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The Statecraft of Dean Acheson
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 September 2018
Extract
When Dean Acheson was appointed Under Secretary of State in September, 1945, I. F. Stone wrote in The Nation: “He has been pro-De Gaulle, anti-Franco, strongly opposed to the admission of Argentina to the U.N., and friendly to the Soviet Union … of all the men now in the Departrrient, Acheson was by far the best choice for Under Secretary, and it is no small advantage to pick a man who already knows a good deal about the inner workings.” Stone went on to note that one of Acheson's strongest assets was “in his relations with Congress. He deserves a generous share of the credit for the passage of the Bretton Woods legislation, and he played no inconsiderable part in the Senate's approval of the Charter.” In order to placate Acheson's reactionary critics, Tom Connally reassured trie Senate that he would “never have voted for Mr. Acheson's confirmation [as Under Secretary] unless it had been implicitly understood that he would not have a predominant voice in foreign policy.”
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- Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1972
References
page 32 note * This was not Acheson's first experience with what Richard Hofstadter calls anti-intellectualism and conspiracy theories in American life. When Roosevelt nominated him Under Secretary of the Treasury in 1933, he was attacked in the Senate for his alleged connections with the House of Morgan, only to be accused a decade later of being a minion of Moscow.
page 32 note ** Both James McGregor Burns in Roosevelt: Soldier of Freedom and Gabriel Kolko in The Politics of War agree on this.
page 33 note * A recent paper, "Symbolic Politics and the Origins of the Cold War," by Martin Wishnatsky of Harvard, contends that the failure to incorporate the O.S.S. into the State Department in 1946 meant a victory for the resurgent, hard-lining Foreign Service Officer Corps over the more liberal-minded, U.N.-oriented academics who comprised Roosevelt's wartime O.S.S. It should be noted that Acheson fought hard to incorporate the remnant of the O.S.S. and was defeated by those who did not want the Department contaminated by (1) liberals and (2) specialists in clandestine intelligence! By this test, Acheson could not have been both a cold warrior and in favor of the O.S.S. Indeed, he warned Truman against the rise of an intelligence agency outside of democratic control.