HOW DEAN ACHESON WON THE COLD WAR

The confusion about Acheson begins with something as mundane as his appearance: his famous “aristocratic” bearing, the prominent mustache, the natty clothing, and the mid-Atlantic accent that so grated on Republican Senators in the 1940s and ’50s: “this pompous diplomat in striped pants, with the phony British accent,” as Senator Joseph McCarthy once put it.

Even less intemperate senators found Acheson arrogant and supercilious. He talked, said one, “as if a piece of fish had got stuck in his mustache.” Richard Nixon recalled in his memoirs that Acheson presented an irresistible target to Republicans looking for a symbol of the effete Eastern establishment. Acheson’s “clipped mustache, his British tweeds, and his haughty manner made him the perfect foil for the snobbish kind of foreign service personality and mentality that had been taken in hook, line, and sinker by the Communists.”

For all his sartorial dash and aristocratic tone, however, Acheson’s roots were neither wealthy nor patrician. His father, an Irish immigrant, was a low-church Episcopal rector; his mother was from a successful family of millers, well off but not rich. Acheson grew up in comfortable, upper-middle-class circumstances in Middletown, Connecticut.

When he was sent off to boarding school at Groton — that bastion of elitism where the Auchinclosses and the Harrimans rubbed elbows under the school’s domineering rector, Endicott Peabody — Acheson rebelled, graduating at the bottom of his class. As a senior, he published in the Grotonian “The Snob in America,” a thinly veiled assault on the Groton style. “The essence of democracy is belief in the common people,” he wrote, “and the essence of snobbery is contempt of them.” When Peabody in exasperation told Acheson’s mother that he could not make a “Groton boy” out of her son, Mrs. Acheson replied, “Dr. Peabody, I didn’t send Dean here to have you make a ‘Groton boy’ out of him. I sent him here to be educated. . . . I will leave him here as long as you think you can succeed, though you give me considerable doubt.” Acheson’s confident and condescending manner derived not from blue blood but from an iron-willed and supremely self-assured mother.

Acheson remained something of a rebel all his life, even in government service. He was never cowed by authority, much less by the authority of class. He had a mixed view of Franklin Roosevelt, a man whom he respected for his understanding of power but who treated his aides and cabinet officers with patrician condescension. “It was not gratifying,” Acheson later said, “to receive the easy greeting which milord might give a promising stable boy and pull one’s forelock in return.” As a senior Treasury Department official, he clashed with Roosevelt over the president’s plan to devalue the dollar in a way that Acheson believed violated the law. The president responded to Acheson’s lawyerly complaints with a simple Rooseveltian pronouncement: “I say it is legal.” When Acheson brazenly replied that it was he, not Franklin Roosevelt, who would have to put his signature on the order, Roosevelt told him to go, ending Acheson’s five months in the New Deal.

The one president Acheson truly admired was not the real aristocrat Roosevelt or the faux-aristocrat John F. Kennedy, but the accidental president, Harry Truman. In elite circles, both Democratic and Republican, Truman was known as a hack haberdasher who had spent his political life as a cog in Missouri’s Pendergast machine. But Acheson devoted himself to Truman with an unusual loyalty both during and after his presidency. As Chace notes, “Truman never really had a close male friend, until, toward the end of his life, he found one in Dean Acheson.”

The confusion over Acheson’s manners has been nothing compared with the controversy over his policies as secretary of state, a controversy that never diminished over the four decades of the Cold War. It is sometimes imagined in today’s forgetful world that the late 1940s and early 1950s were a time of consensus about strategic imperatives. Nothing could be farther from the truth, and no one knew better than Dean Acheson how bloody the battles were. As the principal shaper of American foreign policy in those years, he was attacked from every conceivable direction.

Conservative Republicans flailed at Acheson as a dupe of Moscow, the “Communist-appeasing, Communist-protecting betrayer of America,” as Senator William Jenner called him, or, as the more alliterative Richard Nixon put it, the “Red Dean of the College of Cowardly Containment.”

