Wise Guy

Dean Acheson was once a controversial figure, derided by Republican opponents in the early 1950s as a despicable and even traitorous representative of the Eastern establishment. More recently, he has been remembered as one of “the wise men,” the self-confident elite devoted to public service who have now largely vanished.

How wise they actually were is perhaps debatable, and the story harbors a good deal of nostalgia for the heroic days of dashing deeds and grand strategy (none of which is evident in the Age of Clinton). Written within this genre, James Chace’s biography makes some hefty claims. In creating “the American world,” Acheson was not only “present at the creation” (as he called it in his memoirs): He was its very “architect” and thus “the most important figure in American foreign policy since John Quincy Adams.”

I disagree. Acheson was an imposing and impressive policymaker during the crucial early Cold War; but he was less an architect than an outstanding advocate of what others designed. Moreover, the Cold War that was being designed was not a good thing.

Born in 1893 to Canadian parents, Acheson grew up in Middletown, Conn. His father, a cleric, eventually reached the powerful status of Episcopal bishop. The son was sent to Groton, where he refused to conform; then to Yale, where he became a leading social light; and finally to Harvard Law School, where he began to educate himself. (Boys of Acheson’s background in those days could apparently graduate at the bottom of the class and still effortlessly slide onward and upward). Felix Frankfurter, his mentor at Harvard, sent him to clerk for Louis Brandeis at the Supreme Court, after which he joined a politically connected law firm in Washington.

In 1933, with Franklin Roosevelt’s election, Acheson joined the Treasury Department at a high level though he lacked economic experience. From then until his death in 1971, he would move back and forth between government service and his law firm. He entered the State Department at the outbreak of World War II and became undersecretary in the early days of Harry S Truman. After a legal stint, Acheson succeeded General George Marshall as secretary of state in 1948. He remained a prominent Democratic spokesman after the Republicans returned to power in 1952; later, as an elderly wise man, he became an outside advisor to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, the man who had once denounced Acheson’s “Cowardly College of Communist Containment.”

By any standards, then, Acheson had an interesting life and an impressive career. Chace covers it sympathetically in all its essentials. Concerning its deeper meaning and indeed Acheson’s deeper character, he is less forthcoming. The author is most at home in accounting for Acheson’s handling of foreign policy crises and telling stories about the great man’s relations and encounters with other great men. Acheson was famously fond of martinis and he seems very much the sort of man Chace would have liked to have martinis with.

This makes for a congenial, kind read. What is disappointing, however, is the lack of argument and interpretation in “Acheson.” Chace is curiously reluctant to analyze, to speculate, to engage in controversy. Here I mean not only the obvious questions about the Cold War but also, for example, the personal aspect. Acheson’s father was distant so the son never received the paternal approval he craved. With his mother, an extroverted and indeed quite theatrical woman, he seems by contrast to have had the most intimate relation. Chace describes this relationship but does not probe it. Could there be any connection to Acheson’s later aesthetic projection of himself? For his personal appearance was carefully composed, with exquisite sartorial outfits, the mustache pointing upward to his piercing, commanding eyes and bushy eyebrows, all in all a notorious look for which he was sometimes roundly condemned.

Nor does the book suggest how Acheson understood his relations with the prominent Jews who strongly supported his career: Felix Frankfurter, a lifelong friend and confidant, and Louis Brandeis. It was unusual for a man of his background not to indulge in anti-Semitic prejudices. In the 1940s, he battled for a Jewish scholar slated to become head of Yale Law School: not the sort of thing one ordinarily did. Acheson’s personal model was, otherwise, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Brandeis’ colleague on the Supreme Court, an iconoclastic figure, old but still stylish, corrosive in a debunking sort of way, a legal realist for whom interests ultimately govern the world. Acheson always wanted to be solicitor general and might well have become an excellent Supreme Court justice--he was logical, clear and replete with the kind of appearance and eccentricities of which legend is made. His realism (which Chace emphasizes and likes) was at any rate Holmesian, less political than legal, less a philosophical orientation than a practical way of being toward a world of conflict and advocacy.

Advocacy and deal-making were indeed Acheson’s central talents as a policymaker. His creativity lay chiefly in his ability to get decisions made and in following them through with great efficiency. Chace says otherwise, but his story shows again and again that Acheson was not an innovator. It is not accidental that we get no real account of Acheson’s deeper “views”: They turn out to be a series of fairly conventional attitudes about conduct and character. Chace likes to call this “pragmatic realism,” but it is really a conceptually thin doctrine about prudent action.

In his own conduct, Acheson proved appealingly loyal and upright. At considerable personal cost, he stood by friends and colleagues when Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunt began. Acheson himself was denounced by the Wisconsin senator for being the “Red Dean” not only of the State Department but also, interestingly, of “Fashion.” The description was a code word for the twin sins of homosexuality and treason supposedly so rife at State. For these absurdities, Acheson had nothing but contempt. Yet to fight them was an uphill battle. Acheson had himself partly to blame here. He had used a deliberately inflated vision of a Soviet threat earlier in order to get such measures as the Marshall Plan and NATO through Congress. In 1947, moreover, the Truman administration had instituted a pernicious loyalty program. The ensuing Cold War frenzy gave McCarthy his political opening and made possible the denunciation of Acheson, a conservative Democrat, for being a friend and protector of Communists.

Historically, this now seems darkly farcical. Acheson’s reputation has always been that of a quintessential Cold Warrior. Typically, he was a pretty late convert to the hard line but, equally typically, once he took that position he never looked back (not even after he realized that something had gone horribly wrong in Vietnam). He played an important (if not always crucial) role in the long catalog of deeds that has come to make up the lore of the early Cold War, from the confrontation with Stalin over Iran in 1946 to the division of Germany in 1949 and the Korean War in 1950. For Chace, then, this early period in the Cold War is a heroic one. It is the moment of “great man” action. Acheson’s rhetorical exaggeration of the Soviet threat is ultimately less important than the foreign policy achievements which it produced.

And Acheson was indeed a tactical master at that kind of game. Exuding power and authority, he could conjure up the image of global danger well enough to frighten into submission even the most obdurate and parochial Congressman. He himself, meanwhile, was well aware of his exaggerations. In my view, Acheson was in fact not very interested in the Soviet Union itself after he had concluded that Moscow was the new enemy. His consuming interest was instead to bring the United States irrevocably into world politics and subsequently to implement and maintain the Western alliance, to be led in no uncertain terms by Washington, preferably in the guise of himself. The premises of this system mattered less to him than the political reality. “Explanations,” he wrote to Truman in the 1960s, are “not as important as successful action.”

Thus Acheson could travel to the Mississippi Delta in May 1947 and, without any sense of irony, propagate the new universal struggle for freedom against totalitarianism before an all-white audience. The possibility that there was some repulsive contradiction in the American concept of freedom buried here in the Delta did not occur to him. Nor, surprisingly, does it to Chace.

Freedom, then, was a useful abstraction. It gave Acheson room to argue the case for superpower. Chace thinks the ensuing “institutions” of the Cold War helped to bring about the end of that “war.” I disagree. They served in every way to perpetuate the Cold War that they had created.