Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War

Although Acheson (1893–1971) was a life-long Democrat who served four presidents, Harry Truman's flamboyant and sharp-tongued secretary of state is admired on the right as an architect of American Cold War foreign policy, most famously for the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan. Historian Beisner's exhaustive treatment of Acheson's long, influential career reveals the tangled roots of contemporary policy and political discourse—especially the purported links between the unilateral projection of American might and our national security—during and after WWII. A crucial and complex figure, Acheson was not the earliest "cold warrior," though later among the staunchest, and not easily reduced to left or right in the conflict's dissonant strategic and moral calculus. A deep wariness with regard to the atomic bomb, for instance, did not necessarily temper his involvement in developing U.S. nuclear arms policy, including deployment of the more powerful H-bomb. His early urging of engagement in Vietnam later gave way to counseling Johnson to end it. Chronicling rather than criticizing the assumptions undergirding the postwar period's rapidly evolving bipolar order, this thorough biography offers insight into perhaps one of the least understood fields of government action at the outset of a momentous era that's still, in many respects, very much underway. (Sept.)