by Roy Jenkins
Acheson was Secretary of State for four years from January 1949 to January 1953. He brought the North Atlantic Treaty into the (relatively) safe harbour of completion and signature, he saw the end of the Berlin blockade, he was the Secretary who stood at Truman’s side and organized crucial UN majorities during the hazardous first year of the Korean War, and he was the one who took the brunt of the first wave of McCarthyite attack. Of course he despised McCarthy and, unlike many people from Eisenhower downwards, he had the courage not to conceal his contempt. There is a famous story of a chance encounter in a Senate elevator. McCarthy, away from the television cameras or reporters’ pencils, liked to assume towards those whom he was tormenting the false bonhomie of a travelling salesman in one line of spurious goods to another. They both had their rackets to pursue and there was no need for cut-throat competition to affect their off-duty relations. This often produced an ingratiating response from weak opponents whom he had just been excoriating. He tried the technique on Acheson. ‘Hiya, Dean,’ he optimistically began. The murderously cold silence and apoplectic forehead of the Secretary of State penetrated even to McCarthy.
Yet, although Acheson could squash McCarthy, he could not immunize himself against him. McCarthy did not care about his own reputation. He hardly understood what the word meant. This gave him the deadliness of a terrorist who is indifferent to losing his own life. He made a misery of Acheson’s last two years at the State Department. He threw Acheson on to the defensive, as he was also to do to General Marshall, who was then back in the administration as Secretary of Defense. He forced Acheson to retire several foreign service officers whose loyalty was impeccable except in the distorting eyes of the destructive Senator from Wisconsin, and as a result gave him a morale-shattered Department over which to preside. It considerably weakened his usefulness to the US Government, although probably more at home than abroad.
Acheson was sustained by a fierce loyalty from his President which was important for the buoyancy of his spirits, although Truman in those days did not carry a very thick mantle of prestige or authority that he could throw over the Secretary of State. Ernest Bevin was also a pillar of earthy support. Acheson recorded Bevin as saying on a 1950 occasion when there were Republican congressional demands for his resignation: ‘Don’t give it a thought, me lad. If those blokes don’t want yer, there’s plenty as does.’
In the tangled skein of Anglo-American personal relations in the critical post-war years Bevin and Acheson got on crucially well. There is a general easy belief that after the years of wartime partnership there was a natural camaraderie between American and British leaders and public servants, which by comparison left the French, the Germans and others out in the cold. The position was more complicated than this. Bevin rather admired Marshall, but he did not have easy relations with him, and Marshall in turn, who was in some ways priggish, believed that Bevin was, of all things, unreliable, and in any event rather a crude fellow. With Truman, Bevin’s relations were vitiated by Israel, and by his belief that the President played politics with the issue. Nor were Attlee-Truman relations particularly close, although they once had a convivial evening together, under the surprising aegis of Ambassador Oliver Franks, singing World War I songs. Acheson both failed to understand and discounted Attlee. Furthermore, to underline that this was no special feature of Democrats or Labour ministers, Dulles’s relations with Eden were abysmal, and very little better with Churchill and Macmillan. So the Acheson-Bevin bond of affectionate respect, the more impressive for being across a chasm of dissimilarity, stood out as both valuable and unusual.
Acheson, however, was not Anglo-Saxon-centric. He got on almost as well with Robert Schuman, the ascetic-looking Lorraine lawyer who had been brought up in Metz under the German occupation of 1870-1918 and was the key early architect of Franco-German rapprochement, as he did with Bevin. He was also good with the pointed gothic arches of Konrad Adenauer’s appearance and personality. The Federal Republic of Germany with which he had to deal was immensely weak compared with what subsequently emerged, but he none the less had the foresight to treat its first Chancellor with a respect that laid secure foundations to a Bonn-Washington axis which persisted for thirty years as a salient world feature until Helmut Schmidt became disenchanted with the leadership of Jimmy Carter. Acheson was also crucial to bringing Italy into NATO. Truman was at first against. But the French, influenced by Mediterranean solidarity, persuaded Acheson, who persuaded Truman. There was thus avoided a major misfortune for the Alliance and a disaster for Italy, which with its big Communist Party and ambiguous location needed both Europe and NATO and would have been desperately adrift without either one of them.
