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The U.S. Secretary of State turned his head slowly from one interrogator to another, his slightly bulging, frosty eyes looking down an impressive, beaklike nose. His expression hardly changed, except to break occasionally into a fleeting wry smile. He handled the press conference delicately, parrying questions, articulating carefully in his cornetlike voice.
There was no change in U.S. foreign policy, he said, referring to the congressional squabbling (see above). There was a dilemma, he added, between the great need for as full and as quick public information as possible, and the equally great need for a certain amount of privacy and calm. He remembered once talking about this in a lecture under the heading of “The Bureaucrat’s Dilemma, or Why Diplomats Become Dipsomaniacs.”
Through Washington and world politics last week, Dean Acheson gracefully picked his way, reminding a British journalist of a Velasquez grandee—tall and thin, quietly and elegantly garbed, in appearance, at least, the perfect diplomat. Despite seven years of Government service, many more years as an attorney with one of the nation’s great law firms, he was still something of an enigma, even to his friends. Who was Dean Gooderham Acheson?
Arising with Drums. In the early 1900s, on every Easter morning, an orchestra hired for the occasion would roll into a kettledrum crescendo which just about lifted the roof off the Middletown (Conn.) Holy Trinity Church. It was Gounod’s St. Cecilia Mass. The choir chanted: “I believe in one God . . .” Anda skinny little substitute crucifer, home from boarding school, would tell himself tremblingly: “Boy, I sure do.”
The little boy clutching the cross was Dean Acheson, who came to believe in a number of things: in having a good time, in the importance of Scroll & Key at Yale, in Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. But at the moment he believed chiefly in God and in Father. Father was the rector of the Holy Trinity Church.
Father Acheson was a Scots-Ulstbiuian who lit out from Britain to Canada in 1881. He fought with the Queen’s Own Rifles in the Indian Rebellion, then went into the Anglican ministry. After serving as curate of St. George’s Church in New York, he settled down in the rectory in Middletown. He had married Eleanor Gertrude Gooderham (pronounced Good-rum), of the Gooderham & Worts distillers’ clan; Gooderham money built a 16-room brick house on elmlined Broad Street in which the Achesons lived, and Mother was a social arbiter. But Father ran the family, and off & on, the spiritual life of Middletown.
The Secretary remembers: “Father knew everybody in town—the harness maker, the policeman, the garbage collector … A walk up Main Street used to be an ordeal. Father said, ‘Now come on, Dean, we’re going down to the post office.’ Well, I knew that was a morning shot to hell . . .”
The Golden Hours. “Little things irritated him: you didn’t cut toast—you broke it. Or maybe you didn’t break it, you cut it. Whatever it was, you always got it wrong . . . Father had a great sense of drama. In the Middle Ages he would have been a cardinal.”
From his pulpit Father used to deplore “the duckwaddle or bandmaster’s style of carrying the processional cross.” And when Isaac Wrubel, who owned a clothing store, asked him to take his five sons into the choir and teach them a little religion —any religion—on the side, Father said he’d teach them Isaac’s Jewish religion. “The Old Testament is good enough for me,” he said.
Life on a fashionable Middletown street was happy and uncomplicated. About the only rule was that a boy mustn’t hang on to the back of ice wagons. “So we hung on to the back of ice wagons,” says the Secretary of State, who enjoys recalling the “golden age of childhood.” But Acheson could not help but bear some of the stamp of Father. No one who ever came in contact with the Rev. Edward Campion Acheson, later Bishop of Connecticut, came away without his imprint.
On the street corners of Middletown he talked politics, professing his Republicanism but plumping for such radical measures as workmen’s compensation. Long and vehemently Father argued: “You know that 40 people in the drop-forge plant are going to lose their hands or smash their fingers before the end of the year. I say that it’s just nonsense to say that workmen’s negligence has anything to do with it.”
