Portraits and Miniatures (10 page)

It was as well that the tripod was in place and Truman's confidence underpinned by January 1947, for that month was the beginning of a peculiarly testing year for Europe and hence for
American leadership. France and Italy looked on the brink of revolution. Russia, moved by a mixture of truculence and fear, had become wholly unco-operative, iron-handed in Eastern Europe and menacing beyond. Of the victorious countries, Britain, snowbound and fuelless in a cruel winter, was forced to begin the long process of withdrawing from its world power illusions and responsibilities. On two successive days in February a date was fixed for withdrawal from India and the almost immediate cessation of aid to Greece and Turkey was announced.

The only country with any surplus energy and resources was the United States. Would they deploy them? Acheson was central to the positive answer. First he argued with almost excessive vigour the case for the proclamation of the ‘Truman Doctrine'. This replaced British with American aid to Greece and Turkey on the grounds ‘that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempts at subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure'. Viewed favourably, the doctrine proclaimed several decades of the
Pax Americana.
Viewed unfavourably, it set the country on course to the débâcle of Vietnam. Viewed from any point of view, it was a momentous decision.

No sooner had it been taken than Acheson set about preparing the ground for Marshall's speech at Harvard four months later, which launched the European Recovery Programme or, as by Truman's shrewd and generous decision it came universally to be known, the Marshall Plan. The President knew that a Republican Congress would not vote a vast programme of civil aid to Europe (the Truman Doctrine was military and therefore less vulnerable) under a name as controversial as his own. Marshall, at least until Senator McCarthy got going, was a name almost beyond criticism. But although Marshall provided the eponym, as well as one or two insights of simple but crucial importance, it was Acheson who organized the work, provided the most persuasive arguments, and even tried out the substance of the speech before the less august audience of a Teachers' College in Mississippi a good month before the Harvard Commencement Day. None of this would have worked without the dependable commitment of
Truman, but it is none the less the case that Acheson's State Department work in January-June 1947, carried out from only the number two position, had more constructive impact than that of Cordell Hull, Stettinius and Byrnes put together. This was made stranger by the fact that he did it all under a self-imposed sentence of retirement. He had told Marshall in January that, after six years of (poorly paid) public service, he proposed to return to private legal practice on 30 June. It was odd to sound such a tocsin to America and the world in the spring and then to find compelling a return to Covington and Burling at midsummer. But it all worked out for the best as it enabled Acheson to replenish his energy and finances during Marshall's period of maximum effectiveness and then to come back as his successor at the head of the State Department when the General's health failed after the 1948 election.

Acheson was Secretary of State for four years from January 1949 to January 1953. He brought the North Atlantic Treaty into the (relatively) safe harbour of completion and signature, he saw the end of the Berlin blockade, he was the Secretary who stood at Truman's side and organized crucial UN majorities during the hazardous first year of the Korean War, and he was the one who took the brunt of the first wave of McCarthyite attack. Of course he despised McCarthy and, unlike many people from Eisenhower downwards, he had the courage not to conceal his contempt. There is a famous story of a chance encounter in a Senate elevator. McCarthy, away from the television cameras or reporters' pencils, liked to assume towards those whom he was tormenting the false bonhomie of a travelling salesman in one line of spurious goods to another. They both had their rackets to pursue and there was no need for cut-throat competition to affect their off-duty relations. This often produced an ingratiating response from weak opponents whom he had just been excoriating. He tried the technique on Acheson. ‘Hiya, Dean,' he optimistically began. The murderously cold silence and apoplectic forehead of the Secretary of State penetrated even to McCarthy.

Yet, although Acheson could squash McCarthy, he could not immunize himself against him. McCarthy did not care about his
own reputation. He hardly understood what the word meant. This gave him the deadliness of a terrorist who is indifferent to losing his own life. He made a misery of Acheson's last two years at the State Department. He threw Acheson on to the defensive, as he was also to do to General Marshall, who was then back in the administration as Secretary of Defense. He forced Acheson to retire several foreign service officers whose loyalty was impeccable except in the distorting eyes of the destructive Senator from Wisconsin, and as a result gave him a morale-shattered Department over which to preside. It considerably weakened his usefulness to the US Government, although probably more at home than abroad.

