Not-so-special relationship

‘Three things of my own are about to burst on the world,’ Dean Acheson wrote to his friend Lady Pamela Berry, the London hostess and wife of Michael Berry, later Lord Hartwell, owner of the Daily Telegraph. They were ‘a leader in the December issue of Foreign Affairs… a speech at West Point… and a piece about my childhood in the Connecticut valley.’ It was characteristic of Acheson’s self-regard that he should have thought the first and last of these would ‘burst’ anywhere, but he was more right about the second than he can have known. Just over fifty years ago, on 5 December 1962, two days after his letter to Lady -Pamela, Acheson gave that speech, and indeed it exploded across the Atlantic like an artillery shell.

Maybe his name no longer rings the loudest of bells, but in his day Acheson was a mighty figure. His father was English by birth, an Episcopalian (Anglican) clergyman who became Bishop of Connecticut. After Groton, Yale and Harvard Law School, Dean joined Covington & Burling, a fashionable Washington law firm, and he then moved into politics, though not the messy electoral kind. He briefly served President Roosevelt as undersecretary of the Treasury, returning to the administration as assistant secretary of state in 1941, before he was promoted to undersecretary by President Truman, who then chose him as his secretary of state from 1949 to 1953.

Not only was Acheson at the heart of an American patrician establishment which no longer exists, his political CV — Lend-Lease, Bretton Woods, the coming of the Cold War, the Truman Doctrine, the creation of Nato, the Korean war — is a short history of the age. At the State Department, he had to deal, almost absurdly, with the threat abroad from communist Russia under Joseph Stalin, and the threat at home from the anti-communist demagoguery of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the two Joes together making rational conduct of foreign policy very difficult.