The Best and the Brightest (67 page)

For the truth was that despite the Democratic desire to blame Dulles for the commitment to Southeast Asia, the creation of South Vietnam, and the invention of Diem, the roots of the change in American policy actually predated Eisenhower’s coming to power. The really crucial decisions were made at the tail end of the Truman years, with Acheson as Secretary of State and Rusk as his principal deputy for Asia. This was the period when the United States went from a position of neutrality toward both sides in the Indochina war to a position of massive military and economic aid to the French. The real architect of the American commitment to Vietnam, of bringing containment to that area and using Western European perceptions in the underdeveloped world, was not John Foster Dulles, it was Dean Acheson.

Acheson. A handsome man, the right kind of handsomeness, not matinée-idol handsome, but respectable-handsome. He looked like a Secretary of State; in fact, it was hard to think of him as anything else. Had he been a banker he would have looked too respectable to be simply a financier; he looked more worldly and urbane than a man who simply dealt with money. He became a Democratic icon of the fifties both because he had been viciously attacked by McCarthy and had stood the attack without flinching (personally, if not professionally), and because he would not turn his back on Alger Hiss (who was of course a member of the Establishment in very good standing; a remarkable amount of what Acheson was committed to was at its heart class). His reputation in the fifties because of those McCarthy years, a quirk of history really, was somehow that he was a soft-liner, and that Dulles was the hard-liner. If anything, the reverse was true. It was not so much that Dulles was softer, but for all the bombast of his speeches, the verbal righteousness in public, there was an element of private flexibility (the great corporation lawyer who can make a resounding appeal in the courtroom and then a more subtle private deal in the judge’s chambers), whereas Acheson was the hard-liner who felt that Dulles’ policies were extremely dangerous and that the defense budget was too small. Acheson was always the true interventionist who deeply believed that the totalitarians might exploit the democracies. He was not soft, Acheson, he never was. He was Wilsonian, but new-generation Wilsonian, Wilson flexing old ideals with new industrial and technological might, Wilson with a longer reach.

He was the son of a British Army officer who went to Canada, fought against a half-breed insurrection in Manitoba, and later became an Anglican minister and eventually bishop of Connecticut. Dean Acheson’s upbringing was stern (in fact, he once wanted to be Solicitor General of the United States, a job for which he had been recommended by the Roosevelt Administration, only to find that he was blocked by Attorney General Homer Cummings, who was from Connecticut, the reason being that the senior Acheson had found Cummings too frequently divorced and had withheld a marital blessing). His background was clerical-military and quite traditional; like other proper young men he went off to Groton (writing of Franklin Roosevelt years later, he would say: “Ten years older than I, he had left our school before I got there, but he regarded my having gone to it as a recommendation”). From there he went to Yale, where he received a gentleman C, and then to Harvard Law, where for the first time the excellence of his mind began to flash. He became a favorite of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who got him a clerkship under Louis Brandeis; with that, his career was under way.

The young Acheson was an offbeat Democrat, and a somewhat unlikely one. He was excited by Teddy Roosevelt and bored by Taft, and was finally brought into the Democratic party by Woodrow Wilson, a figure of austere, almost harsh moralism, with the same bent toward both the Atlantic countries and internationalism. Acheson was a conservative and proper young man, capable at his tenth Yale reunion in 1925 of giving a speech which dealt with regaining control over a burgeoning government and criticized the government for interfering too much in human affairs. He was almost classically a man of the Establishment—the right backgrounds, the right schools, the right clubs, the right connections. Indeed, in 1933 he entered the Roosevelt Administration in the best Establishment tradition of the old-boy network (“In May 1933 two old friends, Arthur Ballantine, the Republican holdover Under Secretary of the Treasury, and James Douglas, Assistant Secretary, also awaiting relief, asked me to lunch with them. The new Secretary, Will Woodin, was, they said, a man after our own hearts who would need congenial friends. Would I come to meet him at lunch. The lunch was gay and uninhibited . . . I was hardly back in my office before the operator announced Secretary Woodin calling. Would I become Under Secretary of the Treasury?”).

