vietnam more heavily in 1961, saying that if U.S. troops had been sent to fight then, the present difficulties would not exist.


title: Dean Rusk

text: Rusk came into conflict with his Undersecretary of State, George Ball, about Vietnam. When Ball argued the governing duumvirate of Thieu and Ky in South Vietnam were "clowns" unworthy of American support, Rusk replied: "Don't give me that stuff. You don't understand that at the time of Korea we had to go out and dig up Syngman Rhee out of the bush where he was hiding. There was no government in Korea, either. We're going to get some breaks, and this thing is going to work." Rusk felt that Ball's memos arguing that American involvement in the war should be seen by as few as possible. At meetings of the National Security Council, Rusk consistently argued against Ball.


title: Dean Rusk

text: In 1964 and again in 1965, Rusk approached the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson to ask for British troops to go to Vietnam, requests that were refused. The normally Anglophile Rusk saw the refusal as a "betrayal". Rusk told the "Times" of London: "All we needed was just one regiment. The Black Watch would have done it. Just one regiment, but you wouldn't. Well, don't expect us to save you again. They can invade Sussex and we won't do a damn thing about it."


title: Dean Rusk

text: Shortly before his death, Adlai Stevenson, the American ambassador to the UN, mentioned in an interview with the journalist Eric Severeid the aborted peace terms in Rangoon in 1964, saying the UN Secretary General U Thant was disappointed that Rusk had rejected the terms. When Johnson asked Rusk about the matter, the latter replied that in diplomacy "there is a difference between rejecting a proposal and not accepting it", a distinction that maintained that U Thant had missed.


title: Dean Rusk

text: In December 1965, when McNamara first told Johnson that the "military action approach is an unacceptable way to a successful conclusion" and urged him to pause the bombing of North Vietnam, Rusk advised the president that there was only a 1 in 20 chance that a bombing pause would lead to peace talks. However, Rusk argued for the bombing pause, saying "You must think about the morale of the American people if the other side keeps pushing. We must be able to say that all has been done." When Johnson announced the bombing pause on Christmas Day 1965, Rusk told the press "We have put everything into the basket of peace except the surrender of South Vietnam." Some of the language that Rusk included in his offer for peace talks seemed to calculate to inspire rejection such as the demand that Hanoi must publicly vow "to cease aggression" and the bombing pause was "a step toward peace, although there has not been the slightest hint or suggestion from the other side as to what they would do if the bombing stopped." On December 28, 1965, Rusk sent a cable to Henry Cabot Lodge Jr, the ambassador in Saigon, presenting the bombing pause as merely a cynical exercise in public relations as he wrote: "The prospect of large-scale reinforcements in men and defense budget increases for the next eighteen-month period requires solid preparation of the American public. A crucial element will be a clear demonstration that we have explored fully every alternative but the aggressors has left us no choice." Rusk ordered Henry A. Byroade, the ambassador in Rangoon, to make contact with the North Vietnamese ambassador to Burma with the offer that the bombing pause might be extended if North Vietnam made "a serious contribution to peace". The offer was rejected as the North Vietnamese refused to open peace talks until the bombing raids were stopped "unconditionally and for good". Like the other newly independent states in Africa and Asia, the North Vietnamese were extremely sensitive to any violation, real or perceived, of their newly achieved sovereignty, and the North Vietnamese Politburo regarded the bombing as a major violation of their nation's sovereignty. In a way that the Johnson administration had much trouble understanding, the North Vietnamese felt to negotiate with the Americans reserving the right to resume the bombing would be to accept a diminution of their country's independence, hence the demand for an unconditional bombing halt. In January 1966, Johnson ordered the Rolling Thunder bombing raids to resume.


title: Dean Rusk

text: After President of France Charles de Gaulle withdrew France from the common NATO military command in February 1966 and ordered all American military forces to leave France, President Johnson asked Rusk to seek further clarification from President de Gaulle by asking whether the bodies of buried American soldiers must leave France as well. Rusk recorded in his autobiography that de Gaulle did not respond when asked, "Does your order include the bodies of American soldiers in France's cemeteries?"


title: Dean Rusk

text: In February 1966, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chaired by Fulbright held hearings on the Vietnam War and Fulbright had called as expert witnesses George F. Kennan and General James Gavin, who were both critical of the Vietnam War. Rusk who served as Johnson's principle spokesman on Vietnam was sent by the president together with General Maxwell Taylor to serve as his rebuttal witnesses before the Foreign Relations Committee. Rusk testified that the war was a morally justified struggle to halt "the steady extension of Communist power through force and threat". Historian Stanley Karnow wrote the televised hearings were a compelling "political theater" as Fulbright and Rusk verbally dueled about the merits of the Vietnam war with both men pouncing on any weaknesses in the other's argument.