“From an early age,” says the Secretary of State, “this made me impatient with people who said this step is leading to socialism and the next step will be Communism and the next step will be antiChrist. To my mind the point is, how do you deal with this problem? They say if you do this or that you will end up in socialism. Nuts!”
The Good Oar. The scion of a modest Gooderham inheritance was sent to a primary boarding school in Pomfret, Conn., then to Groton, which left another mark: he learned that he was of the elite, chosen and trained to serve, and to solve problems. With the notion of getting closer to the world, young Dean undertook a romantic, singlehanded journey into the Canadian north woods as cook and handyman with a surveying gang.
At a train stop named Porcupine the gang piled off for a drink of “redeye” at a makeshift trackside bar. Not to be shamed, Dean ordered a slug, gulped it down. Up it came. With his companions, the rector’s son ran shakily for the train, missed the handrail, fell and knocked himself out. Someone on the platform pulled him clear of the wheels. The train rolled off with the gang and his baggage. It took him several days to catch up, but a determined Dean arrived at the north woods camp at last, to spend a summer learning to smoke a pipe, talk like a roughneck, and cope with life in the raw.
That fall he went to Yale, where he rowed No. 7 on the frosh crew. Says Acheson, archly: “Those who row No. 7 say it is the most important place.” He never put on enough weight to row on the varsity, but another old Groton boy and Yale oarsman, Averell Harriman, admiringly remembers the Dean of those days. Says Harriman, with the air of a man making a lasting character judgment: “He was a good oar.”
Dean was also a member of the socially select Scroll & Key and of a number of other assorted clubs such as the Turtles, the Grill Room Grizzlies, the Hogans, the Mohicans, and Delta Kappa Epsilon. Among his friends were Cole Porter, destined to become famous for his Broadway musical comedies, and Archibald Mac-Leish, destined to become the troubadour of the New Deal.
They were bons vivants together at the tables down at Mory’s, Yale’s Whiffenpoof-encrusted saloon. There were holiday trips to New Orleans, and to Japan. It was 1915, and Europe was at war. The golden hours of childhood were long since over in the world, but the fact was hardly noticed by a well-to-do young man at Yale, playing in the afterglow.
Then in the fall he entered Harvard Law School.
The Mustache. Dean Acheson began to get down to business. “I began to see that excellence was something that counted,” he says. “That just a sloppy try was not enough. Edmund Burke talked about the same thing when he wrote that the law sharpens man’s mind by narrowing it. I don’t accept that in quite the same sense, but it is a little like a sharpened pencil. I also began to get excited about what was going on in the world.” Later Acheson wrote a book (never published) on labor law.
On a Thanksgiving Day holiday at home, while still at Yale, he had met Alice Stanley, the Wellesley roommate of his sister Margaret, and had fallen in love. They were married in the spring of 1917, a few months before Dean became an ensign in the Navy and went off to serve briefly at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
It was in the Navy that the Acheson mustache first blossomed. At first it was an off-again, on-again affair. Sometimes it was waxed into spikes. Sometimes it resembled a British hussar’s. For a time during his early lawyer’s career it disappeared. Now obviously it is here to stay, as distinguishing, if not quite so obtrusive, as the cavalry mustachio of Russia’s Marshal Budenny.
“You Can Take It.” At Harvard, Acheson had studied under Felix Frankfurter. It was through Frankfurter that he came to Justice Brandeis as a secretary, and it is busy little Justice Frankfurter who today is one of Acheson’s few intimate friends. Brandeis kept Acheson for two years. He was a tough taskmaster: “If you came close to perfection, you said ‘Thank God I’ve scraped by.’ ” For two years, young Dean sat at the feet of the great legal harbinger of the New Deal revolution. After that he went to work for one of Washington’s top law firms—Covington, Burling and Rublee.
He prospered, bought a 12-room brick town house in Georgetown and a ramshackle farmhouse some 20 miles from Washington. He began raising a family of three children: Jane, David and Mary Eleanor. In 1926, he was made a partner of the firm. He was there in 1932 when the country’s roof fell in.