The first tour with Roosevelt did not work out well: Acheson was more conservative than the Administration on fiscal policies, and ill at ease with Roosevelt’s loose, disorganized personal style, which he considered “patronizing and humiliating. To accord the President the greatest deference and respect should be a gratification to any citizen. It is not gratifying to receive the easy greeting which milord might give a promising stable boy and pull one’s forelock in return.” He eventually resigned and only returned before the beginning of the war because his own fierce interventionism coincided with Roosevelt’s needs; in 1941 he was made an Assistant Secretary of State.

While he never felt comfortable with Roosevelt, personally or politically, he was later very much at ease with Truman, a feeling which most members of the Establishment came to share. Roosevelt was too political a figure and thus too capricious, and Truman had more reverence for the wisdom of the Establishment (one of the differences was that Roosevelt, having come from that particular class, was a good deal less in awe of it, be it in foreign affairs or anything else. He knew too much about them; he was broader than they. Acheson, and men like him, would come to be admirers of Truman, in part because he gave them a very free hand and took them at face value, but there was a certain condescension at first toward him: John Carter Vincent would recall Acheson saying at the beginning, “John Carter, that little fellow across the street has more to him than you think”). Joseph Alsop, a journalistic extension of Acheson, would tell a reporter, “Stewart [his brother] and I were still patronizing toward Truman then because we thought the big successes of his Administration were owing to the big men in the Cabinet—Marshall, Forrestal, and the others. But it is a rule that a President must always be given final credit for
all
his Administration’s successes and the final blame for
all
its failures . . . We admitted in our column several times that we had underestimated Truman, and several years ago we wrote him a letter of apology. Dean said it would make the old man happy and I believe it did . . .”

The big man. Acheson was of course the big man of the Truman years. Marshall was beginning to age; the China mission after the war had taken a good deal out of him and had not gone well, and when he eventually served as Secretary of Defense he never seemed to catch hold, as if something had gone out of him. The Defense Department, preoccupied with its own problems and reorganizations, was not as influential as State in the late forties. In the late forties and early fifties, Acheson was a rising figure there, both as Undersecretary, from 1945 to 1947, and then as Secretary from 1949 to 1953. Not by chance would he call his memoirs
Present at the Creation.

In 1947, when congressional support for aid to Greece and Turkey was wavering, when the British, clearly bled white by two world wars, could no longer function as the dominant Western power, the torch was passed to the United States, and it was Acheson who assisted in relaying the torch of Anglo-Saxon sanity and order. The British said they could not bail out the Greek economic situation, which was near collapse, nor could they underwrite the modernization of the Turkish army. Reading the cables at the time, Loy Henderson, then director of the office of Near Eastern and African Affairs, thought “that Great Britain had within the hour handed the job of world leadership with all its burdens and all its glory to the United States.”

With congressional leadership dubious, it was Acheson who rallied everyone; he painted a picture of a world slowly being infected by Communism, country by country, one rotten apple contaminating the barrel. Only the United States stood between freedom and this latest totalitarian threat of all Western civilization. The dark ages were the alternative: the Russians would get control of the Mediterranean, then Africa, then Asia. In Europe our friends would feel the impact. He said it forcefully and with passion; these were not sham views. Fine, said Senator Arthur Vandenberg, but “if Truman wants it he will have to go and scare hell out of the country.”

This became the origin of the Truman Doctrine. Truman, charged with scaring hell out of the country, did exactly that, to such a degree that when the message for the Doctrine went before Congress it surprised Secretary Marshall, then flying to Moscow. Uneasy with the extent to which the anti-Communist element was stressed, Marshall sent a cable to Truman questioning the wisdom of this presentation, saying he thought Truman was overstating the case. Truman replied that after talking with Senate leaders, he felt sure that this was the only way to get the message through. So it was that Acheson, even more than Marshall, was the architect of containment, the architect of an attitude of universality toward Communism (one could not struggle with them in Europe and acquiesce to a different form of them in Asia. It was not a time for subtleties. Subtleties blew up in your face).

