Word: acheson
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Frank Record." What had caused the disease and the disaster? The State Department's answer, said Dean Acheson, was "a frank record of an extremely complicated and most unhappy period in the life of a great country." The record, reviewing U.S. relations with China back to 1844, prefaced by a 15-page lawyer's brief by Acheson, and displaying some studied flourishes of erudition, added up to a savage indictment of China's Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his regime. Acheson summarized...
...fumbling, vacillating attempts to help Nationalist China, the U.S. had actually spent $2 billion. It was a sum, said Acheson, "of proportionately greater magnitude in relation to the budget of that Government than the United States has provided to any nation of Western Europe since...
...Oriental Munich." This was the end of the tragic China road-but had not much of it been paved with shiny, good American intentions? Acheson argued vigorously that the U.S. could not have done more: "It is obvious that the American people would not have sanctioned ... a colossal commitment of our armies in 1945 or later . . . The ominous result . . . was beyond the control of the Government of the United States . . . Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed that result; nothing that was left undone by this country...
...wait-and-see' policy would lead to ... disturbance verging on chaos, at the end of which the Chinese Communists would emerge as the dominant group." The U.S. did more than ignore Wedemeyer's recommendations. It suppressed release of his report until last week. In releasing it, Dean Acheson gave the Administration's astonishing reason for suppression: Wedemeyer had recommended that Manchuria be placed under U.N. trusteeship, and that would have disturbed the Nationalist government. At the time, Manchuria was almost completely in the hands of the conquering Communists...
Platitudes & Principles. The U.S. asked: What now? Dean Acheson had an answer that was no answer at all. The U.S., he said, was "to encourage in every feasible way the development of China as an independent and stable nation"; it was to stand firmly "opposed to the subjection of China to any foreign power." Moreover, warned the Secretary, if Communist China tried aggression against its Asiatic neighbors, then we "would be confronted by a situation violative of the principles of the United Nations Charter." Pressed to translate this wind into any language meaning action, Acheson was evasive...