Dean Acheson

(b. Middleton, Connecticut, 11 Apr. 1893; d. 12 Oct. 1971) US; Secretary of State 1949 – 53 Acheson received a privileged education at Groton and Yale and, in 1918, graduated LLB from Harvard Law School. At this time it was customary for distinguished Supreme Court judges to pick the two most gifted men in the graduating Harvard law class to assist them. Acheson was chosen by Justice Brandeis. During the First World War Acheson served for a time in the Navy. On returning to civilian life he became a practising lawyer.

In 1933 he gained his first experience of public office when F. D. Roosevelt appointed him Under-Secretary of the Treasury. An inability to justify Roosevelt's fiscal unorthodoxy prompted Acheson's early departure from office.

In 1939, when Europe once again became embroiled in war, Acheson, an Anglophile, became a strong advocate of aid to Britain. He returned to government in 1941 becoming Assistant Secretary at the State Department. In the following six years he gained a wealth of experience serving under four secretaries of state. The tasks for which he was responsible notably included organizing the lend-lease programme and making preparations for the San Francisco Conference which created the United Nations.

Acheson is best remembered for his period as Secretary of State during the second Truman administration, 1949 – 53. This was the time in which the Cold War and the policy of containment formed the template of foreign relations, and in which the McCarthy witch-hunts whipped up a climate of hysteria and suspicion at home. Acheson, a cultured, cosmopolitan intellectual, aroused resentment and suspicion. This suspicion was fuelled by his fierce loyalty to his subordinate, Alger Hiss, who was implicated in the "pumpkin papers" spy case. For much of his time in office Acheson was a persecuted and perpetually embattled Secretary of State at home. This markedly contrasted with his international reputation. At home he earned the disapprobation of the Republicans for his handling of America's China policy and for allegedly "inviting" the Korean attack in a speech setting out the American defence line in the Pacific. Abroad, at least among European allies, Acheson was credited with being a principal figure behind the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty. Truman asserted that without Dean Acheson there would have been no NATO. The signing of the treaty in 1949 marked the beginning of America's first military alliance concluded in peacetime. It signalled the end of American isolationism and the beginning of its leadership of the Western world. Acheson was also a prominent figure behind the adoption of the Marshall aid programme. He played a key role in persuading Republican congressmen to endorse aid to Greece and Turkey thereby putting flesh on the bones of the Truman doctrine.

Eisenhower's landslide in 1952 signalled the end of Acheson's period in office but not his interest in, or influence upon, America's foreign policy. Throughout his public career Acheson was frequently vilified and was the target of smear tactics. But he was a stoic, reflecting that no man needing an atmosphere of approbation would serve as Secretary of State. He was the author of two books: A Democrat looks at his Party (1955); A Citizen looks at Congress (1957).

(1893–1971), lawyer, statesman, secretary of state

After holding lower State Department posts from 1941 to 1947, Acheson became secretary of state under President Harry S. Truman in January 1949, serving until January 1953. As a diplomatic official, Acheson held strong views about how, when, and why to use armed force in international affairs.

Acheson was a hawkish interventionist before U.S. entry into World War II. After the war, in 1945–46, he advocated an agreement with the USSR on control of nuclear arms (embodied in the Acheson‐Lilienthal Plan). In 1949, when the Soviets first exploded an atomic bomb, Acheson feared it would neutralize the West's nuclear weapons. In response, he consistently advocated building strong conventional U.S. and NATO military forces. Acheson thought an East‐West war unlikely, but should it occur, he wanted a military that could stop aggression before the Soviets could conquer Western Europe. With some ambivalence, he always favored keeping a powerful American nuclear arsenal, and in 1950 as an adviser he recommended to President Truman that the United States build the hydrogen bomb. He worked to keep the Korean War from becoming a general war, but used the sense of resulting urgency to push for greater NATO forces, including the rearmament of West Germany.

Advising Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon after 1953, he consistently took hard‐line defense positions, especially in the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and the early stages of the Vietnam War. However, by 1968 he became an influential advocate of ending the war in Vietnam.

Acheson's key strategic concepts focused on the efficacy of various forms of power, the importance of “strategic reach” to project the first line of U.S. defense far from American shores, and developing “positions of strength” before engaging in negotiations with potential adversaries.

[See also Berlin Crisis.]

Bibliography

• Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department, 1969.
• Gaddis Smith, Dean Acheson, 1972.
• Douglas Brinkley, Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, 1953–71, 1992.
• Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War, 1992

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Ǝsǝn (1893-1971) lawyer, statesman, and secretary of state, born in Middletown, Connecticut. Acheson served in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration as assistant secretary of state for economic affairs. He was also undersecretary of state (1945-1947) and secretary of state under President Harry S. Truman (1949-53). Acheson was a chief architect (with George F. Kennan) of the Cold War policy of containment and a shaper of the Truman Doctrine (1947). He assisted with the Marshall Plan (1947-48), and presided over final diplomatic negotiations for the North Atlantic Treaty (1949), and advocated a nuclear arms control agreement with the USSR. Acheson advocated a policy of developing “situations of strength” before entering into negotiations with the Soviet Union. He was an informal adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, urging Kennedy to bomb Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962-63) and advising Johnson not to continue the Vietnam War after the Tet Offensive in 1968.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

The American lawyer and statesman Dean Gooderham Acheson (1893-1971) served as secretary of state in President Harry Truman's Cabinet.

