Acheson

...But China was convulsed by a terrible civil war between Nationalist and Communist forces, respectively led by Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung...

...Acheson was born on April ii, 1893, the son of an Episcopal clergyman who in 1915 JOSEPH SHATTAN is a Bradley Fellow at the Heritage Foundation writing a book tentatively titled Heroes of the Cold War...

...Culture Vultures/Steyn...

...And since, after Chiang's retreat from the mainland, the biggest obstacle to normalization with the Communists was the Nationalist base on Taiwan, Acheson practically exhorted Mao to finish Chiang off...

...It was only at Harvard Law School, under the tutelage of Felix Frankfurter, that Acheson discovered what he called "the power of thought...

...For a surprisingly long time Acheson continued to believe that some sort of understanding with Stalin was possible...

...Had Acheson's "realistic" assessment of China's Communist leadership been accurate, Mao would surely not have intervened on North Korea's side, since the last thing China's national interests required was a major war with the United States...

...0 n top of these seething political tensions came the war in Korea, for which Acheson, like almost everyone else in the Truman administration, was completely unprepared...

...Still more unfortunately, Acheson played into the hands of this lunatic fringe by declaring, on the very day Alger Hiss was sentenced to prison for denying that he had passed secret documents to Whittaker Chambers, that "I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss...

...In a letter to Frankfurter analyzing the Justice's character, Acheson noted that Brandeis had not "the slightest faith" in universalistic schemes for mass salvation...

...Although he did, at one point, take a swing at one of his senatorial tormentors, on the whole Acheson bore these attacks with stoic fortitude...

...Acheson's instinctive distrust of highsounding abstractions and universal panaceas—the New Deal, The American Spectator • November 1998 83 the U.N., even organized religion ("I find the Devil easier to believe in than God," he declared in 1967)—led him to downplay the role of ideology in world affairs...

...It is even more ironic that James Chace, in his concise, well-written, and generally admiring biography of Acheson, should argue that the former secretary of state was a quintessentially American figure, since the most striking feature of his statecraft is precisely its "Europeanness...

...became bishop of Connecticut...

...After Secretary of War Henry Stimson, on the eve of his retirement, urged Truman to share American nuclear technology with Stalin on the fatuous grounds that, "the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him, and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust," Acheson was among Stimson's most passionate and outspoken supporters...

...Nor should it be forgotten that it was Stalin's designs on Turkey, not his reign of terror in Eastern Europe, that turned Acheson into a Cold Warrior...

...Unfortunately, some of the loonier elements in American political life concluded that the only explanation for this contrast was that Acheson was harboring a nest of Communist agents in the State Department who were sabotaging our China policy...

...He had already made a name for himself as a distinguished lawyer, prominent Democrat, and high official in Roosevelt's administration...

...Though his achievement was considerable, Acheson's lack of sympathy for the victims of power politics (what Americans today would call his disregard for "human rights") makes it difficult to share James Chace's almost unqualified enthusiasm for this most ruthlessly "realistic" of American statesmen...

...In his "realist" view, statesmen made decisions on the basis of concrete interests, not abstract ideals, and the fact that the Soviet Union and the United States subscribed to sharply opposed visions of The Good Society did not in the least preclude their enjoying perfectly amicable relations on a stateto-state level...

...Even Acheson's friend and Georgetown neighbor, political pundit Walter Lippmann, called for Ache-son's resignation, arguing that it was "impossible to conduct foreign affairs, and especially to conduct wars, without popular confidence in the men who conduct them...

...Everything Acheson did after the Turkish crisis—helping to draft the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and to integrate West Germany into NATO—was designed, in Chace's words, "to restore the balance of power in Europe....This had been his long-term strategy and would be his lasting legacy...

...Forget it.' mer of 1946, when Stalin demanded control of the Turkish Straits, that the veil finally fell from Acheson's eyes, and he realized, as Chace puts it, "that the Russians would not be content with a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, but instead were engaged in a policy of renewed expansion...

...Acheson's "realistic," non-ideological approach to Chinese issues rightly struck many Americans as wholly incompatible with the anti-Communist rhetoric employed by the Truman administration to drum up support for American aid to Western Europe...

...When Acheson issued this scornful (and still valid) appraisal of the United Nations, he was about to become the Number Two man in Truman's State Depai tinent, serving under, and often substituting for, the peripatetic James Byrnes...

...In case Mao wasn't up to the job, George Kennan —who headed the Policy Planning staff at Acheson's State Department—actually recommended that the U.S...

...The United States, he told Winston Churchill in 1952, "no longer felt, as it had in January 1950, that there was any 84 November 1998 The American Spectator real possibility of inducing Chinese Titoism in the foreseeable future...

...Despite his change of heart toward Communist China, to many Americans Acheson's "Cowardly College of Communist Containment" —to quote Congressman Richard Nixon's felicitous formulation—was somehow responsible for everything that had gone wrong in the world...

