Who is dean acheson

In , President Harry S. Truman appointed Acheson undersecretary of state. As a member of the Truman administration, Acheson chaired a committee on the international control of atomic energy , helped formulate the Truman Doctrine , and was highly involved in the formative stages of the Marshall Plan He stepped down from government service in but continued to lobby publicly on behalf of the Marshall Plan. Acheson returned to the Truman administration in as secretary of state and held the post until As secretary of state, Acheson lobbied for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization , supported the expansion of the armed forces through NSC , contested Senator Joseph McCarthy's allegations of communist infiltration of the State Department, and helped secure international support for military action in Korea.

During the Eisenhower presidency, Acheson became a vocal critic of the administration's reliance on nuclear weapons. He later served as an advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and in advised Johnson to de-escalate the war in Vietnam. Dean Acheson died in Grant Rutherford B. The confusion over Acheson's manners has been nothing compared with the controversy over his policies as secretary of state, a controversy that never diminished over the four decades of the Cold War.

It is sometimes imagined in today's forgetful world that the late s and early s were a time of consensus about strategic imperatives. Nothing could be farther from the truth, and no one knew better than Dean Acheson how bloody the battles were. As the principal shaper of American foreign policy in those years, he was attacked from every conceivable direction. But to others, Acheson was the epitome of hardheaded anti-communism.

Senator Arthur Vandenberg saw Acheson as a thoroughgoing anti-Communist hawk, "totally anti-Soviet and. In fact, he was too tough, too driven by anti-Communist ideology, too inclined to confront the Soviets, and too ambitious in his exercise of American power.

At a famous Georgetown dinner party in , Lippmann railed against the Truman Doctrine's expansive promises to defend "free peoples" every-where. Acheson, the Truman Doctrine's intellectual author, loudly accused Lippmann of "sabotaging" American foreign policy.

Fingers were jabbed in chests. And when Republican congressmen less than two years later voted unanimously for Acheson's resignation on the grounds that he had betrayed both China and Korea to communism, Lippmann, the dean of the college of cowardly columnists, joined in calling for Acheson's head. The controversy persisted throughout the Cold War.

In the s, Acheson remained tarnished by Republican attacks and still bore the absurd reputation of being soft on communism. He was shunned as a political liability by Adlai Stevenson during that hapless candidate's two failed presidential runs. Even John Kennedy, though he admired Acheson, would not give him a high-ranking post in his new administration.

Nevertheless, the events of the s and early '60s did much to rehabilitate Acheson's reputation. By the time Kennedy took office, Acheson's foreign-policy legacy had become far less controversial. Nixon's earlier criticisms of Acheson's "cowardly containment" lost their punch when the Eisenhower-Nixon administration proved no more -- and indeed somewhat less -- aggressive against communism than Acheson had been. Among Democrats, meanwhile, Acheson's brand of liberal anti-communism had become the reigning orthodoxy.

When Acheson, as the senior figure in a group known as the "Wise Men," urged Lyndon Johnson in to hold the line against communism in Indochina, even if it meant introducing thousands of American combat troops, he was expressing the near-unanimous view of the liberal foreign-policy establishment. By the end of the s, Acheson stood at that establishment's pinnacle, and when Richard Nixon took office in , the erstwhile baiter of the "Red Dean" assiduously courted Acheson's favor.

By Acheson had become, in the words of Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, "the high priest of the old order. But no sooner had Acheson been rehabilitated than that old order exploded over Vietnam, and Acheson's reputation came tumbling down again.

A new breed of liberals, disgusted not only with Nixon but also with the Democrats' role in bringing America into the war, found the original villains in Acheson, Truman, and the post-war establishment. In , no less a figure than Senator William Fulbright declared that "the anti-communism of the Truman Doctrine" had indeed been "the guiding spirit of American foreign policy since World War II.

Leftist revisionist historians like Walter LaFeber fleshed out Fulbright's argument. In the edition of his influential America, Russia, and the Cold War, LaFeber angrily charged that it was Acheson and his colleagues who invented the original "domino theory," applied with such disastrous results in Indochina. It was Acheson who had consciously refused to place limits on the Truman Doctrine's application around the world. And it was Acheson who had pressed for American intervention in the Greek civil war in , an unwarranted interference in the internal affairs of another nation, justified in the name of anti-communism, that provided the model for intervention in Vietnam less than two decades later.

This revisionist attack by LaFeber and many young liberals during the s resonated even within Acheson's liberal establishment. Acheson's policies now seemed too bold. As Isaacson and Thomas noted in their biography of the establishment, The Wise Men, Vietnam turned liberals into "quasi isolationists; they argued that the United States was badly overextended and had to pull back, that communism was not monolithic, and that its threat had been grossly overestimated.

Difficult but not impossible. Isaacson and Thomas, speaking for the new, post-Vietnam liberal establishment, labored to put some distance between Acheson's policies and later American behavior. Perhaps Acheson in his efforts to win congressional approval for early Cold War policies had employed an overheated rhetoric and oversold America's role in defending "free peoples.

Perhaps Acheson, like the sorcerer's apprentice, had unwittingly unleashed forces that then overwhelmed him. But the key word is "unwittingly. He opposed negotiations until the United States had "eliminated all of the areas of weakness that we can. Acheson also believed the Cold War could, in time, be won. He predicted a future in which "a thriving Western Europe would continue its irresistible pull upon East Germany and Eastern Europe. This would, in turn, have its effect upon the demands of the Russian people on their government.

At that point, Acheson believed, negotiations for the reunification of Germany would be possible and with it "the return of real national identity to the countries of Eastern Europe. Acheson did, indeed, believe the Cold War struggle was between good and evil, a view he wanted expressed clearly in NSC 68, the famous planning document whose production he supervised in The document's authors, including Paul Nitze, asserted that the Cold War was "in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake.

Roosevelt administration as Under Secretary of the Treasury. In , Acheson began his career at the Department of State as Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, a position that gave him a front-row seat to the increasing tensions between the United States and Japan that led to war. In this capacity, Acheson oversaw the U. Truman on January 21, As Secretary of State, Acheson played an important role in shaping U.