Word: achesons
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Another newsman asked: "Would aggression against a country, by infiltration within the country, be an armed attack?" If it were purely an internal revolutionary activity, said Acheson, .that would not be an armed attack. But if it were a revolution inspired, armed and directed from the outside, that would be a different matter. The pact, he said, didn't spell it out and shouldn't-when you come to real situations you ought to be able to have some latitude in deciding them...
...There Is Any Doubt. But in a contract between nations, said Acheson, there is no sheriff sitting up in the clouds who is going to come down and see the contract carried out. Nobody could force us to carry out our contract, but we would do what we had contracted to do. If there was an attack, the decisions on what the U.S. would have to do would be made under constitutional procedures...
...Acheson went on, if there is any doubt about what to do, you don't take the most extreme action first. If you have a little flurry on the border somewhere, you don't take a sledge hammer to kill a fly. You take what action is necessary, and it may be something short of force. The Japanese attack on the gunboat Panay in 1937 and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 were good examples. Both were armed attacks; one called for response by armed force and the other...
...Acheson said that the pact did not bind the U.S. to provide arms for Western Europe, but it was obvious to him that only the U.S. could. He did not say, but his audience knew that the Administration was already preparing a first-year program of $1 billion to $1.5 billion in arms shipments to Western Europe. It was the point in the North Atlantic Treaty discussions that was most likely to get senatorial danders up. The Senate, after plenty of questioning, would probably produce the two-thirds majority vote required to ratify the pact. But several key supporters...
Stand Together. Dean Acheson continued his lecture in a radio speech which was cleared with Harry Truman and delivered with a Shakespearian actor's measured resonance. The U.N., he said, is "not working as effectively as we hoped because one of its members has attempted to prevent it from working...