Acheson Country

...Acheson Country, as I said, is neither Literature nor History...

...Have you any other questions...

...And for the student of the news it offers a gentle lesson: how once our leaders—well, some of them, at any rate—were aristocrats of style, and sometimes of birth, the confortable inheritors of power, discretion, moral example and dread responsibility, who knew how' to step on the stage with aplomb, and leave when the curtain began to descend...

...The accent, of course, was unique: a vigorous blend of the Connecticut Valley, Canada, and England, with a touch of the Middle Atlantic in the vowels, destined to infuriate his enemies in the Senate...

...And, it should be added, they personify the vital difference between the bad old political culture of Acheson's time, and the new, improved, diverse, multicultural, sensitized, total-quality-management philosophy of our own—the downward spiral of national statecraft...

...In a sense, it is encouraging that even so blithe a memoir as this could be published, much less written, in our time...

...His skepticism about post-colonial Africa—mortifying to somany of his friends and admirers—was brutally correct, of course, as was his horror at the breakdown of the postwar bipartisan consensus in Vietnam...

...this was, after all, a president who publicly wore a cape and pince-nez, favored bow ties, smoked his cigarette in a holder, and spoke English with an accent unheard before or since...

...This is a life in which religion is a private affair, even for a bishop's son, an idea to be wrestled with and fixed with a cold eye...

...I suppose that my ill-defined hostility to Warren Christopher is grounded in my very brief service some fifteen years ago as a speechwriter for him and his patron Cyrus Vance...

...I assume it was the late Brenda Frazier, whose picture appeared on the cover of Life, not Time...

...It tells several anecdotes, retells some others, illuminates many shadows, fills in gaps, and answers numerous questions no scholar would ask: What was it like to ride a horse in Acheson's company, sing Christmas carols in his Georgetown home, spend an afternoon on his rugged Maryland farm, clearing brush or making chairs, share an afternoon cocktail with Felix Frankfurter and friends...

...Roosevelt saw nothing unusual in the bilious brahmin Acheson...

...The author of this book, with various relatives and friends, sat in attendance, and offered some brief, amusing, appreciative words...

...And the clothes: lots of tweed, firmly knotted neckties from J. Press, linen in the summer, chalk stripes in winter, stiff (but not too stiff) collars, gray homburg for greeting the president at Union Station...

...Matthew beginning with verse 34...

...As a speaker, he was fortunate to have lived in the waning years of an epoch when occasional Latin phrases or fictional allusions did not send reporters scurrying to Bartlett's...

...M uch has been made, for example, of Acheson's mysterious dislike for Franklin Roosevelt and fealty to Harry Truman...

...The postmaster general was there in his splendor, along with assorted bureaucratic subordinates...

...Acheson himself offered a self-serving explanation in his memoirs, but we know better...

...Having observed the horrors of Democratic policymaking up close, I was allowed on this occasion to watch Christopher at some distance, both spiritual and physical...

...To convey his anguish about his colleague Alger Hiss—the knowledge that Hiss was a traitor while Acheson was a gentleman—he had only to refer his interrogators to "the 25th chapter of the Gospel according to St...

...It is impossible to imagine what he would have made of this year's Clinton/Christopher expedition to the Balkans, or the earlier Carterian devotion to appeasement, which gave us the Sandinistas, the Ayatollah, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and a calamitous nuclear disadvantage in Europe...

...At second glance, he has the look of an Indian on exhibit at the Smithsonian: Chief Warren, of the now-extinct Christopher tribe, who was brought to the capital in 1910 to be examined but died in the harsh winter of 1911, was embalmed, and whose brown, waxy, deeply-lined countenance (clothed in western garb) now stares out at visitors in the final month before he is moved off display and buried with dignity in his ancestral lands...

...This is neither a work of great literature nor a definitive portrait, but makes compelling reading in the ahistorcal, all-night-pizza Washington of the Clinton era...

...Truman was lucky to have gambled on Acheson, just as he was smart to rely on George Marshall...