title: Dean Rusk

text: By 1966, the Johnson administration had become divided between the "hawks" and the "doves", through the latter term was somewhat misleading as the "doves" within the administration merely favored opening peace talks to end the war as opposed to pulling out U.S forces from Vietnam. Rusk together with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Earle "Bus" Wheeler and the National Security Adviser Walt Whitman Rostow were the leading "hawks" while the leading "doves" was Rusk's former ally McNamara together with Harriman. Rusk equated withdrawal from Vietnam as "appeasement", through at times he was willing to advise Johnson to open peace talks as a way to rebut domestic criticism that Johnson was unwilling to consider alternative ways to end the war.


title: Dean Rusk

text: On April 18, 1967, Rusk said the United States was prepared to "take steps to deescalate the conflict whenever we are assured that the north will take appropriate corresponding steps".


title: Dean Rusk

text: In 1967, Rusk was opposed to the Operation Pennsylvania peace plan flouted by Henry Kissinger, saying "Eight months pregnant with peace and all of them hoping to win the Nobel Peace Prize". When Kissinger reported that the North Vietnamese would not begin peace talks unless the bombing was stopped first, Rust advocated continuing the bombing, telling Johnson: "If the bombing isn't having that much effect, why do they want to stop the bombing so much?"


title: Dean Rusk

text: Rusk's support for the Vietnam War caused considerable torment for his son Richard, who was opposed to the war but who enlisted in the Marine Corps and refused to attend anti-war demonstrations out of love for his father. The psychological strain caused the younger Rusk to suffer a nervous breakdown and led to a break between father and son.


title: Dean Rusk

text: Rusk considered resignation in the summer of 1967, because "his daughter planned to marry a black classmate at Stanford University, and he could not impose such a political burden on the president", after it became known that his daughter, Peggy, planned to marry Guy Smith, "a black Georgetown grad working at NASA". In response, the "Richmond News Leader" stated that it found the wedding offensive, further saying that "anything which diminishes [Rusk's] personal acceptability is an affair of state." He decided not to resign after talking to McNamara and the president. A year after his daughter's wedding, Rusk was invited to join the faculty of the University of Georgia Law School, only to have his appointment denounced by Roy Harris, an ally of Alabama Governor George Wallace and a member of the university's board of regents, who stated that his opposition was because of Peggy Rusk's interracial marriage. The university nonetheless appointed Rusk to the position.


title: Dean Rusk

text: In October 1967, Rusk told Johnson that he believed the March on the Pentagon was the work of "the Communists", and pressed Johnson to order an investigation to prove it. The investigation was launched involving the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and military intelligence, and found "no significant evidence that would prove Communist control or direction of the U.S. peace movement and its leaders." Rusk said that the report was "naive" and that the agents should had done a better investigation.


title: Dean Rusk

text: When Johnson first discussed dropping out of the 1968 election at a National Security Council meeting in September 1967, Rusk was opposed, saying: "You must not go down. You are the Commander-in-chief, and we are in war. This would have a very serious effect on the country." When McNamara advised Johnson in October 1967 to agree to North Vietnam's demand that the United States cease the bombing campaign as the precondition for opening peace talks, Rusk opposed the idea of a "bombing pause" as removing the "incentive for peace", and urged Johnson to continue Operation Rolling Thunder. By this time, many at the State Department were concerned by Rusk's drinking on the job with William Bundy later saying that Rusk was a like a "zombie" until he started to drink. McNamara was shocked when he visited him at Foggy Bottom in the afternoon and saw Rusk open his desk to pull out a bottle of scotch, which he proceeded to drink in its entirety. Unlike the abrasive McNamara, who was widely disliked at the Pentagon, Rusk was sufficiently liked by his colleagues in the State Department that none leaked their concerns about his drinking to the media.


title: Dean Rusk

text: On January 5, 1968, notes by Rusk were delivered to Ambassador of the Soviet Union to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin, pleading support from the US to "avoid recurrence of" claimed bombing of Russian cargo ships in the Haiphong North Vietnam port the day prior. On February 9, Rusk was asked by Senator William Fulbright over his possible information in regards to a US tactical nuclear weapons introduction in South Vietnam report.


