Word: acheson
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...Worst or the Best? What people thought of Dean Gooderham Acheson ranged from the proposition that he was a fellow traveler, or a wool-brained sower of "weeds of jackassery," or an abysmally uncomprehending man, or an appeaser, or a warmonger who was taking the U.S. into a world war, to the warm if not so audible defense that he was a great Secretary of State, a brilliant executor of the best of all possible foreign programs. A lot of the charges that the State Department had housed party-liners and homosexuals had obviously stuck. But Acheson had the confidence...
...what extent was Acheson to blame for the U.S. being where it was? Any re-examination of recent U.S. history would have to acknowledge two basic errors...
...what extent was Acheson to blame for Mistake No. 1, and to what extent had he determined U.S. foreign policy, and to what extent could he, or anyone else, have done any better...
...Lodestar. Acheson's involvement in U.S. foreign policy began, not in 1949 when he became Secretary, but in the years from 1941 to 1947, when he was first an assistant, then the Under Secretary of State...
During those subordinate years at State, Acheson had been an intellectual lodestar, and sometimes spokesman of a "liberal" group opposed to a "right wing" group (led by Adolf Berle) which had taken an antipodal position on Red Russia. The Acheson group (which included, among others, Alger Hiss) had held various attitudes toward Russia, none of them unfriendly. It was the Acheson group which had been the first to believe that the Chinese Communists might be tamed, and the last to identify the real enemy as Soviet Russia...