Dean Acheson was born in Middletown, Conn., on April 11, 1893, the son of Edward Campion and Eleanor Gooderham Acheson. His father, the Episcopal bishop of Connecticut, provided a genteel upbringing which led to Groton and afterward Yale, where Acheson received his bachelor's degree in 1915. During the succeeding 3 years he served briefly as an ensign in the U.S. Navy and earned his law degree at Harvard. In May 1917 he married Alice Stanley. Three children were born to the Achesons - Jane, David Campion, and Mary Eleanor.

From the beginning Acheson seemed destined for a successful career. Possessed of high intelligence, a deep sense of moral rectitude, and aggressive energy, he had in addition the grace of the patrician and the friendship of such distinguished and influential people as Felix Frankfurter of the Harvard Law School and, later, the Supreme Court of the United States.

Following his graduation from Harvard, Acheson became private secretary to Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis. In 1921 he entered the prominent Washington law firm of Covington, Burling, and Rublee, where he practiced for the next 12 years. President Franklin D. Roosevelt first brought Acheson into public service in May 1933 with an appointment as undersecretary of the Treasury. Acheson resigned 5 months later following a disagreement on the President's gold-purchasing program and returned to his Washington law practice.

In 1941 Acheson again entered the government, this time as assistant secretary of state for economic affairs. He remained in the State Department, except for one brief interlude, until 1953. His long and significant record there reflected a practical rather than a contemplative mentality, which attracted him especially to Harry Truman's forthright leadership. As undersecretary of state from 1945 to 1947, Acheson broke with Truman only on the Palestinian question, convinced that the nation was embarking on a unilateral commitment to Israel's defense against the Arab states which could ultimately prove embarrassing, if not costly.

Acheson's most memorable contributions, as undersecretary and, from 1949 to 1953, as secretary of state, came in his implementation of the containment policy from the Marshall Plan to NATO. Despite his achievements, these years in the State Department were trying ones. The alleged loss of China to Communist leadership in 1949 exposed the Truman administration to charges of treason. Acheson, always loyal to his friends and associates, refused to testify against Alger Hiss, then under trial for spying, or to condemn past American policy toward China. These actions rendered him totally vulnerable and roused a storm of accusations such as few commanding public figures in American history have faced.

Upon his retirement from the State Department in 1953, Acheson returned to Covington and Burling, remaining in public life only as a member of special governmental committees, as a presidential adviser, and as a critical observer of men and events. He served in the late fifties as foreign policy chief of the Democratic Advisory Council of the Democratic National Committee. He died in Sandy Spring, Md., on Oct. 12, 1971.

Further Reading

Acheson's own writings are voluminous. Three of his books which develop his views of external policy, politics, and government are A Democrat Looks at His Party (1955), A Citizen Looks at Congress (1957), and Power and Diplomacy (1958). His autobiography, Morning and Noon (1965), terminates with his appointment to the State Department in 1941. Acheson's personal record of his State Department experience is Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969).

No book-length biographies of Acheson have yet appeared. McGeorge Bundy, ed., The Pattern of Responsibility (1952), includes excerpts and paraphrases of Acheson's many speeches during his secretarial years and is a good source of information on his views toward world affairs. The volumes covering the years 1949 to 1952 of The United States in World Affairs (1950-1953), prepared by Richard P. Stebbins for the Council on Foreign Relations, are replete with observations on Acheson's leadership. Also useful is the survey of postwar American foreign policy, William Reitzel and others, United States Foreign Policy, 1945-1955 (1956). Acheson's role as an adviser to Kennedy is discussed in Seyom Brown, The Faces of Power (1968).

For more information on Dean Gooderham Acheson, visit Britannica.com.

(1893-1971), secretary of state, 1949-1953. Always a controversial figure, Acheson, a lifelong Democrat, broke with the early New Deal policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt when that president took the United States off the gold standard. He returned to government at the outset of World War II and served in various high-level positions in the Department of State.

At the outset of the cold war, Acheson, now under secretary of state in Harry S. Truman's administration, took charge of a White House briefing of congressional leaders on what became the Truman Doctrine. Until then, the legislators had not been overly impressed with the urgency of the need to pick up Great Britain's role in supporting Greece and Turkey. The under secretary painted a stark picture of Soviet communism poised at the intersection of three continents, ready to spread through the Mediterranean area down into Africa, westward into Europe, and eastward into the Middle East. At the conclusion of his remarks, Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Truman he would support the plan if it was put to Congress in those terms.

