Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World

National Review, Oct 12, 1998 by Peter W. Rodman

Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World, by James Chace (Simon & Schuster, 512 pp., $30)

HISTORY has been kinder to Dean Acheson than commentary in his own time, particularly from conservatives. Policy controversies of the time--the "loss of China," the handling of the Korean War--can still be debated, but the Truman era is now remembered favorably as a period of creative and resolute American foreign policy. The "Truman Doctrine," which rescued Greece and Turkey; the Marshall Plan; the North Atlantic Treaty and the formation of NATO; the decision to resist aggression in Korea and the U.S. rearmament afterward-these are now seen as major steps that strengthened America for the contest with the Soviet Union. Dean Acheson was the architect of most of this policy.

James Chace's biography is a thorough account of Acheson's life and career, benefiting from personal papers and interviews with family and close associates. It traces Acheson's upbringing as the son of a Connecticut Episcopal bishop, through his education at Groton, Yale, and Harvard Law School, through his various jobs at the State Department, culminating with his tenure as secretary of state from 1949 to 1953. Retired from office, Acheson became a "wise man" consulted by Presidents from Kennedy to Nixon. (Yes, even the Nixon who had earlier denounced him.) Acheson's career embodied an old-fashioned ideal of public service--including even a principled resignation (in 1933, from a job at the Treasury Department, when he disputed FDR's legal authority to tinker with the price of gold).

The decade of Acheson's greatest influence, from 1943 to 1953, was as turbulent as it was historic. Much of the turbulence was domestic. Republicans chafed at the Democrats' twenty-year dominance of the White House even while making their own uneasy transition from isolationism to internationalism. One of Acheson's achievements was the coopting of senator Arthur Vandenburg, making the Republicans in the Senate partners in the creative endeavors of the Marshall Plan and the Atlantic Alliance. But the frustrations of the time--with the Chinese Communist victory in 1949, the stalemate in the Korean War, suspicions of Communist espionage in Washington--came to be focused, fairly or unfairly, on Acheson.

While Chace offers insights into Acheson's thinking, his analysis of large events is superficial. He is uncritical to the point of hagiography, except where Acheson strays too far from liberal orthodoxy (as in the occasional passion of his anti-Sovietism or his later sympathy for the white minority rulers in southern Africa). Acheson is a substantial enough figure to deserve a more searching treatment.

One example is the origin of the Korean War. On January 12, 1950, Acheson gave a major speech at the National Press Club which omitted South; Korea from the "defensive perimeter" of U.S. strategy. Five months later, North Korea attacked. The blame Acheson received was always a bum rap in that he had merely reiterated a, U.S. policy previously articulated not only by the Joint Chiefs of Staff but also by the Pacific Commander, Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Yet we now know from Soviet archives that Stalin, having rebuffed Kim Il Sung's entreaties for months, agreed only at the end of January 1950 to support Kim's plan for war. The high-visibility reaffirmation of the policy by the U.S. Secretary of State, following on the Communist victory in China, demonstrably affected Stalin's decision, and it is not McCarthyism to take note of it. Chace is disingenuous on this.

More serious is his treatment of the Alger Hiss case. Acheson got himself in hot water by refusing, both before and after Hiss's 1950 perjury conviction, to disavow the man. It is a peculiar episode that Chace only partially explains. Acheson's own professional and personal association with Alger Hiss was slight; it was Alger's brother, Donald, who served for a time as an Acheson aide and law partner. Moreover, Acheson privately expressed doubts about Alger Hiss's story. Yet Acheson seems to have felt strongly that a public renunciation would be a cruel and even cowardly blow. Refusing to "turn [his] back on Alger Hiss" was, in an aide's words, "an act of Christian charity, no more and no less."

The evidence supports this reading, but clearly something more was at work. Hiss's background was similar to Acheson's--Johns Hopkins, Harvard Law, Felix Frankfurter protege--and one can imagine Acheson feeling a reflexive obligation to shield a man of Hiss's standing against the assault of the Yahoos. The Right's attacks on the Truman Administration were often crude (even if on fundamental points, e.g., the nature of Soviet, Chinese, and American Communism, it was later proved to be closer to the truth than the Left). But for Chace class is a blind spot. He chooses not to mention the voluminous archival evidence that now conclusively proves Hiss's guilt. Instead, the foreign policy elite's noble battle against the Yahoos is a major theme of the book.