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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."