by Roy Jenkins
The late 1940s and very early 1950s were as dangerous as they were creative, and Acheson’s nerve was as good as his vision. With Truman and Bevin, Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, he was an architect who built a Western world which was first a secure bastion and then a lighthouse that sent out a beam of attraction which destroyed the Soviet empire. Yet, to illustrate the paradoxes of life, he ended his four years as US Secretary of State (1949-53) under heavy attack from Senator McCarthy and his allies as a quasi-Communist, and ended his life, twenty years later, by embracing some views of which the deplorable Senator, had he still been alive and with the intelligence to understand Acheson’s typically taut and sophisticated expression of them, might have been proud.
Acheson, born in 1893, was the son of a British-born clergyman who had emigrated to Canada at the age of sixteen, trained at Toronto and then crossed the US border to settle in the quiet university surroundings of Middletown, Connecticut. Edward Acheson and his wife none the less remained British subjects until quite late in life. In 1905 he became Episcopal Bishop of Connecticut (a tautological designation, it might be thought, but one habitually used). Dean Acheson (Dean was also an odd name for such a high-ranking clerical gentleman to give his son) was thought in middle life to look like the epitome of an Englishman. At first sight, with his black Homburg hats, his bristling moustache, his waistcoats, his dark town suits and occasional severe tweeds, this was so. Item by item he looked like Anthony Eden. But not in the ensemble, and indeed his ‘Englishness’ was only superficial. This was not because he was trying to look English and failing. On the contrary, what he really looked like was an East Coast American gentleman showing the English how they ought to look if they pulled themselves together and exhibited more leadership and moral fibre. Of his English opposite numbers as Foreign Minister he made Bevin look lumbering, Morrison slovenly, and Eden too consciously negligent. Acheson looked crisp, self-confident and a little bossy. As befitted the grand vizier of American foreign policy at the height of United States power, his clothes owed more to Brooks Brothers than to Savile Row.
Although his mother was the daughter of an Ontario whiskey distiller and bank president, Acheson did not belong to the plutocracy or even strictly to fashionable society, much admired and sought-after by the cognoscenti though he mostly was. He was never a New Yorker. From his upbringing in Connecticut to his school in Massachusetts, his university back in Connecticut, his law school once more in Massachusetts, his law firm and his high government posts and elegant pre-Civil War house in Washington, DC, his farm in Maryland, and his many trips to Europe and the Far East, he managed to skip over the city of wealth and fashion on the Hudson. Of course he visited it, but he never lived there. His wife, Alice Stanley, whom he married in 1917 when he was twenty-four and who is still alive, came from Michigan via the good New England women’s college of Wellesley.
Yet, although he eschewed the Manhattan glitter of the super rich, everything was always of very high quality, including Alice Acheson. The school was Groton, which the Reverend Endicott Peabody, a product of Trinity College, Cambridge, had founded in 1884 with the object of creating a less easy-going and more high-minded Eton in the green and pleasant land of northern Massachusetts. Franklin Roosevelt went there in 1896 and thirty-six years later Peabody, still headmaster, was able to appear in night-shirt and night-cap in the dormitory of FDR’s youngest son and say: ‘Boy, your father has just been elected President of the United States. Whether this is a good thing I do not know. But I thought you ought to know. Goodnight, boy.’
The hesitancy of the second sentence came from the fact that although after a hundred years its three best-known alumni were probably Roosevelt, Harriman and Acheson, Democrats to a man, the spirit of the school, certainly of the majority of the parents, was strongly Republican. This thought was, however, tempered in Peabody’s mind by his liking for worldly success. He allowed the official school history to perform the statistical feat of pointing out that, if all American schools had produced high public servants on the scale of Groton’s first thousand graduates, the country would have had 37,000 Presidents, 350,000 ambassadors and 110,000 Senators, which might be regarded as a remarkable tribute to the classlessness of American society.