title: Dean Rusk

text: Like other members of the Johnson administration, Rusk was shaken by the surprise of the Tet Offensive. During a news briefing at the height of the Tet Offensive, Rusk who was known for his courteous manner, was asked how the Johnson administration was taken by surprise, causing him to snap in fury: "Whose side are you on? Now, I'm the Secretary of State of the United States, and I'm on our side! None of your papers or your broadcasting apparatuses are worth a damn unless the United States succeeds. They are trivial compared to that question. So I don't know why people have to be probing for things that one can bitch about, when there are two thousand stories on the same day about things that are more constructive." However, despite his rage at the media who he felt were misrepresenting the war, he admitted to finding signs that public opinion was shifting against the war. He later recalled that during a visit to Cherokee County in February 1968 that people were telling him: "Dean if you can't tell us when this war is going to end, well then maybe we just ought to chuck it." Rusk added "The fact was that we could not, in any good faith, tell them." Shortly afterwards, in March 1968 Rusk appeared as a witness before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chaired by Fulbright that was examining allegations that the Johnson administration had been dishonest about the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964. Fulbright made his sympathies clear by wearing a necktie decorated with doves and olive branches. Through Rusk handled himself well under the relentless questioning by Fulbright, the televised hearings were another blow to the prestige of the Johnson administration as it became very apparent to the viewers that a number of senators were now opposed to the war or were only lukewarm in their support. When Fulbright asked Rusk to promise Congress a greater say in the war, Rusk replied that Johnson would consult "appropriate members of Congress". When Senator Claiborne Pell asked if the war was worth all the suffering, Rusk charged that he was suffering from "moral myopia" about "the endless struggle for freedom".


title: Dean Rusk

text: On April 17, during an American Society of Newspaper Editors luncheon meeting, Rusk admitted that the United States has taken "some lumps" propaganda wise but the Johnson administration should persist in trying to find a location of neutrality for the peace talks to occur. The following day, Rusk added 10 sites to the 5 proposed initially, accusing Hanoi of having a propaganda battle over neutral areas for discussion during a press conference.


title: Dean Rusk

text: Just before the peace talks in Paris were due to open on 13 May 1968, Rusk advocated bombing North Vietnam north of the 20 parallel, a proposal strongly opposed by the Defense Secretary Clark Clifford who stated it would wreck the peace talks. Clifford persuaded a reluctant Johnson to stick by his promise of 31 March 1968 of no bombing north of 20 paraellel. Rusk continued his advocacy of bombing north of 20 parallel, telling Johnson on 21 May 1968 "We will not get a solution in Paris until we prove they can't win in the South". During a meeting on 26 July 1968, Johnson briefed all three presidential candidates about the state of the war and the peace talks. Rusk who attended the meeting agreed with Richard Nixon's statement that bombing provided leverage in the Paris peace talks, saying: "If the North Vietnamese were not being bombed, they would have no incentive to do anything". When Nixon asked "Where was the war lost?", Rusk replied: "In the editorial rooms of this country".


title: Dean Rusk

text: On June 26, Rusk assured Berlin citizens that the United States along with its North Atlantic Treaty partners were "determined" in securing Berlin's liberty and security, additionally criticizing the recent travel restrictions of East Germany as violating "long standing agreements and practice".


title: Dean Rusk

text: On September 30, Rusk met privately with Foreign Minister of Israel Abba Eban in New York City for discussion on peace plans from the Middle East.


title: Dean Rusk

text: In October 1968, when Johnson considered a complete bombing halt to North Vietnam, Rusk was opposed. On November 1, Rusk said long term allies of the North Vietnam bomb halt should pressure Hanoi to accelerate their involvement in the peace talks in Paris.


title: Dean Rusk

text: Nixon won the election and Rusk prepared to leave office January 20, 1969. On December 1, 1968, citing the halt of bombing in North Vietnam, Rusk said that the Soviet Union would need to come forward and do what it could to forward peace talks in southeast Asia. On December 22, Rusk appeared on television to officially confirm the 82 surviving crew members of the USS "Pueblo" intelligence ship, speaking on behalf of the hospitalized President Johnson.


title: Dean Rusk

text: In the last days of the Johnson administration, the president wanted to nominate Rusk to the Supreme Court. Although Rusk had studied the law, he did not have a law degree nor had he ever practiced law, but Johnson pointed out that the constitution did not require legal experience to serve on the Supreme Court and "I've already talked to Dick Russell and he said you'd be confirmed easily." However, Johnson failed to reckon with Senator James Eastland, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who was also a white supremacist and a supporter of segregation. Through Eastland was a fellow Southerner, he had neither forgotten nor forgiven Rusk for allowing his daughter to marry a black man. Eastland announced he would not confirm Rusk if he were nominated to the Supreme Court.


