Dean Gooderham Acheson

The American lawyer and statesman Dean Gooderham Acheson (1893-1971) served as secretary of state in President Harry Truman's Cabinet.

Dean Acheson was born in Middletown, Conn., on April 11, 1893, the son of Edward Campion and Eleanor Gooderham Acheson. His father, the Episcopal bishop of Connecticut, provided a genteel upbringing which led to Groton and afterward Yale, where Acheson received his bachelor's degree in 1915. During the succeeding 3 years he served briefly as an ensign in the U.S. Navy and earned his law degree at Harvard. In May 1917 he married Alice Stanley. Three children were born to the Achesons—Jane, David Campion, and Mary Eleanor.

From the beginning Acheson seemed destined for a successful career. Possessed of high intelligence, a deep sense of moral rectitude, and aggressive energy, he had in addition the grace of the patrician and the friendship of such distinguished and influential people as Felix Frankfurter of the Harvard Law School and, later, the Supreme Court of the United States.

Following his graduation from Harvard, Acheson became private secretary to Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis. In 1921 he entered the prominent Washington law firm of Covington, Burling, and Rublee, where he practiced for the next 12 years. President Franklin D. Roosevelt first brought Acheson into public service in May 1933 with an appointment as undersecretary of the Treasury. Acheson resigned 5 months later following a disagreement on the President's gold-purchasing program and returned to his Washington law practice.

In 1941 Acheson again entered the government, this time as assistant secretary of state for economic affairs. He remained in the State Department, except for one brief interlude, until 1953. His long and significant record there reflected a practical rather than a contemplative mentality, which attracted him especially to Harry Truman's forthright leadership. As undersecretary of state from 1945 to 1947, Acheson broke with Truman only on the Palestinian question, convinced that the nation was embarking on a unilateral commitment to Israel's defense against the Arab states which could ultimately prove embarrassing, if not costly.

Acheson's most memorable contributions, as undersecretary and, from 1949 to 1953, as secretary of state, came in his implementation of the containment policy from the Marshall Plan to NATO. Despite his achievements, these years in the State Department were trying ones. The alleged loss of China to Communist leadership in 1949 exposed the Truman administration to charges of treason. Acheson, always loyal to his friends and associates, refused to testify against Alger Hiss, then under trial for spying, or to condemn past American policy toward China. These actions rendered him totally vulnerable and roused a storm of accusations such as few commanding public figures in American history have faced.

Upon his retirement from the State Department in 1953, Acheson returned to Covington and Burling, remaining in public life only as a member of special governmental committees, as a presidential adviser, and as a critical observer of men and events. He served in the late fifties as foreign policy chief of the Democratic Advisory Council of the Democratic National Committee. He died in Sandy Spring, Md., on Oct. 12, 1971.

Further Reading

Acheson's own writings are voluminous. Three of his books which develop his views of external policy, politics, and government are A Democrat Looks at His Party (1955), A Citizen Looks at Congress (1957), and Power and Diplomacy (1958). His autobiography, Morning and Noon (1965), terminates with his appointment to the State Department in 1941. Acheson's personal record of his State Department experience is Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969).

No book-length biographies of Acheson have yet appeared. McGeorge Bundy, ed., The Pattern of Responsibility (1952), includes excerpts and paraphrases of Acheson's many speeches during his secretarial years and is a good source of information on his views toward world affairs. The volumes covering the years 1949 to 1952 of The United States in World Affairs (1950-1953), prepared by Richard P. Stebbins for the Council on Foreign Relations, are replete with observations on Acheson's leadership. Also useful is the survey of postwar American foreign policy, William Reitzel and others, United States Foreign Policy, 1945-1955 (1956). Acheson's role as an adviser to Kennedy is discussed in Seyom Brown, The Faces of Power (1968). □

ACHESON, DEAN 1893-1971

U.s. secretary of state, 1949-1953

Controversial Secretary of State

Although considered one of the most successful architects of American foreign policy, Dean Acheson won many enemies by ignoring public opinion. Some blamed Acheson and his policy of Communist containment for American entry into the Korean War. Others such as Sen. Joseph McCarthy accused Acheson of being soft on communism for not having been vigilant enough in protecting U.S. interests in China. Acheson was often pressured by members of both political parties to resign. His Old World demeanor and English attire made him an easy target for those who thought him to be effete and out of touch.

Background

A protege of Felix Frankfurter at Harvard Law School, Acheson first worked in Washington as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis. He subsequently became a partner and a leading figure in the powerful Washington lawfirm Covington and Burling. He entered government service during World War II, when he became assistant secretary of state with the responsibility to help manage the land-lease program, which provided $39 billion in aid to American allies. Under Harry S Truman, Acheson was promoted under-secretary of state in 1945 and then to secretary of state in 1949 suceeding George Marshall. He contributed heavily to both the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, which defined American foreign policy during the early years of the cold war.