Acheson was sustained by a fierce loyalty from his President which was important for the buoyancy of his spirits, although Truman in those days did not carry a very thick mantle of prestige or authority that he could throw over the Secretary of State. Ernest Bevin was also a pillar of earthy support. Acheson recorded Bevin as saying on a 1950 occasion when there were Republican congressional demands for his resignation: ‘Don't give it a thought, me lad. If those blokes don't want yer, there's plenty as does.'

In the tangled skein of Anglo-American personal relations in the critical post-war years Bevin and Acheson got on crucially well. There is a general easy belief that after the years of wartime partnership there was a natural camaraderie between American and British leaders and public servants, which by comparison left the French, the Germans and others out in the cold. The position was more complicated than this. Bevin rather admired Marshall, but he did not have easy relations with him, and Marshall in turn, who was in some ways priggish, believed that Bevin was, of all things, unreliable, and in any event rather a crude fellow. With Truman, Bevin's relations were vitiated by Israel, and by his belief that the President played politics with the issue. Nor were Attlee-Truman relations particularly close, although they once had a convivial evening together, under the surprising aegis of Ambassador Oliver Franks, singing World War I songs. Acheson both failed to understand and discounted Attlee. Furthermore, to
underline that this was no special feature of Democrats or Labour ministers, Dulles's relations with Eden were abysmal, and very little better with Churchill and Macmillan. So the Acheson-Bevin bond of affectionate respect, the more impressive for being across a chasm of dissimilarity, stood out as both valuable and unusual.

Acheson, however, was not Anglo-Saxon-centric. He got on almost as well with Robert Schuman, the ascetic-looking Lorraine lawyer who had been brought up in Metz under the German occupation of 1870-1918 and was the key early architect of Franco-German rapprochement, as he did with Bevin. He was also good with the pointed gothic arches of Konrad Adenauer's appearance and personality. The Federal Republic of Germany with which he had to deal was immensely weak compared with what subsequently emerged, but he none the less had the foresight to treat its first Chancellor with a respect that laid secure foundations to a Bonn-Washington axis which persisted for thirty years as a salient world feature until Helmut Schmidt became disenchanted with the leadership of Jimmy Carter. Acheson was also crucial to bringing Italy into NATO. Truman was at first against. But the French, influenced by Mediterranean solidarity, persuaded Acheson, who persuaded Truman. There was thus avoided a major misfortune for the Alliance and a disaster for Italy, which with its big Communist Party and ambiguous location needed both Europe and NATO and would have been desperately adrift without either one of them.

Acheson was also at his best at the outbreak of the Korean War. In June 1950 the sudden eruption of a strongly Soviet-backed (so it was thought; Stalin, it subsequently emerged, had given only reluctant acquiescence) North Korean invasion of the South carried with it the clear threat of World War III. Equally clearly the brunt of resistance was certain to fall upon the United States. This combination of circumstances exactly suited Acheson's capacity for quick decision, his national self-confidence, and his lack of fear at peering into the abyss. By the time that Truman got back to Washington from a brief weekend in Missouri, Acheson had already procured a UN Security Council vote of nine to nil with one abstention (the Soviet Union was
luckily and foolishly boycotting the Council) in favour of action. ‘You are a great Secretary of State,' Truman wrote to him at the end of the week. ‘Your handling of the situation has been superb.'

