Acheson on the Cold War
NEVINS, ALLAN
Acheson on the Cold War Power and Diplomacy. Reviewed by Allan Nevins By Dean Acheson. Professor of American history, Harvard. 137 pp. $3.00. Columbia. University This clearheaded, informed and...
...It was essential from every point of view—economic progress, social stability, military security...
...Acheson is of the fact that the Soviet Government represents a society dedicated to the destruction of our society...
...The President seemed to think lately that a visit from Marshal Zhukov might improve Russo-American relations...
...President Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles keep insisting that the test must be deeds, not words...
...Russia, giving first place to her own perpetuation by military power, devotes an almost equally powerful effort to accomplishing the collapse of all capitalistic systems and states, with the aim of making Communism universal and the Soviet Union paramount over a world of Communist satellites...
...and he presents his own prescription for a leadership to meet the enduring crisis of our age...
...In describing our defects of policy, Mr...
...Acheson correctly refuses to spare the whole people...
...Acheson says, Dulles's threat of "massive retaliation" for a local attack was incredible...
...All of us on the American side of the table left the meeting deeply saddened...
...In great coalitions, as Thucydides once remarked, "leaders are required to show a special care for the common welfare.'' The Senator who last summer introduced a resolution declaring that, if France made no settlement of the Algerian question before the next General Assembly of the UN, the United States should "support an international effort to derive for Algeria the basis for an orderly achievement of independence," was singularly forgetful of this aphorism...
...They will have to be made gradually, by multitudes of persons in scores of segments of national life...
...The largest single section of this book treats of defense...
...Does anybody believe that, in answer to a Chinese descent on Quemoy, the United States would unleash a retaliatory stroke in which Moscow, Pekingand New York— would be destroyed...
...Of course, if the United States keeps the attachment of other strong Western nations from Britain down, we shall have the larger population...
...The answer to that question is the fact that, if Russia hurled bombs on us tomorrow, we would not hesitate to devote every effort, dollar and ounce of resources to meet the attack...
...Acheson cites Government figures which imply that our overseas investment should be at least twice what it now is, and figures by Professor A. K. Cairn-cross of Glasgow suggesting that in the next half-century it should total $600 billion, with the steady reinvestment of all returns...
...Acheson's object in this hard-hitting set of lectures...
...But they will go to war if they think the risks are low, and they labor sleeplessly to reduce the risks...
...But in treating so forcibly his triple subject of the Soviet peril, the defects of recent policy, and the demands to be met by wiser leadership...
...But the problem which France posed for her friends was that she was faced by a rapidly deteriorating condition, and had no policy for dealing with it...
...Can we afford the fearful expenditures needed to make sure that it is ample...
...Nobody can be in the slightest doubt about Mr...
...It is a basic question to which we should revert now that we are emerging from a brief spasm of concern over scientific education without worrying in the least over our fundamental habits...
...But how...
...The Russian dictators say they do not need a war to overthrow America...
...We must have ample strength for deterrence, he says, as he always said while in office...
...No responsible person in or out of the American Government, I said, wanted to remove or weaken French influence in North Africa...
...But the solution came no closer...
...Acheson that, no matter how plainly these lethal Russian aims are explained, not only by antagonists but by the Russians themselves, Americans high and low refuse to believe the truth...
...As in his previous book, the exposition is lighted up by some striking bits of autobiography, placed where they most count...
...But strength is useless unless leaders are at hand to employ it well...
...Winston Churchill was not more uncertain in the 1930s of the malignity of Hitler and the peril of Nazism than Mr...
...The meeting was a long one...
...This was folly, declares Mr...
...It was almost imperceptibly accomplished by the multitudinous decisions of labor unions demanding higher pay, farmers extorting parity payments, Government departments stockpiling metals, and numerous banks and businesses raising rates and prices...
...This is true...
...But, if these nations are really to possess strength, the whole American people will have to take a better attitude toward not merely foreign aid but investments overseas...
