How the West Won the Cold War
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
How the West Won the Cold War Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World By James Chace Simon and Schuster. 512 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor...
...General Omar N. Bradley, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accepted his share of the blame in his memoirs, and so did Acheson...
...This era of uncertainty came to an end when General Marshall was appointed Secretary of State in January 1947...
...But containment was the only way to stop Communism short of a world war, something the Republicans did not want, and the strategy would be the basis of Eisenhower's foreign policy just as it was Truman's...
...Following a series of warnings, China attacked in strength and drove the UN forces back into South Korea...
...Both Truman and Acheson nevertheless received much abuse and little credit for having resisted the advance of Communism...
...author, "A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II" James Chace has undertaken a difficult task in writing about Dean Acheson, who was not only the greatest Secretary of State of this century but the author of a brilliant memoir, Present at the Creation (1969), covering his years in the State Department...
...Chace cannot match Acheson's elegant and witty prose (few could), but he skillfully puts all the pieces of his subject's career together in their historic context...
...If imperfect, it was unavoidable: In a world where only two great powers remained, and one of them was hostile to freedom as well as expansionist in nature, the other had no choice except to establish limits...
...Acheson played a key part, too, in drawing up the hugely successful Marshall Plan for aid to Europe, announced on June 5, 1947...
...Truman and Acheson in particular were singled out for their alleged softness toward Communism...
...Acheson had planned to return to private life, but Marshall asked him to stay on for at least six months—a period that stretched into six years...
...Acheson also served as Assistant Secretary for Congressional relations, which brought him into frequent contact with Senator Harry S. Truman...
...I knew we were met at Armageddon," Acheson later wrote...
...Continuing to work and write for the Democratic Party, Acheson became an early and vocal advocate of aid to the Allies after World War II broke out in Europe...
...Truman and Marshall agreed...
...Its later extension was shaped by events, and by initiatives that Truman and subsequent Presidents of both parties took...
...Before a joint session of Congress, he declared "that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures...
...His crowning achievement, however, came after he succeeded Marshall as Secretary of State in January 1949: Within six months, the Senate approved American participation in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization...
...Rutgers...
...All the President's advisers had been intimidated by MacArthur's immense reputation, and by his political clout in the United States, where he was frequently mentioned as a possible President...
...General MacArthur, smarting from his humiliation by the Chinese, would not countenance this new reality...
...George F. Kennan, head of the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department, was horrified by the open-endedness of this pledge—a view revisionist historians would echo...
...The Administration had verbally drawn a defensive line in the Western Pacific and East Asia, but failed to make clear which side of it South Korea was on...
...Thanks to Frankfurter, he graduated fifth in his class in 1918 and then clerked for Justice Louis D. Brandeis...
...That encouraged Stalin to give Communist North Korea its head—although it seems to have jumped the gun, since the Soviets were boycotting the United Nations when North Korea invaded the South in June 1950 and could not veto the resolution that authorized member nations to assist South Korea...
...Most of the 142,000 American casualties in the Korean War were incurred after the Chinese intervention, a terrible and senseless price that could have been avoided if there had been more fortitude in Washington and less glory-seeking in Tokyo...
...The harm done could not be reversed...
...This won over the Republicans, especially Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, without whose support—the "Vandenberg brand" Acheson called it—nothing could be done...
...Fired by Truman, he returned home from Tokyo to an undeserved hero's welcome...
...Moving to Washington permanently, he formed a close and lifelong friendship with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the third of his four mentors...
...If America did not defend freedom in Europe no one would, he argued, and eventually the United States would find itself alone in a world of totalitarian nations...
...The global effort to limit the spread of Communism came to be known as containment...
...Senator Richard M. Nixon assailed Acheson's "Cowardly College of Communist Containment...
...Things turned sour in December after General Douglas MacArthur—who had in effect won the so-called UN police action with a dazzling amphibious assault behind enemy lines—invaded North Korea and threatened Chinese security...
...The trick was to win over Congress, then controlled by conservative Republicans who were isolationists before America entered World War II and had not yet entirely changed their spots...