title: Dean Rusk

text: On January 2, 1969, Rusk met with five Jewish American leaders in his office to assure them the US had not changed its policy in the Middle East of recognizing the sovereignty of Israel. One of the leaders, the American-Israeli Public Affairs committee's Irving Kane, said afterward that Rusk had successfully convinced him.


title: Dean Rusk

text: January 20, 1969 marked Rusk's last day as Secretary of State, and upon leaving Foggy Bottom he delivered a brief valedictory: "Eight years ago, Mrs. Rusk and I came quietly. We wish now to leave quietly. Thank you very much". At a farewell dinner hosted by Dobrynin, the longest-serving ambassador in Washington, Rusk told his host: "What's done cannot be undone." After the dinner, Rusk drove away in a modest car that barely seemed to be working, which Dobrynin considered to an apt symbolic end to the Johnson administration. Upon his return to Georgia, Rusk suffered from a prolonged bout of depression and suffered from psychosomatic illnesses, visiting doctors with complaints of chest and stomach pains that appeared to have no physical basis. Unable to work, Rusk was supported throughout 1969 by the Rockefeller Foundation who paid him a salary as a "distinguished fellow".


title: Dean Rusk

text: On July 27, 1969, Rusk voiced his support for the Nixon administration's proposed anti-ballistic missile system, saying that he would vote for it, were he a senator, from an understanding that further proposals would be reviewed if any progress would be made in Soviet Union peace talks. The same year, Rusk received both the Sylvanus Thayer Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, with Distinction.


title: Dean Rusk

text: Following his retirement, he taught international law at the University of Georgia School of Law in Athens, Georgia (1970–1984). Rusk was emotionally exhausted after 8 years as Secretary of State and narrowly survived a nervous breakdown in 1969. Roy Harris, a university regent who served as the Georgia campaign manager for the presidential campaign of George Wallace in 1968, tried to block Rusk's appointment under the ostensible grounds "We don't want the university to be a haven for broken-down politicians", but in reality because he was opposed to a man who had allowed his daughter to marry a black man. However, Harris's vote was overruled. Rusk found that the return to teaching in 1970 and the resumption of the academic career he had abandoned in 1940 was emotionally satisfying. The other professors remembered him as being like a "junior associate seeking tenure". Rusk told his son "the students I was privileged to teach helped rejuvenate my life and make a new start after those hard years in Washington."


title: Dean Rusk

text: In the 1970s, Rusk was a member of the Committee on Present Danger, a hawkish group opposed to détente with the Soviet Union and distrustful of treaties to control the nuclear arms race.


title: Dean Rusk

text: In 1984, Rusk's son Richard, whom he had not spoken to since 1970 owing to the opposition of Rusk "fils" to the Vietnam War, surprised his father by returning to Georgia from Alaska to seek a reconciliation. As part of the reconciliation process, Rusk, who had gone blind by this point, agreed to dictate his memoirs to his son, who recorded what he said and wrote it down into what became the book "As I Saw It".


title: Dean Rusk

text: In a review of his memoir "As I Saw It", the American historian Warren Cohen noted that little of the acrimony of Rusk's relations with McNamara, Bundy and Fulbright appeared, but that Rusk was unremittingly hostile in his picture of Kennedy's closest adviser and right-hand man, his younger brother Robert, together with the UN Secretary General U Thant. In "As I Saw It", Rusk expressed considerable anger at the media's coverage of the Vietnam War, accusing anti-war journalists of "faking" stories and images that portrayed the war in an unflattering light. Rusk spoke about what he called the "so-called freedom of the press", as he maintained that journalists from "The New York Times" and "The Washington Post" only wrote what their editors told them to write, saying, if there were true freedom of the press, both newspapers would have portrayed the war more positively. Despite his hawkish views towards the Soviet Union, Rusk stated during his time as Secretary of State that he never saw any evidence that the Soviet Union planned to invade Western Europe and he "seriously doubted" that it ever would. Cohen noted that in contrast to his years with Kennedy, Rusk was warmer and more protective towards Johnson, whom he clearly got on better with than he ever did with Kennedy.


title: Dean Rusk

text: In a review of "As I Saw It", the historian George C. Herring wrote that the book was mostly dull and uninformative when it came to Rusk's time as Secretary of State, telling little that historians did not already know, and the most interesting and passionate parts concerned his youth in the "Old South" and his conflict and reconciliation with his son Richard.


title: Dean Rusk

text: Rusk died of heart failure in Athens, Georgia, on December 20, 1994, at the age of 85. He and his wife are buried at the Oconee Hill Cemetery in Athens.