...Acheson has a great deal to say about the needs and potentialities of our airpower, seapower and land-power, it is plain that he thinks arms will be ineffectual without shrewd, farsighted leadership...
...His book will not please pacifists, to whom he pays his respects in a searing sentence from Hans Morgenthau...
...Will the United States be leisurely, soft, luxury-loving...
...Not with the dramatic suddenness of decisions after Pearl Harbor...
...It is a matter of the deepest anxiety to Mr...
...The air was cleared...
...But, as Mr...
...He leaves many questions undiscussed...
...Our continuing inflation was not willed by any one group or authority...
...We shall thus decide for or against adequate nutriment to allied societies...
...One great test of our ability to withstand the Soviet assault is just this: How hard will we work in the next three decades as compared with Russian standards of work...
...I spoke of the inevitable outcome...
...Yet our leaders, and indeed our people" close their eyes and ears...
...Here, and elsewhere, broad popular decisions must be made...
...for Russia will toil fiercely and, instead of using technological change to produce more comfort, will use it to swell the savings available for new productive capacity, making it grow in geometrical ratio...
...No American statesman has a better right to be heard on the central problem of our foreign affairs than Mr...
...the worst enemy of the United States has always been drift...
...Acheson, "can seal its fate with a gradualism and apparent inevitability which seems to blind its leaders to the nature of the road ahead, as they were blinded in the years before the Civil War...
...Acheson has performed a notable service...
...he indicts the careless and shortsighted policies which some responsible men in Washington have enunciated...
...Acheson's previous volume, A Democrat Looks at His Party, was equally wise, and embodied a great deal of poignant but patient experience...
...The threat of retaliation against an aggressor will deter if it is a credible threat...
...Russia expects to catch up with the United States in per capita production within a few decades—and Russia has the larger population...
...It would please some readers if he had taken a few pages to consider the problem of protecting civil liberties in a country strenuously devoting its energies to defense...
...Floods of deeds follow, amply explained by torrents of words...
...France is one of our most sensitive allies...
...As Britain once nourished the vigor of the Americas and the dominions by exports of capital, machines and managerial skill, we should nourish that of the NATO powers and uncommitted but friendly nations...
...To this end, Khrushchev and his associates foster confusion and discontent throughout the outside world...
...A democracy," says Mr...
...To this end, Moscow tries to frustrate all attempts to build any international society, through the United Nations or any other agency, except her own international regime...
...University This clearheaded, informed and sagacious book profits by its unity of purpose...
...Politically as well as economically, our salvation in the future will depend on a leadership which binds allies to us and wins the friendship of hesitant nations like India...
...It was held at the request of the French Government and attended by most of the Cabinet and four or five former Prime Ministers...
...it suffered a little, however, from diffuseness of aim...
...and while Mr...
...His description of Russia's aim is unwavering in its realism...
...Then it will be lost...
...He warns us anew of the terrible danger in which we stand from Russia's unsleeping and unconquerable hostility...
...Acheson, who wrestled with it so long and conscientiously...
...It may be a matter of life and death for democracy to get our overseas investment high above the $2.8 billion at which the Commerce Department placed it in 1956...
...For a full hour I laid the situation out, completely and frankly, saying everything the Senator has said, and a good deal he has not thought of...
...He might have dealt with the possibility, so comforting to some, that emergent new power groups in Asia and Latin America, with the rise of a new Germany, may alter and soften the outlines of Russo-American enmity...
...It was plain to us that in the fading of the French position in North Africa this group of highly intelligent and patriotic Frenchmen saw farewell, a long farewell, to all French greatness...
...The road ahead led inevitably to a conclusion which, as yet, Frenchmen were too divided in will and too emotionally involved to face...
...Pointing out that the Senatorial move could do no good and was certain to do harm, Mr...
...Acheson offers a striking page from his own experience: "I wish the Senator could have been with me a little over five years ago at a meeting on this very subject at the Quai d'Orsay...
...Acheson, for fundamentally our relations cannot be improved while Soviet intentions remain just what Khrushchev continually reiterates they are...
Vol. 41 • May 1958 • No. 20
