Curiously, the small group of amateurs who revolved in and out of the State Department in the 1940s managed to get far more accomplished than the legions of full-time professionals who now inhabit the downtown think tanks and office warrens of Foggy Bottom, Capitol Hill, and the West Wing. Perhaps that is because the older generation was primarily concerned with serving their President and country, while the newer seems inordinately preoccupied with serving themselves. “My generation doesn’t produce people in the selfless tradition of a McCloy,” frankly admits Kissinger. “We’re too nervous and ambitious.” McCloy is almost bitter about the unwillingness of his successors on Wall Street to serve their country. Asked to name the next generation of lawyers and bankers wise in international affairs who might be called on to come to Washington, McCloy did not even pause to think. “You won’t find one,” he said. “Those lawyers don’t exist anymore. They’re all too busy making money.”
McCloy’s generation, it is true, did not have to worry much about material concerns. They did not have to worry too much about the daily chore of child care, or about their wives’ careers, or about paying the mortgage. They were relatively free to pursue what they really cared about: service to the country. Public service was for them a demanding mistress, but a passionate one. Indeed, it seems to have been a sustaining life-force.
These men owed no one. Free of political patrons, they served only the President. Even then, their loyalty was often more to the office than the man. They could afford the frankness born of intimacy; government in their time was virtually a club. They did not need to grope for a sense of values. Though they mocked the Rector’s pieties, they nonetheless lived by his ethics. Virtues that now seem almost quaint, such as placing loyalty over ambition, were to them commandments.
The leaders of the old Establishment were self-confident enough to be selfless. Not always personally secure - Kennan, certainly, was exceedingly fragile - but self-assured in a broader sense. Products of institutions that preached service to country, they came of age at a time when it was possible to believe sincerely that America had a duty to serve the world. They came to power during a time “when Washington was at its best,” says George Ball, “and absorbed that yeasty atmosphere. It was an era when we weren’t taking a parsimonious view, worrying about balancing the budget, but about how the hell we were going to save the world.”
Acheson and Harriman, Lovett and McCloy, Bohlen and Kennan: they saw themselves, throughout their lives, not as public figures but as public servants. They rarely had to wonder about their place in society; they did not have to read the newspapers to know where they stood. Freed from the distraction of self, they were strangely liberated and empowered. They could bring their extraordinary energy, tempered by long exposure to the wider world, to the immense postwar task of rebuilding and making secure the shattered West.
There are, no doubt, diplomats and officials these days who are as brilliant as Acheson, as dogged as Harriman or McCloy, and as competent as Bohlen. There may even be some as prescient as Kennan and as honorable as Lovett. But there certainly does not now exist, and may never again, a breed of statesmen with the same synergism, the talent to work together in a way that transcends their contribution as individuals. Their triumphs and failures may be surpassed, but as dying Acheson said to Harriman, “never in such good company.”
For better or worse, they were positioned by the chance of history to have consequence far beyond their individual identities. Secure in their common outlook, empowered by the bonds of trust, they met the challenge of a demanding new age. In their sense of duty and shared wisdom, they found the force to shape the world.
Foreign policy, Kennan believed, had become political theater. By sacrificing realism to polemics, consistency to opportunism, America had forfeited its role as world leader.
If there is no first use of these nuclear weapons, there will never be any use of them.
Acheson sensed that his era was passing, and he did not much like what he saw was taking its place. “We are now in a period where there are mediocre men everywhere. People have opinions but no knowledge, and leaders are made in the image of the masses. Democracy is only tolerable because no other system is.”
Who added the sapiens to homo? He ought to get his tail back - and be kicked.
God watched over every little sparrow that fell, and the US could not compete with Him.
Bundy later wrote in his private memoir that he left the White House with a “slightly queasy feeling” that the group had been briefed too quickly and superficially, that there had been no real time to deliberate, and that “quickie” consultations were a bad idea. Acheson was not well informed; “quickie consultations” deprived him of the facts he needed to fully engage his lawyerly acuity.
“I looked to him as a God,” McNamara recalled of his relationship with Acheson during those years. “I was tremendously sensitive to his thoughts. He was the wisest foreign policy adviser I worked with during seven years in government.”