But to others, Acheson was the epitome of hardheaded anti-communism. Senator Arthur Vandenberg saw Acheson as a thoroughgoing anti-Communist hawk, “totally anti-Soviet and . . . completely tough.” Walter Lippmann, America’s most influential columnist and a leading proponent of foreign-policy “realism” in his day, agreed that Acheson was tough. In fact, he was too tough, too driven by anti-Communist ideology, too inclined to confront the Soviets, and too ambitious in his exercise of American power. At a famous Georgetown dinner party in 1948, Lippmann railed against the Truman Doctrine’s expansive promises to defend “free peoples” every-where. Acheson, the Truman Doctrine’s intellectual author, loudly accused Lippmann of “sabotaging” American foreign policy. Fingers were jabbed in chests. And when Republican congressmen less than two years later voted unanimously for Acheson’s resignation on the grounds that he had betrayed both China and Korea to communism, Lippmann, the dean of the college of cowardly columnists, joined in calling for Acheson’s head.

The controversy persisted throughout the Cold War. In the 1950s, Acheson remained tarnished by Republican attacks and still bore the absurd reputation of being soft on communism. He was shunned as a political liability by Adlai Stevenson during that hapless candidate’s two failed presidential runs. Even John Kennedy, though he admired Acheson, would not give him a high-ranking post in his new administration.

Nevertheless, the events of the 1950s and early ’60s did much to rehabilitate Acheson’s reputation. By the time Kennedy took office, Acheson’s foreign-policy legacy had become far less controversial. Nixon’s earlier criticisms of Acheson’s “cowardly containment” lost their punch when the Eisenhower-Nixon administration proved no more — and indeed somewhat less — aggressive against communism than Acheson had been. Among Democrats, meanwhile, Acheson’s brand of liberal anti-communism had become the reigning orthodoxy. When Acheson, as the senior figure in a group known as the “Wise Men,” urged Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to hold the line against communism in Indochina, even if it meant introducing thousands of American combat troops, he was expressing the near-unanimous view of the liberal foreign-policy establishment. By the end of the 1960s, Acheson stood at that establishment’s pinnacle, and when Richard Nixon took office in 1969, the erstwhile baiter of the “Red Dean” assiduously courted Acheson’s favor. By 1970 Acheson had become, in the words of Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, “the high priest of the old order.”

But no sooner had Acheson been rehabilitated than that old order exploded over Vietnam, and Acheson’s reputation came tumbling down again. A new breed of liberals, disgusted not only with Nixon but also with the Democrats’ role in bringing America into the war, found the original villains in Acheson, Truman, and the post-war establishment. Wasn’t it Acheson’s grand strategy — from the Truman Doctrine through the Korean War — that ultimately led the United States into Vietnam? In 1972, no less a figure than Senator William Fulbright declared that “the anti-communism of the Truman Doctrine” had indeed been “the guiding spirit of American foreign policy since World War II.”

Leftist revisionist historians like Walter LaFeber fleshed out Fulbright’s argument. In the 1980 edition of his influential America, Russia, and the Cold War, LaFeber angrily charged that it was Acheson and his colleagues who invented the original “domino theory,” applied with such disastrous results in Indochina. It was Acheson who had consciously refused to place limits on the Truman Doctrine’s application around the world. And it was Acheson who had pressed for American intervention in the Greek civil war in 1947, an unwarranted interference in the internal affairs of another nation, justified in the name of anti-communism, that provided the model for intervention in Vietnam less than two decades later.

This revisionist attack by LaFeber and many young liberals during the 1970s resonated even within Acheson’s liberal establishment. Acheson’s policies now seemed too bold. As Isaacson and Thomas noted in their biography of the establishment, The Wise Men, Vietnam turned liberals into “quasi isolationists; they argued that the United States was badly overextended and had to pull back, that communism was not monolithic, and that its threat had been grossly overestimated.” On every one of these points, it was difficult to pretend that the anti-Communist policies and worldview they were now attacking had not been the policies and worldview of Dean Acheson.

