Mister Secretary

There never was, and there is never likely to be, a secretary of state quite like Dean Gooderham Acheson. Son of the Episcopal bishop of Connecticut, educated at Groton, Yale, and Harvard Law School, tall and effortlessly elegant in manner, between the cut of his J. Press suit and the angle of his waxed moustache, he personified the well-connected WASP lawyer-statesman of the American Century.

But as is often the case, things were not precisely as they seemed. Acheson was American by birth but the product of an Anglo-Canadian marriage, and his mother was the granddaughter of a successful distiller. There is no evidence that Groton’s famous rector, the Rev. Endicott Peabody, who tirelessly preached the gospel of public service, inspired anything in Acheson except mild schoolboy rebellion. After Harvard he set his sights not on Wall Street but on provincial Washington, serving as clerk to Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, the Court’s first Jewish member. During the 1920s and ’30s, while living comfortably off corporate practice, he positioned himself on the left wing of the Democratic party.

A brief tenure as Franklin Roosevelt’s under (and later acting) secretary of the Treasury ended in disaster and resignation/dismissal in late 1933, leaving him in the wilderness for the balance of FDR’s first two terms. This may account, to some degree, for Acheson’s retrospective coolness toward Roosevelt–respect without affection, in his words–but may also be described as the clash of two supremely self-confident egoists whose temperamental similarities may well have been discomfiting.

Roosevelt, in any case, was capable of rising above such things. Acheson took particular satisfaction in the story that FDR once returned an angry letter of resignation with advice to consult Dean Acheson about the way a gentleman quits. And in 1939, when Acheson served as counsel during his friend Felix Frankfurter’s contentious nomination to the Supreme Court, he found himself restored to Roosevelt’s good graces. This was a mixed blessing for Acheson: He resented what he considered to be FDR’s condescension, and was obliged to decline a pair of flattering appointments–as a federal judge, and as solicitor general. But in late 1940, as Great Britain struggled alone against Nazi Germany, and the Roosevelt White House contended with U.S. neutrality, Acheson was invited to join the State Department, where he was to remain (with one brief interregnum) for the next dozen years.

I furnish this introductory information not because Dean Acheson is unduly concerned with his background–it is not–but because, in Acheson’s case, style was, to some degree, complementary to substance. As assistant secretary, undersecretary, and secretary of state (1949-53) during Harry Truman’s second term, Acheson displayed a personal loyalty to his chief and determination to push the United States toward postwar global leadership–in contrast to the decades between the two world wars–setting the stage for the struggle between West and East, and ordained the unipolar world we now inhabit.

We may speak of the Truman Doctrine to assist free peoples in resisting subversion or aggression, and the Marshall Plan to rebuild a shattered Europe, but what we are really talking about is the diplomacy of Dean Acheson.

The great value of Dean Acheson is that it concentrates not only on the ways in which Acheson came to perceive the Soviet threat after 1945, and designed alliances and institutions (notably NATO) to resist Stalin’s schemes, but also how he worked with Truman and Congress on Cold War tactics and strategy, and dealt with America’s isolationist instincts. In this excellent study, Robert L. Beisner, a diplomatic historian who has specialized in the tension between politics and policy, is especially perceptive on the day-to-day mechanics of making foreign policy. Acheson has been fortunate in his previous biographers–David McClellan, Gaddis Smith, James Chace, Douglas Brinkley–but Beisner is the first to examine his relations with Truman and Congress in illuminating detail.

Readers interested in comparing present circumstances with the heroic past will find plenty of material. Acheson’s fidelity to Truman was sincere, of course, but pragmatic as well: Truman’s loyalty to Acheson was dependent on trust, and Acheson’s success hinged on mutual respect. The Department of State in that era was not so much a fifth wheel in perpetual conflict with the Pentagon, but a bureaucratic fiefdom in concert with the White House. The secretary really was the president’s principal diplomatic adviser.

Similarly, while it is always fashionable to commend bipartisanship in White House relations with Capitol Hill, Acheson actually enjoyed its benefits–an experience not always awarded his successors.

The remnants of Republican isolationism in the Senate–notably Robert Taft and, later, Joseph McCarthy–harried Acheson, but precursors of GOP internationalism–Arthur Vandenberg, John Foster Dulles, John Sherman Cooper, and others–furnished critical support at decisive moments: in resisting Communist aggression in Greece and Turkey, at the creation of NATO, in choosing to defend the independence of South Korea. Now that the two political sides have long since traded ideologies, the Democrats being the isolationist party, it is impossible to imagine Democratic support for the Bush Doctrine–“It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world”–which is largely indistinguishable from what Dean Acheson and Harry Truman believed.

Philip Terzian is literary editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.