The university was Yale, which in 1911, when Acheson went there, and for two or three decades afterwards, probably had a stronger corporate loyalty and a more close-knit élitist identity than Harvard. It was chosen by Scott Fitzgerald, who had himself been at Princeton, the third of America’s ‘gold coast’ universities, as the epitome of privileged education for fictional representation in both Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby. And at Yale, as opposed to Groton, Acheson was a success and enjoyed himself. However, in his first volume of memoirs he ignored both Groton and Yale and wrote about the two-month period which he spent between them, in very rough conditions in northern Ontario, working as a tree-feller for the building of the second transcontinental Canadian railway. This tempted me to contrast Acheson’s slightly self-conscious American toughness with Eden’s old world effeteness, until I remembered that Eden spent the equivalent nineteenth summer of his life in incomparably worse conditions on the Somme.
The law school was Harvard, where Acheson shared an apartment with Cole Porter, also a ‘Yalie’, who defected to the music school. Acheson there fell under the intellectual influence of Felix Frankfurter, who enjoyed a dazzling academic reputation before becoming a Supreme Court Justice in 1939. It was, however, an older Jewish Justice (and as a Supreme Court judge, although not as an academic, still more distinguished figure), Louis Dembitz Brandeis, who first took Acheson to Washington as his law clerk. He stayed two years (from 1920 to 1922) with Brandeis, and then joined a Washington law firm with the splendidly wasp (white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) name of Covington and Burling, with which through various mutations he remained intermittently associated to the end of his life.
He was professionally sought after, both as an advocate and as an adviser. While still in his early thirties he argued many cases before the Supreme Court, and apparently lost every one of the first fifteen. But if his clients went down his reputation went up. He became prosperous enough to buy during the 1920s both his Georgetown house which dated from the time of James Polk’s presidency (1845-9) and his horse-country farmhouse at Sandy Spring, Maryland, which dated from that of George Washington.
Yet through all this privileged education, highly successful use of it, and rise to repute and limited affluence, he was essentially a product of the upper professional classes and not a magnate. This did not mean that he was modest. He was about as modest as Quintin Hailsham or Richard Crossman, who were almost exactly his social equivalents. But it did mean that he saw life differently from his fellow Grotonians Franklin Roosevelt and Averell Harriman. They were the American equivalents of Cecils or Rothschilds. He was the equivalent of a ‘poor Etonian’, more alike in social outlook although not in personality to a Robert Armstrong or a Douglas Hurd. This made him in a sense a servant rather than a ruler of the state. But it did not deprive him of a splendid and careless independence. Psychologically he needed office less than did Harriman, who desperately felt that it was both his duty and his pleasure to be ‘in’.
This difference was vividly illustrated by Acheson’s behaviour in his first government office. When Roosevelt was constructing his administration in early 1933 Acheson hoped to be Solicitor-General. However, the Attorney-General (Homer Cummings) vetoed him. Some said it was because Bishop Acheson had refused to bless the divorced Cummings’s second marriage. Others said that it required no assistance from the father to make the son’s grand manner unacceptable to the Attorney in a subordinate. Acheson was lucky in the circumstances to be offered the under-secretaryship of the Treasury, which office he accepted with enthusiasm but not with happy results. Woodin, the Secretary of the Treasury, soon became ill, so that Acheson was effectively head of the second major department in the US Government by the time he was forty. Roosevelt wanted to devalue the doll
ar by gradually raising the price of gold from $20.67 an ounce to $35.00, where it remained until 1968. Acheson got locked in with the conservative financiers in the government, of whom Lewis Douglas, later Truman’s ambassador to London, was the most prominent, and said this was illegal.
Roosevelt did not want Under-Secretaries who said what was right and what was wrong. He wanted those who could remove road-blocks. He became irritated with Acheson. Acheson in turn quickly ceased to be a Roosevelt fan, foolishly resenting being treated with a familiar condescension. ‘It is not gratifying to receive the easy greeting which milord might give a promising stable boy and pull one’s forelock in return,’ he wrote. What he particularly disliked was Roosevelt’s habit of calling everyone ‘from his valet to his Secretary of State’ by his first name or even a nickname, and responded by never in my experience referring to FDR (fifteen years dead when I first knew Acheson) as anything other than a cool ‘Mr Roosevelt’. He allowed him neither a ‘President’ nor a place in history without a prefix. It was reminiscent of the old lady in Henry James’s Aspen Papers who always spoke of the poet as ‘Mr Shelley’. Elsewhere Acheson wrote of his attitude towards Roosevelt as being ‘one of admiration without affection’. That quality, extending even to devotion, he said, and accompanied by a still larger dose of admiration, he reserved for Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, superficially an improbable hero for the patrician Acheson.
