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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."