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"This is a family matter," the father of the bride insisted. "It's going to be handled in a family way." And Dean Rusk made it stick. A hermetic shroud of secrecy effectively surrounded the advance preparations, and when he escorted Margaret Elizabeth Rusk down the aisle of Stanford University's Memorial Church, the assembly of 60 was limited to personal friends and kin. The shortened Episcopal service took barely a dozen minutes. Then the whitegowned bride, smiling fetchingly and seemingly relaxed, emerged with her equally poised husband, Guy Gibson Smith.
They posed indulgently for photographers, Guy bussing Peggy's cheek on demand. One cameraman complained that he had dropped his film. "Anyone else lose his film?" asked Guy, as sprightly as the yellow rose in his lapel. He kissed Peggy three more times for retakes. As the wedding party took off for a reception at a friend's home, the pictures and wire stories raced across the country to land on front pages nearly everywhere. Family matter or no, the wedding was social history rather than society-page fare. Dean Rusk, Secretary of State of the U.S., native of Cherokee County, Ga., and grandson of two Confederate soldiers, had given his only daughter's hand to a Negro.
Resignation Offer. As recently as 1948, California law would have made the union a criminal offense in the state. Until last June, when the U.S. Supreme Court killed Virginia's miscegenation law, 16 states still banned interracial marriage. More to the point, and more poignant, in a year when blackwhite animosity has reached a violent crescendo in the land, two young people and their parents showed that separateness is far from the sum total of race relations in the U.S.—that to the marriage of true minds, color should be no impediment. Indrawn as usual, Rusk pronounced himself "very pleased." Clarence Smith, Guy's father, said simply: "Two people in love."
It was not quite that simple. Guy, 22, and Peggy, 18, took on more than the double risk of a young and mixed marriage when they exchanged rings and vows. The wedding bells rang also for Dean Rusk. Protocol makes the Secretary of State No. 1 in the President's Cabinet, and Lyndon Johnson has made him No. 1 in presidential esteem and trust. Anything that affects Rusk personally also affects the Administration politically. Thus there was credibility to the speculation that Rusk, when informing Johnson of the wedding, offered to resign if the White House considered that necessary.
There was never any prospect that Johnson would accept such an offer, because of his great reliance on Rusk, because Rusk's resignation over his daughter's choice of a husband would be a major political disaster for the Administration, and because there is little likelihood that the President would find the marriage embarrassing. (In any event, as of this week Rusk has outlasted all but six of his predecessors.) But the mere fact that the hint of resignation was reported, and allowed to go undenied by both Rusk and the White House, underscored the kind of pressure that the new Mr. and Mrs. Smith knowingly accepted.