Difficult but not impossible. Isaacson and Thomas, speaking for the new, post-Vietnam liberal establishment, labored to put some distance between Acheson’s policies and later American behavior. Perhaps Acheson in his efforts to win congressional approval for early Cold War policies had employed an overheated rhetoric and oversold America’s role in defending “free peoples.” Perhaps Acheson, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, had unwittingly unleashed forces that then overwhelmed him. But the key word is “unwittingly.” Acheson and other Truman administration officials “would have been quite taken aback if they had realized in 1945 that for the next forty years — and perhaps for decades to come — the world would lurch from one crisis to another, driven on by a hair-trigger nuclear arms race.” Acheson and his colleagues had been “doomed to watch as men less comfortable with subtleties and nuances shattered their vision of a stern yet stable modus vivendi between the U.S. and U.S.S.R.”

The unsubtle and unnuanced men Isaacson and Thomas had in mind were, of course, the senior policymakers of the Reagan administration, whose policies constituted “the triumph of ideology over pragmatism, of political posturing over serious statesmanship.” Surely the admirable Dean Acheson could not be associated with anything the despised Ronald Reagan did. James Chace, too, was part of the liberal, anti-Reagan orthodoxy. “An anti-Soviet consensus leading to a new crusade of global containment,” he wrote in 1981, “will not only strain our resources to such a degree that we will have to live with an enormous military establishment and a continuing reduction in our standard of living, but will also stretch our alliances to the breaking point.”

Three years after Isaacson and Thomas published The Wise Men, however, the Cold War ended, not in nuclear holocaust but peacefully — not with the straining of American resources and alliances, as Chace had predicted, but with the collapse of communism and the Soviet empire.

The new post-Cold War era inevitably inspired yet another round of revisions to the Acheson legacy. In 1992, the historian Melvyn P. Leffler argued in his monumental study of the Truman era, A Preponderance of Power, that while the men who shaped policy in the early Cold War had made some “foolish” errors (including overconcern with “peripheral” issues like Indochina), nevertheless they had also made many “wise” and “prudent” decisions of enormous and lasting importance. After 1989 it was hard to gainsay the achievements of Acheson and his colleagues, and Leffler, who had been something of a revisionist himself at one time, candidly acknowledged the central, inescapable, and, for some, difficult historical truth: “The cold war, Truman and his advisers believed, could be won. And so it has been.”

Chace’s Acheson is the first serious look at the man and his policies since the end of the Cold War, and like all previous interpretations of Acheson, it bears the mark of the era in which it was written, as well as the prejudices of the author. Chace is positively celebratory in crediting Acheson with the Cold War victory and the peace and prosperity that ensued in the new world of the 1990s. That world, Chace insists, was very much Acheson’s creation.

“It was Acheson who created the intellectual concepts” that guided American foreign policy in what Chace unashamedly calls the “heroic period” of the early Cold War. It was Acheson “who had the clearest view of the role America might play in the postwar world, and who possessed the willpower to accomplish these ends.” It was Acheson “who was a prime architect of the Marshall Plan to restore economic health to Western Europe, who refashioned a peacetime alliance of nations under the rubric of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who crafted the Truman Doctrine to contain any Soviet advance into the Middle East and the Mediterranean.” It was Acheson was played a major part in creating “the international financial institutions at Bretton Woods that helped ensure global American economic predominance.” And so it was Acheson who “not only defined American power and purpose in the postwar era, but also laid the foundations for American predominance at the end of the twentieth century and beyond.”

But Chace’s account of Acheson also contains another message, which complicates, if it does not actually subvert, that ringing endorsement. For the key to Acheson’s great success, Chace insists, was that he was a “realist.” In fact, he was the “quintessential American realist.”