Back in Connecticut, Father, now 74, surveyed the wreckage of an old economy and lifted his eyes to Heaven. “Brace up,” he said bravely to a church convention. “Keep cool and put your hope for good and all in the grace that has come to you from God.” Lawyer Dean Acheson put his faith in God and in Franklin Roosevelt.
As a reward for his political support, on the recommendation of Secretary of the Treasury, William H. Woodin, he was made Under Secretary of the Treasury. It was one of the shortest jobs he ever held. His legal mind did not approve of President Roosevelt devaluing the dollar, and he spoke out against it. Roosevelt fired him. In a ceremony of Treasury officials at the White House, at which Acheson himself was a stiff-faced participant, Roosevelt handed the Under Secretary’s job over to Henry Morgenthau Jr., remarking pointedly that he hoped Morgenthau’s loyalty would stand up under any test. In a strained silence Acheson marched up to the President, shook his hand and told him that he was happy to have served. The two Groton graduates surveyed each other. Roosevelt gave Acheson a quick, surprised smile. “Well, Dean,” said F.D.R., “you certainly can take it.”
Acheson could take it. He went back to his law firm.
Advocate & Executor. But he remained loyal to Roosevelt. Acheson was one of the torchbearers in the 1940 campaign to put U.S. aid squarely behind Britain and France. He and three lawyer colleagues had written and made public a lawyer’s brief supporting Roosevelt’s right to swap the 50 U.S. destroyers for British bases in the Western Hemisphere. At the urging of Cordell Hull, Roosevelt invited Acheson back into his family as Assistant Secretary of State. Acheson gave up his law practice to take the $9,000-a-year job.
History has not yet made a final appraisal of the period between 1941 and 1947, when Dean Acheson served first as Assistant, then Under Secretary of State. In those six years the U.S. pulled itself out of one great crisis only to slide back into another, perhaps even greater crisis. A crashing historical failure, certainly, was the failure of the U.S. to understand and guard against Russian ambitions. A few men comprehended them and sounded warnings. But Acheson was not one of them. As did many another well-meaning man who was unable to divine the essential nature of Communism and the U.S.S.R., he believed that Communist Russia could be lived with amicably. By the time Dean Acheson had moved from that position he was moving with the crowd.
As Assistant and Under Secretary, Dean Acheson was always a highly competent explainer, advocate and executor of Administration policy. He acted as State’s liaison man with Congress. He helped steer such complex and unwieldy vessels as Lend-Lease, UNRRA, the World Bank, the Export-Import Bank through diplomatic shoals. With David Lilienthal he wrote the plan for international control of atomic power which became the basis for U.S. policy.
When he finally took aim at Moscow, he drew the fire of Russian propagandists, who yelped that some of his remarks were “gross and rude slander.” He helped fashion the so-called Truman Doctrine and warned Congressmen: “This is a dangerous life and a dangerous world.” He planted a seed in a speech at Cleveland, Miss., which, somewhat to his astonishment, blossomed into the Marshall Plan.
Feeling that he had done his duty, he resigned as Under Secretary in June 1947, to return a year and a half later, at the urging of Harry Truman, to the highest position in the President’s Cabinet and the nation’s second most ticklish job.
A Civilized Man. The question now posed is: How will Acheson do in the assignment?
He follows in the official footsteps of other aloof, juridical Secretaries: John Hay, Elihu Root, Charles Evans Hughes, and like them has had extensive experience and a firm grasp of law.
But his course to the State Department has followed a different route from that of Hay, Root, or Hughes, who had a firm belief in a set of established philosophical values. Acheson belongs to a more experimental school. Like his friends, Justices Brandeis and Frankfurter, and their own precursor, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, he is more apt to believe that ethical and legal principles can not be so rigidly fixed; their touchstone is whether an action appears to be good in the light of the needs of the day. It was and is a philosophy generally regarded as “civilized,” and Dean Acheson is in all respects a highly civilized man.
