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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.