Portraits and Miniatures(22)

The law school was Harvard, where Acheson shared an apartment with Cole Porter, also a ‘Yalie’, who defected to the music school. Acheson there fell under the intellectual influence of Felix Frankfurter, who enjoyed a dazzling academic reputation before becoming a Supreme Court Justice in 1939. It was, however, an older Jewish Justice (and as a Supreme Court judge, although not as an academic, still more distinguished figure), Louis Dembitz Brandeis, who first took Acheson to Washington as his law clerk. He stayed two years (from 1920 to 1922) with Brandeis, and then joined a Washington law firm with the splendidly wasp (white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) name of Covington and Burling, with which through various mutations he remained intermittently associated to the end of his life.

He was professionally sought after, both as an advocate and as an adviser. While still in his early thirties he argued many cases before the Supreme Court, and apparently lost every one of the first fifteen. But if his clients went down his reputation went up. He became prosperous enough to buy during the 1920s both his Georgetown house which dated from the time of James Polk’s presidency (1845-9) and his horse-country farmhouse at Sandy Spring, Maryland, which dated from that of George Washington.

Yet through all this privileged education, highly successful use of it, and rise to repute and limited affluence, he was essentially a product of the upper professional classes and not a magnate. This did not mean that he was modest. He was about as modest as Quintin Hailsham or Richard Crossman, who were almost exactly his social equivalents. But it did mean that he saw life differently from his fellow Grotonians Franklin Roosevelt and Averell Harriman. They were the American equivalents of Cecils or Rothschilds. He was the equivalent of a ‘poor Etonian’, more alike in social outlook although not in personality to a Robert Armstrong or a Douglas Hurd. This made him in a sense a servant rather than a ruler of the state. But it did not deprive him of a splendid and careless independence. Psychologically he needed office less than did Harriman, who desperately felt that it was both his duty and his pleasure to be ‘in’.

This difference was vividly illustrated by Acheson’s behaviour in his first government office. When Roosevelt was constructing his administration in early 1933 Acheson hoped to be Solicitor-General. However, the Attorney-General (Homer Cummings) vetoed him. Some said it was because Bishop Acheson had refused to bless the divorced Cummings’s second marriage. Others said that it required no assistance from the father to make the son’s grand manner unacceptable to the Attorney in a subordinate. Acheson was lucky in the circumstances to be offered the under-secretaryship of the Treasury, which office he accepted with enthusiasm but not with happy results. Woodin, the Secretary of the Treasury, soon became ill, so that Acheson was effectively head of the second major department in the US Government by the time he was forty. Roosevelt wanted to devalue the dollar by gradually raising the price of gold from $20.67 an ounce to $35.00, where it remained until 1968. Acheson got locked in with the conservative financiers in the government, of whom Lewis Douglas, later Truman’s ambassador to London, was the most prominent, and said this was illegal.

Roosevelt did not want Under-Secretaries who said what was right and what was wrong. He wanted those who could remove road-blocks. He became irritated with Acheson. Acheson in turn quickly ceased to be a Roosevelt fan, foolishly resenting being treated with a familiar condescension. ‘It is not gratifying to receive the easy greeting which milord might give a promising stable boy and pull one’s forelock in return,’ he wrote. What he particularly disliked was Roosevelt’s habit of calling everyone ‘from his valet to his Secretary of State’ by his first name or even a nickname, and responded by never in my experience referring to FDR (fifteen years dead when I first knew Acheson) as anything other than a cool ‘Mr Roosevelt’. He allowed him neither a ‘President’ nor a place in history without a prefix. It was reminiscent of the old lady in Henry James’s Aspen Papers who always spoke of the poet as ‘Mr Shelley’. Elsewhere Acheson wrote of his attitude towards Roosevelt as being ‘one of admiration without affection’. That quality, extending even to devotion, he said, and accompanied by a still larger dose of admiration, he reserved for Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, superficially an improbable hero for the patrician Acheson.

Following the dollar devaluation dispute Acheson was dropped from the Roosevelt administration in the autumn of 1933 and did not re-enter the government until February 1941, when he became an Assistant Secretary of State (for economic affairs) under Cordell Hull in the State Department. Relations with Roosevelt had recovered their equilibrium in the mean time and Acheson had even written one of the President’s more important speeches of the 1940 election campaign. In the later stages of his period out of office Acheson had been a resolute campaigner for American assistance to Britain and France.