The effect on Acheson was not to make him share his own doubts about Vietnam, but to proke him to tell the President to stop whining. Acheson described his reaction in a letter to Harry Truman: We were all disturbed by a long complaint about how mean everything and everybody was to him - Fate, the Press, the Congress, the Intellectuals and so on. For a long time he fought the problem of Vietnam (every course of action was wrong; he had no support from anyone at home or abroad; it interfered with all his programs…) I got to thinking about you and General Marshall and how we never wasted time “fighting the problem” or endlessly reconsidering decisions, or feeling sorry for ourselves. Acheson fidgeted impatiently as he listened to Johnson wallow in self-pity. Finally, he could stand it no longer. “I blew my top and told him he was wholly right on Vietnam. That he has no choice except to press on, that explanations were not as important as successful action.”
When a North Vietnamese representative began calling the US a warmonger, Harriman “accidentally” hit the “talk” button on his microphone and said to an aid, “Did that little bastard say we started WW2?”
The US, Acheson said, must be prepared to “raise tensions to the point where people no longer act coolly, they no longer act on the basis of cool calculation, but they act on the basis of fear… So the Russians will say, ‘We may get a strike when we’re not expecting it.’ This is the only thing to do. This is what you call the delicate balance of terror.” As Paul Nitze later acknowledged, “Brinkmanship may have been discredited, but that was our policy.”
Washington was torn by conflicting aims. An abundant supply of cheap oil was essential to the economy and national security. Friendly relations with the Arabs were necessary to keep them out of the Soviet orbit. Yet no Administration could politically afford to offend American Jews by appearing to help Israel’s mortal enemies in the Middle East. The solution: Let the oil companies take care of the Arabs, with the discreet aid or at least noninterference of the US government.
American oil operations are, for all practical purposes, instruments of our foreign policy towards Middle Eastern countries. Eisenhower and Dulles simply maintained the Truman Administration’s benign hands-off policy toward the oil companies. The US continued to regard royalties paid to Arab countries by the oil companies as income tax, saving the oil companies billions in US taxes. This so-called “golden gimmick,” first conceived in 1950 and kept secret for the next six years, allowed the US to in effect funnel foreign aid to Arab countries without admitting it.
Actually, Acheson, Marshall, and Lovett were having difficulty simply persuading the Joint Chiefs that US forces should not quit Korea altogether.
General MacArthur, meanwhile, was preparing for Armageddon. “He simply could not bear to end his career in checkmate,” wrote his biographer. Acheson in his memoir quoted Euripides: “Whom the gods destroy they first make mad.”
MacArthur wanted to stomp out Communism in the Far East, if not the entire globe, in one last apocalyptic battle. At the end of December, the proposed to the JCS that he blockade the coast of China, destroy China’s industrial capacity with air strikes, and unleash Chiang Kai-shek to attack the mainland. When the Joint Chiefs replied that they were not interested in staring WW3, MacArthur came back complaining that the morale of his troops was suffering and that unless “the extraordinary limitations and conditions imposed” upon him were lifted, “complete destruction” beckoned. The blood, he implied, would be on Washington’s hands. General Marshall dryly observed to Dean Rusk that “when a general complains of the morale of his troops the time has come to look to his own.”
In Kennan’s view, Nitze had succumbed to the seduction of military planning, to the “planner’s dummy.” The military always assumed the worst in its hypotheticals. Too much emphasis was put on the enemy’s capacity, not enough on his intentions.
Bored with an economics course, he skipped the final exam to go to a house party in Newport, and received a zero. In those day, grades didn’t count. Harvard was more like a European university. You just tried to absorb wisdom. We all drank too much, had girls, and a rich glorious life.
So, with loose rocks, do avalanches begin: In the next four years, the US would spend $2.5B to finance France’s losing war in Southeast Asia, more than it spent through the Marshall Plan to rebuild France itself. And that, of course, was just the beginning.
General Marshall was indignant. He thought that Truman was buckling under to political pressure, an unpardonable sin to the upright old general.
