ACHESON AND EMPIRE: The British Accent in American Foreign Policy. - Review - book review

Washington Monthly, July, 2001 by Andrew Cockburn

ACHESON AND EMPIRE: The British Accent in American Foreign Policy by John McNay University of Missouri Press, $34.95

AMONG THE MANY CONVENIENCES introduced in official Washington in recent times has been the convention that those aspiring to statesmanship do not actually have to behave like states-persons. Aspirants need only to conspicuously bury their noses in Professor James Chace's benign biography of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Even before his inauguration, George W. Bush figuratively brandished Acheson, apparently with the aim of demonstrating a scholarly preoccupation with diplomatic history while simultaneously proving that the 43rd president can actually read. A few years earlier, the Clinton administration, judging by press reports, fought the war over Kosovo with a gun in one hand and Acheson in the other.

It's not hard to see why today's placemen and women find such inspiration in the tale of this tweedy hero. While they struggle to find some purpose in American foreign policy in a fractured post-Cold War world, Acheson was presented with the simpler challenge of confronting Joseph Stalin, fighting the Korean War, rearming Western Europe, and stomping on the last flickering embers of American isolationism. He did the job nicely, while apparently behaving in a decent and gentlemanly manner--viz, his reluctance to abandon Alger Hiss.

John McNay's Acheson and Empire, the British Accent in American Foreign Policy comes therefore as a welcome palliative to the prevailing hagiography. McNay's view, in brief, is that Acheson was so solicitous of the welfare of the British Empire that, time and again, he acted against the best interests of the United States out of irrational deference to policy. In the course of expounding this thesis, the author reminds us that there was much not to like in Dean Acheson--his tireless efforts, for example, on behalf of the racist Rhodesian regime that fought through the latter 1960s and 1970s to preserve white minority rule in what is now Zimbabwe. Chace, for reasons we can only conjecture, makes no mention of this.

McNay traces his subject's unappealing affections to the Acheson family's Ulster Protestant roots, a culture in which Irish Catholics and subject peoples everywhere were viewed with lofty derision, and the Empire as guardian of the privileges of the master race. Acheson retained lifelong affectionate memories of celebrating the British monarch's birthday in Middleton, Connecticut, where his father presided as Episcopal minister, with a solemn toast to "the Queen." Imbued early with Anglocentric prejudices, Acheson retained much of this worldview as he advanced toward positions where he could give it practical effect. "No sensible person can believe that African peoples can find their way toward a stabilized and civilized life without the help of the Europeans who know them best," he wrote in 1961.

It is certainly bracing to come across such citations and appreciate how deeply this man, who did so much to shape the second half of the 20th century, was rooted in the Victorian era. McNay also pays due attention to Acheson's performance as a courtier to Harry Truman, himself a subject of inflated hagiography these days. Thus, on leaving town for vacation in late 1949, the president found his secretary of state obediently waiting at the airport to see him off, the only cabinet member to do so. "As I looked around that morning ... I saw no officials present," Acheson wrote his master in a subsequent note, pointedly reminding Truman that no one else had bothered to show up, "only a man to see off on vacation another man for whom he has the deepest respect and affection."

However, when McNay delves into the archives to demonstrate his thesis that Acheson's anglophilia went beyond merely aping the manners of a British gentleman, it seems to me that he goes a little off the rails. The Irish, for example, refused to sign up for NATO unless and until something was done about "partition," the British occupation of six counties in Ulster long after the rest of Ireland had gained independence. The Dublin government hoped to use obduracy over joining the new alliance as a means of generating American pressure on London. McNay, quite rightly, has every sympathy with the Irish position, and excoriates Acheson for dismissing it out of hand. It would have indeed been a fine thing if the Truman administration had anticipated Bill Clinton by 45 years and actually leaned on the British to do something about their little apartheid colony in Ulster, but such interference by Washington in the internal affairs of its closest Cold War ally was, at that time and for decades after, simply inconceivable. Even in the Clinton era, the Irish only just succeeded in getting the ear of the White House.

McNay detects similar examples of suspicious deference to Britain, to the detriment of American interests, in policy toward India, Iran, and Egypt. I find the Indian case rather confused, while with Iran and Egypt it is not clear that Acheson was really as much a pawn of Whitehall as the author suggests. In the case of Iran, for example, it was Acheson who turned down a British proposal to mount a coup against the nationalist Mossadegh and the Dulles brothers who gave the go-ahead. The fact is that in those days, if you were going to have a Cold War, it was of supreme importance to have the British safely in the U.S. corner. Britain was, after all, the "unsinkable aircraft carrier," the one secure base in those pre-ICBM days from which U.S. nuclear bombers could threaten the U.S.S.R.