With his beautiful, chalk-stripe English flannel suits, his striking carriage, his bristling guardsman’s mustache and luxuriant eyebrows, Acheson looked not quite real, more like an actor cast for the part of Secretary of State, a tall, slim, imperious, emphatically English-looking Secretary of State. Everything was in order—expensive English shoes rubbed to a fine gloss, the correct quantity of cuff showing spotlessly, hair brushed back from a noble brow. He was just over six feet tall, but the perfect tailoring and perfect posture, the lift of the head, made him seem taller still. He could not go unnoticed. Among the fond memories of Washington in these years would be the sight of the Secretary of State on his way to work in the morning, leather dispatch case in hand, walking the mile and a half from his home in Georgetown accompanied by Justice Felix Frankfurter, who, nearly a head shorter, seemed to take two steps for every one of the Secretary's. Two celebrated conversationalists, they talked the whole way, and reportedly never about government, while Frankfurter’s car followed behind to drive him to the Court, once he and Acheson parted company at the steps of the State Department.
“If Harry Truman were a painter,” said a Republican congressman, “and had never laid eyes on Acheson, and sat down to paint a picture of a foreign minister, he would come up with a life-size oil of Dean.” For years Senator Lyndon Johnson entertained friends with his imitation of Acheson entering a committee room, nose in the air. Averell Harriman, who had known Acheson since they were undergraduates at Yale and who worried that Acheson’s appearance might prove a handicap, urged him to at least get rid of the mustache, saying, “You owe it to Truman.” But the mustache would stay, and if anything about Acheson’s appearance or manner or background ever bothered Truman, he did not say so.
To Truman the State Department was “a peculiar organization, made up principally of extremely bright people who made tremendous college marks but who have had very little association with actual people down to the ground.” They were “clannish and snooty,” he thought, and he often felt like firing “the whole bunch.” Yet no such feelings applied to the Secretary. Acheson was doing a “whale of a job.” Truman hoped he would never leave the government.
Acheson, who was fifty-six years old in 1949, had been raised in the small-town America of other times, in Middletown, Connecticut, at the turn of the century, a setting not unlike Independence, Missouri. His mother was the heir to a Canadian whiskey fortune. His father, English by birth and a veteran of the Queen’s Own Rifles, was an Episcopal minister, and later bishop of Connecticut, whose frequent admonition to his son was, “Brace up!” Like Truman, Acheson had had his first youthful brush with the “real world” working with a railroad crew. Like Truman, he relished history and biography. He, too, adored Mark Twain. If Acheson was a fashion plate, so, of course, was Truman in his way.
They had their morning walks in common. Both were men of exceptional physical vitality. Both were amateur architects. Truman spoke often of the influence Justice Brandeis had on him in his first years in Washington; Acheson had first come to the city, after law school in 1919, to clerk for Brandeis, from whom, he often said, he learned more than from anyone. Politically, like Truman, Acheson considered himself a little left of center.
His stiff appearance to the contrary, Acheson was also a warmhearted man with a wit of a kind that greatly appealed to Truman. Acheson enjoyed a convivial drink, a good story. (With his father a minister and his mother a distiller’s daughter, he liked to say, he knew both good and evil at an early age.) And like Truman, he was devoted to his family. When his oldest daughter, Mary, was stricken with tuberculosis in 1944 and had to be sent to a sanatorium at Saranac, New York, for an extended cure, Acheson wrote to her every night, often revealing how much more of life he savored than was commonly understood.
At lunch at the Capitol I was asked to sit at a table with Jessie Sumner of Illinois, the worst of the rabble rousing isolationists…. We got along famously. She is a grand old girl and reminded me of the madam in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, sort of low, humorous and human. We became great friends and are going to lunch again. I often wonder whether I have any principles at all. It’s a confusing world.
Writing once to Ethel Noland, Truman had said, “You know all of us have a very deep sentimental streak in us, but most of the time we are too timid or too contrary to show it.” Acheson, when asked years later by Eric Sevareid how so much trust and affection could have developed between two such seemingly different men as he and the President, said the answer was complicated, but that much of it had to do with what he called Truman’s “deeply loving and tender nature,” adding, “This isn’t the general impression of him at all.” When Acheson’s daughter had to undergo a serious operation while Acheson was out of the country, and it was not certain she would pull through, Truman personally called the hospital every day for a report, which he himself then transmitted to Acheson by overseas phone.
“Well, this is the kind of person that one can adore,” Acheson later said. “You can have an affection for that man that nothing can touch.”
Truman, Acheson knew, was far more sentimental than generally known, or than he wished people to know, far more touched by gestures that to many might seem routine. On board his plane later in the year, bound again for Key West, he would write Acheson a brief longhand note marked and underscored “Personal.”
It was good of you to see us off. You always do the right thing. I’m still a farm boy and when the Secretary of State of the greatest Republic comes to the airport to see me off on a vacation, I can’t help but swell up a little.
“And then he was so fair,” Acheson would say. “He didn’t make different decisions with different people. He called everyone together. You were all heard and you all got the answer together. He was a square dealer all the way through.”
