Acheson's Bedside Memoir
GROSE, PETER
Waiters Writing ACHESON'S BEDSIDE MEMOIR BY PETER GROSE Now that he has finally succumbed to the pressure to relate his own story of the postwar years, Dean Acheson has produced in Present at...
...He appears on the defensive only in reference to his National Press Club speech of January 12, 1950...
...he simply lets his past words and actions speak for themselves...
...Although he repeatedly questions the wisdom of what he calls "the American attitude of missionary evangelicism in foreign policy," when he comes to those days of February 1947, his own account confirms the claim of recent critics that it...
...We relive Acheson's agony over Alger Hiss, and learn that during the awkward moments when the Secretary and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy were alone together-It happened only once, in an elevator-not a single word passed between them...
...Richard J. Barnet, in his excellent polemical book published last year, Intervention and Revolution, observes that at the crucial policy meeting of February 26, Acheson "did not talk about Greece, the rebels or the decline of Britain...
...Assistant Secretary of State from 1941-45, Undersecretary from 1945-47, and highly influential Secretary from 1949-53-acheson has recreated a bygone era of diplomacy, when the central issues were European...
...The wife worried continually, and harassed her husband, over the dangers to which this exposed their daughter...
...Waiters Writing ACHESON'S BEDSIDE MEMOIR BY PETER GROSE Now that he has finally succumbed to the pressure to relate his own story of the postwar years, Dean Acheson has produced in Present at the Creation (W...
...The pivotal conferences Acheson attended-described with witty and illuminating detail-were in London, Paris or Lisbon, rather than Guam, Wake Island or Bangkok...
...Acheson takes no notice of such criticism...
...Acheson makes no attempt to spell out why he believes they were...
...He is proud of his stewardship and intends his book to be inspirational...
...His was the real Cold War, not the artificial extension of it to other battlefields, around which the most profound analytical criticism now swirls...
...the underdeveloped Third World hardly mattered to him...
...But they are invariably brightened by anecdotes of high diplomacy and telling personal portraits...
...Thus, Barnet comments, "with an 'or,' Acheson took a massive intellectual leap and lumped two quite different political phenomena...
...it was my task to bring it home...
...It was a period, he archly observes, when the Administration was capable of handling more than one crisis at a time...
...For the United States to take steps to strengthen countries threatened with Soviet aggression or Communist subversion was to protect the security of the United States...
...Or did it matter...
...Only in passing does Acheson note that some Soviet experts questioned whether the world revolution was really Stalin's aim by then...
...It was summed up, I said, by the story of the family with the beautiful young daughter who lived on the edge of a large army camp...
...Today, detachment and objectivity seem to me less important than to tell a tale of large conceptions, great achievements, and some failures, the product of enormous will and effort...
...A decade and a half later," he asserts in a footnote, "a school of academic criticism has concluded that we overreacted to Stalin, which in turn caused him to overreact to policies of the United States...
...The hard facts are already out...
...For the rest, there are no apologies...
...One afternoon the husband found his wife red-eyed and weeping on the doorstep...
...In 1950, three years after that meeting, the Secretary was the main force behind the drafting of a basic strategic document labeled nsc-68, calling for the worldwide establishment of "situations of strength" to prevent Soviet expansionism...
...he talked about the Soviet Union...
...Anyone expecting to skim the text or read it through the index according to familiar names and incidents is hereby forewarned...
...avoiding all but a minimum of retrospective judgments on the policies pursued during his State Department years, he has deprived it of an important value...
...The memoir weaves its way in realistic, if sometimes realistically incoherent, chronology through events long forgotten by all except the participants and historians...
...A mere five years ago, he says, he forswore the writing of this memoir...
...Urbane and relaxed beyond the battle, the author steps back from dogmatic self-righteousness in discussing the quotation from which he chose his memoir's title...
...Given Acheson's declared intentions, this cavalier dismissal of current arguments may be permissible enough...
...Also cautioned are those in search of controversy, or seeking a thoughtful entry into the argument now joined over this country's Cold War policies...
...The mounting tension caused by General MacAr-thur's panic, insubordination and ouster, is similarly conveyed with drama and vividness...
...Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east...
...Unfortunately, they do not make the strongest case for his position or inspirational purpose...
...His narrative indicates that he was little concerned with the ambiguity of the Greek revolt and the nature of its Communist support (Stalin...
...And where today the Secretary of State and the Soviet Foreign Minister call each other "Bill" and "Andrei," in 1951 it took the urging of UN Secretary General Trygve Lie to move Acheson and Vishinsky into casual conversation at a diplomatic reception...
...whether the image is rotten apples or dominoes, American foreign policy had acquired a new theme, which Acheson passed on to his heirs...
...We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only...
...was Acheson himself, as Undersecretary of State, who injected the missionary and ideological element into the emerging policy toward the Greek Civil War...
...Nevertheless, it is bound to disappoint a reader who turns to Present at the Creation for enlightenment on whether the "enormous will and effort" were rightly spent...
...that was subsequently-but, he insists, wrongly-taken as a disclaimer of any intention to defend South Korea with American forces...
...Tito...
...The Russians were out to 'encircle' Turkey and Germany...
...In a way," Acheson explains, "this volume is an attempt to do just that, for those who acted in this drama did not know, nor do any of us yet know, the end...
...The worst had happened, she informed him: their daughter was pregnant...
...He blandly retorts, "This may be true," and then adds: "Fortunately, perhaps, these authors were not called upon to analyze a situation in which the United States had not taken the action which it did take...
...the usefulness of Acheson's narrative is in its demonstration of how a man copes with problems of foreign policy that are beyond any single individual's capacity to solve...
...Far from explaining his "massive intellectual leap," he states it with pride: "When we convened the next morning in the White House to open the subject with our Congressional masters, I knew we were met at Armageddon...
...The result is a diplomatist's bedside book, to be dipped into at leisure and savored for its elegance of thought, its grace of style and the flavor of the times...
...But recent experiences "have brought the country, and particularly its young people, to a mood of depression, disillusion and withdrawal from the effort to affect the world around us...
...In his recapitulation of the controversial few days leading up to the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine, for example, Acheson is on shaky ground...
...It would also carry infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe...
...After the deed was done, Acheson recalls, "the President asked me to give my impression of the events of the last few days...
...No time was left for measured appraisal...
...The Soviet Union was playing one of the greatest gambles in history at minimal cost...
...In the past 18 months, I said, Soviet pressure on the Straits, on Iran and on northern Greece had brought the Balkans to the point where a highly possible Soviet breakthrough might open three continents to Soviet penetration...
...It was King Alphonso X of Spain who wrote in the 13th century, "Had I been present at the creation I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe...
...Acheson adds C. V. Wedgwood's reflection that "History is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect...
...These Congressmen had no conception of what challenged them...
...Wiping his brow, he said 'Thank God that's over!'" Acheson's overall judgment on the immediate postwar era he was responsible for is indicated in his opening comment...
...W. Norton, 798 pp., $12.50) an extraordinary personal epic of one man's odyssey through the fabric of foreign affairs...
...Determined to tell it like it was, he has imparted the virtue of immediacy to his account...
...He calls the argument "stultifying" and "sterile"-but it rages with vigor two decades later...
...For his own reasons, Acheson has decided not to do battle on the issue at present...
...We and we alone were in a position to break up the play...
Vol. 52 • November 1969 • No. 22
