Word: achesonism
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...postwar world, should it return to the familiar isolationism that would insulate it from dangers abroad? Or should it continue to intervene in world affairs with the awesome power at its disposal? The U.S. chose the activist path, and the man who embodied that choice was Dean Gooderham Acheson, first as an influential Assistant and Under Secretary of State and then as Secretary. Every step that Dean Acheson took was dogged by criticism, and it is a measure of the man that, when he died last week at 78 of a heart attack, he remained scarcely less controversial. Some praised...
With a characteristic lack of false modesty, Acheson entitled his memoirs Present at the Creation. Yet he was not unduly exaggerating. His policies did indeed constitute a kind of creation. During World War II, the U.S. had done little postwar planning. It fell to the Truman Administration to improvise some semblance of international order. With audacious speed, one major-policy decision followed another; in each, Acheson assumed leadership. Economic and military aid were sent, after a strenuous domestic battle, to Greece and Turkey. The Marshall Plan was formulated to revive the prostrate European economy. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization...
Gentlemanly Resignation. This spectacular interventionism, unparalleled in peacetime America, could be carried off only by a man of singular self-assurance. This Acheson had-to a fault. His career was a textbook example of the rise of a 'patrician in the snug embrace of the American Establishment. His father was a clergyman who migrated to the U.S. from Britain and became Episcopal bishop of Connecticut. His mother was an heiress, daughter of a family of Canadian whisky distillers. Young Dean attended Groton, Yale and Harvard Law School. He married Alice Stanley, his sister's roommate at Wellesley...
...Acheson then joined the well-connected Washington law firm of Covington, Burling & Rublee. From there it was an easy step to Government office. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt appointed him Under Secretary of the Treasury. But six months later he abruptly left office after being outraged when F.D.R. took the dollar off the gold standard. He had the discretion, however, to keep his objections to himself-a fact that Roosevelt appreciated. When another official resigned with an angry blast at the President, F.D.R. instructed an aide: "Tell that man to go see Dean Acheson to learn how a gentleman resigns...
...since John Maynard Keynes, Dean Acheson, Henry Morgenthau and politico-economic experts from 45 other countries huddled in the little New Hampshire resort town of Bretton Woods in 1944 has there been a monetary meeting like the one convening in Washington this week. John Connally, the tough but still charming Texan, will be there as the chief attraction, if one can put it that way. So will assorted treasury chiefs, finance ministers and central bankers-France's Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Germany's Karl Schiller, Italy's Guido Carli. Like their predecessors at Bretton...