 Rusk found that the return to teaching in 1970 to resume the academic career he had abandoned in 1940 to be emotionally satisfying as the other professors remembered him as being like a "junior associate seeking tenure".Rusk told his son "the students I was privileged to teach helped rejuvenate my life and make a new start after those hard years in Washington".In the 1970s, he was a member of the Committee on Present Danger, a hawkish group opposed to détente with the Soviet Union and distrustful of treaties to control the nuclear arms race.