title: Dean Rusk

text: Rusk Eating House, the first women's eating house at Davidson College, was founded in 1977 and is named in his honor. The Dean Rusk International Studies Program at Davidson College is also named in his honor.


title: Dean Rusk

text: Dean Rusk Middle School, located in Canton, Georgia, was named in his honor, as was Dean Rusk Hall on the campus of the University of Georgia.


title: Dean Rusk

text: The consensus of historians is that Rusk was a very intelligent man, but very shy and so deeply immersed in details and the complexities of each case that he was reluctant to make a decision and unable to clearly explain to the media what the government's policies were. Jonathan Coleman says that he was deeply involved in the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, NATO, and the Vietnam War. Typically he was highly cautious on most issues, except for Vietnam:


title: Dean Rusk

text: Regarding Vietnam, historians agree that President Johnson relied heavily on the advice of Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and national security adviser McGeorge Bundy to the effect that a communist takeover of all of Vietnam was unacceptable, and the only way to prevent it was to escalate America's commitment. Johnson took their conclusions and rejected dissenting views.


title: Dean Rusk

text: Rusk's son Rich wrote about his father's time as Secretary of State: "With this reticent, reserved, self-contained, emotionally bound-up father of mine from rural Georgia, how could the decision making have gone any differently? His taciturn qualities, which served him so well in negotiating with the Russians, ill-prepared him for the wrenching, introspective, soul-shattering journey that a true reappraisal of Vietnam policy would have involved. Although trained for high office, he was unprepared for such a journey, for admitting that thousands of American lives, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, might have been lost in vain."


title: Dean Rusk

text: George Herring wrote about Rusk in 1992: "He is a man utterly without pretense, a thoroughly decent individual, a man of stern countenance and unbending principles. He is a man with a passion for secrecy. He is a shy and reticent man, who as Secretary of State sipped scotch to loosen his tongue for press conferences. Stolid and normally laconic, he also has a keen, dry wit. He has often been described as the 'perfect number two,' a loyal subordinate who had strong—if unexpressed—reservations about the Bay of Pigs operation, but after its failure could defend it as though he had planned it."


title: International sanctions during the Venezuelan crisis

text: During the crisis in Venezuela, governments of the United States, the European Union, Canada, Mexico, Panama and Switzerland applied individual sanctions against people associated with the administration of Nicolás Maduro. The sanctions were in response to repression during the 2014 Venezuelan protests and the 2017 Venezuelan protests, and activities during the 2017 Venezuelan Constituent Assembly election and the 2018 Venezuelan presidential election. Sanctions were placed on current and former government officials, including members of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ) and the 2017 Constituent National Assembly (ANC), members of the military and security forces, and private individuals accused of being involved in human rights abuses, corruption, degradation in the rule of law and repression of democracy.


text: By March 2018, the Washington Office on Latin America said 78 Venezuelans associated with Maduro had been sanctioned by several countries. Through April 2019, the U.S. sanctioned more than 150 companies, vessels and individuals, in addition to revoking visas of 718 individuals associated with Maduro.


text: The sanctions included freezing of individuals' accounts and assets, prohibiting of transactions with sanctioned parties, seizing of assets, arms embargoes and travel bans. The OAS commissioner for Venezuelan migrants and refugees, David Smolansky, has said the sanctions targeted Maduro and Chavismo "elites" while having little impact on average Venezuelans. "The Washington Post" stated that "the deprivation long predates recently imposed US sanctions".


text: Beginning in January 2019, during the Venezuelan presidential crisis, the United States applied additional economic sanctions in the petroleum, gold, mining, food and banking industries. A report published by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that although the "pervasive and devastating economic and social crisis began before the imposition of the first economic sanctions", the new sanctions could worsen the situation. In April 2019, Human Rights Watch and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published a joint report noting that most early sanctions did not target the Venezuelan economy in any way, adding that sanctions imposed in 2019 could worsen the situation, but that "the crisis precedes them".


text: After sanctions were issued, Venezuela has continued to ship oil and to send money to ally countries, shipping oil to Cuba and paying Saint Vincent and the Grenadines' debt with Petrocaribe in 2022.


text: Through April 2019, the U.S. has sanctioned more than 150 companies, vessels and individuals, in addition to revoking visas of 718 individuals associated with Maduro.


text: The United States has been concerned about Venezuelan narcotics trafficking since 2005 and its lack of cooperation in combatting terrorism since 2006. The U.S. has used sanctions as a policy tool for at least a decade to combat terrorism-related activity as well as narcotics and human trafficking, corruption and human rights violations, according to the Congressional Research Service's "Venezuela: Overview of U.S. sanctions". In 2008, Executive Order 13224 (EO 13224) aimed to reduce terrorist funding in Venezuela via sanctions, and the United States Department of the Treasury has used the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act (Kingpin Act) to sanction at least 22 Venezuelans, including several current and former government officials.


