Portraits and Miniatures(24)

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.