Portraits and Miniatures(21)

Acheson, born in 1893, was the son of a British-born clergyman who had emigrated to Canada at the age of sixteen, trained at Toronto and then crossed the US border to settle in the quiet university surroundings of Middletown, Connecticut. Edward Acheson and his wife none the less remained British subjects until quite late in life. In 1905 he became Episcopal Bishop of Connecticut (a tautological designation, it might be thought, but one habitually used). Dean Acheson (Dean was also an odd name for such a high-ranking clerical gentleman to give his son) was thought in middle life to look like the epitome of an Englishman. At first sight, with his black Homburg hats, his bristling moustache, his waistcoats, his dark town suits and occasional severe tweeds, this was so. Item by item he looked like Anthony Eden. But not in the ensemble, and indeed his ‘Englishness’ was only superficial. This was not because he was trying to look English and failing. On the contrary, what he really looked like was an East Coast American gentleman showing the English how they ought to look if they pulled themselves together and exhibited more leadership and moral fibre. Of his English opposite numbers as Foreign Minister he made Bevin look lumbering, Morrison slovenly, and Eden too consciously negligent. Acheson looked crisp, self-confident and a little bossy. As befitted the grand vizier of American foreign policy at the height of United States power, his clothes owed more to Brooks Brothers than to Savile Row.

Although his mother was the daughter of an Ontario whiskey distiller and bank president, Acheson did not belong to the plutocracy or even strictly to fashionable society, much admired and sought-after by the cognoscenti though he mostly was. He was never a New Yorker. From his upbringing in Connecticut to his school in Massachusetts, his university back in Connecticut, his law school once more in Massachusetts, his law firm and his high government posts and elegant pre-Civil War house in Washington, DC, his farm in Maryland, and his many trips to Europe and the Far East, he managed to skip over the city of wealth and fashion on the Hudson. Of course he visited it, but he never lived there. His wife, Alice Stanley, whom he married in 1917 when he was twenty-four and who is still alive, came from Michigan via the good New England women’s college of Wellesley.

Yet, although he eschewed the Manhattan glitter of the super rich, everything was always of very high quality, including Alice Acheson. The school was Groton, which the Reverend Endicott Peabody, a product of Trinity College, Cambridge, had founded in 1884 with the object of creating a less easy-going and more high-minded Eton in the green and pleasant land of northern Massachusetts. Franklin Roosevelt went there in 1896 and thirty-six years later Peabody, still headmaster, was able to appear in night-shirt and night-cap in the dormitory of FDR’s youngest son and say: ‘Boy, your father has just been elected President of the United States. Whether this is a good thing I do not know. But I thought you ought to know. Goodnight, boy.’

The hesitancy of the second sentence came from the fact that although after a hundred years its three best-known alumni were probably Roosevelt, Harriman and Acheson, Democrats to a man, the spirit of the school, certainly of the majority of the parents, was strongly Republican. This thought was, however, tempered in Peabody’s mind by his liking for worldly success. He allowed the official school history to perform the statistical feat of pointing out that, if all American schools had produced high public servants on the scale of Groton’s first thousand graduates, the country would have had 37,000 Presidents, 350,000 ambassadors and 110,000 Senators, which might be regarded as a remarkable tribute to the classlessness of American society.

The university was Yale, which in 1911, when Acheson went there, and for two or three decades afterwards, probably had a stronger corporate loyalty and a more close-knit élitist identity than Harvard. It was chosen by Scott Fitzgerald, who had himself been at Princeton, the third of America’s ‘gold coast’ universities, as the epitome of privileged education for fictional representation in both Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby. And at Yale, as opposed to Groton, Acheson was a success and enjoyed himself. However, in his first volume of memoirs he ignored both Groton and Yale and wrote about the two-month period which he spent between them, in very rough conditions in northern Ontario, working as a tree-feller for the building of the second transcontinental Canadian railway. This tempted me to contrast Acheson’s slightly self-conscious American toughness with Eden’s old world effeteness, until I remembered that Eden spent the equivalent nineteenth summer of his life in incomparably worse conditions on the Somme.