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1,576 WORDS

#3 - 8/22/06

Review of Robert L. Beisner's
**Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War**
for **The New York Times Sunday Book Review**

Dean Acheson was perhaps the most vilified Secretary of State of modern American history. Robert Beisner, in his sweeping and thoughtful account of Acheson's tenure, cites a scholar who discovered, in an [excess] of meticulous pedantry, that during the four years that Acheson served as Secretary of State, Republicans made 1,268 antagonistic statements on the Senate floor about him and only seven favorable ones (one wonders for what).

History has treated Acheson more kindly. Accolades for him have become bipartisan. Even Secretaries of State appointed by the party of his erstwhile tormentors have described him as a role model.

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Condoleezza Rice is the most recent example. Thirty years after his death, Acheson has achieved icon status.

This is all the more remarkable in view of Acheson's out of scale personality, so at odds with a period in which eminence seems to be tolerable only in the garb of the ordinary, if not the banal. The debonair conduct, the bristling mustache, the Bond Street tailoring, the biting wit, the extraordinary analytical skill, the refusal to turn the other cheek bespoke an insistence on the ~~individual~~ *idiosyncratic* rather than the conventional. He was a man of high principle and sense of honor shaped by the nineteenth century, whose hero was Oliver Wendell Homes, a Boston Brahmin, and whose ~~personal~~ Boston Brahmin friend was Felix Frankfurter, the brilliant son of Jewish immigrants. Though Acheson served during the transition when America emerged as a world power and still enjoyed a nuclear monopoly, the scale of government was as yet relatively [small], and Washington was still a comparatively ~~relatively~~ *relatively*

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William D. Rogers

Aug 22 06 05:01p

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provincial city. Its political conflicts were therefore highly personal and
[not shaped] by public relations focus groups. That senior officials
must be bland and turn the other cheek while their veracity is being
systematically challenged was not part of the Acheson code. This
explains the scene, unimaginable today, described by Mr. Beisner
when Acheson admonished Senator Kenneth Wherry at a hearing
before the Senate Appropriations Committee not to shake his dirty
finger in his face. When Wherry persisted, Acheson rose and launched
a roundhouse swing at his senatorial gadfly, which was stopped at the
last moment because the legal advisor of the State Department
wrapped his arms around Acheson and pulled him down into his seat.

All this was possible because America had only just started its
journey towards global involvement. The debate was not over
aspirations to hegemony but over whether America should engage
internationally, whether it itself at all, never mind permanently. The impetus behind foreign

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William D. Rogers

Aug 22 06 05:02P

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policy was to defend [America's] values/ Crusading on their behalf in
every corner of the globe was as yet unimaginable.

Yet the position of Secretary of State is potentially the most fulfilling
in the government short of the presidency. Its scope is global; it
addresses an ultimate philosophical inquiry into the nature of world
order and the relationship of order to progress and national interest.
Lacking such a conceptual framework, the daily task of dealing with
the thousands of e-mails from nearly 200 diplomatic posts and a
constant flow of communication from the Executive Department
compiled with the need for congressional liaison that daily demand
attention, by which America's relationship to the world is constantly
redefined, runs the risk of turning incoherent.

Acheson served as Undersecretary of State and then as
Secretary during the period when a people that had known no direct
permanent threat to [its] security since the early days of the republic

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William D. Rogers

Aug 22 2006 05:02P

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and that had grown up with the conviction that such challenges as
arose could be overcome rapidly by the mobilization of America's
strength, had to be brought to recognize that its participation was
indispensable for peace and security and that [it] would have to do so
on a permanent basis. Inevitably this realization was painful and slow
in coming, if indeed it has been fully achieved to this day. This is why
Acheson was assailed from both political wings by those convinced by
a desire for an end to involvement as soon as an immediate threat had
been overcome, [from those who sought a final victory over the threat
followed by withdrawal] and, on the other wing, by those who thought
there was no threat to begin with, or at least none that required
Acheson's militant response.

In this maelstrom, Acheson dealt with the five principal tasks of
any Secretary of State: the identification of the challenge; the
development of a strategy to deal with it; organizing and motivating

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the bureaucracy, both in the State Department and in other agencies;
persuading the American public; and conducting American diplomacy
towards other countries. These tasks require the closest collaboration
with the President. Secretaries of State who seek to base their
influence on the prerogatives of the office invariably become
marginalized. Presidents cannot be constrained by administrative flow
charts; for a Secretary of State to be effective, he [or she] has to get
into the President's head, so to speak. This is why Acheson made it a
point to see Truman almost every day they were in town together and
meticulously kept him informed.

No Secretary can fulfill all these tasks with equal skill - though
Acheson came closer than any other of the modern period. He was
the first to face the need to define a conceptual framework on which to
base America's involvement in global affairs. He turned George
Kennan's seminal article on "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" into an

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operating principle of American foreign policy. He interpreted it to mean that the task of American foreign policy was to create situations of strength around the Soviet periphery to deter any temptation for Soviet aggression. Negotiation with the Soviet Union was to be deferred until these situations of strength had come into being; any attempt to launch diplomacy prematurely would undermine the primary task. Kennan was later to reject this approach, which he considered the militarization of his policy, launching a debate that has not ended to this day.

Acheson's overriding priority, in the years immediately following World War II, was to restore Western Europe and create a political community to resist what then appeared as the Soviet colossus. Acheson created the structure that sustained the free countries during the Cold War via the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, the return of Germany and Japan to the community of nations; without it, the

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William D. Rogers

Aug 22 06 05:02P

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8

ultimate outcome of the Cold War would never have been reached.

aside from the fact that Acheson foresaw not so much the collapse of
the Soviet Union as its ultimate transformation into a normal state.

But Acheson was less clear about the diplomacy needed to follow the
culmination of his architectural phase.

Kennan represented the other strand of American thinking.

Acheson implicitly believed that situations of strength would be self-
enforcing, thus lessening the importance of diplomatic engagement
with the adversary. Kennan raised the question [of] how to gain

Soviet acquiescence in the situations of strength and what a
negotiation based on it would involve. The danger of the Acheson
approach has been conflict through miscalculation. The danger of the
Kennan approach was that diplomacy might shade into appeasement.

The tension between the two schools of thought – the one that treats
diplomacy as a means to a strategic end and those who see it as an

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William D. Rogers

Aug 22 06 05:03P