Those not immersed in the arcana of today’s foreign-policy debates may miss the implications of calling Acheson a “realist.” But for the past fifty years, “realism” has been shorthand in foreign policy for a systematic way of thinking about international relations. Emphasizing power over ideology in relations among nations, elevating the national interest (defined in geopolitical terms) over moral considerations, “realism” was the hot theory of the 1940s when Reinhold Neibuhr, Hans Morgenthau, Walter Lippmann, and George Kennan first gave it full expression. It enjoyed a renaissance when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were in the White House practicing their brand of realpolitik. And since the end of the Cold War, it has been back in vogue among self-consciously “hard-headed” foreign-policy thinkers — the kind who declare that promoting American principles, rather than American interests, is foolhardy, messianic, and, in any case, a game for sissies.

Realists warn — now, as then — against the tendency of Americans to wish to remake the world in their own image, against undertaking foreign commitments where no “vital interests” seem to be at stake, and against Americans’ allegedly congenital unwillingness to recognize the limits of their power to shape the world. More than fifty years ago, Walter Lippmann pleaded for “solvency” in foreign policy, insisting that the United States tailor its goals in world affairs to meet its limited resources. This has been James Chace’s particular hobbyhorse for more than two decades. In 1981 he published Solvency, arguing, as Lippmann had, that America’s Cold War foreign policies simply exceeded America’s ability to sustain them.

During the debates of the Cold War, different foreign-policy schools battled over precisely how much blame Acheson deserved for everything that had gone wrong. Now that Acheson’s Cold War policies are widely believed to have been successful, all the competing foreign-policy schools want to claim him again. Chace’s biography is the realists’ bid for the Acheson legacy.

Chace argues that Acheson “never embraced a strongly ideological stance toward the Soviet Union.” Acheson did not believe that the Cold War was “a struggle between good and evil,” but considered the Soviet Union just another “great power.” Impatient with ideals and “abstractions,” Acheson consistently favored “moderation in international affairs.” He pleaded for “balance and solvency.” He was “fully aware of the limitations of American power and purpose.” And while he may haveemployed rhetoric that seemed intensely ideological and that seemed to commit the United States to a global campaign of aggressive anti-Communist containment, in reality “Acheson had a more pragmatic and temperate worldview.” Or, to put it another way, Acheson’s worldview was not all that different from James Chace’s, both during and after the Cold War.

The idea that Acheson was a “realist” — and that, were he alive today, he would favor a foreign policy that is non-ideological, “moderate,” and primarily attuned to the issues of “balance and solvency” — is likely to become the new consensus. But before we let the Cold War pass fully into the darkness of history, it may be worth recalling who Acheson was, what he thought he was doing when he built his policy, and why he was most certainly not a “realist.”

One of the chief characteristics of realism has always been a profound doubt about the possibility of human progress. Acheson, by this measure, was a liberal. He was, to be sure, a pragmatic liberal. He did not place his faith in human perfectibility, but he did believe that with the proper laws and institutions, backed by the requisite power, men’s evil urges could be contained and channeled toward good. Both his career and his policies were heavily shaped by abstract principles and ideals of a particularly American variety. If historians and biographers have missed the great significance of Acheson’s ideals, it was perhaps because, as the son of an Episcopal clergyman, he did not feel it necessary or even seemly to explain them. For Acheson, the question “What do we believe?” had long ago been answered. The pressing question was rather “What do we do next?”

The degree of Acheson’s commitment to principles is well limned in Chace’s biography, though Chace himself seems unaware of the implications of the story he tells so gracefully. Entering his professional and public career after World War I as an eager partisan of the “common man,” Acheson held progressive, reformist views that did not stem from any Grotonian tradition of noblesse oblige. As a student at Harvard Law School, Acheson fell under the powerful sway of Louis Brandeis and Felix Frank-furter, two Jewish legal giants whose liberalism was shaped by the conviction that government had a responsibility to protect minorities and society’s weak. Acheson’s commitment to civil rights, nurtured in those years, persisted throughout his life: In the 1950s and ’60s, he strongly supported and counseled Lyndon Johnson on the great civil-rights issues of the day.