...The world to which we are cautiously introduced—the early-rising, tennis-playing, novel-reading WASP upper-middle class—is by no means so moribund as journalists like to think, but its valiant tradition of duty and service, combined with its code of high-minded comfort, has been beaten about the head a great deal, like its most recent exemplar, George Bush...

...At which point the assemblage—to my surprise, at any rate—was treated to a speech from Acheson's latest successor...

...But Truman, surrounded as he was by Kansas City yes men and ward heelers from the grimiest precincts in the East, found this character from a Marquand novel an adornment...

...This is a realm in which the secretary of state retires to the country for the weekend to think, rather than fix his face with pancake for a chat with Cokie Roberts...

...It was not for nothing that Truman left Acheson alone, asking only to be properly consulted and advised, a courtesy Acheson was born to observe...

...It does what it purports to do—describe Life with Father when Father was the architect of postwar foreign policy—and does it to the satisfaction of anyone who ever looked at a/ recently happened to attend a brief, slightly comical ceremony at the State Department: the unveiling of the 29-cent Dean Acheson commemorative stamp...

...What, I wondered, was the essential difference between Dean Acheson and Warren Christopher—apart, that is, from their obviously divergent views of the world, diplomacy, and American power...

...Here is a place where people resign on principle, children are taught to swim in cold water, poems are memorized, presidents of Yale are selected by discussion, puns are exchanged, horses are broken, uncles are eccentric, money is acquired but not needlessly expended...

...a formidable postal employee bellowed the national anthem...

...But Acheson, it should be said, was the better judge of character, principle, crisis, and intent...

...His was a flourishing, reddish, ostentatious affair, brushed up on the ends and waxed with Pinaud's, the sort of thing a Hollywood British general might possess...

...I mention all these superficial aspectsof Dean Acheson by way of leading up to this fair-minded, amusing, and affectionate memoir by his son, a prominent Washington lawyer and distinguished public servant...

...It is nonetheless a beguiling thing to read, a satisfying visit to a place we don't know...

...The reason, to be sure, is simple: FDR and Acheson were birds of a feather—Roosevelt knew hundreds of Achesons all his life—while Truman was beguiled by his courteous, dutiful, industrious Groton-, Yale-, and Harvard-educated subordinate...

...The answer, of course, is obvious: Acheson was a character, vivid and unabashed, with the courage of his principles, while Christopher is a frightened apparatchik, embarrassed by his countrymen and too ashamed to fight...

...His voice was low without being too basso, pitched somewhere in the south middle range, finely modulated to the moment, conveying an air of amiable superiority or natural command...

...This, however, is the background, the subtext, of Acheson Country...

...David Acheson is drawn to appear supremely foolish, but the identity of his companion, whose behavior is disgraceful, is gallantly protected from the 'curious modern reader...

...Not only was Acheson a vivid symbol of American foreign policy at a time when it was being re-invented, but he also possessed the ability to articulate exactly what he meant, regardless of the vagaries of public opinion or congressional caprice, and the instinct to stick to the rules he understood...

...Unlike his predecessors Elihu Root and Henry Stimson, Dean Acheson did not sport a simple, discreet silver-gray accoutrement to his curled upper lip...

...The world that he made was dismembered in his lifetime, but painstakingly reconstructed during the past dozen years...

...The author tells a story that is typically in form, and readily convertible to the 1930s screen: a disastrous "date," while summering in Murray Bay, involving a debutante, the family Packard, and a downhill gravel drive...

...Then there were the eyebrows: thick, beetly, furrowed for emphasis, irony, playfulness, or anger...

...At first glance, he appears to be a character in one of those low-budget cartoons of the 1960s—"Clutch Cargo," for instance—where the figures are inert but the eyes and lips move...

...Only a Marxist would fail to understand how opposites attract, prima donnas trade insults, and the ways of the world are ruled by human nature...

...Acheson, it is often said, did not suffer fools gladly, largely because to have done so would have been catastrophic, and partly because the kinds of fools who now govern us were utterly alien to the universe he inhabited...

...It seeks neither to explain Dean Acheson to posterity nor furnish details for the psychobiographer...