To Better Order the Universe: Recalling Dean Acheson

I first met Dean Acheson in the week of the Bay of Pigs at what he rather charitably described as "a meeting of intellectuals" in Bologna, Italy. The occasion, rather than the attendance, is described on page 389 of Chace's authoritative and reasonably succinct biography of the 51st secretary -- of state. For me, then a relatively young backbench Labour member of the British Parliament, Acheson trailed clouds of glory, not only for the assured authority of his personality, but for his record as perhaps the key member of a team of architects -- the others were Harry Truman, George Marshall, Ernest Bevin, Robert Schuman, and Jean Monnet -- who built a Western world that was first a secure bastion and then a lighthouse that sent out a beam of attraction that was eventually to destroy the menace of the Soviet empire. Acheson was not an unduly modest man, but when he called his 1969 memoirs Present at the Creation, it was an understatement.

I last saw him in December 1970 at a Washington dinner party given by the late author Douglass Cater and his wife, now the stepmother-in-law of the king of Jordan. By this time Acheson, who toward the end of his secretaryship of state had been bitterly denounced not merely as a liberal but almost as a crypto-communist by Senator Joseph McCarthy (and indeed by Richard Nixon), had by a supreme irony come to embrace some views of which the deplorable senator, had he been alive and with the intelligence to understand Acheson's typically taut and sophisticated expression of them, might well have been proud. Acheson considered the South African and Rhodesian regimes among the best in the world, and Chancellor Willy Brandt with his dangerous Ostpolitik an agent of communism, a ludicrous mantle which Acheson himself had once been forced to wear with a mixture of pain and pride.

If these views pointed to a faltering of Acheson's judgment in the last year of his life, this was not accompanied by a similar faltering of the crisp abrasiveness with which he expressed them. The evening for me was memorable for the way in which he put to the sword Edmund Muskie, who was also present, than for the unexpected eccentricity of his own views. The amiable senator from Maine was limbering up for his 1972 presidential bid and eager to get the support of Acheson, whom he appeared hardly to have met. As a result he made the fatal mistake of responding to Acheson's half-teasing but epigrammatically expressed budget of provocation with a long meander which began with the statement that he reckoned he could go along "with about 90 percent of what had been said" (which few sane men would have done) but adding the gloss that there was need for much more democratic participation in policymaking.

Acheson, having listened with impatience to this response, then 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." Whereupon he turned his back on Muskie, effectively dismissing him from the conversation as well as rejecting his ambitions.

WINTER OF THE PATRIARCH

I was half-aware during this exchange that I had observed two defining moments. First, it was one of the last cries of the 30-year history of authoritative American world leadership under the auspices of the Democratic Party. Acheson was a splendid exponent of this tradition, arrogant, elitist, courageous. It was also the moment when, well before his becoming tearful in Manchester, New Hampshire, I realized that Muskie, in spite of his many admirable qualities, would not make a president of the United States. Someone who could not stand up to a fusillade from Acheson, formidable though that could be, was unlikely to be able either to beat Nixon or, if elected, to deal adequately with Leonid Brezhnev or Mao Zedong.

In Muskie's defense, however, it must be said that Acheson did have a reputation for disenchantment with presidents, let alone presidential aspirants. Truman was the exception. He and Acheson supported each other in an alliance of mutual respect and loyalty. But with the rest Acheson was either critical from the beginning or allowed his faint praise quickly to wither. He objected to Franklin Roosevelt on the odd ground, particularly for Acheson, that he called everyone "from his valet to the secretary of state" either by his first name or a nickname, and was in general too assuredly patronizing. He never in my experience referred to FDR (17 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' Aspen Papers who always spoke of the poet as "Mr. Shelley." For Eisenhower his enthusiasm was well short of the ecstatic. Kennedy he took to slowly (mainly because of Kennedy pŠre), but even after working quite closely with him he said, long after JFK's assassination, that while he was "attractive" and "blessed with real charm" he was well short of being "in any sense a great man." For Johnson, who craved Acheson's approval, he began with a burst of enthusiasm which soon turned to a mounting irritation. With Nixon he began with enmity, followed by a lurch toward forgiving old grievances. Fastidious though he was, Acheson, like most of us, found it difficult to resist the twitch upon the thread of an invitation to a White House (or its near equivalent) consulting session. It was only a year or so, however, before his natural urge to criticize reasserted itself. Long before Watergate he was off Nixon.

THE YOUNG MATADOR