ATHENS, Georgia -- Former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who went "eyeball to eyeball" with Moscow during the Cuban missile crisis and helped oversee America's ill-fated buildup in Vietnam, has died. He was 85.


Rusk, the son of a poor Georgia farmer who became the nation's highest Cabinet officer in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the 1960s, died Tuesday night at his home in Athens. He had been in declining health for several years.


In his eight years as secretary, Rusk presided over a series of major global events. Rusk backed President Lyndon Johnson's policy during the Vietnam war so strongly that he became a favorite target of anti-war lawmakers and student protesters.


Rusk defended his role in the Vietnam War in his son's 1990 book, "As I Saw It."


Early in his tenure in 1961, Rusk was at Kennedy's side when a group of Cuban exiles, supported by the Central Intelligence Agency, tried to invade Cuba's Bay of Pigs to oust Fidel Castro. The invasion was a fiasco and years later he said it was a mistake.


Rusk was also in the center of the Cuban missile encounter in 1962.


The world held its breath when Kennedy ordered Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to dismantle Cuban missile sites aimed at the United States.


When he sensed that Khrushchev had begun to back down, Rusk summed it up with his quotation: "We're standing eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked."