IN the 1940s, America was confronted with a fateful choice. In the chaos of the postwar world, should it return to the familiar isolationism that would insulate it from dangers abroad? Or should it continue to intervene in world affairs with the awesome power at its disposal? The U.S. chose the activist path, and the man who embodied that choice was Dean Gooderham Acheson, first as an influential Assistant and Under Secretary of State and then as Secretary. Every step that Dean Acheson took was dogged by criticism, and it is a measure of the man that, when he died last week at 78 of a heart attack, he remained scarcely less controversial. Some praised him for his bold assertion of American leadership; others blamed his policies for leading, ultimately, to a dead end in Viet Nam.
With a characteristic lack of false modesty, Acheson entitled his memoirs Present at the Creation. Yet he was not unduly exaggerating. His policies did indeed constitute a kind of creation. During World War II, the U.S. had done little postwar planning. It fell to the Truman Administration to improvise some semblance of international order. With audacious speed, one major-policy decision followed another; in each, Acheson assumed leadership. Economic and military aid were sent, after a strenuous domestic battle, to Greece and Turkey. The Marshall Plan was formulated to revive the prostrate European economy. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created to resist Soviet aggression. When Tito broke with Stalin, Acheson offered him aid. When South Korea was invaded by the North, Acheson urged American military assistance. He took major responsibility for establishing the West German Federal Republic and supplying it with arms.
Gentlemanly Resignation. This spectacular interventionism, unparalleled in peacetime America, could be carried off only by a man of singular self-assurance. This Acheson had—to a fault. His career was a textbook example of the rise of a 'patrician in the snug embrace of the American Establishment. His father was a clergyman who migrated to the U.S. from Britain and became Episcopal bishop of Connecticut. His mother was an heiress, daughter of a family of Canadian whisky distillers. Young Dean attended Groton, Yale and Harvard Law School. He married Alice Stanley, his sister's roommate at Wellesley. He clerked for two years for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who became a fast friend and mentor.
Acheson then joined the well-connected Washington law firm of Covington, Burling & Rublee. From there it was an easy step to Government office. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt appointed him Under Secretary of the Treasury. But six months later he abruptly left office after being outraged when F.D.R. took the dollar off the gold standard. He had the discretion, however, to keep his objections to himself—a fact that Roosevelt appreciated. When another official resigned with an angry blast at the President, F.D.R. instructed an aide: "Tell that man to go see Dean Acheson to learn how a gentleman resigns."