Posted on 10/15/2006 8:18:32 AM PDT by aculeus
DEAN ACHESON A Life in the Cold War. By Robert L. Beisner. Illustrated. 800 pp. Oxford University Press. $35.
Dean Acheson was perhaps the most vilified secretary of state in modern American history. [snip]
History has treated Acheson more kindly. Accolades for him have become bipartisan. Secretaries of state appointed by the party of his erstwhile tormentors have described him as a role model; Condoleezza Rice is the most recent example. Thirty-five years after his death, Acheson has achieved iconic status. This is all the more remarkable in view of his out-of-scale personality, so at odds with the present period, in which eminence seems to be tolerable only in the garb of the commonplace.
The debonair conduct, the bristling mustache, the Bond Street tailoring, the biting wit, the extraordinary analytical skill coupled with a defiant refusal to turn the other cheek bespoke an affirmation of the idiosyncratic over the conventional. Acheson was a man of high principle, whose hero was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., an iconoclastic Boston Brahmin shaped by the 19th century, and whose best friend was Felix Frankfurter, the brilliant son of Jewish immigrants.
[snip] That senior officials must remain blandly obliging while their veracity or honor is being systematically challenged was never part of the Acheson code. This explains the scene, unimaginable today, when Acheson, in the author’s words, at a hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee, admonished Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska not to shake his dirty finger in his face. When Wherry persisted, Acheson rose and launched a roundhouse swing at the senatorial gadfly, which was stopped at the last moment because Adrian Fisher, the le
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
And unlike many Republicans, too. Don't forget some of the most prominent Repubicans of the day, including Sens. Javits and Hatfield were against the war.
This is not true. Acheson, like almost all Democrats and the liberal media, strongly supported the Vietnam War until 1968. He was one of the "wise men"(senior Democrats who advised Johnson). In early 1968 he immediately did a complete turnaround and opposed the war along with the other "wise men". The media(Walter Concrite for example) almost immediately followed. The Best and the Brightest who set the policy for Viet Nam almost all had strong ties to Dean Acheson.
Unlike many Democrats, Dean Acheson is known for his support of Alger Hiss.
Hiss was a successful -- very successful -- mole. By definition he managed to fool his colleagues and his bosses including Acheson.
Hiss's success with Acheson doesn't negate Acheson's very strong anti-communism in his official role as Secretary of State.
Acheson stated in 1950 that South Korea was "outside the US defense perimeter" which was taken by some in North Korea (and Russia and China) to mean that the US wouldn't defend South Korea.
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