HENDERSON DELIVERED THE final memorandum to Acheson’s house in Georgetown on Sunday evening. The neighborhood of row houses and cobblestone streets was the oldest in the city; it had been a Maryland village before the state ceded part of its territory to create the District of Columbia in 1791. Georgetown in Acheson’s time was not yet the wealthy enclave it would later become, but many of the nation’s political and diplomatic elite already called it home. Columnist Joseph Alsop lived a few blocks away, as did Philip and Katherine Graham, both future publishers of the Washington Post. Other historic figures would later join the “Georgetown Set,” including Senator and Mrs. John F. Kennedy.
The undersecretary reviewed the material and pronounced it satisfactory. Henderson and his boss both felt prepared for what would be a momentous week in Washington. “At that,” Acheson later recalled, “we drank a martini or two toward the confusion of our enemies.”
As he sipped his drink in the old brick house on P Street, Acheson must have savored the moment. He and his staff had moved with remarkable speed and unanimity, even with the stakes looming large before them. But who was this unruffled diplomat with patrician manners and exquisite tailoring? In another life he might have been a British ambassador, and he even spoke with a mid-Atlantic accent that infuriated his critics. His father had been born in England, and as a child young Dean was raised to celebrate the queen’s birthday.
But Acheson’s latent Anglophilia never clouded his strategic vision. He understood better than most that the United States was poised on the brink of a new era of global leadership, and that it was the only nation that could take up the burden laid down by a faltering British empire. He dedicated most of his life to fulfilling that vision, spurning the life of indolence and ease that his privileged background and elite education would have afforded him.
Dean Gooderham Acheson was born in Middletown, Connecticut, in 1893, son of an Episcopal priest who would eventually become bishop of Connecticut. His father had first emigrated to Canada before arriving in the United States, and there married the Canadian daughter of a prosperous businessman. Acheson enjoyed a happy and stable childhood. He was exceptionally bright and viewed the world around him as a playground ordered for his pleasure.
With little effort, and less interest, he passed through Groton, the austere and forbidding boarding school recently founded for the offspring of the nation’s elite. A free spirit, he chafed at the school’s rigid structure and proved to be a poor student. His classmates relentlessly hazed him, and he once faced expulsion. Only his mother’s intervention kept him in the school.
But Acheson survived his Groton ordeal, and after an unlikely but enjoyable summer spent working on railroad construction in Canada, he entered Yale as an undergraduate student. The New Haven college was far different in 1912 than today. The fact that he had been last in his class at Groton did not deter the admissions office. Yale academics proved to be just as boring to young Acheson as Groton’s, but Dean led an active social life and began to develop the sense of style for which he would become known.
Then Harvard Law beckoned, and the once-freewheeling student found himself enthralled by Professor Felix Frankfurter, the future legendary Supreme Court justice. Frankfurter encouraged him to take law seriously as a field of study, and Acheson began to excel academically for the first time in his life. He later recalled of his intellectual awakening, “Not only did I become aware of this wonderful mechanism, the brain, but I became aware of an unlimited mass of material that was lying about the world waiting to be stuffed into the brain.” Groton’s worst student would graduate near the top of his class at Harvard Law.
After a brief naval career near the end of the First World War, he secured with Frankfurter’s assistance a clerkship with Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis in 1919. Continuing his meteoric ascent, he joined the prestigious Covington, Burling, and Rublee law firm (now Covington & Burling). Acheson gained valuable experience dealing with cases of international law, and built a comfortable life with homes in Georgetown and rural Maryland. The firm’s close ties to the Democratic Party would inspire his next career move.
Government service soon followed. The newly inaugurated President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Acheson undersecretary of the Treasury before his fortieth birthday. He would soon find himself serving as acting secretary during the illness of Secretary William H. Woodin until a policy clash with the White House led him to resign months later.
