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October 13, 1971 New York Times
OBITUARY
Architect of Postwar Policy, Acheson
Advocated Containment of the Soviet
Union
By ALDEN WHITMAN
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One of the principal molders of
the American posture in the postwar world, Dean
Gooderham Acheson, an urbanely elegant,
sharp-minded and even sharper-tongued lawyer,
helped to create what he called "half a
world, a free half" through containment of
the Soviet Union by American military power and
political alliances.
As a member of the State Department almost
continuously from 1941 to 1953--for the final
four years he was President Harry S. Truman's
Secretary of State--Mr. Acheson articulated a
policy and practice that assumed that the Soviet
Union was bent on world conquest and,
negotiations being virtually useless, could be
deterred only by overwhelming United States
economic, political and arms aid to countries on
the perimeter of the Communist bloc. Some of his
chief achievements were:
The Bretton Woods agreement, which led to the
establishment of the World Bank.
The Truman Doctrine of assistance to Greece
and Turkey.
Spade work for the Marshall Plan of bolstering
Europe.
Shaping atomic policy.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization
agreement.
The Japanese peace treaty.
The diplomacy of the Korean conflict.
Nonrecognition of Communist China and aid to
Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan.
Creating and rearming West Germany.
Bipartisanship in foreign policy.
As one so intimately associated with the
strategy and tactics of the cold war, Mr. Acheson
was the target of much contention. To Mr. Truman
he was "among the greatest Secretaries of
State this country had." To Senator Joseph
R. McCarthy, he was soft on Communism for
harboring security risks in the State Department
and for asserted lack of foresight in dealing
with China before 1949. To more moderate critics,
he was blind to the reputed advantages of
negotiating with the Russians. To revisionist
historians of the nineteen-sixties, he was
"the Commissar of the Cold War" who
invented, or at least exaggerated, Soviet world
ambitions and who promoted the United States as a
super colonial power. And to himself he was
"the faithful first lieutenant" to Mr.
Truman ("the captain with a mighty
heart") who was serenely certain that
"our efforts for the most part left
conditions better than when we found them."
Earthy in Private
Although Mr. Acheson tended to be formal and
school-teacherish in his public manner, in
private he was colloquial and earthy. Reminiscing
about his career in an interview for this article
in the spring of 1970, he ticked off his views.
Of Mr. McCarthy he said:
"He was a very cheap, low scoundrel. To
denigrate him is to praise him."
On the United Nations as a forum for
negotiations:
"I never thought the U. N. was worth a
damn. To a lot of people it was a Holy Grail, and
those who set store by it had the misfortune to
believe their own bunk."
Of the Korean conflict, which the United
States entered without Congressional approval:
"I don't think there was any alternative
to going into Korea. It was a perfectly simple
thing to do."
And of the revisionist criticism: "I
think it's stupid. Ill-formed is the politest way
I can express it."
Mr. Acheson, however, had no riposte to
President Nixon (whose Indochina policy he warmly
supported), although Mr. Nixon in 1952 had lashed
out at "Dean Acheson's College of Cowardly
Communist Containment." He indicated that
President Nixon had "gone ahead doing what
we did" in combating Communism.
Enjoyed Capitol Politics
As a broker in power who helped to pilot many
of his plans through Congress, Mr. Acheson
recalled his enjoyment of Capitol politics and
his fondness for Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg,
the Republican leader, and Senator Tom Connally,
his Democratic counterpart. Some of his happiest
moments, he said, were spent in the Capitol
backrooms with these and other cronies.
"Some of my worst enemies on the Hill were
my best friends," he remarked.
To facilitate a bipartisan foreign policy, Mr.
Acheson went on, he had on occasion so drafted
bills that the Republicans could
"correct" them to their glory, in the
name of bi- partisanship. And once he went so far
as to write a speech for a critic of the Bretton
Woods bill. "It was the best attack on the
bill ever delivered," he recalled with a
merry laugh.
The personal touch that made Mr. Acheson a
Capitol favorite was also the key to his dealings
with many foreign diplomats. "The best
diplomacy is on the personal level," he
said, adding:
"I got along with everybody who was
housebroken. But I was never very close to the
Russians. They were abusive; they were rude. I
just didn't like them."