text: Prior to the crisis in Venezuela, in 2010 the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned three current or former Venezuelan government officials, saying there was evidence they had materially helped the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in the illegal drug trade. The order "freezes any assets the designated entities and individuals may have under U.S. jurisdiction and prohibits U.S. persons from conducting financial or commercial transactions involving those assets". Hugo Carvajal, former director of Venezuela's military intelligence (DGIM); Henry Rangel Silva, director National Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services (DISIP); and Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, former Minister of the Interior, were sanctioned. Carvajal was arrested in Spain on 12 April 2019 based on arrest warrant from the United States for the 2011 charges; the U.S. asked Spain to extradite Carvajal.


text: In 2011, four allies of Hugo Chávez, including a general, two politicians, and an intelligence official, were sanctioned for allegedly helping FARC obtain weapons and smuggle drugs. Then-Foreign Minister Maduro said the accusations were "abusive". Freddy Bernal, one of the sanctioned, dismissed the charges as "an aggression", saying he would not be frightened by the sanctions.


text: President Barack Obama signed the Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Act of 2014, a U.S. Act imposing sanctions on Venezuelan individuals held responsible by the United States for human rights violations during the 2014 Venezuelan protests, in December of that year. It "requires the President to impose sanctions" on those "responsible for significant acts of violence or serious human rights abuses associated with February 2014 protests or, more broadly, against anyone who has directed or ordered the arrest or prosecution of a person primarily because of the person's legitimate exercise of freedom of expression or assembly". The Act was extended in 2016 to expire on 31 December 2019.


text: On 2 February 2015, the United States Department of State imposed visa restrictions on current and former Venezuelan officials that were allegedly linked to presumed human rights abuses and political corruption. The visa restrictions also included family members, with the Department of State saying, "We are sending a clear message that human rights abusers, those who profit from public corruption, and their families are not welcome in the United States".


text: Obama issued Executive Order 13692 in March 2015, which blocks assets or imposes travel bans on those "involved in or responsible for the erosion of human rights guarantees, persecution of political opponents, curtailment of press freedoms, use of violence and human rights violations and abuses in response to antigovernment protests, and arbitrary arrest and detention of antigovernment protestors, as well as significant public corruption by senior government officials in the country."


text: United States National Security Advisor John R. Bolton outlined the policies of the administration of United States President Donald Trump towards Venezuela in a November 2018 speech, describing Venezuela as part of a troika of tyranny, along with Cuba and Nicaragua. Bolton has alternately described the three countries as the "triangle of terror" and the "three stooges of socialism", stating that the three are "the cause of immense human suffering, the impetus of enormous regional instability, and the genesis of a sordid cradle of communism in the western hemisphere". The United States has condemned actions of the governments of the three Latin American nations and has maintained both broad and targeted sanctions against their leadership.


text: Into 2020, President Donald Trump expressed that he believed that the removal of Maduro from office was occurring too slowly and that incremental processes, such as sanctions, did not provide results. Because such processes to remove Maduro were unsuccessful, President Trump began to consider military options, including a naval blockade against Venezuela.


text: Under EO 13692, the Obama administration sanctioned seven individuals, and the Trump administration has sanctioned 73 as of 8 March 2019.


text: U.S. President Barack Obama issued a presidential order on 9 March 2015 declaring Venezuela a "threat to its national security" and ordered the United States Department of the Treasury to freeze property and assets of seven Venezuelan officials. The U.S. held the seven individuals sanctioned responsible for "excesses committed in the repression of the demonstrations of February 2014 that left at least 43 dead" including "erosion of human rights guarantees, persecution of political opponents, restrictions on press freedom, violence and human rights abuses in response to anti-government protests, arbitrary arrests and arrests of anti-government protesters, and significant public corruption". Among those sanctioned were Antonio Benavides Torres, commander in the Venezuelan armed forces and former leader of the Venezuelan National Guard, and SEBIN directors Manuel Bernal Martínez and Gustavo González López.


text: Tareck El Aissami, Vice President of Economy and Minister for National Industry and Production, and his frontman Samark Lopez Bello were named in February under the Kingpin Act as significant international narcotics traffickers. Five U.S. companies in Florida and an airplane registered in the U.S. were also blocked.


text: The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Maikel Moreno and seven members of the Venezuelan Supreme Justice Tribunal (TSJ) in May for usurping the functions of the Venezuelan National Assembly and permitting Maduro to govern by decree. The U.S. assets of the eight individuals were frozen, and U.S. persons prohibited from doing business with them.