The danger in the philosophy is that it sometimes leads its practitioners along roads without guideposts, and they sometimes get their bearings when brutal experience shows them where they have been wrong. Thus Acheson discovered Soviet Russia’s real nature. The least the U.S. can hope for is that in dealing with Russia he has his bearings now; it can be convincingly demonstrated that he has.
Some of his critics and, in fact, some of his friends, wonder whether the well-trained lawyer has the capacity for more than an impersonal view of people and of history. Some of his friends, who do not question his ability to execute policy, wonder whether he has the imagination to become a creator and formulator of policy.
Sustained Meanness. These were measurements to apply in the future. Acheson had an assignment to carry out a policy already clearly outlined. The policy was to keep a hard eye on the Russian neighbor and to contain him on the ground he had seized. This was not the way Americans usually liked to behave. They liked to be on a friendly basis with everyone, and if there were any differences, have things out and get it over with. But the U.S. was going to have to be unneighborly for a good many years to come. It was a policy which called for wariness, skill and a capacity to meet Russia’s sustained meanness. For this assignment Acheson could be just the man.
He commanded respect on Capitol Hill. Backslapping Congressmen did not especially take to him, but they appreciated his cold competence. They also appreciated the fact that he appeared to stand above ordinary Washington politicking. If he was ever devious, it was a deviousness too subtle for the average human eye. On the record, his methods were straight and direct. He sometimes got impatient at congressional questioning, but managed pretty well to cover it up; only occasionally did his voice become edgy and curt. Once, when he was Assistant Secretary, he spent a whole day under the grueling, stubborn fire of one Senator and never cracked—although when he got back to the State Department, the son of the bishop clenched his fists and gritted to an aide: “That son of a bitch—I could hardly restrain myself.”
The Woodsman’s Pal. The U.S. Secretary of State spends most of his evenings poring over documents in the small, well-worn study of his red brick home, the walls of which are brightened by Mrs. Acheson’s own cheerful, absent-minded oil paintings. The bookcases are stacked with history, biography and international law, a solemn collection in which a book on gardening appears to be an anomaly. But gardening now is Acheson’s chief fun.
Over the years the farmhouse out in the country, at Sandy Spring, has gradually had its face lifted and has become a comely, charming estate with a name, “Hare-wood,” after one of Dolly Madison’s estates. On weekends the Secretary of State manages to get out there with his wife. He finds it a never-ending challenge: his wintertime project is clearing out the woods. Armed with a South Pacific wartime weapon, a sharp, machete-like tool called a “Woodsman’s Pal,” the Secretary works through the woods, slicing through the underbrush. Mrs. Acheson, whom he jocularly calls the “Fire Goddess,” follows behind, piling the brush on a bonfire.
Tough Old Monkey. The Secretary has demonstrated that he also has the kind of incisive mind which can slice quickly and effectively through the Kremlin’s underbrush. He demonstrated that most recently in his handling of Stalin’s blatant propaganda offensive via I.N.S. Correspondent Kingsbury Smith. There might have been other ways of handling the situation besides turning the cold eye on Stalin’s bid.
Other ways were considered. Might it have been a good idea, for instance, to counter Stalin’s offer by accepting the idea of a Truman-Stalin meeting, providing it was held on neutral ground? Behind Acheson’s decision was this thinking: there is no magic in meeting Stalin, because he is just part of the machinery and a pretty tough part at that. Why play their game? Stalin is a pretty tough old monkey who got where he is through the blood of many of his friends.
Dealing with the Russians, “You say to yourself, ‘What are the specific things they are trying to accomplish?’ And then you make it as inconvenient for them as possible. If you had a conference you might say to yourself, ‘We’ve got them now.’ But what about the days after that? You just give them a propaganda sounding board. When they finally see they’re getting nowhere and they know you know they’re getting nowhere, then they come around and say, ‘Let’s talk about these specific things.’ And then you say: ‘Fine.’ “
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