“I have no feelings,” the general declared, “except those I reserved for Mrs. Marshall.”
Marshall was an icon to Acheson. Like Stimson, he was as important for what he inspired in others as what he accomplished himself. Acheson described General Marshall entering a room: “Everyone felt his presence. It was a striking and communicated force. His figure conveyed intensity, which his voice, low, staccato, and incisive, reinforced. It compelled respect. It spread a sense of authority and calm.”
Marshall was far from brilliant. His mind was more conventional than imaginative. He was wise, but his judgement was hardly infallible. Yet he had about him an aura of absolute integrity.
In wartime, he dealt with martial egos with fairness, while utterly suppressing his own.
Marshall held himself aloof. When President Roosevelt called him George, Marshall gently remonstrated that only his wife called him by his first name. He rationed his energy and emotions. “I cannot allow myself to become angry. That would be fatal. It is too exhausting.”
When Marshall became Secretary of State, he was sixty-six years old. Highly competent at running a war machine, he knew less about peacetime diplomacy. He believed in delegating responsibility, which in practice meant letting Acheson run the State Department. Yet he also had “the capacity for decision,” Acheson noted, a quality that was to Acheson “surely God’s rarest gift of mind to man.” Marshall had little use for “kicking the problem around,” a State Department pastime. Acheson relished quoting Marshall to his subordinates: “Don’t fight the problem; decide it!”
Our name for problems is significant. We call them headaches. You take a powder and they are gone. The pains about which we have been talking are not like that. They will stay with us until death. We have got to understand that all our lives the danger, the uncertainty, the need for alertness, for effort, for discipline will be upon us. This is new to us. It will be hard for us.
There is no war to end all wars. No war to make the world forever safe. Men who fight for freedom merely win the opportunity to continue the peacetime struggle to preserve and advance it.
Acheson was eloquent in conveying his sympathy for the Soviet’s security aims. To understand them, he said, an American would have to imagine what it would be like if Germany had invaded the US, destroyed industrial centers from New York to Boston to Pittsburg, ruined a large part of the Midwest’s breadbasket, and killed a third of the population. To Acheson this made a compelling case for allowing the Soviets at least some form of sphere in Eastern Europe. “We understand and agree with them,” he said, “that to have friendly government along her borders is essential both for the security of the Soviet Union and the peace of the world.”
To that extent, Bohlen concluded, Moscow was entitled to some sort of sphere of influence, despite the high-minded rherotic of the Atlantic Charter, and to “friendly” states next door. The problem was defining what “friendly” meant. The difficulty, as Bohlen saw it, came when the Kremlin insisted “on complete Soviet domination and control over all phases of the external and internal life” of countries within its sphere. Such police-state repression was an anathema not only to Americans, but to principled and freethinking people everywhere. Besides, this total domination (at least in Bohlen’s eyes, if not the Kremlin’s) was unnecessary for Soviet security purposes. Somehow, he figured, there must be a way to establish governments in Eastern Europe that were “friendly” to the Soviets and yet did not depend on repressive Stalinist tactics to stay in power.
There was an enormous crowd celebrating the victory under the American flag. It made me feel very humble to recognize how much these people looked to the US as the protector of their freedom. Here was the hope of the world, the American flag.
The chief lesson I have learned in a long life, is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him.
With a combination of self-pity and conceit, Kennan concluded that Russia, riddled with contradictions, would always remain an enigma to Americans. “There will be much talk about the necessity for ‘understanding Russia’; but there will be no place for the American who is really willing to undertake this disturbing task,” he wrote. “The best he can look forward to is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow, and where few will consent to believe he has been.”
To Kennan, Harriman’s unreflective and cold personality was perplexing. “He had that curious contempt for elegance that only the wealthy can afford,” Kennan later wrote. “I often think: what a trial I must have been to him, running around with my head in the usual cloud of philosophic speculation, full of interests other than my work… bombarding him with bundles of purple prose on matters which, as I am sure he thought, it was the business of the President to think about, not mine.”