Making Foreign Policy

Acheson saw the creation of economic blocs as the remedy for Soviet expansionism and worked to reindustrialize West Germany. Acheson devised the plans to integrate a rearmed Germany into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In Asia he sided with the French in Indochina and saw the split between the Russian and Chinese Communists as early as 1949. Acheson supported the removal of Gen. Douglas Mac Arthur as supreme commander in Korea, mainly because he wanted the resources going to the Far East to be diverted back to Europe. He continued to be a strong voice for a conservative, anti-Soviet foreign policy throughout the 1950s.

Hawkish Adviser

As an adviser to President John F. Kennedy, Acheson increasingly came to be viewed as a "hawk," advocating dealing with the Soviets through superior military and strategic strength. Overruled in his recommendation for a direct strike against the Soviet missiles placed in Cuba in October 1962, Acheson nevertheless argued forcefully for continued U.S. presence in Vietnam.

Source:

Douglas Brinkley, Dean Acheson and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992).

Acheson, Dean (1893–1971), statesman.Born to a privileged background, Acheson attended Groton, Yale, and Harvard Law School. After a clerkship with Justice Louis Brandeis, he joined the Washington law firm of Covington and Burling in 1921.

A conservative Democrat, Acheson joined Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration in 1933 as undersecretary of the treasury but resigned quietly that same year in disagreement over monetary policy. With the onset of war in Europe he became a fervent interventionist and pushed for measures supporting Great Britain. Named assistant secretary of state for economic affairs in 1941, he played an important role at the Bretton Woods Conference (1944), which established the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Promoted to undersecretary of state in 1945, Acheson served until 1947, helping to shape U.S. policies in the early Cold War, including the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Appointed secretary of state in 1949 by President Harry S. Truman, Acheson proved the key builder of political, economic, and military structures to contain the Soviet Union—a Cold War strategy codified in National Security Council Document 68 in 1950. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the decision to build the hydrogen bomb, the American military response to North Korean aggression, the substantial defense build‐up, and the incorporation of West Germany and Japan into the western alliance all bear his strong imprint. Despite his anticommunist policies and convictions, Acheson was mercilessly criticized by the right wing of the Republican party, especially Senator Joseph McCarthy. A man of great self‐assurance and caustic wit, he dismissed such assailants as “primitives.”

Acheson returned to his law practice in 1953 but remained involved in foreign policy issues and vigorously defended the containment strategy and policies he had helped to fashion. When Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson sought his advice, he consistently counseled a tough line until 1968, when he abruptly urged U.S. disengagement from the Vietnam War. His aptly titled memoir Present at the Creation won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970.
See also Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of State; Korean War; New Deal Era, The; World War II.

Bibliography

Douglas Brinkley , Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, 1953–1971, 1992.
James Chace , Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World, 1998.

Wilson D. Miscamble

Acheson, Dean (1893–1971), lawyer, statesman, secretary of state.After holding lower State Department posts from 1941 to 1947, Acheson became secretary of state under President Harry S. Truman in January 1949, serving until January 1953. As a diplomatic official, Acheson held strong views about how, when, and why to use armed force in international affairs.

Acheson was a hawkish interventionist before U.S. entry into World War II. After the war, in 1945–46, he advocated an agreement with the USSR on control of nuclear arms (embodied in the Acheson‐Lilienthal Plan). In 1949, when the Soviets first exploded an atomic bomb, Acheson feared it would neutralize the West's nuclear weapons. In response, he consistently advocated building strong conventional U.S. and NATO military forces. Acheson thought an East‐West war unlikely, but should it occur, he wanted a military that could stop aggression before the Soviets could conquer Western Europe. With some ambivalence, he always favored keeping a powerful American nuclear arsenal, and in 1950 as an adviser he recommended to President Truman that the United States build the hydrogen bomb. He worked to keep the Korean War from becoming a general war, but used the sense of resulting urgency to push for greater NATO forces, including the rearmament of West Germany.

Advising Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon after 1953, he consistently took hard‐line defense positions, especially in the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and the early stages of the Vietnam War. However, by 1968 he became an influential advocate of ending the war in Vietnam.

Acheson's key strategic concepts focused on the efficacy of various forms of power, the importance of “strategic reach” to project the first line of U.S. defense far from American shores, and developing “positions of strength” before engaging in negotiations with potential adversaries.
[See also Berlin Crisis.]

Bibliography

Dean Acheson , Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department, 1969.
Gaddis Smith , Dean Acheson, 1972.
Douglas Brinkley , Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, 1953–71, 1992.
Melvyn P. Leffler , A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War, 1992.