Despite his key role in the development of the containment policy, Acheson quickly became the target for Republican criticism of Truman's foreign policies. In part this was a reaction to Acheson's personality--he could be devastatingly acerbic. Fed up with criticism of American commitments to Europe, Acheson described his antagonists as "re-examinists." They reminded him, he said, of the farmer who pulled up his crops every morning to see how they were growing. But it was also a reaction to the twin setbacks of 1949: the Russians' developing the atomic bomb and the "loss" of China to communist-led forces. Republicans merely took advantage of the national sense of malaise to attack the steward of American foreign policy. Acheson made matters worse with his statement that he would not turn his back on Alger Hiss, convicted of perjury in connection with charges that he had passed documents to Soviet agents in the 1930s. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy focused much of his attention on Acheson's supposed role as protector of "card-carrying communists" in the Department of State, describing him as "this pompous diplomat in striped pants, with a phony British accent."

Nevertheless, Acheson survived these attacks and with the passing of time became a figure much admired in conservative circles. In typical fashion, he titled his memoirs Present at the Creation, a reference to all that had been accomplished in establishing the cold war bastions of the West.

His defense of American foreign policy in the 1960s and his criticism of third world nations now put him at odds with liberal critics of the Vietnam War. He was never much in sympathy with revolutionaries, he said. Yet it was Acheson who advised President Lyndon B. Johnson in March 1968 that he must find a way out of the war. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, he said, had been leading the country down the primrose path with overly optimistic predictions. His controversial statements continued to the end of his life, when he defended Richard Nixon against press attacks. The national press, he insisted, simply must stop destroying presidents.

Bibliography:

Gaddis Smith, Dean Acheson (1972).

Author:

Lloyd C. Gardner

See also Anticommunism; Cold War; Truman Doctrine.

Acheson, Dean Gooderham (ăch'ĭsən) , 1893–1971, U.S. secretary of state (1949–52), b. Middletown, Conn., grad. Yale, Harvard Law School. He was (1919–21) private secretary to Louis Brandeis, became a successful lawyer, and served (1933) as undersecretary of the treasury until he resigned in disagreement with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's fiscal policy. Having been assistant secretary of state (1941–45) and a key actor in the Bretton Woods Conference, then undersecretary of state (1945–47), he was appointed (Jan., 1949) secretary of state. Beginning in 1946 Acheson became convinced of the necessity of resisting and restraining the Soviet Union. Under his direction the policy of using foreign economic and military aid to contain Communist expansion, as enunciated in the Truman Doctrine, was developed, and the Marshall Plan was implemented. He also played an important role in establishing (1949) the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Acheson's attempts to dissociate the United States from the Nationalist Chinese regime in Taiwan drew relentless attacks from congressmen of his own party as well as Republicans; his support of U.S. military commitments to South Korea also aroused much criticism. Moreover, his unwillingness to condemn Alger Hiss brought personal abuse as well as attacks on his handling of loyalty and security policy at the Dept. of State. Returning to private practice in 1953, Acheson remained a Democratic spokesman on foreign policy and exerted considerable influence on the Kennedy administration. He wrote A Democrat Looks at His Party (1955), A Citizen Looks at Congress (1957), Power and Diplomacy (1958), Fragments of My Fleece (1971), and three autobiographical works, Morning and Noon (1965), Present at the Creation (1969), and Grapes from Thorns (1972).

Bibliography

See biographies by G. Smith (1972), D. S. McLellan (1976), D. Brinkley (1992), J. Chace (1998), and R. L. Beisner (2006).

1893 - 1971

U.S. statesman.

As undersecretary of state (1945 - 1947), Acheson was one of the main proponents of the Truman Doctrine (1947), aiding Greece and Turkey. He is often associated with the U.S. containment policy for communism and promoted the foundation of NATO (1949). As secretary of state (1949 - 1953), he was concerned primarily with the USSR and Korea, although he had been involved in the early negotiations with Iran's prime minister (1951 - 1953) Mohammad Mossadegh. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department.

Bibliography

Findling, John, ed. Dictionary of American Diplomatic History, 2d edition. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.

Spiegel, Steven. The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

— ZACHARY KARABELL

(1893-1971)

1969

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department. Acheson covers his long political career and his role in U.S. foreign relations from 1941 to 1953. According to reviewer Wallace Carroll, "As autobiography, this book is enthralling, as history indispensable, as a manual for government and diplomacy invaluable."

Quotes:

"Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role."

"The future comes one day at a time."

"A memorandum is not written to inform the reader, but to protect the writer."

"Negotiating in the classic diplomatic sense assumes parties more anxious to agree than to disagree."

"We have actively sought and are actively seeking to make the United Nations an effective instrument of international cooperation."

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