Word: achesons
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...interesting disorderly house in Washington," an admiring guest once noted. Visitors encounter thousands of stacked books, a calendar of personal engagements from 1907, a 15-ft. tiger skin that was a gift from the Dowager Empress of China, a drawing of a Chinese tiger (she calls the beast "Dean Acheson" and notes, "He loved it when I said it looked like him"), an African voodoo mask slipped over the head of a replica of the Statue of Liberty...
EVERYONE KNEW that Johnson, a man of enormous talent and capability, felt out of place among the Ivy League Acheson-types. Insecure, he demanded enthusiastic support and judged all opinions by the "loyalty" or "disloyalty" of their proponents...
...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...