But he was not a man concerned or interested in Asia; he was a man of Europe, which was the serious world, with values that were Western, Christian, democratic-elitist. It was not really Europe as a whole that shared his values, but specifically Anglo-Saxon Europe; as one went farther south and the people became darker and more Mediterranean, they tended to be less worthy and dependable (with the exception of Portugal’s Salazar). But Europe was the world: the Russians to be stopped there, the British held together and given a rest period, the French encouraged to be more worthy of us and their own past, the Germans to be re-created in our image. The French were perhaps the most troublesome, surprisingly unstable for a major European power, insisting always on being French. The underdeveloped world was not a serious place. Though Acheson presided as head of State at a time of great restlessness and changes in the colonial world, with its deep longing for a new order, there is little evidence of it in his memoirs other than a certain irritation with Nehru for his lack of appreciation for Acheson’s grace and wit as a host. Instead, his is an Anglo-Saxon book, dealing mainly with the passing of the torch.

It was this basic disinterest in the underdeveloped world, a belief that it was not only less important but somehow less worthy, and above all the unwillingness to rock any European boat, which came back to haunt, if not him, then his country and his party on Indochina. In October 1949 Acheson, now Secretary of State, talked about Indochina with Nehru, who was extremely pessimistic about the French experiment there (“the Bao Dai alternative,” as it was known). He outlined the failings of the prince and said that the French would never give Bao Dai the freedom necessary to hold the hopes and passions of his people. Acheson told Nehru he was inclined to agree, but that he saw no real alternative. This was an odd answer, since he was in effect saying that we were committed to a dead policy. Nehru, who like other newly independent Asian leaders refused to recognize Bao Dai, told Acheson that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist, albeit a Communist. Nehru argued that European judgments on the failures of popular fronts were specious in an Asian context, and Acheson replied by talking about France and Italy. But at that early date, Acheson knew the French cause was both wrong and hopeless.

Even that attitude would shift in the waning days of 1949 and the first days of 1950. It was not that events in Indochina were different, but that domestic perceptions in the United States, pushed by developments in China, were changing. No longer would the Americans be so even-handed, if that is the word, in their policy toward Indochina. Up until that point Walton Butterworth, still Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East, was fighting valiantly against all the French attempts to involve us in the war with aid and arms, but things were fast moving out of his control. Among other things, the fall of China to the Communists had released a vast amount of money which had been ticketed for Chiang Kai-shek, and there was now talk of giving some of it to the French in Indochina. Philip Jessup, the ambassador-at-large for the Administration, was to go on a special mission in which part of his assignment was to bestow official recognition upon the Bao Dai government (which we had previously thought worthless). After the recognition, the Bao Dai government might receive some leftover China aid. Jessup was to be accompanied by Ray Fosdick and Everett Case. Of course the American options were steadily narrowing; the most hopeful possibility by this time was Bao Dai, since the Ho Chi Minh alternative was now long gone. If we could not support him up to 1949, when there was no domestic pressure, it was impossible now. Bao Dai represented a frail, non-Communist, nationalist alternative, even if the French were co-operative, which they were not likely to be.

Jessup carried with him a letter from Acheson to Bao Dai saying that the Americans were delighted that he had been chosen to lead Vietnam. Jessup, an authority on international law, considered this a letter of recognition. After the visit he went to Singapore, where he held a press conference praising his own visit and saying that the United States was extremely pleased that the French had granted the Vietnamese independence. There was an immediate uproar in Paris, and Jessup was ordered by Washington to give a second press conference, in which he very carefully stated that he had referred to Vietnamese independence within the French union. Once more we had caved in to the French; even within the already limited and probably futile framework of working with Bao Dai, the United States was accepting further limitations. Rather than being the high-water mark of the U.S. commitment to Vietnamese nationalism, it was a reflection of one more concession to the European ally. All in all, it was not a happy trip; on his way back to the United States, Jessup learned that he would have to answer McCarthy’s charges that he had an “affinity for Communism.”