It was these strong liberal convictions that had made Acheson a Democrat in the first place. His early political allegiances were with Theodore Roosevelt and the progressive Republicans. But after the 1912 defeat of the Bull Moose party and the rise of the more conservative Republicanism of Taft, Harding, and Coolidge, Acheson drifted toward the Democratic party of Woodrow Wilson, attracted to its reformist domestic agenda, internationalist foreign policy, and anti-tariff trade policies. Like many progressives, Acheson was a free trader. He favored American participation in international institutions. His affinity for Wilsonian ideals emerged relatively unscathed even from the debacle of the Versailles Treaty and the failure of the League of Nations. If Wilson’s mistakes were “great and tragic,” Acheson later wrote, “great also was his understanding of the new role which his country must play in the realignment of power which the crumbling of empires and emergence of new forces necessitated.”

Acheson also became a fervid supporter of labor during the great coal strike of 1919 and the anti-Communist raids ordered by Attorney General Palmer that same year. “The essential role of labor unions in the scheme of our times was to me no longer a purely intellectual conclusion,” he later wrote. “I had passed the first test of the liberal; it was a conviction.” Acheson’s first book, a never-published treatise on labor relations and the law, was so liberal that Acheson himself mused that he might have to find a publisher “in Moscow.” David Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, which Acheson later represented as a lawyer at the firm of Covington and Burling, described Acheson as “not only brilliant as a lawyer, well known as a progressive, but one who could understand the heart of our labor movement.”

In 1928, Acheson campaigned hard for the Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith, the embodiment of northeastern, big-city liberalism. And after Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, Acheson was high on the list of enthusiastic young men whom Roosevelt’s adviser and Acheson’s mentor Felix Frankfurter promoted. Acheson’s ignominious departure from the administration after only five months blurred his reputation as a New Dealer and made him popular with Covington and Burling’s corporate clients throughout the remainder of the 1930s. But Acheson remained a liberal, all his friends were New Deal Democrats, and within a few years Roosevelt, who appreciated the dignified way Acheson had tendered his resignation in 1933, was once again turning to him with job offers.

Acheson didn’t put his long-held liberal, democratic ideals on the shelf when he joined the State Department in 1941 and began making American foreign policy. Like most of his colleagues in the Roosevelt administration during the last two years of World War II, he believed that once Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were defeated, the great task of American foreign policy would be to restore a liberal international order on firmer foundations than those which had crumbled so tragically in the 1930s.

This entailed much more than reestablishing a balance of power in the world, though that was certainly one essential part of the strategy. Roosevelt, Acheson, and others hoped, quite unrealistically as it turned out, that the United States, Great Britain, Russia, and China — the “United Nations” that had won the war — could undertake as relatively equal players collective responsibility for preserving peace and a liberal order. But they never viewed the outbreak of World War II simply as a breakdown of the balance of power: There had also been that little matter of fascism, imperialism, and totalitarianism. For Acheson and others of his generation, the ideological issues and the strategic, balance-of-power issues were inseparable.

The international structures Acheson and others tried to put in place were unmistakably derived from the idealist tradition not only of Wilson but of Theodore Roosevelt. The United Nations was supposed to be a League of Nations that worked, chiefly because this time America would not retreat into isolation. It is true that Acheson soon became highly skeptical of the UN’s utility in a world that contained Stalin’s Soviet Union. Nor did he share the more utopian views of the UN as a guarantor of universal peace and freedom. But as “an aid to diplomacy” he did not disparage it. The more grandiose goals envisioned for the UN at its birth would (as the historian David Fromkin puts it) “like Sleeping Beauty” have to be “left in repose until international politics should change in such a way as to bring it to life and allow it to function.”

This kind of pragmatic idealism also characterized Acheson’s international economic policies. The establishment of the Bretton Woods system and the push for global free trade were critical to strengthening Western Europe and thus redressing the balance of power. But Acheson saw far broader benefits, convinced, as Chace notes, that “a multilateral free-trading system . . . would help create conditions that would lead to general peace and prosperity.” Acheson’s own description of his views puts him among those whom realists usually decry. “We believe passionately,” he declared in 1946, “that only by continuing a system of free enterprise and having other nations in the same state [can we] continue the same sort of world in which the United States has lived in the past.”