...It is ironic, however, that a principal architect of that victory, Dean Gooderham Acheson, was a self-styled "realist" who had little use for public moralists —"Christers" he called them—and who deeply admired Cardinal Richelieu, the seventeenth century French statesman who embodies the cynical, amoral approach to international affairs that Americans have generally abhorred...

...I watch his smart-aleck manner and his British clothes and that New Dealism in everything he says and does, and I want to shout, 'Get out, get out...

...Some of Brandeis's skepticism may have rubbed off on Acheson, for in 1946, when nearly all Americans regarded the newly launched United Nations as the world's best hope for peace, Acheson sharply questioned the new organization's value...

...It followed that those who sought to divine Soviet political purposes from the regime's ideological pronouncements were mistaking shadows for substance...

...There aren't any...

...It was not until the sum-44 Fears of Stalin, he said, were 'hobgoblins under the bed...

...Acheson's dismissive attitude toward Communist ideological pronouncements is sharply at variance with his public image as the quintessential Cold Warrior...

...Acheson drew the obvious conclusion...

...As his friend and fellow Yalie, Archibald MacLeish, put it, "The Acheson who had been scornful of zeal was now full of zeal—zeal for the law...

...From Groton it was on to Yale, where Acheson distinguished himself more for his wit and joie de vivre than for any academic attainments...

...He therefore opposed Winston Churchill's call for an Anglo-American alliance, fearing that such a grouping might give Stalin the (false) impression that the Anglo-Saxon powers were ganging up on him...

...The Communists would be criminally crazy," he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1950, "if they did not put an end to [Chiang's island bastion] just as soon as possible...

...Acheson personally never took this rhetoric too seriously, but nonetheless employed it, he explained, because sometimes it was necessary to make matters "clearer than truth...

...But Mao was a Communist, not a nationalist, and he acted in accordance with his ideological convictions...

...I am told," he said, "that the way to solve this or that problem is to leave it to the United Nations...

...You stand for everything that has been wrong with the United States for years...

...As Acheson saw it, American interests did not necessarily require a Nationalist victory, since even a Communist China would, in the natural course of things, follow a "Titoist" path and oppose Russian imperialism...

...Thus, when the youthful Paul Nitze, early in 1946, expressed his alarm to Acheson over a recent speech by Stalin denouncing capitalism, Acheson told him that he was "just seeing mirages...

...At the age of iz, he was sent to the Groton School in Massachusetts, where he performed so poorly that he graduated at the very bottom of his class...

...Yet even his conversion to a hard-line anti-Russian stance was rather belated...

...should forcibly overthrow Chiang...

...But in fact, Acheson was never much of an anti-Communist...

...Characteristically, though, he refused to call himself a New Dealer—arguing that he preferred "to consider specific proposals from the point of view of whether they are practicable methods of dealing with immediate problems," rather than to declare himself for or against so vague an abstraction as the New Deal...

...In Asia, too, Acheson sought to restore the balance of power—which meant strengthening China so that it might serve as a counterweight to Russia...

...He was, however, fiercely anti-Russian, believing that Stalin was emulating the czars in a bid for continental hegemony, and that only the United States could stop him...

...and no more can be expected of this forum for political adjustment than the sum total of the contributions....In the Arab proverb, the ass that went to Mecca remained an ass, and a policy has little added to it by its place of utterance...

...There aren't any...

...Paul," Acheson continued, "you see hobgoblins under the bed...

...As Republican Senator Hugh Butler of Nebraska said of Acheson, "I look at that fellow...

...what mattered was the balance of power...

...Yet sympathy for his ordeal at the hands of the Yahoos cannot alter the fact that, during China's civil war, Acheson was quite willing to surrender the entire country to the Communists, knowing full well that the fate of its inhabitants was bound to be bitter...

...Frankfurter arranged for Acheson to clerk with Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who became (along with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes) one of Ache-son's heroes...

...During the 1930's, he strongly supported FDR's campaign to arm Great Britain, and was favorably disposed to Roosevelt's domestic initiatives as well...

...An American Richelieu and the Limits of Realism Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World James Chace Simon & Schuster /5r2 pages / $3o REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan A mericans have ample reason to be proud of their victory in the Cold War—a victory, above all, for those moral ideals embodied in the phrase "the democratic way of life...

...And then, of course, there was Palestine, where Acheson unsuccessfully urged Truman to abandon the Jews to the Arabs' tender mercies, rather than adopt a pro-Zionist stand that might facilitate Russian penetration of the region...

...For Acheson, as for Richelieu, other people's troubles were none of his concern...

...Forget it...

...When he began his service in the Truman administration as undersecretary of state, Acheson was one of the president's more dovish advisers...

...To be sure, Acheson would have preferred a Nationalist victory, but when he saw that American aid to Chiang was having no discernible impact on his military fortunes, he decided that the most realistic course of action for the United States would be to reduce aid to the Nationalists and reach an accommodation with Mao...

...But it still seems to me inescapable that if they are...united, they are still nations...