Toward those he liked, Mr. Acheson had a
gentleman-of-the-old-school loyalty. One example
was his friendship with Alger Hiss, a
former State Department official who was
convicted of perjury in a sensational spy-ring
case. Mr. Hiss
was a friend of long standing and was already
under some suspicion when Mr. Acheson was
confirmed as Secretary of State. He restated at
that time his ties to Mr. Hiss ("And
my friendship is not easily given, nor is it
easily withdrawn") and later, after Mr. Hiss's
conviction, when many of his friends vanished,
Mr. Acheson met the situation baldly by telling a
news conference," I do not intend to turn my
back on Alger Hiss."
"Congress," Mr. Acheson wrote in
"Present at the Creation," "flew
into a tantrum and the press got all
excited." Nevertheless, and with perhaps a
touch of arrogance, Mr. Acheson stood by Mr. Hiss. With much
the same tenacity, he declined to dismiss John
Carter Vincent, a State Department official under
fire from Mr. McCarthy, or O. Edmund Clubb.
Students of Mr. Acheson have suggested that his
defense of Mr. Hiss,
Mr. Vincent and Mr. Clubb sprang, in part at
least, from his Brahminlike contempt for Mr.
McCarthy's right-wing attacks--that Mr. Acheson
had "lost" China, pursued a
"non-win" policy in Korea and
"coddled" Communists in government.
Picture of a Diplomat
And indeed, Mr. Acheson was as lofty in
physique as he was in manner. Tall, erect, with
wavy hair, bushy eyebrows and a guardsman's
mustache, he looked, in his impeccably tailored
clothes and black homburg, every inch the
formidable diplomat. Added to that was an Ivy
League voice and a bright mind's disdain for what
he called "ninnies."
Many wondered how the immaculate and patrician
Mr. Acheson was able to form an almost perfect
union with the small, perky, Midwestern Mr.
Truman, a creature of rough- and-tumble Missouri
politics. In "Present at the Creation,"
Mr. Acheson gave an answer, saying:
"As only those close to him knew, Harry
S. Truman was two men. One was the public
figure--peppery, sometimes belligerent, often
didactic, the 'give-'em-hell' Harry. The other
was the patient, modest, considerate and
appreciative boss, helpful and understanding in
all official matters, affectionate and
sympathetic in any private worry or sorrow . .
.Mr. Truman's methods reflected the basic
integrity of his own character."
Another factor was that Mr. Acheson, with all
his mature cocktail-circuit charm and quick grasp
of complex issues, was reared in fairly modest
circumstances. Born April l1, 1893, in
Middletown, Conn., Dean Gooderham (pronounced
"goodrum") Acheson was the son of an
English-born clergyman and a mother whose family
were Canadian whisky distillers. Edward Acheson
had entered the Anglican ministry, emigrated to
Canada and then to the United States, where he
became Episcopal Bishop of Connecticut.
To Yale and Harvard
Dean was submitted to the fashionable rigors
of Groton under the stern Endicott Peabody and
went on to Yale, from which he was graduated in
1915. After marrying Alice Stanley, a painter, in
1917, he gained a Harvard law degree in 1918 and
spent his first two years out of school as law
secretary to Supreme Court Justice Louis D.
Brandeis.
Mr. Brandeis "was like a father to
me," Mr. Acheson recalled in 1970. That
Justice and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes greatly
influenced his legal thinking, just as did his
very close friend of later years, Justice Felix
Frankfurter, with whom he often strolled about
Washington. The two were congenial on all issues
except Israel, which by mutual consent they never
discussed.
The Justice, a Zionist, favored the State of
Israel, while his friend was disquieted by it as
upsetting the Mideast balance. Their friendship,
though, was such that Mr. Acheson dedicated one
of his books, "Morning and Noon," to
"F.F."
In 1921 Mr. Acheson joined the capital firm of
what is now Covington & Burling, of which he
became senior partner. One of Washington's
largest law establishments, it gave Mr. Acheson a
comfortable life--a house in Georgetown, a farm
in Maryland--and a clientele that included 200 of
the nation's largest corporations. When he was
not in government, he practiced law.
A Democrat, Mr. Acheson supported Franklin D.
Roosevelt in 1932 and was appointed Under
Secretary of the Treasury in 1933, a post he held
for six months. He broke temporarily with the New
Deal when he found himself unable to approve
devaluing the gold content of the dollar. He
thought that doing it by Executive order was
unconstitutional, and he learned from
newspapermen that his "resignation had been
accepted." His personal relations with the
President, however, remained good, and he
supported him in 1936 and 1940.