Following the dollar devaluation dispute Acheson was dropped from the Roosevelt administration in the autumn of 1933 and did not re-enter the government until February 1941, when he became an Assistant Secretary of State (for economic affairs) under Cordell Hull in the State Department. Relations with Roosevelt had recovered their equilibrium in the mean time and Acheson had even written one of the President’s more important speeches of the 1940 election campaign. In the later stages of his period out of office Acheson had been a resolute campaigner for American assistance to Britain and France.
He served four and a half years as one of four Assistant Secretaries, nearly all the time under Cordell Hull, the longest-serving but not the most influential Secretary of State (for Roosevelt encouraged him to concentrate on trade policy not high politics), and then under Edward Stettinius whose distinction of appearance many people, including Acheson, regarded as about ten times that of his mind. The shunting of Hull away from the political mainline suited his Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs quite well, and Acheson was able to play an effective role in negotiating Lend-Lease and the Bretton Woods currency agreement. In both cases he enjoyed having Keynes, ten years his senior, as an interlocutor. Keynes sometimes offended Americans by his impatient intellectual speed, and Acheson sometimes offended his own countrymen and others by his inability to suffer fools gladly. But in this relationship neither wanted to or could patronize the other, and they got along well, with the distinct but not excessive superiority of Keynes’s mind balanced by the superiority of the national power which was behind Acheson.
In the summer of 1945 Acheson thought the time had come to resume his lucrative private practice of the 1920s and 1930s. The war against Germany was won, and that against Japan was unexpectedly on the brink of following. Roosevelt was dead and Truman was President. First Hull and then Stettinius had resigned. James F. Byrnes, who had the fatal flaw for a Secretary of State of thinking that he and not the incumbent ought to be President, had taken over the State Department. Acheson achieved a week of freedom from office in early August and was then summoned back to become Under-Secretary, that is, number two man as opposed to one of four number three men in the Department. He held this office for twenty-two months until January 1947, and achieved almost as much in it as he was subsequently to do in his four years in full charge of the State Department. Byrnes spent a great deal of time abroad. This was partly because of the leisurely rhythm of mid-century diplomacy. Bevin did the same, sometimes being away from London for six weeks at a time, as was Byrnes from Washington. But it was also because Byrnes did not respect Truman and Truman did not trust Byrnes. They were like a husband and wife who could keep going only if they did not often coincide in the same house. As a result Acheson came increasingly to be both the co-ordinator of US foreign policy in Washington and the man who kept the White House and the State Department, then only a couple of hundred yards from each other, within hailing distance.
The Truman-Acheson relationship was at once bizarre and crucially beneficial for the Western world. They were utterly unlike each other, yet became locked in an alliance of mutual respect and affection. The key date was 6 November 1946. Nineteen forty-six was the nadir of Truman’s presidency, although the first half of 1948 and even 1952 with its end-of-regime wave of petty scandals were both pretty bad. Although Truman’s reputation has stood so high for the past twenty-five years, he enjoyed no similar esteem when he was actually doing the job. At all three periods his poll ratings were abysmal. But by early 1948 he had gained confidence and a sense of direction, and in 1952 he knew that he had steered the country through seven testing years. In 1946 he was unproven and floundering. There were quite serious suggestions that he ought to resign the Presidency. He took no notice of them but he did accept the humiliating advice that he should play no part in the mid-term congressional elections. The only hope for the Democratic candidates, it was suggested, was that the Democratic President should neither open his mouth nor show his face.