...Truman arranged a meeting with Congressional leaders for February 27...
...In that position he helped formulate the postwar economic order, drawing up the charter for the World Bank at the historic Bretton Woods conference in 1944...
...In Greece, a Communist-led uprising was threatening the government, and Turkey was under heavy Soviet pressure to turn over partial control of the Turkish Straits—the Dardanelles and the Bosporus...
...It was not until he came under the spell of Felix Frankfurter at Harvard Law School that he began to live up to his enormous potential...
...He had to settle for Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and soon offended his mighty boss by rejecting on principle FDR's scheme to raise commodity prices by buying gold above its market value...
...Now a political solution was in order...
...No two men could have been more unlike than the unpretentious Truman and the imperious Acheson, yet they got along famously...
...Chace's accomplished biography is a splendid tribute to Acheson, and a welcome reminder in these shabby times that our country was once led by giants...
...The great work began on February 21,1947, when Acheson was notified by Britain's ambassador that his country's aid to Greece and Turkey would end six weeks from that date...
...By the time the United States was prepared to deal, China was not, so the war dragged on fitfully until July 27, 1953, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower finally negotiated its conclusion...
...All that is long past today, and both Truman and his Secretary of State lived to see the tide of public sentiment rum in their favor (Acheson died in 1971, Truman a year later...
...But the Truman Doctrine, as the proposal was quickly named, applied at first exclusively to Greece and Turkey...
...Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history...
...With Truman's solid support, the two men transformed American foreign policy into an instrument that would ultimately win the Cold War...
...Truman felt the same way, and in a week the United States was fighting an undeclared war with North Korea under the UN banner...
...Acheson's toughness saw him through the years of calumny...
...Despite Acheson's patrician good looks and regal bearing, he was not to the manor born...
...Marshall's presentation fell flat...
...Acheson then stepped in with what Chace rightly terms a passionate call to arms, pointing out that should Greece fall, the Communist contagion would spread to Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Western Europe itself...
...Acheson had respected Roosevelt but never liked him...
...An active Democrat, he hoped to become Solicitor General in the new Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration...
...Like Greece, it needed both the economic and military assistance that a destitute Britain could no longer supply...
...Yet even the reviled and mishandled Korean War was an important part of doing precisely that, for it made clear to the Communists the limits of American patience...
...A new commander, the brilliant General Matthew D. Ridgway, ended the retreat by stabilizing the front roughly along the old border between North and South Korea...
...Acheson saw at once that the power vacuum left by Britain's withdrawal would be filled by the Soviets if America did not act...
...But it is an irony of history that the men (including even General Marshall) most responsible for saving what was then called the free world suffered years of slander for their bold decisions...
...He both respected and liked Truman for his modesty, openness and loyalty...
...During the war McCarthyism reached its peak...
...As relations with the Soviets steadily worsened after the War, the United States had no grand strategy for meeting the challenge and reacted unpredictably to each new crisis...
...As a lawyer in private practice Acheson was inevitably a success, but that was not enough...
...The Korean War marked the beginning of the end for Truman and Acheson...
...He was not a gifted speaker and failed to make clear what was at stake...
...The future Secretary was an indifferent student at Groton and Yale...
...the other was General George C. Marshall...
...The conflict was popular initially...
...Vandenberg got right to the point: "Mr...
...Although his father became the Episcopal bishop of Connecticut, at Dean's birth in 1893 he was a simple Middletown pastor...
...Truman's key men failed him by giving MacArthur too free a hand...
...The fate of the Old World was at issue, and American security as well...
...As a result, in 1941 he was named Assistant Secretary of State for economic affairs...
...President, the only way you are ever going to get this is to make a speech and scare the hell out of the country.' That is precisely what Truman did on March 12, 1947...
...He later believed himself to have been mistaken, deciding that the sticking point had been less important than backing the President, but his opposition cost him his job...
...Acheson saw immediately that the challenge could not go unanswered...
Vol. 81 • October 1998 • No. 11
