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Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World

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No one was more influential in successfully constructing the American political approach toward negotiating the difficult passage of the United States in the fractious post World War Two period than Harry Truman's controversial Secretary Of State, Dean Acheson. No single individual was more energetic, impassioned, or persistent in creating the American worldview of the second half of this century than Acheson, and although he was not among the original company of American "Cold Warriors", he quickly made up for his late start with extraordinary enthusiasm, brilliance, and decisive action. In this stirring, comprehensive, and immensely readable biography by historian James Chace, the reader is taken into the fascinating vortex of the wealthy power elite, where we watch with fascination as this child of privilege slowly comes of age, graduating from prestigious Groton Academy and undergraduate studies at Yale, moving on to Harvard Law School, where he was a housemate of Cole Porter's.

Acheson indeed quickly learned to walk with ease in the corridors of money, power, and influence, first, as a protégé of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, and then as a close advisor to General George Marshall. He was a friend and confidant to Winston Churchill, and after the war was appointed by Harry Truman to the job of a lifetime, that of Secretary of State from 1949 until 1953, thus achieving the key position he needed to massively influence the key decisions and policies that would shape the post-WWII world. As a consummate man of action who often moved decisively behind the scenes, Acheson executed the Marshall Plan to contain Soviet aggression and influence in Berlin, and was also the principal architect of the so-called Truman Doctrine designed to limit Stalin's expansionist ambitions in the early 1950s. Moreover, he was a driving force in the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, which ensured military parity in Europe and restrained The Soviet Union in its efforts to export its philosophy and politics to the rest of a Europe still reeling from the effects of the war.

The author's portrait of Acheson is not that of an impassioned ideologue seemingly obsessed with single-handedly combating the evils of communism. Quite the contrary, Chace's view of Dean Acheson seems more that of a quite intelligent, thoughtful, and balanced veteran of `realpolitik', i.e., of a brilliantly pragmatic patriot whose enlightened views of the Soviet Union and Communist China quite gradually hardened based both on experience as well as a belated recognition of the horrors of what had transpired in each of those countries both before and during the Second World War. Unfortunately for Acheson, his moderate and realistic views earned him the distrust and repudiation of the far right, and McCarthy and his fellow travelers unfairly branded him as the man "who had lost China". Acheson later became a much-valued elder statesman who advised Presidents and Senators alike, and he is largely credited with having successfully articulated the policies and strategies that eventually won the Cold War. This is a quite literate, entertaining, and very informative book about a man central to the construction of the post WWII American foreign policies that literally saved the world from communism. I highly recommend it. Enjoy!

James Chace has written an excellent history of the cold war through his biography of Dean Acheson, the architect of the US post WWII foriegn policy. If you like history and biographies -- this book is a great read.

While it can sometimes be overly favorable to the former Secretary of State, this book provides a very interesting view of the most important events of the century. A must read for anyone interested in Cold War history, the author has done a great job - it's not remotely boring!

Acheson is a great biography and a splendid introduction to Cold War history. Unlike most political biographers, Chace manages to render a full portrait of Acheson without getting bogged down in the minutiae of his long and extraordinary public life.

Prior to this book, my impression of Acheson was as the Ultimate Cold Warrior. Chace reveals him to be a far more complex and ultimately heroic character than that moniker would suggest. Aside from the Cold War chapters, what I found most fascinating were the details of Acheson's relationship with Oliver Wendell Holmes and the influence the old jurist had on him.

As Mr. Gower noted below, this book will definitely be the comprehensive Dean Acheson biography for years to come. But it packs so much play-by-play of Mr. Acheson's life -- his testimony in Congress, what he was doing when President Roosevelt died, how he responded to this nuclear policy or that, and where he lived during this life -- that the book becomes tedious. Don't get me wrong, this is an interesting book. But I only read halfway through because it became boring. I recommend reading another book that a reviewer below recommended: Walter LaFeber's "The American Century." It gives a bigger picture of the Cold War and doesn't bore the reader as quickly as this door stopper (that book, too, can get boring). But that is the nature of books written with page numbers and not the reader in mind.

