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Equal Treatment. Mixed unions are hardly strange to Americans, going back to John Rolfe's marriage to Pocahontas in 1614. In the same era, colonial elders became so concerned about the number of marriages between white indentured women and Negroes that they began writing laws to prohibit them. Abolitionist Frederick Douglass, son of a Negro mother and white father, who became the nation's Minister to Haiti in 1889, divorced a Negro and later married a white woman, explaining blithely that he "wanted to be fair to both races." Negro-white miscegenation, in fact, had a brief vogue after the Civil War and then declined until the post-World War II period, when gradual loosening of racial sanctions chipped further at the taboo.
Many of the prominent Negroes who have taken white spouses have come from the laissez-faire world of show business: Lena Home, Pearl Bailey, Paul Robeson, Eartha Kitt, Harry Belafonte and Sammy Davis Jr. Some civil rights activists, such as James Farmer, formerly chief of CORE, and the late Walter White, the N.A.A.C.P.'s longtime executive secretary, went the same route. Massachusetts' Senator Edward Brooke has an Italian wife, but the wedding was long ago and far away from public view; by the time it became noteworthy, Negro Brooke, rather than his Caucasian spouse, had led the family into the Establishment.
Bug in the Brain. The Smith-Rusk marriage is like none of these: it resembles more closely the 1953 wedding of another Margaret known as Peggy, the daughter of Sir Stafford Cripps, Britain's onetime Chancellor of the Exchequer. His Peggy wed Joseph Appiah, son of an Ashanti chief and now a legal adviser to the Ghanian government. Britain took it without hysteria.
Peggy Rusk, like Peggy Cripps, brought as her dowry a famous name (but not much else; the Rusks are not wealthy). No hippie or swinger, the Rusks' brunette daughter is an attractive, serious-minded student of simple tastes who won a D.A.R. prize for academic and citizenship excellence in the ninth grade. Precisely because of her sobriety and wholesome appearance, almost any parents could visualize her as their own young daughter plunging into intermarriage. "This," Sociologist Gunnar Myrdal (An American Dilemma) said a few years ago, "is a kind of bug in the white man's brain—that the Ne gro is anxious to marry his daughter."
Despite the white man's bug, the marriage did not unleash the kind of storm that it would have stirred only a few years ago.
In this may lie its ultimate social significance. In Washington, a few Democrats muttered privately about political damage next year, and the feeling of shock was obvious, but apprehension was scattered and not taken very seriously. Some Southerners who support Rusk on Viet Nam policy and generally admire him were privately indignant, and at least some of his enemies thought they smelled his undoing. "How could she have done it to him?" was a common reaction in Dixie. On the floors of the House and Senate, however, silence was the rule. Indeed, there had been a far greater outcry over Justice William Douglas' successive (albeit intraracial) marriages than over the Smith-Rusk wedding, which, after all, only indirectly involved a high public official and had been handled with notable grace and discretion.