Judgeship Declined
Just before the 1940 campaign, Mr. Roosevelt
offered to appoint him to the Court of Appeals
for the District of Columbia, a step below the
Supreme Court. "I told the President I just
can't sit on my tail and listen to
foolishness,"he recalled in his 1970
interview. "Then the President offered to
make me e special Assistant Attorney General. But
I told him no, I could do him more good on the
outside [he was active in the Committee to Defend
America by Aiding the Allies] and that I would
write campaign speeches, which I did. Well, then
the war came along and I went into the State
Department."
As Assistant Secretary of State in 1941
(Cordell Hull was the Secretary), Mr. Acheson was
intimately concerned with a number of
undertakings that accompanied America's emergence
as the world's greatest capitalist power. His
initial duties involved international economics.
He helped to elaborate the Lend-Lease
arrangements that poured $39-billion in American
war goods and civilian items into lands resisting
Fascism and Japanese warlords.
He was also liaison man with Congress, and had
a vigorous hand in developing postwar
international organizations, including the Food
Agricultural Organization, the United Nations
Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, the
International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development (World Bank) and the International
Monetary Fund.
After Mr. Hull stepped down, Mr. Acheson
served under Secretary Edward R. Stettinius Jr.,
a man, he said in his memoirs, who "had gone
far with comparatively modest equipment."
Then he was Under Secretary of State when the
department was headed by James F. Byrnes and by
Gen. George C. Marshall.
When Mr. Truman became President in April,
1945, Mr. Acheson formed bonds with him that were
to last for their lives. Among his first chores
for Mr. Truman was obtaining Senate approval for
United States membership in the United Nations.
"I did my duty faithfully and
successfully," he wrote in his memoirs,
"but always believed that the Charter was
impractical."
Mr. Acheson was Under Secretary for almost two
years, from August, 1945, to July, 1947, but much
of that time, owing to the absences of his chief
abroad, he acted as the Secretary. His
intractable definition of Soviet policy was
elucidated at this time. Stalin, in early 1946,
spoke out for Soviet preparedness in what he saw
as a hostile world. Analyzing the speech in a
telegram to the State Department, George F.
Kennan, then charge d'affaires in Moscow,
concluded that Soviet policy would be to use
every means to infiltrate, divide and weaken the
West.
Mr. Kennan's proposals for coming to terms
with the Russians did not, however, appeal to Mr.
Acheson. "To seek a modus vivendi with
Moscow would prove chimerical," he wrote in
his memoirs, adding in another place that
"Soviet authorities are not moved to
agreement by negotiation."
Meanwhile, Mr. Acheson was busy, with David E.
Lilienthal of the Tennessee Valley Authority and
a group of scientists, drafting a policy paper on
international atomic matters. At the time, the
United States believed it held a monopoly, and
proposed that "no nation would make atomic
bombs or the materials for them." Instead,
there would be an international authority, with
inspection controls and other checks to assure
peaceful uses of nuclear energy.
Many of the proposals appeared in what was
called the Baruch plan, named for Bernard M.
Baruch, who was not in Mr. Acheson's pantheon.
"I protested the generally held view that
this so-called 'adviser of Presidents' was a wise
man," he later wrote. "My own
experience led me to believe that his reputation
was without foundation in fact and entirely
self-propagated."
As Mr. Acheson perceived events in 1946-47,
the Soviet Union was embarking on an
"offensive against the United States and the
West" in the Balkans and the Mideast, which
was to reach a crescendo in Korea in 1950. He
discerned special danger spots in Greece and
Turkey. And in early 1947, when the British
reported they could no longer afford to support
the royalist Greek regime, he shaped the Truman
Doctrine, by which $400- million in emergency
military and economic aid was provided those two
countries--in Greece to counter
"Communist" insurgents and in Turkey to
strengthen her armed forces.
Heart of the Doctrine
The heart of the Truman Doctrine was the
assertion that "it must be the policy of the
United States to support free peoples who are
resisting attempted subjugation by armed
minorities or by outside pressures." Then
and later, however, such commentators as Walter
Lippmann questioned whether this was not a
formula for America as a world policeman and
whether it did not involve repression of
legitimate nationalist or revolutionary
movements.