Robert L. Beisher

Dean Gooderham Acheson , 1893–1971, U.S. secretary of state (1949–52), b. Middletown, Conn., grad. Yale, Harvard Law School. He was (1919–21) private secretary to Louis Brandeis , became a successful lawyer, and served (1933) as undersecretary of the treasury until he resigned in disagreement with President Franklin D. Roosevelt 's fiscal policy. Having been assistant secretary of state (1941–45) and a key actor in the Bretton Woods Conference , then undersecretary of state (1945–47), he was appointed (Jan., 1949) secretary of state. Beginning in 1946 Acheson became convinced of the necessity of resisting and restraining the Soviet Union. Under his direction the policy of using foreign economic and military aid to contain Communist expansion, as enunciated in the Truman Doctrine, was developed, and the Marshall Plan was implemented. He also played an important role in establishing (1949) the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Acheson's attempts to dissociate the United States from the Nationalist Chinese regime in Taiwan drew relentless attacks from congressmen of his own party as well as Republicans; his support of U.S. military commitments to South Korea also aroused much criticism. Moreover, his unwillingness to condemn Alger Hiss brought personal abuse as well as attacks on his handling of loyalty and security policy at the Dept. of State. Returning to private practice in 1953, Acheson remained a Democratic spokesman on foreign policy and exerted considerable influence on the Kennedy administration. He wrote A Democrat Looks at His Party (1955), A Citizen Looks at Congress (1957), Power and Diplomacy (1958), Fragments of My Fleece (1971), and three autobiographical works, Morning and Noon (1965), Present at the Creation (1969), and Grapes from Thorns (1972).

Bibliography: See biographies by G. Smith (1972), D. S. McLellan (1976), D. Brinkley (1992), J. Chace (1998), and R. L. Beisner (2006).

Acheson, Dean Gooderham (b. 11 Apr. 1893, d. 12 Oct. 1971). US Secretary of State 1949–53 Born at Middletown, Connecticut, he was educated at Yale and Harvard Law School. He served as a personal assistant to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis between 1918 and 1921, and built a successful New York law practice thereafter. Having briefly served as Under-Secretary of the Treasury in 1933, he became Assistant Secretary of State for economic affairs for President F. D. Roosevelt in 1941, and in 1944 became a key figure in promoting the establishment of the Bretton Woods conference. As Under-Secretary for President Truman, 1945–7, he urged international control of atomic power in the Acheson–Lilienthal Report of 1946, helped formulate the Truman Doctrine of US support for nations threatened by Communism, and was instrumental in creating the Marshall Plan. As Secretary of State he helped in the creation of NATO, but was criticized by Republicans in Congress for what they regarded as his failure to pursue a more vigorously anti-Communist policy in China; and his policy towards South Korea was seen as having invited the North Korean offensive in 1950. He was a strong supporter of the French in Indochina and of the Republic of China in Taiwan. In 1961, he once again became an important influence on US foreign policy as an adviser to President Kennedy. In 1967–8, he became opposed to the Vietnam War despite his earlier staunch support, and called publicly upon President Johnson to end it. His memoirs, Present at the Creation, won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in history.

Acheson, Dean Gooderham ˈæchəsən (1893–1971) lawyer, statesman, and secretary of state, born in Middletown, Connecticut. Acheson served in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration as assistant secretary of state for economic affairs. He was also undersecretary of state (1945–1947) and secretary of state under President Harry S. Truman (1949–53). Acheson was a chief architect (with George F. Kennan) of the Cold War policy of containment and a shaper of the Truman Doctrine (1947). He assisted with the Marshall Plan (1947–48), and presided over final diplomatic negotiations for the North Atlantic Treaty (1949), and advocated a nuclear arms control agreement with the USSR. Acheson advocated a policy of developing “situations of strength” before entering into negotiations with the Soviet Union. He was an informal adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, urging Kennedy to bomb Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962-63) and advising Johnson not to continue the Vietnam War after the Tet Offensive in 1968.

Acheson, Dean (Gooderham) (1893–1971) US politician. He served as Assistant Secretary of State, Under-Secretary, and Secretary of State 1949–53, urging international control of nuclear power in the Acheson-Lilienthal Report of 1946, formulating plans for NATO (NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION), implementing the MARSHALL PLAN, and the TRUMAN Doctrine of US support for nations threatened by communism.

Acheson, Dean Gooderham (1893–1971) US statesman, secretary of state (1949–53) under Harry S Truman. Acheson's desire to restrict the growth of communism was fundamental to the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the ANZUS Pact, and the Marshall Plan.