The Diplomat Who Did Not Want to Be Liked

IN the 1940s, America was confronted with a fateful choice. In the chaos of the postwar world, should it return to the familiar isolationism that would insulate it from dangers abroad? Or should it continue to intervene in world affairs with the awesome power at its disposal? The U.S. chose the activist path, and the man who embodied that choice was Dean Gooderham Acheson, first as an influential Assistant and Under Secretary of State and then as Secretary. Every step that Dean Acheson took was dogged by criticism, and it is a measure of the man that, when he died last week at 78 of a heart attack, he remained scarcely less controversial. Some praised him for his bold assertion of American leadership; others blamed his policies for leading, ultimately, to a dead end in Viet Nam.

With a characteristic lack of false modesty, Acheson entitled his memoirs Present at the Creation. Yet he was not unduly exaggerating. His policies did indeed constitute a kind of creation. During World War II, the U.S. had done little postwar planning. It fell to the Truman Administration to improvise some semblance of international order. With audacious speed, one major-policy decision followed another; in each, Acheson assumed leadership. Economic and military aid were sent, after a strenuous domestic battle, to Greece and Turkey. The Marshall Plan was formulated to revive the prostrate European economy. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created to resist Soviet aggression. When Tito broke with Stalin, Acheson offered him aid. When South Korea was invaded by the North, Acheson urged American military assistance. He took major responsibility for establishing the West German Federal Republic and supplying it with arms.

Gentlemanly Resignation. This spectacular interventionism, unparalleled in peacetime America, could be carried off only by a man of singular self-assurance. This Acheson had--to a fault. His career was a textbook example of the rise of a 'patrician in the snug embrace of the American Establishment. His father was a clergyman who migrated to the U.S. from Britain and became Episcopal bishop of Connecticut. His mother was an heiress, daughter of a family of Canadian whisky distillers. Young Dean attended Groton, Yale and Harvard Law School. He married Alice Stanley, his sister's roommate at Wellesley. He clerked for two years for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who became a fast friend and mentor.

Acheson then joined the well-connected Washington law firm of Covington, Burling & Rublee. From there it was an easy step to Government office. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt appointed him Under Secretary of the Treasury. But six months later he abruptly left office after being outraged when F.D.R. took the dollar off the gold standard. He had the discretion, however, to keep his objections to himself--a fact that Roosevelt appreciated. When another official resigned with an angry blast at the President, F.D.R. instructed an aide: "Tell that man to go see Dean Acheson to learn how a gentleman resigns."

Acheson had his misgivings about Roosevelt. "It didn't flatter me," he later remarked, "to have the squire of Hyde Park come by and speak to me familiarly, as though I were a stable boy and I was supposed to pull my lock and say, 'Aye, aye, sir.' " That was no way for one squire to treat another. But in 1941 Acheson was invited to return to the Government--this time to the State Department. He remained for six years, then left to resume his law practice until he was appointed Secretary by Truman in 1949. His success was partly due to his keen analytical mind, but it owed something as well to the impression he created. Acheson seemed to be typecast for Secretary of State, the Continental beau ideal of a diplomat--correct, precise, immaculately attired, imperious or witty as the occasion demanded, ever so slightly condescending.

Unforgivable Personality. If his bearing won plaudits overseas, it endeared him to few at home. His enemies might forgive him his policies, but never his personality; it was not mainstream America. As his State Department colleague Louis Halle put it: "He was too unrepresentative to be trusted." Said Canada's former Prime Minister Lester Pearson: "Not only did he not suffer fools gladly, he did not suffer them at all." "A good many members of Congress didn't like me," said Acheson. "This didn't bother me at all. I didn't care whether they liked me or didn't like me. The point was that they did what they were asked to do. And if they did that, they could have any views they liked about me."

They did indeed go along with much of what he proposed, but then some of them savagely turned on him. The collapse of Chiang Kai-shek gave them an excuse. Exploiting a confused and distressed public, Senator Joseph McCarthy seized the issue to denounce the "Red Dean" and demand his resignation. Illustrating what Halle called a "moral courage that sometimes amounted to recklessness," Acheson came to the defense of Alger Hiss, the onetime State Department official who was exposed as a Soviet agent. "I will not turn my back on Alger Hiss," he told a stunned press conference.

The American right thereupon proclaimed that at last they had proof that Acheson was the Communist dupe they had said he was. Under attack as never before, Acheson offered to resign, but Truman, who vastly admired him, pluckily backed him up. "I suppose an element of pride entered into this," Acheson later explained. "I knew this question was going to be asked. And I knew the press was going to believe I'd run. And I just said, 'I'm not going to run. I'm going to let you have it right on the jaw.' And perhaps I knocked myself out."

He did himself damage, at any rate. When Truman was succeeded by Eisenhower in 1953, Acheson left office under a dark cloud. In time it lifted. His Republican successor, John Foster Dulles, preached a tougher anti-Communist line but practiced much the same policy. Conservatives took another look at the man they had pummeled, and the apologies drifted in. "I was always a conservative," said Acheson. "I sought to meet the Soviet menace and help create some order out of the chaos of the world. I was seeking stability and never had much use for revolution." When John Kennedy was elected President, Publisher Henry Luce urged him to appoint Acheson as Secretary of State. "An interesting idea," replied Kennedy, "but it's too late."

Hawkish Advice. Kennedy did seek Acheson's advice at critical times. During the Cuban missile crisis, Acheson urged the President to bomb the Soviet installations and was miffed when J.F.K. refused. He also gave hawkish advice to Lyndon Johnson on Viet Nam. But when he realized in early 1968 that the war was costing more than it was worth, he shocked the President by telling him that he was being "led down the garden path by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They don't know what they are talking about." Nixon also sought his advice, though in the heat of partisan politics in 1952 he had referred to Acheson's "College of Cowardly Communist Containment." On Acheson's death, the President had kinder words: "I shall greatly miss both his wise counsel and his penetrating wit."

In the erratic politics of America, it is perhaps unsurprising that the man who was vilified for being soft on Communism should later be condemned for being too hard on it. In fact, Acheson's position did not change over the years. A master of Realpolitik, he viewed the world in classic diplomatic terms: a balance must be struck among contending powers. There was no room for morality as such in diplomacy; it spoiled the game and led to fanaticism. All his career he scorned the liberal habit of trying to "exorcise evil spirits by moral incantation." His worst enemies were ideologues, whether of the left or right. He dismissed Henry Wallace, the presidential candidate of the Communist-backed Progressive Party, as a "man who soared into abstractions, trailing a cloud of aphorisms." He branded Joe McCarthy a "primitive" and the "most unlovely character in our political history since Aaron Burr."

Toward the end of his life, Acheson worried about the march of egalitarianism. "It would not be unfair to say that the century of the common man has come into its own. Wherever you look, you'll find governments which are not outstanding in nature. I see grave problems coming from this." A thoroughgoing elitist, he believed that the best should rule, or at least tend to such complicated matters as foreign affairs; accurately, he ranked himself among their number. At a time when Secretaries of State are more self-effacing and less powerful, it is hard to recall the domination that Acheson exercised over foreign policy. For good or ill, he is not replaceable.

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