In Mr. Acheson's view, however, "the
corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to
the East." "It would also," he
added, "carry infection to Africa through
Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy
and France, already threatened by the strongest
Communist parties in Western Europe."
Critics of this foreign policy have asked
whether his ideological division of the world
corresponded with reality, whether
"freedom" should be equated with
American strategic and political interests,
whether the domino theory was justified and
whether Communism was equivalent to "Soviet
imperialism."
After persuading Congress to approve
Greek-Turkish aid, Mr. Acheson voiced the
outlines of what became the Marshall Plan in a
speech on May 8, 1947. His speech, he said, was a
"reveille" to the American people to
avert the economic collapse of Western Europe and
to prevent its falling into the Communist orbit.
Officially, General Marshall was father to the
European Recovery Plan, but there is little doubt
that Mr. Acheson, with Will Clayton, a State
Department official, did most of the work.
The Marshall Plan, in the view of historians
such as Louis J. Halle, contributed to the Berlin
blockage and Soviet absorption of Czechoslovakia
in 1948. Stalin, this argument holds, saw the
plan as a design to plant American influence and
military power in Western Europe, and he reacted
by tightening his vise on Eastern Europe.
For 18 months after the Marshall Plan was
offered, Mr. Acheson was out of the State
Department at his request to return to a more
financially rewarding law practice. "I was
tired," he explained. In this period,
however, his personal relationships with the
President and other leading Washington figures
continued to be close. And he was back as Mr.
Truman's Secretary of State in January, 1949.
Stating his feelings about Communism in his
confirmation hearings, Mr. Acheson said:
"It is my view that Communism as a
doctrine is economically fatal to a free society
and to human rights and fundamental freedom.
Communism as an aggressive factor in world
conquest is fatal to independent governments and
to free peoples."
Although such a statement might appear to be
unequivocal evidence of Mr.Acheson's
anti-Communism, it failed to satisfy many on the
far right, including Senator McCarthy, Senator
William F. Knowland, the Republican leader,and
Representative Richard M. Nixon, then aspiring to
national prominence. And he was hectored for four
years as an insufficiently sterling anti-Red.
The China affair, especially painful to Mr.
Acheson, was touched off in the summer of 1949 by
a 1,000-page White Paper designed to explain the
victory of the Communists despite more than
$2-billion of American assistance to Chiang
Kai-shek. The Acheson document described the
Chiang regime as "corrupt, reactionary and
inefficient," and added:
"The unfortunate but inescapable fact is
that the ominous result of the civil war in China
was beyond the control of the government of the
United States. Nothing that this country did or
could have done with the reasonable limits of its
capabilities could have changed that result. . .
. It was the product of internal Chinese forces,
forces which this country tried to influence but
could not."
The attack on Mr. Acheson (and, through him,
on General Marshall, who had tried to compose
Chiang-Communist differences) was fueled largely
by the China Lobby, Chiang's vociferous partisans
in this country. And the cry was taken up by
Senators McCarthy and Knowland and others who
insisted that State Department aides had been
covertly sympathetic to the Communists.
The attack produced more headlines than
substance, but it bedeviled Mr. Acheson's years,
and left many convinced that Chiang was a victim
of American perfidy. Mr. Truman, however, was
stout in his defense, retorting to one ouster
demand by saying, "Communism--not our
country--would be served by losing Dean
Acheson."
The attacks "of the Primitives," as
he termed them, made it seem that Mr. Acheson was
insensitive to Asia. But it was he who
established the policy of nonrecognition of the
Communist Chinese and supported military and
other aid to Chiang on the island of Taiwan,
where he fled in 1949.
Furthermore, In May, 1950 Mr. Acheson sought
and obtained economic and military aid for France
in Indochina to help battle Ho Chi Minh, thus
setting America's fateful role in Vietnam.
"I could not then or later think of a better
course," he said. Additionally, his Japanese
peace treaty contained provisions for American
military bases in Japan.
In Europe, meantime, Mr. Acheson's theme was
to build up areas of strength to counter the
Soviet Union. And under his guidance, NATO, or
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization of West
European nations, Canada and the United States,
came into being in 1949. It was the first
military alliance every joined by the United
States in peacetime.