If Mr. Chace ever decided to become a college professor, his department would grant him tenure on the basis of the length of his book alone (even though no one would probably read his book).

I recommend this book for anyone aspiring to be America's chief diplomat and chief foreign policy advisor to presidents. This is the story of Dean Acheson, the American diplomat who helped to create NATO, helped to rebuild Europe after WWII, and later set the stages for the decades-long fight against Communism.

This book doesn't reveal anything new about the Cold War that you can't find in Ronald Steel's Walter Lippmann and the American Century and Walter LaFeber's The American Age. Instead, the author does a good job of bringing the Secretary of State to life by revealing his human side. As an associate in the new law firm of Covington and Burling, Mr. Acheson decides to pursue his own line of argument in court which prompts old man Burling to shove a piece of paper at Mr. Acheson bearing the words "SHUT UP!" In another colorful account, Mr. Acheson tries to punch a nasty US senator from across the table but is restrained by an assistant who says: "Take it easy, boss; take it easy." Wow, who would have thought that history could be so exciting.

The book is sometimes inadvertently funny because Mr. Chace tries to place Mr. Acheson at every historic event. What was Mr. Acheson's contribution to the Lend-Lease program to England? Says Mr. Chace: "Acheson thoroughly approved of the lend-lease idea" but "wished he could come up with a brilliant suggestion, but he had none." And Mr. Acheson's contribution to the creation of the IMF? He played a small role but "was prepared to defend it vigorously before congressional committees." You almost expect to read that while Mr. Acheson was picking his teeth or getting a manicure, he heartily approved of this plan or that. Nevertheless, this is an interesting book if you are a fan of American history.

Dean Acheson, who served as Harry Truman's Secretary of State from 1949 until 1953, was in that office during a series of momentous events. This was the period when the People's Republic of China emerged victorious from the Chinese civil war, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was organized, the Korean War started, and the superpowers' nuclear arms race commenced in earnest. It is no wonder, therefore, that Acheson entitled his State Department memoir Present at the Creation and that his biographer James Chace, who teaches at Bard College, paraphrased that title for the sub-title to this book. Acheson was a great Secretary of State, and, although I believe that this biography is longer on description than insight, it is a very good narrative of one of the exceptional public careers of the 20th century.

At the risk of stereotyping, Acheson was Eastern establishment to his viscera. The son of the Episcopal Bishop of Connecticut, young Dean went to Groton School (where Franklin Roosevelt also received his secondary education), Yale College, and Harvard Law School. After clerking for Justice Louis Brandeis and making the acquaintance of the Supreme Court's other Olympian figure, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Acheson practiced law at a prestigious firm in Washington, D.C. Acheson was a good enough lawyer to have been offered a federal appellate-court judgeship in the mid-1930s, and he was under consideration for appointment as Solicitor General when President Roosevelt died in 1945. But it is, of course, as a long-time State Department official that Acheson is best known.

Acheson intellectual eminence is obvious, but Chace makes clear that, as Secretary of State, Acheson was an implementer, not an innovator. Acheson believed strongly that foreign policy was made in the White House, and, according to Chace, Acheson brought a "relentlessly pragmatic approach" to serving the will first of Franklin Roosevelt and then of Harry Truman. But some Acheson-era policies clearly were rooted in his attitudes. In the 1930s, Acheson supported an "interventionist foreign policy," and, in 1939, two years before the United States entered World War II, Acheson favored a "military and naval buildup" as part of what he called a "realistic American policy." These were to be recurrent themes during Acheson's State Department years. I was surprised, therefore, by how little thought was given to the post-war world until virtually the end of World War II. Chace entitles one of his chapters about the early Cold War "No Grand Strategy," but that phrase could have been applied to the entire era. Part of the problem, as Chace makes clear, was the sheer technical difficulty of some of the issues. For instance, in discussing what we now know was the beginning of the nuclear arms race, Chace writes that "Acheson was well aware of his own limitations in understanding the scientific aspects of atomic energy." Chace repeats an often-told, but splendid, anecdote about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the principal organizer of the Manhattan project which designed and built the first atomic bomb, trying to explain to Acheson and another high government official some arcane point in nuclear physics and then stating is exasperation: "It's hopeless! I really think you two believe neutrons and electrons are little men." It is understandable that even the well-educated Acheson struggled with cutting-edge scientific concepts. What is more difficult to comprehend is why Acheson was not better prepared for the victory of Mao Zedong's Communist forces in China in 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War the next year. Chace explains that "myriad problems [faced] the new secretary