Acheson’s idealism led him, for a brief period between the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War in 1946, to some dubious policy judgments. In late 1945, he was the co-author, with David Lilienthal, of a plan to share nuclear weapons with the Soviet Union. The Acheson-Lilienthal plan, based on the ideas of Robert Oppenheimer, called for the establishment of an “International Authority” that would control all nuclear-weapon materials and allow nations to share technological developments. Acheson was loath to give up Roosevelt’s vision of a collective security system that included Moscow, what historian Robert L. Beisner has called “FDR’s circumspectly optimistic view about future U.S.-Soviet relations.” According to James Forrestal’s harsher interpretation, Acheson “could not conceive of a world in which we were hoarders of military secrets from our allies, particularly this great ally upon our cooperation with whom rests the future peace of the world.”

It says something about his Procrustean interpretation that Chace presents even the Acheson-Lilienthal plan, quickly abandoned by the Truman administration, as evidence of Acheson’s realism. (Nor is this the only place in the book where Chace the old Cold War liberal and Chace the post-Cold War realist twist themselves into a pretzel trying to find common ground.) Acheson’s hope of sharing nuclear secrets with Stalin was part of a lingering attachment to an earlier hope for global harmony. It may not have been pure idealism, but it certainly wasn’t realism.

The dream did not last long in any case. Conservatives who even today criticize Acheson for being late to comprehend the Soviet threat ought to realize that he was late only by a matter of months. George Kennan sent his famous “Long Telegram” warning against the Soviet menace in February 1946. Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech in March. Acheson, according to Robert Beisner’s meticulous tracing of his views, became a hard-line, anti-Soviet cold warrior in August. By the middle of 1946, Acheson realized that his grand postwar vision would not be possible.

Acheson’s shift was not due to any change in his liberalism. Before August 1946, Acheson believed he was creating a world order that could withstand the challenge of an as-yet-unseen adversary; after August 1946, the adversary had clearly emerged. And the fact that Stalin’s Soviet Union looked more like an enemy than an ally of the new liberal order was only one of the changed international circumstances. China, rent by civil war, was obviously not going to play its part as a great power. And neither, for that matter, was Great Britain, whose abdication of responsibility for holding the line in Turkey and Greece in the summer of 1946 probably did more than anything else to convince American officials like Acheson that a concert of great powers was doomed.

As Acheson recalled in his memoirs, “Only slowly did it dawn upon us that the whole world structure and order that we had inherited from the nineteenth century was gone and that the struggle to replace it would be directed from two bitterly opposed and ideologically irreconcilable power centers.” By 1946, defending the new liberal order meant defending it against the Soviet Union and communism.

When Acheson turned, he turned hard. Much of the confusion over where to place Acheson on the Cold War spectrum has come from the fact that he was so bitterly attacked by the Republican conservatives who called for the rollback of communism in Europe and Asia. Liberal historians like Isaacson and Thomas, and now Chace with his realist interpretation, have tried to portray Acheson as a moderate by contrasting his positions with the ludicrous call of some Republicans for a preventive war against the Soviet Union in 1950: He must have been a moderate because he did not seek the immediate liberation of Eastern Europe or intervene militarily on behalf of Chiang Kai-shek in his battle against Mao.

But that Republican hard line was phony. Republicans, bitter at their unexpected defeat by Truman in 1948, vented their anger by declaring Truman and Acheson soft on Reds abroad, a charge that complemented their more accurate accusation that the Truman administration was penetrated by Reds at home. But they were never serious, as became clear when Eisenhower took over in 1952 and as was reconfirmed when Nixon became president in 1968. Acheson’s position was the real hard line in the Cold War, and there were few who genuinely outflanked him on the right.

