Volume 45, Number 18 · November 19, 1998
Dean of the Cold War
By Noel Annan
Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World
by James Chace
Simon and Schuster, 512 pp., $30.00
Most Europeans think of Dean Acheson as the most distinguished American secretary of state in this century, the progenitor of the Marshall Plan, the sponsor of the Franco-German alliance, and the man who brought into being the North Atlantic Treaty, which committed America to the defense of Europe against Soviet Russia. Yet in his own country Acheson was for years seen in some quarters as a villain. When in 1947 he told Congress America must take over Britain's role in protecting Greece and Turkey, the isolationists accused him of pulling Britain's chestnuts out of the fire. He got little credit in Congress for this display of anticommunism. The China lobby declared that he had 'lost China' for not giving aid on the European scale to Chiang Kai-shek. Senator William Jenner called him a Communist and Mao's triumph the result of his treachery.
Review, 6751 words
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