Acheson was also at his best at the outbreak of the Korean War. In June 1950 the sudden eruption of a strongly Soviet-backed (so it was thought; Stalin, it subsequently emerged, had given only reluctant acquiescence) North Korean invasion of the South carried with it the clear threat of World War III. Equally clearly the brunt of resistance was certain to fall upon the United States. This combination of circumstances exactly suited Acheson’s capacity for quick decision, his national self-confidence, and his lack of fear at peering into the abyss. By the time that Truman got back to Washington from a brief weekend in Missouri, Acheson had already procured a UN Security Council vote of nine to nil with one abstention (the Soviet Union was luckily and foolishly boycotting the Council) in favour of action. ‘You are a great Secretary of State,’ Truman wrote to him at the end of the week. ‘Your handling of the situation has been superb.’
The Korean War proved a major but necessary defensive undertaking in which the United States suffered 157,000 casualties, including 34,000 dead. Truman and Acheson survived it together, unsubdued but not, at the time, honoured either, with the bond of mutual respect between them growing closer. When the Truman presidency came to an end in January 1953 the brunt in Korea was well over, although the armistice had not been negotiated. The final act of the presidency was a Cabinet luncheon for the Truman family at the Achesons’ Georgetown house. At it Truman thawed from his icy excursion with Eisenhower to the Capitol, and the party was described by his daughter as ‘an absolutely wonderful affair, full of jokes and laughter and a few tears.’ Truman went back to Missouri, and Acheson, once more, to Covington and Burling. Subsequently, such is the role of circumstances in personal relations and in spite of their mutual respect and survival of shared vicissitudes, they did not see much of each other for their remaining two decades, although they exchanged some good letters. Acheson died on 1 October 1971, at the age of seventy-eight, and Truman followed two months later and nearly ten years older.
In these later years Acheson wrote a moderate amount (two slim volumes of reminiscence and a serious, sharply amusing but none the less too long tome of memoirs). He earned substantial fees for Covington and Burling but was never ensnared in the obsessive pursuit of mammon. He remained a firm although increasingly right-wing and hardline Democrat. I remember staying a weekend in 1959 at John Kenneth Galbraith’s house to which the host returned from a meeting of the Democratic Advisory Committee in a state of half-controlled exasperation at the cold war intransigence of the former Secretary of State.
Acheson never had much view of Adlai Stevenson, who was too hesitating and ambiguous for his taste. Nor was he an early Kennedy supporter, but he responded to the success and verve of the young President. At the time of the Cuban missile crisis he was temporarily recruited back into active service, and became a rash and leading ‘hawk’ in Excom, as the directing body was called. Although discontented with the President’s desire to get a negotiated solution, Acheson undertook crucial missions to Britain, France and Germany with the photographic evidence of the Soviet build-up. In the first and the third countries the evidence was studied with sympathetic interest. In France it was swept aside as police court stuff. General de Gaulle asked one central question. Was he being consulted or informed of a decision already taken by the President? Acheson had the firmness to sa
y clearly that it was the latter. De Gaulle expressed himself satisfied by the directness. He was in favour of independent decisions, he said. ‘You may tell your President that on this occasion he will have the support of France,’ he grandly concluded.
The last time I saw Acheson was at the end of 1970. He expressed some fairly outrageous opinions, partly as a tease. Unfortunately Senator Muskie, who was present and who was desperately trying to get Acheson’s support for his then strong bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, purported to take them seriously, but adding the gloss that policy had to be democratically decided. Acheson turned on him like a matador on an old bull. ‘Are you trying to say, Senator, that United States foreign policy should be determined in a series of little town meetings in the State of Maine? Don’t ask them, Senator, tell them. When I believe you will do that, I will support you. Until then, not.’