Consider Acheson’s views on the main questions he and other Americans confronted between 1946 and 1952. Should American foreign policy have a strong ideological component, in favor of global freedom and opposed to communism as the evil alternative to freedom, or should it treat the Soviet Union as another great power and seek primarily to preserve international balance? Should the new strategy of containing Soviet communism be limited to Europe, and specifically to the defense of Turkey and Greece, or should it be global? Should the United States try to negotiate its differences with the Soviet Union and limit its military expenditures to avoid provoking an arms race, or should it shun negotiations with Moscow and concentrate on a massive buildup of conventional weaponry? Should the United States limit the interests it considered vital in order to preserve national solvency, or should it keep the definition of its interests vague and flexible?

On every one of these questions, Acheson came down on the hard-line side. He favored creating “situations of strength” everywhere, not just in Europe but also in Asia, where he explicitly called for the containment of communism. He opposed negotiations until the United States had “eliminated all of the areas of weakness that we can.” He insisted that the Soviets had to “modify their policies” before the United States could consider “meaningful negotiation . . . on the larger issues that divided us.” In order to create situations of strength, Acheson wanted a massive American military buildup, from less than $ 15 billion a year to more than $ 50 billion — an increase most in the Truman administration believed would bankrupt the country, but which Acheson believed was well within the capacity of the American economy. It took the Korean War to convince Americans (and, for that matter, President Truman) that Acheson was right.

Acheson also believed the Cold War could, in time, be won. He predicted a future in which “a thriving Western Europe would continue its irresistible pull upon East Germany and Eastern Europe. This would, in turn, have its effect upon the demands of the Russian people on their government.” The pressures for a higher standard of living in Russia would ultimately require that the Soviet Union disassemble its command economy and its imperial control of Eastern Europe. At that point, Acheson believed, negotiations for the reunification of Germany would be possible and with it “the return of real national identity to the countries of Eastern Europe.” This, Acheson declared in 1958, had been “the goal of Western policy for the past decade.”

Acheson did, indeed, believe the Cold War struggle was between good and evil, a view he wanted expressed clearly in NSC 68, the famous planning document whose production he supervised in 1950. The document’s authors, including Paul Nitze, asserted that the Cold War was “in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake.”

The Soviet Union was not just another great power but a nation “animated by a new fanatic faith antithetical to our own, [which] seeks to impose its authority over the rest of the world.”

NSC 68 refused to define where America’s interests were vital. Containment was to be global. “Nowhere,” Chace notes, does NSC 68 spell out in any geographical detail where American interests conflicted with Russia’s. Although the point of NSC 68 was to call for greater expenditures to defend existing U.S. interests, the authors of the document did not define those interests, only the threat. Interests could therefore expand or contract according to Washington’s evaluation of that threat.

In formulating this policy of global strategic and ideological confrontation with the Soviet Union, was Acheson behaving like a realist? There was a fairly well-defined realist position in the debates of the early Cold War years, a view that was expressed most consistently by Walter Lippmann, but also by George Kennan who, despite being the intellectual author of containment, sought immediately to disown the policy. Both Lippmann and Kennan were horrified by the clear implications of the Truman Doctrine; Lippmann predicted it would mean “inexorably an unending intervention in all the countries that are supposed to ‘contain’ the Soviet Union” and was thus a recipe for “insolvency.” Kennan even opposed the creation of NATO and called for a complete withdrawal of both American and Soviet troops from Europe — prescriptions that Acheson and the Truman administration rejected as unworkable and reckless.

According to Chace, Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, Paul Nitze, and Dean Acheson were all realists, yet they disagreed profoundly on the most important issues of the day. There is something wrong with this picture, though Chace apparently does not see it: Either realism is a hollow concept, useless for analyzing American policymaking, or Acheson was not a realist.