Moreover, Truman welcomed other people’s ideas. “He was not afraid of the competition of other ideas…. Free of the greatest vice in a leader, his ego never came between him and his job.”
Felix Frankfurter, in listing the elements of Acheson’s personal code, would put loyalty first, followed by truthfulness, and “not pretending to be better than you are.” Truman had not forgotten that it was Acheson alone who was at Union Station to greet him, after the humiliation of the off-year elections in 1946. Acheson, Truman told David Lilienthal, was a fine man, “loyal, sensible, not like some men who are brilliant.”
That Acheson had an exceptional capacity for hard work, that he also subscribed to the philosophy that civilization depended largely on a relatively small number of people who were willing to shoulder the hard work necessary, contributed greatly to Truman’s regard for him. Acheson believed in clear, orderly thinking. He knew there were no easy answers, no quick remedies. With the world as it was, he said, Americans would have to get over the idea that the problems facing the country could be solved with a little ingenuity or without inconvenience.
He did not see the Cold War as an inevitable clash between good and evil. To say that good and evil could not exist in the world was absurd, he told an audience of military officers at the National War College in December 1949:
Today you hear much talk of absolutes…people say that two systems as different as ours and that of the Russians cannot exist in the same world…that one is good and one is evil, and good and evil cannot exist in the world…. Good and evil have existed in this world since Adam and Eve went out of the Garden of Eden.
The proper search is for limited ends which soon enough educate us in the complexities of the tasks which face us. That is what all of us must learn to do in the United States; to limit objectives, to get ourselves away from the search for the absolute, to find out what is within our powers…. We must respect our opponents. We must understand that for a long, long period of time they will continue to believe as they do, and that for a long, long period of time we will both inhabit this spinning ball in the great void of the universe.
As would become apparent to everyone
soon enough, Acheson was not only the most important member of Truman’s Cabinet, but the most important appointment Truman ever made. And unlike Byrnes and Marshall, he would serve as Secretary throughout a full term, despite vilification such as few in American public life had ever known. He would be seen as an immense political liability, called a fool and a traitor. Nor were his critics and adversaries to be found only among the ranks of the Republicans. One especially determined to challenge his authority at every chance, to see Acheson taken down several pegs, if not entirely, was Louis Johnson, who clearly disliked him and whose cutting remarks soon reached the White House. Greatly displeased, Truman warned Johnson to stop it. “Acheson is a gentleman,” Truman told James Webb, the former Director of the Budget, who was now Acheson’s under secretary. “He won’t descend to a row. Johnson is a rough customer, gets his way by rowing. When he takes out after you, give it right back to him.”
Others who knew Acheson thought that in a showdown Johnson wouldn’t have a chance. Oliver Franks, the British ambassador and a close friend, described Acheson as “a romantic” and “a blade of steel.”
He had a serious—a very serious—problem to decide before long, Truman told Lilienthal on November 7, Acheson having by then talked to him about the superbomb.
He hoped to have a full report from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) committee soon, Lilienthal replied.
Yes, said Truman. He wanted the facts, of course.
The report, with its unanimous conclusion by the advisory committee that the superbomb should not be developed, plus a concurring recommendation by the AEC, was delivered two days later, on November 9. The AEC had decided against the bomb by 3 to 2, with Lilienthal the deciding vote. The following day, Truman named Acheson, Johnson, and Lilienthal to act as a special committee of the National Security Council—the Z Committee, as it was called—to advise him whether to proceed with the Super and whether “publicity” should be given the matter. A week later all Washington knew a superbomb was under consideration.
A Washington Post reporter, Alfred Friendly, had picked up the first hint of the story from remarks made on a local television broadcast in New York by Democratic Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado, a member of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, who made his disclosure while airing his fears about the ability of scientists to keep secrets. So suddenly the “H-bomb,” a new word, was a public issue.
Physicists Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence were lobbying hard for proceeding with it. Karl T. Compton, who served on the Interim Committee in 1945 and had only just retired as head of MIT, wrote to Truman saying that in the absence of an international agreement on the control of atomic energy, the United States had no choice but to go ahead with the Super.
At the State Department, stirred by moral outrage, George Kennan labored intensively on a close analysis of the problem and in a long memorandum to Acheson, a plea “as earnest and eloquent” as he knew how to make it, he not only declared against the project but urged that the United States set an example. The last hope for humanity was international control of all weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction. The United States should announce it was “prepared to go very far, to show considerable confidence in others, and to accept certain risk for ourselves,” in order to achieve international agreement. To go forward with this still more fearsome next step would be to commit the country and the world to an indefinite escalation of destructiveness and cost.
So the voices against the Super were essentially three, Lilienthal, Kennan, and Oppenheimer, who apart from his own moral objections did not think such a bomb was technically feasible.
But Kennan, like Lilienthal, was about to retire, and the new head of the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department, Paul Nitze, agreed with the Joint Chiefs. To Nitze, Soviet possession of the atomic bomb meant not only that the United States must proceed with work on the H-bomb but build up its conventional forces as well.
