ACHESON: SPEAKER FOR THE US WAY

Author: By Sam Tanenhaus

Date: SUNDAY, August 23, 1998

Page: C3

Section: Books

The wisdom of the post-World War II strategic thinkers -- the ``Wise Men,'' as they came to be known -- inhered largely in their collective memory of that earlier failure and of the mistakes that caused it. They benefited, too, from the frightening specter of world communism, summed up in the expansionism of Stalin's Russia and in Mao Zedong's triumph in China in 1949. These ominous developments, and the danger of more alarming ones to come, persuaded the American people to override their isolationist instincts and accept a new internationalist role. Next to President Harry Truman, the figure who did most to define that role was his secretary of state, Dean Acheson.

A disappointment of James Chace's biography ``Acheson'' is that he never makes us see how his subject, the model of liberal anticommunism, arrived at his views. We see him grow progressively tougher with the Soviets and more impatient with doves in the Democratic Party, but are given no sense of his grounding principles or beliefs, save what we can extrapolate from Chace's dry recitation of the facts. Dean Acheson was raised in Middletown, Conn., in 1893, the elder son of an Episcopal rector and his wife, and was groomed for respectable success: Groton, Yale, Harvard Law. He moved through their halls without betraying any particular seriousness or talent, though when he came under the tutelage of Felix Frankfurter at Harvard he discovered that he had a mind, after all, and a capacious one at that. He clerked under Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, honed his considerable legal skills in the Washington firm of Covington and Burling, and then joined the stream of lawyers brought into government by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 amid the heady first ``100 days'' of the New Deal.

Why should this privileged 40-year-old have been attracted to the domesticated radicalism of FDR's reform program? Was he shaken by the crash of 1929? By the image of jobless millions? By the rise of fascism and communism abroad and inklings of both at home? Chace doesn't say. He doesn't even mention the Great Depression. We learn only that ``Acheson's views on economic matters were flexible; he was a reformer like Brandeis and was far from being an ideological opponent of the New Deal.''

In any event, Acheson's rise was swift. He was orderly, efficient, industrious, discreet. At the same time, he gleamed forth as the caricature of the ``striped pants'' diplomat, with his Savile Row suits, his Royal Guardsmen's mustache, his erudition and icy Anglo wit. These might have sentenced him forever to a secondary role had not Harry Truman, with his country shrewdness, discovered the truth about Acheson, that beneath the polished exterior lurked a fearless ally, tenacious and decisive, who relished political combat and liked a stiff drink. In 1949, after the great George Marshall wearily stepped down as secretary of state, Truman anointed Acheson his successor.

His mettle was tested instantly. His friend Alger Hiss, accused of spying, had been indicted for perjury. At his confirmation hearing, Acheson refused to disown him. A year later, after two sensational trials ended in a conviction, Acheson blurted out to a roomful of reporters, ``I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.'' These words earned him the sneering epithet ``Red Dean,'' courtesy of the Republican right. ``The primitives'' was Acheson's disdainful term for them. He met their assaults with a hard glare and little more. He was too busy administering the postwar world, his firm hand on the wheel. More or less simultaneously, he helped a crippled Europe back to its feet, prosecuted the Korean War, tamped out continual fires in a divided Germany, supervised the rebirth of Japan in the Far East, ushered in the nuclear age -- and all the while kept Moscow off balance.

Chace, an eminent international historian, records all this faithfully but mechanically. We see everything from too close or too far. One minute we're plodding through policy arcana, the next we're thrashing in the vapors of high summitry. ``Acheson'' lacks the combination of sweep and detail of a true historical narrative and for long stretches is devoid of suspense, excitement, or even tension. His Acheson sleepwalks through the accreted events, and after 440 pages remains as remote to us as he was to his contemporaries. Even the diplomatic themes Chace knows so well are set forth in a monochrome of staff meetings and position papers, with drinks all around at day's end and a plane to catch in the morning. Chace never rises to the political biographer's first challenge, which is to locate the moment in which an entire age seems to seek its meaning through the moral drama of a particular life.

Yet, almost despite itself the book intermittently comes alive. Chace's treatment of the Korean War and the climactic firing of Douglas MacArthur is well-paced and absorbing. The most satisfying pages, however, cover Acheson's later years as an elderly adviser to presidents in distress. There is a fine scene in which Acheson, in the role of envoy, visits Charles de Gaulle at the height of the Cuban missile crisis -- the Cold War's tensest moment -- and warns him that President Kennedy has chosen to impose a naval blockade on Cuba. De Gaulle absorbs the news with grave calm and then, as he shows Acheson the door, says in English, ``It would be a pleasure for me if these things were all done through you.'' One feels de Gaulle's regret that hereafter no men of comparable seriousness will visit from Washington, only callow inferiors buoyed up by power and adventurism.

Acheson, too, seemed to feel lost amid the newer, cruder world. His touching esteem for Truman, the ``little man'' par excellence, derived not only from the history they made together but also, apparently, from a generational bond that withstood superficial differences of region and upbringing. Acheson judged all of Truman's successors coldly, yet served three of them. He did not shrink from telling Lyndon Johnson, when so few others would, that the Vietnam War was unwinnable. And shortly before his death in 1971, he came to the aid even of Richard Nixon, one of his Hiss case tormentors, helping him secure approval for an antiballistic missile system over the objection of Senate doves. In these autumnal episodes one glimpses something of Acheson's grandeur. More than any of his contemporaries, except perhaps George Marshall, he embodied the ideal, long since vanished, of a WASP patriciate that brought to world affairs a combination of hard practicality and high idealism. Acheson, the minister's son, could imagine no higher purpose than to serve, and this made him more qualified to lead than others possibly more gifted.

This truth was dramatized by Acheson's complicated relationship with George Kennan, a subject Chace explores with some nuance. Kennan, the era's preeminent strategic thinker, had a visionary capacity greater than anything Acheson could summon. But it was Acheson who left the deeper imprint. He diligently translated Kennan's proposal that the Soviets could be ``contained'' on the edges of their empire into a workable policy. What was more, he pursued this course unwaveringly even as the primitives howled for his head. It was an extraordinary feat of discipline, courage, and patriotism. And, as de Gaulle understood, we may not see its like again.