Word: acheson
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...Iron Hand. In sharp contrast, Acheson then staked out a second Asian area in tougher language. The nation's defense, said he, rests on a North Pacific frontier running along the Aleutian Islands to Japan and down through the Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa) to the Philippines. In case of attack on this line, he said, the U.S. would defend all these positions. (For Korea, hanging perilously close to the most naked of Russian ambitions, the Secretary offered only a vaguer acknowledgment of "responsibility...
...Helping Hand. For the third sector of Asia-the uneasy non-Communist nations of Southeast Asia, India and Pakistan-Acheson had cold words and measured promises: "The direct responsibility lies with the peoples concerned . . . You cannot sit around in Washington or London or Paris or The Hague and determine what the policies are going to be in those areas." The U.S. would offer aid-generally along the lines of the careful yardstick set down recently by State's Counselor George Kennan...
...United States, in my judgment," said Acheson, "acts in regard to a foreign nation strictly in regard to American interests or those wider interests which affect American interests ... I am not in the slightest bit worried at all because somebody can say, 'Well, you said so and so about Greece, why isn't all this true about China?' I will be polite. I will be patient and I will try to explain why Greece is not China, but my heart will not be in that battle...
...Acheson sat down and pocketed his spectacles amid the chair scraping and applause of a rising ovation. Forensically, it was a brilliant performance: an advocate's skilled case for the defense. As the outline of a policy, one basic flaw weakened it: a negative attitude which accented the hazards instead of emphasizing the opportunities. There was little in it for Americans to rally to. The U.S.-unlike the defense-could not afford to rest...
Only once by name, with passing scorn for "foolish adventures," did Dean Acheson in his Press Club speech mention Formosa. But the word had hissed like a hot coal on ice earlier in the week when he met for five hours with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and for four hours next day with the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and it steamed all week in the speeches of a small but angry group of Republican critics...