The former conclusion is tempting, but for now it may be enough to note that whatever realists claim to believe about the world and America’s role in it, Acheson was not one of them. The genuine realist Henry Kissinger knew it. In his 1994 opus, Diplomacy, Kissinger writes, “The fathers of containment — Acheson and Dulles and their colleagues — had, for all their sophistication on international affairs, conceived of their handiwork is essentially theological terms.” Kissinger goes too far, but he is closer to the mark than Chace.

In making the case for Acheson’s realism, Chace is forced to argue that Acheson was often disingenuous. The expansive, ideological language of the Truman Doctrine, for example, was merely a political tactic to win approval for aid to Greece and Turkey using the only rhetoric an ideological Congress and public could understand: anti-communism.

Chace bases this conclusion on Acheson’s famous later declaration that, when dealing with Congress and the American people, it had been necessary to make arguments “clearer than truth.” Like Isaacson and Thomas before him, Chace suggests that Acheson knew better than to believe his own rhetoric. “Despite the messianic language of Truman’s speech,” Chace argues, “Acheson had a more pragmatic and temperate worldview.” Acheson might be blamed for the excesses that followed from his rhetoric, but he at least knew that it was only rhetoric.

Perhaps nowhere is Chace’s misunderstanding greater than in his failure to grasp the point Acheson was making about democratic leadership. When Acheson said that his arguments were “clearer than truth,” he was not suggesting that they were untrue. On the contrary, they were, in a way, more true. Acheson understood, as realists like Lippmann and Kennan seemed not to, that it is often necessary to return to first principles.

In 1947 Acheson believed, correctly, that Americans needed to be reminded what the fight was all about. It was not, in fact, about how the fate of Turkey might affect the strategic situation in the eastern Mediterranean. It was, as Truman and Acheson said, about the fate of freedom in the world. Acheson feared the American people would not understand the importance of saving Turkey unless they saw how that tactical decision fit into the transcendent task of saving the new liberal world order from the emergent Soviet threat.

Acheson made his point even more clearly when explaining the choice of language in NSC 68. Here again Chace wants us to believe that Acheson did not fully agree with that document’s ideological rhetoric and seemingly open-ended commitment of American military power abroad. Acheson used such rhetoric only to gain “support that would have been much harder to achieve had he been more nuanced.” But Acheson explained his motives quite differently. He later described NSC 68 as “the most ponderous expression of elementary ideas.” And he quoted his hero, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who once “wisely” said that there are times when “we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.”

In order to absolve Acheson of responsibility for the way America conducted the Cold War, Chace has chosen to accuse him of deliberately misleading the American public, not once but consistently throughout his tenure in office.

But a man of Acheson’s proven integrity does not deserve this kind of insulting defense. If it is true, as Chace claims, that it was Acheson’s policies that won the Cold War, why does Acheson need any defense at all?

The answer can be stated in two words: Ronald Reagan. It is now clear that it was not Eisenhower or Kennedy or Nixon but Reagan whose policies most resembled those of Acheson and Truman. Reagan, too, saw the world as engaged in a decisive ideological struggle. Reagan, too, drove both liberals and realists to distraction by openly declaring the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Like Acheson, Reagan believed it a mistake to negotiate with Moscow until the United States had created situations of strength around the globe. And like Acheson, Reagan believed America’s most important Cold War task was rebuilding its military strength. He even agreed with Acheson on the importance of a missile-defense system. Reagan, more than any other president, carried the prescriptions of NSC 68 and the Truman Doctrine to their conclusion.

This is more than Chace can bear to admit, and it is something that most realists today would like to ignore. To acknowledge that both Acheson and Reagan were right, and that the realists of their day were wrong, is to make a concession fraught with implications for the present era of American foreign policy. If realism did not win the Cold War, as it clearly did not, then why should we look to realism for guidance in the post-Cold War world, when the liberal order Acheson worked so hard to establish is once again under siege? The better policy seems to lie in following the course set out by Acheson fifty years ago — for although international circumstances have changed again, the need to conduct a foreign policy that blends strength and moral purpose has never changed.

A contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Robert Kagan is senior associate at the Camegie Endowment for International Peace.