The Good Shepherd

Dean Acheson was more than "present at the creation" of the Cold War; he was a primary architect. Although, as is the case with Scripture, there is more than one version of creation, the dapper dean of diplomacy was a major player in all of them. Undersecretary of state to George Marshall and then Harry S. Truman's fourth and final secretary, Acheson served as principal implementer of the early containment policy, presiding over the British Loan, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the rehabilitation of Japan, NSC-68, and the Korean War. In this exhaustively researched and finely written book, Robert L. Beisner has give us what must surely be the definitive study of one of America's most important diplomats.

Acheson was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, not sterling silver, Beisner quips, but silver nonetheless. His mother Eleanor Gooderham was the daughter of a wealthy banker and distiller from Toronto. She married Edward Campion Acheson, an Episcopal priest who eventually rose to become bishop of Connecticut. All was set for the breeding of a typical New England aristocrat. Acheson's tenure at Groton and Yale was quite FDR like—partier, prankster, he was somewhat aloof but still popular with his classmates. Acheson's famous arrogance—he disdained the curriculum at Yale as focusing on memorizing subjects already known or not worth knowing more about—was early apparent. At Harvard Law, however, he was swept away by the intellect of Felix Frankfurter and finished fifth in his class.

Shortly after enlisting in the National Guard in 1917, Acheson married Alice Stanley. They shared the same social class and interests in painting and politics. She would serve as a stabilizing influence during their long, traditional marriage. The union produced three children: David, Jane, and Mary. After Frankfurter secured a clerkship for his protégé with Louis Brandeis, the young couple moved to Washington where they lived for the rest of their lives. In 1921 Acheson left Brandeis's service to join the firm of Covington, Burling and Rublee, a major counselor to corporations and foreign governments.

Acheson began and ended his political life as a Democrat. He acquired his pro-labor views, and his social conscience in general, from his clergyman father. His prejudices—and they were there—had to do with class and education, not race. He would support black Americans in their drive for equality and opportunity; that two of his three great heroes—Frankfurter, Brandeis, and Oliver Wendell Holmes—were Jews spoke to the absence of a prejudice that was so common to his generation.

Bright and well connected, Acheson jumped on the Roosevelt bandwagon early, and for his services was named undersecretary of the treasury in 1933. As it turned out, he could not stand prosperity. After confronting FDR over devaluation—the president famously terminated the meeting with "That will do!"—Acheson resigned. The brilliant young lawyer was too smart for Roosevelt to permanently bar him from public service, however, and World War II saw him in a number of important bureaucratic posts. The epitome of an internationalist/interventionist, Acheson helped draft the lend-lease legislation. Bouts with isolationists in Congress left him deeply ambivalent about the impact of public and legislative opinion on foreign policy. Acheson favored a hard line toward the Japanese and thought Roosevelt somewhat pusillanimous in this respect, although this time he kept his views to himself. By the close of the war, he was running economic affairs for the State Department. He was a thoroughgoing multilateralist—like Britain in the nineteenth century, the United States must lend on liberal terms—and he battled nationalists over the Bretton Woods agreements. He insightfully observed of treasury chiefs Henry Morgenthau and Harry Dexter White that they wanted World War II to end with both enemies and allies "prostrate—enemies by military action, allies by bankruptcy" (p. 19). Acheson held Cordell Hull and Edward Stettinius in mutual contempt, referring to the latter as "Snow White...