Word: acheson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Gentlemanly Resignation. This spectacular interventionism, unparalleled in peacetime America, could be carried off only by a man of singular self-assurance. This Acheson had-to a fault. His career was a textbook example of the rise of a 'patrician in the snug embrace of the American Establishment. His father was a clergyman who migrated to the U.S. from Britain and became Episcopal bishop of Connecticut. His mother was an heiress, daughter of a family of Canadian whisky distillers. Young Dean attended Groton, Yale and Harvard Law School. He married Alice Stanley, his sister's roommate at Wellesley...
...Acheson then joined the well-connected Washington law firm of Covington, Burling & Rublee. From there it was an easy step to Government office. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt appointed him Under Secretary of the Treasury. But six months later he abruptly left office after being outraged when F.D.R. took the dollar off the gold standard. He had the discretion, however, to keep his objections to himself-a fact that Roosevelt appreciated. When another official resigned with an angry blast at the President, F.D.R. instructed an aide: "Tell that man to go see Dean Acheson to learn how a gentleman resigns...
...Acheson had his misgivings about Roosevelt. "It didn't flatter me," he later remarked, "to have the squire of Hyde Park come by and speak to me familiarly, as though I were a stable boy and I was supposed to pull my lock and say, 'Aye, aye, sir.' " That was no way for one squire to treat another. But in 1941 Acheson was invited to return to the Government-this time to the State Department. He remained for six years, then left to resume his law practice until he was appointed Secretary by Truman...
...Department colleague Louis Halle put it: "He was too unrepresentative to be trusted." Said Canada's former Prime Minister Lester Pearson: "Not only did he not suffer fools gladly, he did not suffer them at all." "A good many members of Congress didn't like me," said Acheson. "This didn't bother me at all. I didn't care whether they liked me or didn't like me. The point was that they did what they were asked to do. And if they did that, they could have any views they liked about...
...them savagely turned on him. The collapse of Chiang Kai-shek gave them an excuse. Exploiting a confused and distressed public, Senator Joseph McCarthy seized the issue to denounce the "Red Dean" and demand his resignation. Illustrating what Halle called a "moral courage that sometimes amounted to recklessness," Acheson came to the defense of Alger Hiss, the onetime State Department official who was exposed as a Soviet agent. "I will not turn my back on Alger Hiss," he told a stunned press conference...