He insisted on going home to vote in Missouri, but his journey across half the continent in the presidential train was conducted in silence and almost in solitude. There were no whistle-stop speeches. On the way back he was informed of the results, the disastrous nature of which had not been avoided by his abstinence. The Democrats had lost control of both houses for the first time since 1928. At Union Station, Washington, there was no one to meet the President except for the unmistakable figure of Dean Acheson, solitary and distinguished, who had gone there of his own volition, way beyond the duties of his office, partly because the disdain which made him suffer fools so badly also made him perversely loyal to those who were down. When the Alger Hiss security scandal broke three years later Acheson pretended that he had known Hiss much better than was the case. (It was Hiss’s brother with whom he had worked closely.)
Acheson’s 1946 presence on that railroad platform also became symbolic of the transition from the first to the middle phase of the Truman presidency. At first Truman felt at home only with Missouri cronies and with very political politicians. At the time of the Chicago convention which had nominated him as Vice-President he would have been amazed to be told that he would rather have been greeted by the acerbic Acheson than by the manipulating Byrnes, still Acheson’s nominal superior, although soon to be eased out. Yet such was the case. Truman took Acheson back for an assuaging gossip at the White House and thereafter a special bond existed between them. Two months later General George Marshall returned to Washington from his long mission to China and immediately replaced Byrnes as Secretary of State. Acheson and Marshall were as different from each other as they both were from Truman, but they together constituted the twin and essential props for the creative international success of Truman’s presidency. Yet they did not do it like crutches supporting a lame man. Their regard for Truman was just as high as was Truman’s for them. They constructed a tripod of American leadership which shaped the Western world of the next forty years and, despite the hazards of the cold war, gave it unprecedented prosperity and unusually long-lasting peace.
It was as well that the tripod was in place and Truman’s confidence underpinned by January 1947, for that month was the beginning of a peculiarly testing year for Europe and hence for American leadership. France and Italy looked on the brink of revolution. Russia, moved by a mixture of truculence and fear, had become wholly unco-operative, iron-handed in Eastern Europe and menacing beyond. Of the victorious countries, Britain, snowbound and fuelless in a cruel winter, was forced to begin the long process of withdrawing from its world power ill
usions and responsibilities. On two successive days in February a date was fixed for withdrawal from India and the almost immediate cessation of aid to Greece and Turkey was announced.
The only country with any surplus energy and resources was the United States. Would they deploy them? Acheson was central to the positive answer. First he argued with almost excessive vigour the case for the proclamation of the ‘Truman Doctrine’. This replaced British with American aid to Greece and Turkey on the grounds ‘that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempts at subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure’. Viewed favourably, the doctrine proclaimed several decades of the Pax Americana. Viewed unfavourably, it set the country on course to the débâcle of Vietnam. Viewed from any point of view, it was a momentous decision.
No sooner had it been taken than Acheson set about preparing the ground for Marshall’s speech at Harvard four months later, which launched the European Recovery Programme or, as by Truman’s shrewd and generous decision it came universally to be known, the Marshall Plan. The President knew that a Republican Congress would not vote a vast programme of civil aid to Europe (the Truman Doctrine was military and therefore less vulnerable) under a name as controversial as his own. Marshall, at least until Senator McCarthy got going, was a name almost beyond criticism. But although Marshall provided the eponym, as well as one or two insights of simple but crucial importance, it was Acheson who organized the work, provided the most persuasive arguments, and even tried out the substance of the speech before the less august audience of a Teachers’ College in Mississippi a good month before the Harvard Commencement Day. None of this would have worked without the dependable commitment of Truman, but it is none the less the case that Acheson’s State Department work in January-June 1947, carried out from only the number two position, had more constructive impact than that of Cordell Hull, Stettinius and Byrnes put together. This was made stranger by the fact that he did it all under a self-imposed sentence of retirement. He had told Marshall in January that, after six years of (poorly paid) public service, he proposed to return to private legal practice on 30 June. It was odd to sound such a tocsin to America and the world in the spring and then to find compelling a return to Covington and Burling at midsummer. But it all worked out for the best as it enabled Acheson to replenish his energy and finances during Marshall’s period of maximum effectiveness and then to come back as his successor at the head of the State Department when the General’s health failed after the 1948 election.