One consequence of NATO was Mr. Acheson's
renewed interest in West Germany, whose
institutionalization as a Federal Republic he
advanced and whose arming he promoted. He was on
good terms with Konrad Adenauer, the Chancellor,
recalling him fondly in 1970 as "a most
delightful person." The separate German
state was not wholly praised, however. In the
opinion of Mr. Kennan, for example, it solidified
the division of Europe by "arous[ing] keen
alarm among the Soviet leaders."
One of the most troublesome of Mr. Acheson's
problems was Korea, where conflict between North
and South erupted in June, 1950. "Plainly,
this attack [from the North] did not amount to a
casus belli against the Soviet Union," he
said. "Equally plainly, it was an open,
undisguised challenge to our internationally
accepted position as the protector of South
Korea, an area of great importance to the
security of American- occupied Japan." Mr.
Acheson decided that "we must settle
ourselves to the use of force. . .to see that the
attack failed."
His method was to work through the United
Nations Security Council, then being boycotted by
the Soviet Union. The Council called the attack
"an unprovoked act of aggression," and
it was under this authority that American troops,
with Gen. Douglas MacArthur in command, moved
onto the Korean peninsula in a "police
action" to repulse the North Koreans.
Critical of MacArthur
The "police action" was supposed to
be limited, but General MacArthur apparently
exceeded his instructions by pushing the North
Koreans to the Yalu River (when the Chinese
entered the conflict) and had to be recalled. A
storm broke out over both Mr. Truman and Mr.
Acheson. Recalling the episode in his 1970
interview, Mr. Acheson said, "MacArthur was
a jackass. If he'd done what he had been told to
do, the war would have been finished early, but
he wanted to be spectacular, and he loused it
up."
Out of office in 1953, Mr. Acheson was a
scornful critic of John Foster Dulles's policy of
"massive retaliation" to Soviet
actions. "This didn't make any sense at
all," he recalled afterward. "We had
very few nuclear weapons."But he did approve
Mr. Dulles's continuation of his policy of
American shouldering of global responsibilities.
When Mr. Acheson returned to private life, he
commented, "To leave positions of great
responsibility and authority is to die a
little." However, not only was he active in
Washington in the fifties, but also he was a
White House adviser of Presidents John F. Kennedy
and Lyndon B. Johnson. His protege,Dean Rusk, was
Secretary of State in those Administrations, and
Mr.Acheson was often called upon for informal
help. He counseled President Kennedy, for
example, to bomb the Soviet missile sites in Cuba
in 1962; and he backed President Johnson's
handling of the Vietnam war. He was also called
in by President Nixon, with whose Indochina and
ABM missile policie she enthusiastically agreed.
He most recently figured in the news last July
when Life magazine printed excerpts of an
interview with the British Broadcasting
Corporation in which Mr. Acheson said President
Kennedy was "out of his depth" in the
Presidency.
In that interview, Mr. Acheson said that Mr.
Kennedy "did not seem to me to be in any
sense a great man. I did not think he knew a
great deal about any of the matters which it's
desirable that a chief of state or a President of
the United States should know about. He was not
decisive."
In retirement, Mr. Acheson also took to the
typewriter, producing six books,including
"Present at the Creation," an account
of his State Department years that won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1970.
In the last year he wrote several articles for
the Op Ed page of The New York Times. In one,
discussing the publication of selections from the
Pentagon Papers by The Times, he wrote:
"We need a severe Official Secrets Act to
prevent irresponsible or corrupt transfer of
secret papers from the Government to publishers,
a commission of the quality of the Royal
Commission recently created in Britain under the
chairmanship of Lord Franks, to determine how
this present disclosure came about and what laws
and procedures we used to prevent its repetition
and for the faster declassification and release
of such papers."
In the concluding pages of "Present at
the Creation," Mr. Acheson wrote his own
epitaph in these words:
"In 1914 Kaiser Wilhelm II referred to
'Britain's contemptible little army.' When it had
taught him to revise that opinion, its survivors
often referred to themselves as 'the old
contemptibles.' I am happy to greet my comrades
of President Truman's State Department with his
affectionate appellation and assure them, as they
look back upon their service under his leadership
during those puzzling and perilous times, that
they played a vital role in setting the main
lines of American foreign policy for many years
to come and that they may feel in their hearts
that it was nobly done."
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