Guy Smith

Guy Smith, an African American, was the son-in-law of former U.S Secretary of State Dean Rusk. He was a graduate of Georgetown University as well as an engineering graduate of Georgia Tech. He was the husband of Peggy Rusk.

When Peggy married a black man, it made headlines in the newspapers. Peggy's brother, Robert Rusk, supported his sister's marriage, later saying in 2014: "They had a terrific marriage. Guy died two years ago. He went from that marriage to fly a Huey Helicopter gunship in Vietnam."

From TIME magazine cover story: (September 27, 1967)

Despite the best efforts of the bride and groom and their families, a wedding that all involved had tried to keep private was this week’s cover story — and it was national news for good reason.

The two parties in question were Margaret Elizabeth “Peggy” Rusk and Guy Gibson Smith. She was the one daughter of U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and a studious 18-year-old enrolled at Stanford. He was a 22-year-old NASA employee whom she had met when they were both horse-loving Washington teenagers. More to the point, he was black, and she was not.

As TIME noted, that fact meant that their wedding — coming very shortly after the Supreme Court struck down laws that banned such unions — was “social history rather than society-page fare.” And, even more than the wedding itself, the story explained, the reaction (or lack thereof) was an important indicator of the national mood:

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 black-white 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.

Though the State Department received a reported couple of hundred nasty letters, and many Rusk family members did not attend the wedding, generally it was acknowledged that the marriage was far less controversial than it would have been just a few years earlier. In fact, one of the more notable reactions came from liberals who denounced Rusk’s Vietnam policies and now found themselves having to stand up for him.

For many people, the news was best summed up by Martin Luther King Jr.’s take on the wedding: “Individuals marry, not races.”

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Guy Smith died on February 20, 2012 at the age of 67. He and his wife Margaret "Peggy" Rusk, daughter of U.S. Secretary Dean Rusk, were married for 44 years.

The Smiths made national headlines in September 1967 when they were wed in Palo Alto, California. Smith, a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force reserve at the time, was an African American. The 18-year-old Rusk, whose family was from Georgia, was white.

The Sept. 23, 1967 edition of Time magazine featured a cover photo of the couple taken after the wedding ceremony. The headline: "MR. & MRS. GUY SMITH/An Interracial Wedding."

Three months before the ceremony, on June 12, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court made interracial marriages legal throughout the country in the case titled Loving v. Virginia.

Secretary of State Rusk reportedly offered to resign before the wedding so that it would not have a negative impact on the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. But he was persuaded to stay by the president and U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara.

Smith, who graduated from Georgetown, saw active duty as a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War.

The Smiths had a daughter, Samantha, and two grandchildren.

In a May 2014 interview on the occasion of the premiere of a Georgia Public Broadcasting documentary about Dean Rusk, his daughter remembered the national headlines and the Time cover. "That was a big shock," she said. "We weren't trying to make any kind of statement. It has really nothing to do with our relationship. The fact that everyone else was making a big deal about it was their issue."