When the war came, Acheson returned to government as assistant secretary of state in 1941. His portfolio was vast in scale: he managed the all-important Lend-Lease program, and success there led to his influence in the administration growing exponentially. That portfolio expanded in part because of a vacuum of power just above him. The secretary, Cordell Hull of Tennessee, was a consummate politician who conferred with the president regularly, but the Roosevelt administration’s foreign policy was run almost exclusively out of the White House. Cautious and laconic to a fault, Hull rarely dared to challenge Roosevelt’s dominance. (He also suffered from a speech impediment.) Hull’s nearly twelve-year tenure as secretary was the longest in the department’s history, but his longevity derived in part from Roosevelt ability to ignore him whenever he wished. Acheson himself was beckoned to the Oval Office whenever it suited FDR, who had little regard for precedent and procedure. Roosevelt’s reliance on personal relationships may have helped forge alliances that helped win the war, but it also caused no end of confusion throughout the staid corridors of official Washington. Fortunately for Acheson, his experience with Truman’s predecessor proved to be excellent preparation for the events to come.
By 1944 Hull was unwell and resigned his office. He was succeeded by Edward J. Stettinius Jr., whose tenure was brief, undistinguished, and blighted by his acquiescence to Soviet bluster at the ill-fated Yalta Conference. There a sickly Roosevelt succumbed to Stalin’s blandishments, and acceded without protest to the dictator’s dark plans for Eastern Europe. Churchill fought to stem the tide as much as he could, but Roosevelt haughtily dismissed the British prime minister and traded jokes with Stalin at Churchill’s expense. An anguished Churchill said to his daughter that evening, “Tonight the sun goes down on more suffering than ever before in the world.” History recorded the summit as a thoroughly discreditable display on the part of the American delegation. As historian Max Hastings has observed, “It may be true that the Western allies lacked the military power to prevent the Soviet rape of eastern Europe, but posterity is entitled to wish that Roosevelt had allowed himself to appear less indifferent to it.”
Perhaps because of the shame attached to Yalta, Truman wasted little time in replacing Stettinius with his former Senate colleague James F. Byrnes, whom Truman had pledged to support for vice president at the 1944 convention that had so dramatically changed his life. Byrnes was no diplomat, but he was ambitious and determined, and served the new president well—for a time. Unlike his predecessor, the former South Carolina senator had no illusions about the Soviets and fierecely confronted them throughout his nineteen-month tenure. But Byrnes’s ambition—and his belief that the man from Missouri was in the place that Byrnes himself should have been—got the better of him. He began to exceed his authority, and Acheson—now undersecretary—found his management style intolerable. Few in Washington protested when Byrnes was sent packing in January 1947 and replaced with General George C. Marshall, who had just returned from a long and grueling mission to China.
Marshall’s appointment immediately ushered in a more efficient operation at State. A keen spotter of talent and effective delegator, the former general prized Acheson’s abilities and devolved upon him vast authority over the sprawling department. As the nation’s chief diplomat in an age when travel was still an ordeal, Marshall knew the State Department would be in competent hands during his frequent absences. Acheson responded to this grant of authority by venerating Marshall and ensuring that his every move met with the general’s approval. This relationship was key to the speed and efficiency of State’s response to the British notes, and also allowed Truman to operate knowing his diplomatic team was united in its advice.
One of Acheson’s many advantages inside Washington’s sprawling bureaucracy was the great trust placed in him by President Truman. After the Democrats suffered a crushing defeat in the midterm elections of 1946, losing both the House and Senate, Truman returned to Washington to find only one man waiting for him at Union Station: Dean Acheson. This display of loyalty, which came naturally to the undersecretary, made a profound impression on the president. Truman would never forget it, and Acheson would one day be greatly rewarded, in part, for that small gesture.
The “Domino Theory” first posited by Dwight Eisenhower in 1954 suggested that one country’s fall to communism would cause the collapse of others surrounding it. Though discredited by America’s future failures in Korea and Vietnam, the fear of Soviet expansion was even more pronounced in 1947. Acheson reasoned that “if France went communist, Italy and Greece were through; if Italy went communist, Greece was through; and if Greece went communist Turkey was in trouble; and if they all went communist Iran was in trouble.”
Dean Acheson’s decisiveness that day was in character. “Wise in the ways of Washington,” as Clark Clifford described him, Acheson saw the crisis as an opportunity not only for America to assert firm leadership in a new world order, but also for the State Department to take the lead in making policy. The military had been in the lead for so long, having triumphed in the greatest war the world had ever known, that the diplomatic service felt often overshadowed. But what was called for in Greece and Turkey was economic aid and diplomatic finesse. Now it would be leaders inside the Pentagon who would find themselves sitting on the sidelines.