This book constitutes very solid biographical writing, but it has surprisingly little personal color. Although Acheson was famous (or infamous) for having one of the sharpest tongues in Washington, D.C., it is only rarely on display. But, when Chace shows this side of Acheson, it is wonderful. For instance, in a latter to Harry Truman, Acheson referred to the Bay of Pigs disaster as "this asinine Cuban adventure." In an interview several years after President Kennedy was assassinated, Acheson told an interviewer that Kennedy "did not seem to me to be in any sense a great man." .... And, while serving as one of Lyndon Johnson's "Wise Men," Acheson instructed Johnson's national security adviser on one occasion to tell the President to "take Vietnam and stick it up his a--." Chace's approach to his subject tends to be too reverential. There is plenty about Acheson to admire, but this book's readers would have benefitted from a more thorough exposition of his human, fallible side.

This probably is as close as we will come to a definitive biography of Acheson. If one also considers Acheson's State Department memoir, which received the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, there may not be much more to say. Nevertheless, I believe that some questions remain. Most prominently, how do we reconcile Acheson the international Cold Warrior with Acheson the bitter opponent of Senator Joseph McCarthy? Can we separate the obvious threat to American national-security interests in the late 1940s and early 1950s from the clearly-exaggerated perception that there was an equally serious internal security threat to the United States? In particular, I wish that Chace had considered the possibility that Acheson was Dr. Frankenstein to McCarthy's monster.... But the men may have had more in common than either would have been willing to admit. In the final analysis, however, this biography should be taken on its own terms, and, my criticisms notwithstanding, it is very good.

American Cold War history and the players who shaped events during this time make it one of the most interesting eras to study. Mr. Chace does a fine job in researching the facts. But the book gets bogged down in the smallest and most trivial details of Mr. Acheson's life (as noted by several reviewers below). You lose a sense of what Mr. Acheson is doing. I simply find it hard to believe that one reviewer below stated: "Chace manages to render a full portrait of Acheson without getting bogged down in the minutiae of his long and extraordinary public life." The book is so full of minutiae that few people will want to finish reading it.

I do recommend this book for students and history buffs who want to confirm certain facts of Mr. Acheson's life and policies. Otherwise, an edited edition of this book will go a long way for many readers interested in Cold War history.

Chace provides a well-balanced history of United States post WWII foreign policy and Acheson's key role during that time. His loyalty to the country and the presidency -- not the individual-- is something sorely missed now. Every Secretary of State should hang Acheson's portrait in their office as a reminder.

Not a great one either, or even a particularly good one, at least to my way of thinking. I had to read this book for a class, and I came at it with a skeptical eye. Why, I thought, should I care about Acheson? I have not read Present at the Creation, but know the history invovled and hadn't really considered Acheson a great man, merely an Establishment figure, and Chace's book did not fare well under the criticism. It seems like it was written as paean to the greatness that is Dean Acheson, with nary a syllable edgewise. As one reviewer noted, Chace places Acheson in every conceivable major topic, no matter how irrelevant his actual role.

Despite these flaws, I have no doubt it will be the definite biography of the man for some time to come. If you're already interested in Dean Acheson or are willing to put up with a fawning and adulatory work on him, then by all means read this book. If not, don't bother.