richie providing context for the hearing. >> february 18, 1966 -- secretary of state, dean rusk, testifying at the vietnam hearings. set the stage for us. mr. ritche: secretary of state dean rusk had been secretary of state since 1961. john f. kennedy appointed him. when kennedy was assassinated, president johnson kept him on. relied on him even more so. even more so than kennedy had. kennedy himself was very interested in foreign affairs, wanted to be his own secretary of state, essentially. johnson had specialized in domestic affairs and leaned heavily on foreign policy advisors, particularly rusk and secretary of defense, mcnamara who also carried over from the kennedy administration. so rusk became one of the great loyalists. he defended the vietnam war to his dying day. he believed that the vietnam war was right, that it was a continuation of american policy since world war ii. he constantly cited munich and other world war ii analogies that we had to stop aggression early on, that we had learned this early, but somehow he could conflate ho chi minh with hitler. beyond that, he was thinking about china, communist china, somehow they w