Tuesday book: A cool head in the Cold War

ACHESON

BY JAMES CHACE, SIMON & SCHUSTER, pounds 25

ARGUABLY, TWO groups of contemporaries stand out in the history of American politics. The Founding Fathers, who invented the US, were of course the first. The second, I would contend, was the set of high officials who served under President Harry Truman in the years after the Second World War. Their achievement was to invent the modern world. They include General George Marshall, George Kennan, Bob Lovett, Clark Clifford, John McCloy, Paul Nitze and - towering above even this august company - Dean Acheson.

Today, less than a decade after its end, the Cold War is almost forgotten. In retrospect, the victory hardly seems worth winning, devalued with each passing day by the pathetic residue of what once was the Soviet Union. But back in 1940s and 1950s, the threat could not have seemed more real. Not only was the Cold War won, the diplomatic architecture that enabled victory remains as the framework of today's world: the Atlantic alliance and Nato; a Germany (now united) anchored in the West; a prosperous and largely united Europe; a democratic Japan, and an America that placed and, despite periodic wobbles, still places internationalism above isolationism. For all of this we must thank those few men in Washington, half a century ago.

Acheson was an American original. The British were fooled by his elegant manners, clipped moustache and mastery of the language into thinking he was one of theirs: a mid-Atlantic Anthony Eden, committed to preserving their Empire and place in the world. After all, his father had been Bishop of Connecticut; he had roomed with Cole Porter at Harvard Law School; in his three-piece suits and homburg hats, he even looked like the Foreign Office's finest. Like the English too, he was a pragmatist. But he was a man of iron intellect and moral courage, who, unlike the English, looked steadfastly forward. Though an anglophile, he saw our problems more clearly than we ever did.

Take his famous judgement that Britain had "lost an empire and not yet found a role". When it was uttered in 1962, long after Acheson had retired, the remark stung with seeming novelty. A decade earlier, when Britain was shunning the European Coal and Steel Community, the forerunner of today's EU, he was already warning that the Commonwealth was no solution, and that not even memories of Churchill would persuade Washington to be accomplice of British efforts to sabotage a stronger Europe.

Happily, a great man has found a great biographer. Chace's is the third biography of Acheson. But it is the most complete, drawing on family records and new Russian and Chinese archives. The narrative drives forward like a novel; the scholarship is meticulous yet unobtrusive, and the prose style yields nothing to Acheson's own in his memoir Present at the Creation.

Creation was the theme of Acheson's career. As Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs early in the war, he led planning for the Bretton Woods agreement, setting up the International Monetary Fund. As Deputy Secretary of State between 1945 and 1947, he helped elaborate the Truman Doctrine, committing Washington to resist the advance of Communism. The Marshall Plan, that most generous act of enlightened self-interest, was formally unveiled by the General at Harvard in June 1947, but Acheson was a driving force behind it.

Two years later, with Truman's re-election, Acheson became Secretary of State and the tempo quickened. Nato was established, Germany was divided, the Soviets exploded an atom bomb, Communism triumphed in China, and war broke out in Korea. At home, Joseph McCarthy emerged. A lesser man might have buckled before the attacks of the Wisconsin senator that he was "soft" on Communism, that he had "lost" China. But Acheson, backed to the hilt by Truman, did not yield an inch.

Their relationship was an attraction of opposites, founded on absolute loyalty and the deepest friendship. Acheson never sought to usurp the ultimate decision. In return, Truman allowed him immense latitude. No Secretary of State this century has had more power, and none has used it with such lasting consequence.

After leaving office in 1953, he continued to advise Democratic presidents. He stiffened JFK's spine in the 1961 Berlin crisis, and helped change Johnson's mind on Vietnam. During the Cuba crisis Acheson was more hawkish than the Kennedys, recommending airstrikes against Soviet missile sites. Even when overruled, he did not hesitate to be JFK's envoy to explain American policy to General De Gaulle. By this time, Acheson was describing himself as "a pampered ghost among the bright new spirits... a sort of Ancient Mariner whose warnings only take on meaning ex post facto". A more fitting epitaph came from the General himself: "Voila un homme" - "That was a man". Given the source, there could be no higher praise.