Rating: 
Summary: Not a bad book, but . . .
Review: Not a great one either, or even a particularly good one, at least to my way of thinking. I had to read this book for a class, and I came at it with a skeptical eye. Why, I thought, should I care about Acheson? I have not read Present at the Creation, but know the history invovled and hadn't really considered Acheson a great man, merely an Establishment figure, and Chace's book did not fare well under the criticism. It seems like it was written as paean to the greatness that is Dean Acheson, with nary a syllable edgewise. As one reviewer noted, Chace places Acheson in every conceivable major topic, no matter how irrelevant his actual role.Despite these flaws, I have no doubt it will be the definite biography of the man for some time to come. If you're already interested in Dean Acheson or are willing to put up with a fawning and adulatory work on him, then by all means read this book. If not, don't bother.
Rating:
Summary: Missed Opportunities
Review: The seventy-five years spanned by Dean Acheson's life saw the radical shift of America's role in the world from one of a significant, but none the less marginal power, to becoming that world's chief law enforcement officer, judge and--in several instances up to the present day--executioner. Chace's contention is that, to a large extent, Acheson was responsible for the shift.
Overstated in the title, the text indicates someone rather different from an earth mover and shaker. Acheson was, in fact, a frequently puzzled, often wrong, usually pragmatic, but sufficiently arrogant Secretary of State to push through policies with a self assurance that indeed profoundly affected the place America would play for over a half-century to come. But it is the personal relationship between two disparate individuals, President Truman and his Secretary of State, that especially intrigues Chace and that will leave the reader wondering as well.
Definitely a member of the East Coast elite--a graduate of Groton and Yale, then on to Harvard Law School--Acheson's life and background were a sharp contrast to that of the Missouri haberdasher. The contrast between Acheson and Truman is very simply illustrated by noting their similar reaction to General MacArthur's farewell speech before Congress, but expressed rather differently. Acheson called it "bathetic," Truman referred to it as "b-------t."
So how could these two have worked so closely together, and so effectively in pushing radical and rather unpopular foreign programs through a fractious and often openly hostile Congress? At least part of the answer was that Truman had a "buck stops here attitude," one which allowed Acheson to advance programs he knew would be fully supported by the President.
Chace's work touches upon events of Acheson's life that, while not new, do put a different emphasis upon what were once accepted as historic givens. For example, MacArthur is most usually remembered as the headstrong field commander who did as he pleased. That was perhaps true near the end of the Korean debacle but, as Chace correctly points out, the bosses back home, including Acheson, Marshall and Truman were cheering him on while Mac was succeeding, became ambiguous in their instructions when he began to fail, and then threw all the burden of blame on his shoulders when it seemed the Americans and their allies were about to be driven into the sea.
Not only did Acheson's concern for Europe and fear of Communism lead him into disastrous policies elsewhere, but it made him as well as many others in Truman's and later administrations, to overestimate Soviet military power and its threat to Western Europe and underestimate the extent and quality of the Soviet scientific community.
Unfortunately, the author presents the entire "Acheson era" as though it occurred in a domestic political and social vacuum. As examples of this narrow view, there is little mention of how the agonizing shift from a wartime to a peacetime economy, the incipient civil rights movement and the flips and flops in the business cycle began to focus public attention inwards. More importantly, there is no indication of the impact of the new medium-TV-and how it began to influence what was once the very private prerogative of the diplomats. The "open covenants, openly arrived at" dreamed of by the mystical Wilson were already showing signs of becoming a reality when Truman became the first President to appear on the screen in America's living room, and yet Chace shows little indication of recognizing that change.
The one map in the volume was hardly worth including, but the notes and bibliography are thorough, and the photos have a remarkable value of their own. The depicted people in power illustrates how remarkably different they were from their counterparts fifty years afterwards. White, Anglo Saxon men dominate the photos. A concession is made to Frankfurter, none to women except for Acheson's wife and mother, both of whom are definitely and exclusively pictured in those roles.
All in all, these photos speak well of the remarkable change that has come to Washington in two scant generations. The outspokenly liberal Truman didn't even leaven his cabinet with a Ma Perkins, while the unabashedly conservative Bush of the current administration has surrounded himself with Latinos, Blacks and women. Anyone viewing the current cabinet must indeed wonder what Acheson would have thought of it.
In looking back at his long career as a public servant and as an advisor to presidents, it would be nice to be able to rewrite history and to give him the position of Under Secretary for Middle Eastern affairs. Nowhere was he more right in his assessment, nowhere more astute in proffered solutions to what now seems to be an insoluble situation.
In short, Chace's biography is a description of a person who had risen to a position beyond him. Perhaps it was a position beyond anyone, but Acheson was someone who could have provided valuable service to this nation and to the beleaguered nations of the Middle East by his far-seeing view of what America's policies in that part of the world would mean for the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Unfortunately, back when he did have the opportunity to prevent the formation of repressive regimes in that part of the world, he was far too much concerned with having anti-Soviet dictators in charge of Middle East nations then in seriously considering the plight of their subjects.
As it is, his legacy is a dubious one. Troops scattered across the globe, a strange indifference to internal happenings in Africa, an inability to comprehend the rage in the world against the U.S. and a sudden casting adrift of America's purposes as a result of the demise of the Soviet Union; all these can be attributed in large part to Acheson's policies as Secretary of State under Truman.
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