To Better Order the Universe: Recalling Dean Acheson

Born in 1893, Dean (an odd name in such a family) Acheson was the son of an Episcopal clergyman of English origin who became bishop of Connecticut. Although his mother was the daughter of a Canadian whiskey distiller and bank president, he was never part of the plutocracy. Everything about him was of discriminatingly high quality, 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 with the splendidly Waspy name of Covington and Burling, his high public service posts, his elegant pre-Civil War house in Georgetown, his eighteenth-century farm in Maryland. But he was never a New Yorker. He always managed to skip over that city of wealth and fashion on the Hudson, and there was something symbolic about that.

He was thought in middle life to look like the epitome of an Englishman, with his black Homburg hats, his bristling mustache, his waistcoats, his dark town suits and occasionally severe tweeds. Item by item he looked like Anthony Eden, but not in the ensemble. His Englishness was only superficial. This was not because he was trying to look English and failing; 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 showed a little more moral fiber. Of his British opposite numbers as foreign minister he made Bevin look lumbering, Herbert Morrison slovenly, and Eden too self-consciously negligent. Acheson looked crisp, confident, and a little bossy. He was very clear-sighted, at least to the middle distance, and he had no squeamishness about peering into the abyss of dark alternatives.

THE ESTABLISHMENT ABROAD

Acheson was, however, surprisingly good at personal relations, except perhaps on Capitol Hill. He did not appreciate Prime Minister Attlee's laconic and reclusive quality, but he got on crucially well with Ernest Bevin, the massive and earthy foreign secretary of that British government. The Acheson-Bevin link was important, for, contrary to a general impression that after the years of wartime partnership there was a natural camaraderie between American and British leaders, it was against the trend. Bevin admired Marshall but did not have easy rapport with him. With Truman his relations were vitiated by Israel. Nor were Truman-Attlee relations at all close. Dulles' relations with Eden were abysmal, and were not much better with Churchill and Macmillan. So Acheson's ability to see gold beneath Bevin's rough exterior (he always had a certain liking for roughness alongside his fastidious streak, as in his summer stint at the age of 18 as a tree-feller for the building of the Canadian National Railroad) came at a crucial and testing time for the creation of Western unity.

Acheson, however, had the breadth and sense not to be Anglo-Saxon-centric. He got on almost equally 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 an early architect of Franco-German rapprochement. Sometimes he cultivated Schuman too much for Bevin's taste, but that was at least partly because of the growing attachment of the United States to European unity, of which Schuman became the symbol, while Bevin, although determinedly attached to an Atlantic community, stood somewhat truculently offshore from a European one. Acheson was also good with the Gothic arches of Konrad Adenauer's appearance and personality. The Federal Republic of Germany was then abjectly weak, but Acheson had the foresight to treat its first chancellor with a respect that laid secure foundations for a Washington-Bonn axis, at least until Helmut Schmidt became disenchanted with Jimmy Carter's leadership of the alliance.

FIRST SERVANT OF HIS STATE

Acheson was in my view a great secretary of state and had many virtues, but he had his faults. Although on the greatest issue of his day he was a moderate, in the sense that he wished to contain and not destroy the Soviet Union, he had something of a black-and-white mind and a streak of arrogant perversity. This came out in his 1933 resignation from the Treasury, in his unnecessary and exaggerated throwing of the cloak of friendship over Alger Hiss in 1950, which considerably reduced his effectiveness in his last years at the State Department, and in his flip-flops on Vietnam. On the other hand, it led to his being the solitary figure to greet Truman at Union Station, Washington, on the president's return from the disastrous midterm elections of 1946, which led to one of the most successful president-secretary of state relationships in American history.

Chace provides a wise and well-paced account of the central events of Acheson's life. His difficulty is that Acheson's memoirs were comprehensive and sparkling, and indeed I was struck by the fact that whenever a footnote was interesting enough to make me turn to the reference appendix, the source was nearly always Present at the Creation. However, Chace has produced an admirable political biography. There is, thankfully, no attempt at psychosexual revelation, but there are occasional passages on lifestyle, done with perception, restraint and, as far as I can tell, accuracy. On British matters, where I can tell, he tends to be slightly off-the-beam with the detail, but, more important, very much on-the-beam with the major issues. He sees the contradiction in Britain's belief that it could improve its "special" relations with America by remaining detached from European unity, to which U.S. policy was dedicated, with a clarity which unfortunately eluded successive British prime ministers.