The Red Skull was US Secretary of State 1961-69?

So Wikipedia seems to assert. At the end of Dean Rusk’s entry in Wikipedia:

“In an issue of Captain America, it was revealed that Dean Rusk had actually been the infamous Nazi supervillian, the Red Skull, in disguise.”

Surely they mean to say that some dumbass comic-book scripter asserted this idiocy into a comic-book, not that it is actually true.

Or is it?

It’s in a paragraph labelled In Popular Culture – I think it’s only making a statement about a fact in the Captain America universe, not about real life.

The worst part was that Kennedy kept calling him Ghost Rider by mistake.* Or to rile him.

*yeah, I know the motorcycle-riding incarnation didn’t come out until 1972.

It was Dell Rusk (note the anagram), and he was Secretary of Defense. Until he got his ass handed to him by the Avengers. Cite.

Wikipedia has all sorts of these little-known facts to teach us. For example, I’ll bet nobody reading this thread was aware of the full history of the beverage known as hot chocolate, or of the public figures Benjamin Franklin and Walter Cronkite.

Note that the linked LiveJournal entries contain NSFW language. The truth is profane sometimes.

Also, good job to whoever just removed the spurious Red Skull information from the Dean Rusk article. Hopefully some silly person won’t start an edit war over it.