Word: acheson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...mourned over his lack of influence. Memoirs are never a sound basis for an assessment of character, but this is far from The Vantage Point. Kennan is not only more balanced then President Johnson, he is more morose. He lacks the some of historical justification and approval that Dean Acheson filled his own account of this period with, and replaces is with reflective melancholy. That makes it an easier book to read. But, of course, it is very difficult to entertain pleasant reflections on having been present at the creation of a of a monster...
...military response to what was seen as a world-wide Communist challenge. Kennan's influence in the councils of the powerful waned with the departure of his bureaucratic angel, General Marshall. Dissatisfaction with prevailing powers compelled Kennan to retreat to Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies. While Dean Acheson put the finishing touches on his creation, solidifying NATO and arranging the rearmament of divided Germany, Kennan lectured, wrote, and informally negotiated with the Russians over the Korean conflict. He was unhappy with foreign policy, and destined to remain that...
...EVERY bit as committed to rule by an elite as Kennan devised the very policies that drove him from the foreign service. Acheson and others, credited by the revisionist historians of the sixties with creating the Cold War, were very sophisticated (whatever else they may have been, they were sophisticated) men. Their policy led to the solidification of a divided Europe and a bipolar world. It led to internationalization and intensification of Third World domestic crises. In retrospect, Kennan's options were preferable, and, in view of his superior expertise (specific expertise preferable to sophistication) that isn't surprising...
...SOMEONE who used to be Dean Acheson's roommate, Cole Porter has come a long way. In the Grand tradition of hula hoops, the Twist, and Batman, he has become a raging American fad, and, although the Porter fad will probably wear out its welcome with the great American populace as quickly as its predecessors, we may as well drink the wine while we have it, Nunc est bibendum...
...Against this backdrop, America's progressive involvement went through several very separate stages. First Washington acquiesced in the French return to Indochina and then financed the French war there largely for reasons that had nothing to do with Asia but rather, as Mr. Acheson and others have revealed, as the price required to win French participation in West European defense arrangements. (By 1954 that price totalled $4 billion.) But with the Communist victory in China. Washington developed a second rationale, namely, resistance to what was wrongly perceived as monolithic international communism: Peking and Hanoi as mere creations and puppets...