The Korean War proved a major but necessary defensive undertaking in which the United States suffered 157,000 casualties, including 34,000 dead. Truman and Acheson survived it together, unsubdued but not, at the time, honoured either, with the bond of mutual respect between them growing closer. When the Truman presidency came to an end in January 1953 the brunt in Korea was well over, although the armistice had not been negotiated. The final act of the presidency was a Cabinet luncheon for the Truman family at the Achesons' Georgetown house. At it Truman thawed from his icy excursion with Eisenhower to the Capitol, and the party was described by his daughter as ‘an absolutely wonderful affair, full of jokes and laughter and a few tears.' Truman went back to Missouri, and Acheson, once more, to Covington and Burling. Subsequently, such is the role of circumstances in personal relations and in spite of their mutual respect and survival of shared vicissitudes, they did not see much of each other for their remaining two decades, although they exchanged some good letters. Acheson died on 1 October 1971, at the age of seventy-eight, and Truman followed two months later and nearly ten years older.

In these later years Acheson wrote a moderate amount (two slim volumes of reminiscence and a serious, sharply amusing but none the less too long tome of memoirs). He earned substantial fees for Covington and Burling but was never ensnared in the obsessive pursuit of mammon. He remained a firm although increasingly right-wing and hardline Democrat. I remember staying a weekend in 1959 at John Kenneth Galbraith's house to which the host returned from a meeting of the Democratic Advisory Committee in a state of half-controlled exasperation at the cold war intransigence of the former Secretary of State.

Acheson never had much view of Adlai Stevenson, who was too hesitating and ambiguous for his taste. Nor was he an early Kennedy supporter, but he responded to the success and verve of the young President. At the time of the Cuban missile crisis he
was temporarily recruited back into active service, and became a rash and leading ‘hawk' in Excom, as the directing body was called. Although discontented with the President's desire to get a negotiated solution, Acheson undertook crucial missions to Britain, France and Germany with the photographic evidence of the Soviet build-up. In the first and the third countries the evidence was studied with sympathetic interest. In France it was swept aside as police court stuff. General de Gaulle asked one central question. Was he being consulted or informed of a decision already taken by the President? Acheson had the firmness to say clearly that it was the latter. De Gaulle expressed himself satisfied by the directness. He was in favour of independent decisions, he said. ‘You may tell your President that on this occasion he will have the support of France,' he grandly concluded.

The last time I saw Acheson was at the end of 1970. He expressed some fairly outrageous opinions, partly as a tease. Unfortunately Senator Muskie, who was present and who was desperately trying to get Acheson's support for his then strong bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, purported to take them seriously, but adding the gloss that policy had to be democratically decided. Acheson turned on him like a matador on an old bull. ‘Are you trying to say, Senator, that United States foreign policy should be determined in a series of little town meetings in the State of Maine? Don't ask them, Senator, tell them. When I believe you will do that, I will support you. Until then, not.'

It was one of the last cries of the thirty-year history of Democratic Party world leadership. Acheson was a splendid exponent of it, arrogant, élitist, courageous, and very clear-sighted to the middle distance. He was in many ways too unsqueamish for British taste in the third quarter of the twentieth century, but Britain was none the less fortunate to have him ‘present at the creation' of so many of the institutions of the post-war Western world.

Konrad Adenauer was the oldest statesman ever to function in elected office, beating Gladstone by a good two years. He became the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949 at the age of seventy-three, and very reluctantly gave way to a successor in 1963 at the age of eighty-seven.

If explanations are sought for the remarkable success of West Germany during its forty-one years of separate existence, the simple answer of the quality of its Chancellors should not be ignored. There were few of them - only six as opposed to ten British Prime Ministers and nine American Presidents during the same period - and they have all, with the sole exception of KurtGeorg Kiesinger, the handsome and somewhat vacuous Würtem-berger who survived in office only from 1967 to 1969, been men who in their different ways were dominant world statesmen: Erhard, the animator of the German economic miracle, who, however, shared with Anthony Eden the characteristic of being better in a second position than at the top; Brandt, who had vision and courage and the capacity to inspire even if not always to administer; Schmidt, who was much the better manager and saw to at least the middle distance with greater clarity; and Kohl, who may look lumbering, but has with exceptional decisiveness both reunited a nation and fostered a dynamic half-decade of European integration.