It was one of the last cries of the thirty-year history of Democratic Party world leadership. Acheson was a splendid exponent of it, arrogant, élitist, courageous, and very clear-sighted to the middle distance. He was in many ways too unsqueamish for British taste in the third quarter of the twentieth century, but Britain was none the less fortunate to have him ‘present at the creation’ of so many of the institutions of the post-war Western world.
Konrad Adenauer
Konrad Adenauer was the oldest statesman ever to function in elected office, beating Gladstone by a good two years. He became the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949 at the age of seventy-three, and very reluctantly gave way to a successor in 1963 at the age of eighty-seven.
If explanations are sought for the remarkable success of West Germany during its forty-one years of separate existence, the simple answer of the quality of its Chancellors should not be ignored. There were few of them - only six as opposed to ten British Prime Ministers and nine American Presidents during the same period - and they have all, with the sole exception of KurtGeorg Kiesinger, the handsome and somewhat vacuous Würtem-berger who survived in office only from 1967 to 1969, been men who in their different ways were dominant world statesmen: Erhard, the animator of the German economic miracle, who, however, shared with Anthony Eden the characteristic of being better in a second position than at the top; Brandt, who had vision and courage and the capacity to inspire even if not always to administer; Schmidt, who was much the better manager and saw to at least the middle distance with greater clarity; and Kohl, who may look lumbering, but has with exceptional decisiveness both reunited a nation and fostered a dynamic half-decade of European integration.
Yet the achievements of Adenauer, the first, the oldest, the least flexible and by no means the most amiable, must be set above those of all the others. He began with a Germany that was shattered, impoverished and reviled, and he ended with one which, while likely to remain indefinitely divided, was rich, respected and even admired. Its real national income had grown threefold under his Chancellorship, its exports by fifty times or more, it had regained such sovereignty as was possible in an interdependent world (although Adenauer always had the sense not to set too much store by sovereignty), had become America’s most dependable and valued ally as well as the economic powerhouse of the Common Market, had buried a hundred years of Franco-German enmity and begun a partnership which was to run the European Community for at least a quarter of a century.
These achievements removed much of the jaggedness of the post-war German mood in which guilt jostled with resentment and poverty with pride. Objectively Adenauer’s role was a calming one, but he was a divisive not a healing figure in West German politics. I doubt if he ever had a friendly relationship with a ‘Sozi’, the not very respectful term by which SPD members were known in CDU circles, although he was on good terms with Hans Bockler, the first post-1945 leader of the German trades unions, and he was always a Christian Democrat and not a Conservative in industrial and social policy. Nor was he very well disposed towards members of his own party who showed an independence of view like Gustav Heinemann, whom he got rid of as Minister of the Interior in 1950 and who subsequently became an SPD-supported President of the Federal Republic, or who achieved too much independent success like Ludwig Erhard. He reserved his affection not for his ministers but for his blood relations or for those who by working for him in the Chancellery constituted an official family, although in the latter case at least a half of them eventually fell out with him.
He was not very forgiving or tolerant of his fellow men, so little so that his successor (Erhard) said that his salient characteristic was ‘contempt for humanity’. But this was after Adenauer was reported as having said of Erhard (then his Vice-Chancellor): ‘I’m told that I ought to nail him down. But how can you nail down a pudding?’ Adenauer’s dislikes extended from political parties and individuals to nations, and it was said that the three principal ones amongst them were ‘the Russians, the Prussians and the British’. Of the three it was certainly the second group, the Prussians, who aroused his most consistent dislike, and quite possibly the strongest as well. The Russians did not much obtrude upon him until they overran and lopped off half (but mainly the Prussian half) of his country in 1945, nor the British until they sacked him as Mayor of Cologne in the autumn of that same year. But for the Prussians his dislike was much more immanent and life-long. He disliked them not just for what they did, which is a curable dislike, but for what they were, which is not.
