Portraits and Miniatures(26)

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





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.

Yet the achievements of Adenauer, the first, the oldest, the least flexible and by no means the most amiable, must be set above those of all the others. He began with a Germany that was shattered, impoverished and reviled, and he ended with one which, while likely to remain indefinitely divided, was rich, respected and even admired. Its real national income had grown threefold under his Chancellorship, its exports by fifty times or more, it had regained such sovereignty as was possible in an interdependent world (although Adenauer always had the sense not to set too much store by sovereignty), had become America’s most dependable and valued ally as well as the economic powerhouse of the Common Market, had buried a hundred years of Franco-German enmity and begun a partnership which was to run the European Community for at least a quarter of a century.