text: In July, thirteen senior officials of the Venezuelan government associated with the 2017 Venezuelan Constituent Assembly elections were sanctioned for their role in undermining democracy and human rights. Those sanctioned included Elías Jaua, Presidential Commission for the ANC and Minister of Education; Tibisay Lucena, President of the Maduro-controlled National Electoral Council (CNE); Néstor Reverol, Minister of Interior and former Commander General of Venezuelan National Guard (GNB), indicted in 2016 by U.S. for drug conspiracy; Tarek William Saab, Ombudsman and President of Moral Council; and Iris Varela ANC member and Prisons Minister.


text: The United States Department of State condemned the Venezuelan Constituent Assembly election and refused to recognize the ANC, stating "We will continue to take strong and swift actions against the architects of authoritarianism in Venezuela, including those who participate in the National Constituent Assembly". The day after the election, the US sanctioned Nicolás Maduro, freezing his assets, banning United States citizens from dealing with Maduro and barring him from entering the United States, stating "These sanctions come a day after the Maduro government held elections for a National Constituent Assembly that aspires illegitimately to usurp the constitutional role of the democratically elected National Assembly, rewrite the constitution, and impose an authoritarian regime on the people of Venezuela". Maduro became the fourth head of state to be sanctioned by the United States government after Bashar al-Assad of Syria, Kim Jong-un of North Korea and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. Maduro fired back at the sanctions during his victory speech saying "I don't obey imperial orders. I'm against the Ku Klux Klan that governs the White House, and I'm proud to feel that way."


text: The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned eight officials associated with the 2017 Constituent National Assembly (ANC) in August, for participating in "anti-democratic actions pursuant to Executive Order 13692" by facilitating the "illegitimate Constituent Assembly to further entrench [Maduro's] dictatorship". The individuals sanctioned included Francisco Ameliach and Adán Chávez, the brother of Hugo Chávez.


text: In November, ten more government officials were added to OFAC's list of Venezuelans sanctioned after the regional elections; the U.S. Treasury Department described the individuals as being "associated with undermining electoral processes, media censorship, or corruption in government-administered food programs in Venezuela". Among those sanctioned was Minister Freddy Bernal, who heads the Local Committees for Supply and Production (CLAP) program, and was previously named in 2011 as a drug trafficker under the Kingpin Act for aiding the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).


text: The U.S. Treasury Department said on 5 January that corruption and repression continued in Venezuela and four senior military officers were sanctioned. Reuters reported that "Maduro regularly laughs off Washington's disapproval and blames the U.S. 'empire' for Venezuela's economic woes." Four more current or former officials were added to the sanctioned list in March 2018.


text: Just before the May 2018 Venezuelan presidential election, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned four Venezuelans and three companies it said were involved in corruption and money laundering. Individuals sanctioned included Diosdado Cabello, Chavismo's number two person and President of the ANC, his wife, Marleny Contreras Hernández de Cabello, who is also the Tourism Minister, and his brother José David Cabello Rondón, the president of Venezuela's tax authority, SENIAT. The three Florida companies, owned or controlled by sanctioned front man Rafael Sarria in Florida were: SAI Advisors Inc., Noor Plantation Investments LLC, and 11420 Corp. Fourteen other properties owned or controlled by Sarria in Florida and New York were also sanctioned. The U.S. Treasury Department said that, "Beyond extorting profits from Venezuela’s Customs and Tax Administration, in September 2017, the Cabello brothers, acting in their capacity as high-level Venezuelan government officials, approved a money laundering scheme based on illicit financial activities targeting the Venezuelan state-owned oil company Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA)."


text: The U.S. Treasury Department seized a private jet and imposed sanctions on Maduro's inner circle in September. Maduro's wife, Cilia Flores, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López, Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, and her brother Jorge Rodríguez, Venezuela's Minister of Communications, were sanctioned. Agencia Vehiculos Especiales Rurales y Urbanos, C.A. (AVERUCA, C.A.), Quiana Trading Limited (Quiana Trading), and Panazeate SL were also sanctioned, as companies owned or controlled in the U.S., British Virgin Islands, and Spain by sanctioned parties. Maduro responded to his wife's sanctions, saying "You don’t mess with Cilia. You don’t mess with family. Don’t be cowards! Her only crime [is] being my wife."