Acheson, who, after Hiroshima, favored an atomic partnership with the Soviet Union, had by now come full circle. In effect, he told Kennan to take his Quaker ideas and go.
I told Kennan if that was his view he ought to resign from the Foreign Service and go out and preach his Quaker gospel but not push it within the Department. He had no right being in the Service if he was not willing to face the questions as an issue to be decided in the interests of the American people under a sense of responsibility.
“How can you persuade a paranoid adversary to ‘disarm by example’?” Acheson asked rhetorically in conversation with another associate.
The top-secret debate went on for three months, from November 1949 to the end of January 1950, and much of it in Acheson’s immense fifth-floor office at the State Department—a room that reminded him, he said, of the cabin-class dining salon on one of the old North German Lloyd ocean liners. But the three-man Z Committee of Acheson, Johnson, and Lilienthal met only twice, due primarily, as Acheson said, “to the acerbity of Louis Johnson’s nature.” Johnson and Lilienthal argued bitterly.
The first of these sessions was on December 22, the second and last on January 31.
Between times Truman kept to a full presidential schedule. He appointed Oscar Chapman as Secretary of Interior, after the resignation of Julius Krug. He received the new Shah of Iran on a first state visit; posed for photographs with five crippled children for the March of Dimes campaign; issued an executive order authorizing the Federal Housing Administration loans of $20 million for low-rent housing in twenty-seven states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico; issued an executive order to the FHA to deny financial assistance to new housing projects with racial or religious restrictions; exchanged Christmas greetings with the Pope; and learned from the Secret Service that in 1949 alone there had been a total of 1,925 threats, Written or oral, against him or his family. (“The day will come,” said one, “when I will have your heart out and give it to the ants as food.”)
Four days into the new year, in a recently redecorated House Chamber, he delivered his fifth State of the Union message. If American productive power continued to increase at the same rate as it had in the previous half century, he told the Congress, then national production fifty years hence would be four times as great, the average family income three times what it was in 1950, or $12,450 a year, which struck many as unimaginable. “Today, by the grace of God, we stand in a free and prosperous nation with greater possibilities for the future than any people have ever had before in the history of the world….”
At a press conference on January 7, 1950, he presented his annual budget—a big green book the size and weight of a New York telephone directory—and answered questions about it. The total figure was $42.4 billion, which included an increase of $1 billion for domestic programs. But most, some $30 billion, was to pay for wars past and for the present national defense, listed to cost $13.5 billion. It was a budget that did not balance. The estimated deficit was $5 billion, which would mean a national debt by 1952 of $268.3 billion.
In a message to Congress he asked for a “moderate” tax increase to bring in an additional $1 billion.
For an hour at the Shoreham Hotel one night, he stood at the door of a private dining room shaking hands with virtually every Democrat in Congress. He addressed the A.F. of L. dinner and a civil rights conference; he held five more press conferences.
He also faced the fact that Clark Clifford and David Lilienthal, two of his best, were leaving in February, to return to private life. The loss of Clifford would be a real blow. But Clifford was worn out and deeply in debt, his living expenses over the past four years having run far ahead of his White House salary. He would stay on in Washington to practice law. Lilienthal, too, was exhausted and knew the time had come to move on. Truman, as he said, felt as though “the bottom had fallen out.”
More serious, and worrisome, however, was the assault on Dean Acheson. In December, angry over the loss of China and the supposed infiltration of Communists everywhere, the Republicans i
n both houses of Congress called on Truman to fire Acheson. Then, in New York, on January 21, at the end of a long second trial, Alger Hiss was found guilty of perjury—he had lied about passing secret documents—and that night Republican Congressman Richard Nixon, who as the only lawyer on the House Un-American Activities Committee had played a leading part in the case against Hiss, went on the radio to accuse the administration of a “deliberate” effort to conceal the Hiss “conspiracy.” On Wednesday, January 25, the day Hiss was sentenced to five years in prison, Acheson was asked at a press conference at the State Department if he had any comments.
The question was not unexpected. At his confirmation hearings the year before, Acheson had acknowledged that Hiss was a friend and remained a friend, adding that his own friendship was not easily given nor easily withdrawn. Hiss’s brother, Donald, a partner in Acheson’s law firm, had served as Acheson’s assistant when Acheson was Assistant Secretary of State. Now to the throng of reporters he said, “I should like to make it clear to you that whatever the outcome of any appeal which Mr. Hiss or his lawyers may take in this case, I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.”
It was no impulsive response. Acheson had thought long about what to say, and as many in the room sensed at once, it was a decisive moment in the history of the Truman administration. He continued, his voice full of emotion:
I think anyone who has known Alger Hiss or has served with him at any time has upon his conscience the very serious task of deciding what his attitude is and what his conduct should be. That must be done by each person in the light of his own standards and his own principles. For me there is little doubt about those standards and principles. I think they were stated for us a very long time ago…on the Mount of Olives and if you are interested in seeing them you will find them in the 25th Chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew beginning with verse 34.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 512