He was born a Prussian subject, but as an ardent Catholic in an area of the Rhineland that had merely been thrown to Prussia at the 1815 Congress of Vienna his loyalty to Berlin was negligible. As a child he lived through the anti-Catholicism of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf. As a young man he found Bach ‘too Protestant’ for his taste. As a middle-aged Weimar Republic politician he claimed that his nights in the Schlafwagen between Cologne and Berlin always became disturbed when the train had crossed the Elbe, and, more seriously, he objected to working with such a respectable figure as Stresemann because of his bullet-headed ‘Prussianism’. As an old man he was content to subordinate his commitment to German unity to the prior need for the integration of the Federal Republic in the West. He had no burning desire to upset the religious and political balance in West Germany by the infusion of too many Prussians, particularly as they might have been subject to Communist indoctrination.
Romantically Adenauer was a Carolingian, whose annus mirabilis was 800, when Charlemagne was crowned at Aachen as Frankish Emperor. But he was not remotely a cosmopolitan. In reality as opposed to romance he was a provincial citizen of Cologne, the centre of whose world was the small area of that Rhineland city which contained the Cathedral, the palace of the Cardinal-Archbishop and the Rathaus, from which, however, he much preferred the westward to the eastward prospect. He had no real command over any foreign language, except perhaps for Latin, and although he had made a student visit to Florence and Venice his travels in the next fifty years were confined to a couple of holidays in (German-speaking) Switzerland and a two-day visit to a Paris conference.
Yet his European vision was extraordinarily clear-sighted. He was determined to transcend the problem of Germany’s past by tying the country into a European future; he saw that the key to that was the partnership with France, and he pursued this goal relentlessly, undeterred by setbacks like the collapse of the European Defence Community and undeflected by side issues like several years of fairly intolerable French behaviour over the Saarland. He also took in his stride the change from the weak Prime Ministers of the Fourth Republic, compared with whom he was manifestly more famous and more permanent, to General de Gaulle, compared with whom he was not.
The strain between these two old eagles was that Adenauer, Carolingian though he was, knew how necessary America was to Europe, and in particular to Germany, at a time when Khrushchev was about to build the Berlin wall, whereas de Gaulle was eager to cock snooks at Washington. Had this been compounded by an equal difference about Britain’s relationship with Europe the gap might have become unc
ontainable. But in fact, although not in theory, there was no such difference on this issue. The official position of the German Government was in favour of British entry, and Atlanticists like Erhard and Foreign Minister Schröder genuinely cared about it. But Britain in Europe was no part of Adenauer’s Rhenish vision. He was a clandestine Gaullist on the issue, privately believed that the General was quite right to veto the negotiations for British entry, and had no intention of applying the only effective German sanction, which was to hold up the signing of the Franco-German Treaty of friendship. So, within six days of the veto, he went to Paris and signed the Treaty. Britain’s hope of relying on ‘the five’ (which meant Germany plus four) to counteract Paris was in ruins.
Was the unhelpfulness based on a desire by Adenauer to avenge past British insults? Not directly, I think, for it was deeper rooted than that. Adenauer was a ‘little European’ and he could not see Britain fitting into his idea of a tightly integrated grouping. And, in view of Britain’s behaviour over the twenty years of her delayed membership, who is to say that he was wrong? The danger he saw was compounded in early 1963, when de Gaulle’s veto was applied, by the looming threat of a British Labour Government. Adenauer not only disliked socialists in general; he had a particularly strong view against British ones. Almost paranoically, he regarded the generals, brigadiers and colonels who had been the agents in Germany of the Attlee/Bevin Government after 1945 as having grossly favoured the SPD and increased his own difficulties in coming to power. He saw the radio stations and Hamburg-based newspapers, such as Die Welt, which the British occupation had fostered, as being centres of left-wing propaganda, and continued to bear a grudge for this.