text: The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned seven individuals on 8 January 2019, who they said were benefitting from a corrupt currency exchange scheme. Alejandro Jose Andrade Cedeño, a former national Treasurer, "was sentenced by the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida on November 27, 2018, to 10 years in prison for accepting over $1 billion in bribes for his role" in the scheme. OFAC also sanctioned five other individuals and 23 companies, including Venezuelan private TV network Globovisión and other companies owned or controlled by Raúl Gorrín and Gustavo Perdomo.


text: On 15 February 2019, officials of Maduro's security and intelligence were sanctioned for helping suppress democracy; the head of state-run PDVSA was also sanctioned. The U.S. Treasury Department says the security officials are responsible for torture, human rights abuses, and extrajudicial killings.


text: [[Tarek Saab]], Attorney General, sanctioned by Canada, the European Union, Mexico, Panama, Switzerland, U.S., and banned from entering Colombia


text: During the February 2019 shipping of humanitarian aid to Venezuela, U.S. Vice-president Mike Pence announced new US sanctions against four Venezuelan state governors, who the US says had furthered the humanitarian crisis by participating in the blocking of aid; the governors of the United Socialist Party representing Zulia, Apure, Vargas and Carabobo states were blacklisted. On 1 March, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned six more military and security forces individuals, including members of FAES, "Fuerzas de Acciones Especiales", a special police force. The U.S. said these individuals helped obstruct the delivery of humanitarian aid to Venezuela on the Colombian and Brazilian borders.


text: On 11 March 2019, the US sanctioned a Russian bank Evrofinance Mosnarbank, which is jointly owned by Russian and Venezuelan state-owned companies. The U.S. Treasury Department accused the Moscow-based bank of being an economic lifeline for the "illegitimate Maduro regime."


text: The US sanctioned Minerven, Venezuela's state-run mining company, and its president, Adrian Antonio Perdomo in March 2019. The sanctions prohibit business with Minerven and Perdomo, and freeze their assets in the US. The U.S. Treasury department said that the Venezuelan military grants access to criminal organizations in exchange for money.


text: The U.S. Treasury sanctioned two companies on 5 April 2019 that had shipped Venezuelan oil to Cuba; the US says Cuban personnel and advisors help the Maduro government maintain power. U.S. citizens and businesses are prohibited from engaging in business with the companies, identified as Liberia-based Ballito Bay Shipping Inc., the owner of the "Despina Andrianna", and the Greek company ProPer Management Inc., the operator of the vessel that was used for an oil shipment to Cuba. Another 34 ships that are owned by PDVSA were also added to the sanction list. The U.S. sanctioned nine ships and four more shipping companies on 12 April 2019: Liberian companies Jennifer Navigation Ltd., Large Range Ltd. and Lima Shipping Corp.; and Italian PB Tankers. An unnamed U.S. senior official told Bloomberg that these companies and vessels account for as much as half of the 50,000 barrels daily of oil that "Venezuela sends to Cuba in exchange for the social, intelligence and strategic support Havana provides Maduro". Cuba denies any influence on Venezuela's military and—along with Russia, China, Turkey and Iran—is determined to defend Maduro according to Bloomberg.


text: On 17 April 2019, the U.S. Treasury added sanctions to the Central Bank of Venezuela and one of its directors, Iliana Ruzza. Directors Simon Alejandro Zerpa Delgado and William Antonio Contreras were already sanctioned. In a speech on 17 April 2019 in Miami which marked the anniversary of the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion, Bolton announced new restrictions on U.S. dealings with the three countries he called the "troika of tyranny" — Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela — as "part of a broader set of policies" aimed at "reversing the Obama administration's embrace" of Cuba. Bolton said the sanction was "aimed at restricting U.S. transactions with the bank and cutting off the bank's access to U.S. currency", and "meant to be a warning to others, including Russia, against deploying military assets to Venezuela." United States Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin stated that the sanction was to prevent the Central Bank "from being used as a tool of the illegitimate Maduro regime, which continues to plunder Venezuelan assets and exploit government institutions to enrich corrupt insiders." Maduro responded in a television broadcast, saying: "Let me tell you, imperialist Mr. John Bolton—advisor to Donald Trump—that your sanctions give us more strength." Maduro said the sanctions were "totally illegal" and that "Central banks around the world are sacred, all countries respect them. ... To me the empire looks crazy, desperate."


text: On 26 April 2019, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Maduro's foreign minister Jorge Arreaza and Judge Carol Padilla, which it accused of exploiting the U.S. financial system to support the "illegitimate" government of Nicolas Maduro. The U.S. Department of State issued a statement describing Arreaza as being "at the forefront" of the Maduro administration attempts "to thwart the democratic aspirations of the Venezuelan people", and Padilla as the judge involved in the detention of Roberto Marrero, Guaidó's top aide.