Lovett was once asked to pick the greatest negotiator he ever met. Without hesitation, he named McCloy. Indeed, McCloy seemed to have a magic ability to conjure a consensus out of chaos. Blessed with stamina and patience, he could gather a contentious group in his office, outlast their arguments, and gently but persistently prod them toward areas of agreement. He had a sensitive appreciation of how far each could be pushed. One tactic, which he called “yellow padding,” consisted of carefully preparing on a legal pad the outcome he hoped to achieve at a meeting; after edging the players toward that consensus, he would pull out his draft of “what everyone seems to be saying.”
Unlike McCloy, Lovett did not relish the art of consultation and consensus building; he was, instead, a doer, someone who was a master at accomplishing a task and administering an activity. “To hell with the cheese,” he would declare when enmeshed in a tangled problem. “Let’s just get out of this trap.” When faced with disagreements, he tried to downplay ideological differences. The resolution, he insisted, would come from weighting the facts and figures. As General Marshall put it: “Lovett has the finest facility in the world for handling unpleasant problems without making anyone mad: he solves them.”
Part of Kennan’s growing disdain for Communism grew out of his rather prissy elitism. On a solitary sojourn to Sochi, a resort on the Black Sea, he was repulsed by the “bored, homesick proletarians” at the hotel. “Had the father of the Revolution really imagined that, once the upper and middle classes had been kicked out of these watering-places, the members of the proletariat would move in and proceed to amuse themselves gracefully and with taste?” He mused in his journal. “Did they really fail to foresee that such simple people would make pig-sties of these hotels and villas, would have no appreciation for sky and air and mountain scenery?”
Yet Acheson also felt that the best statesmen were those who had the attributes of great lawyers, in particular an ability to remain emotionally detached from a case and appreciate the facts on both sides.
He always maintained a cool detachment. Some lawyers get so steamed up they think their client is the Lord God Almighty fifteen minutes after he has stepped into the office. Acheson always saw the client as representing a soluble problem, and nothing more.
Acheson took justifiable pride in his ability to cut through a morass of complexities and facts to reach the kernel of a problem. Yet he had neither Harriman’s proving curiosity nor Kennan’s philosophical depth. “Dean took pleasure in finding the answer to riddles,” said a former law partner. “The nature of the riddles did not concern him. He as not a man to wander into the penumbra of thought.”
His pro-union sentiments, however, never took precedence over his concern for social stability. A breakdown of order, he felt, was an irrational abandonment of common interests, and there was nothing Acheson valued more than rationality.
Judge Lovett, ever eager to hone his son’s mind, gave him four volumes of Immanuel Kant to read on his honeymoon. Young Lovett, who prided himself on an agile mind unclouded by dogma, was particularly struck by the section of the Critique of Pure Reason called the Antinomies, in which the German philosopher places pairs of contradictory propositions side by side and proceeds to offer air-tight “proofs” of each.
It became a time of intellectual transformation: the intricacies of the law and the rigor of the law school stimulated the careless young man into becoming a serious scholar. “This was a tremendous discovery: the discovery of the power of thought,” Acheson later recalled. “Not only did I become aware of this wonderful mechanism, the brain, but I became aware of an unlimited mass of material that was lying about the world waiting to be stuffed into the brain.”
It was at Harvard Law that Acheson realized that “excellence counted - a sloppy try wasn’t enough.” He began comparing his mind to a welder’s torch, waiting to be focused. His sense of security firmly re-established after the grueling trial of Groton, Acheson began to push himself intellectually, to take great pride in the sharpness of his mind. At Groton, intellectual ambition was considered socially suspect. But at Harvard Law School, Acheson found it prized as a path to social distinction.
The type of intelligence that Acheson developed through immersion in the law was a logical and analytic one, “learning that you need not make up your mind in advance, that there is no set solution to a problem, and that decisions are the result of analyzing the facts, of tussling and grappling with them.” But the law held even more for Acheson: he saw its evolution as a mirror of the economic and philosophic forces that ordered a community; when those forces changed, he came to believe, so too should the law.
At Groton I didn’t happen to feel like conforming. And to my surprise and astonishment, I discovered not only that an independent judgement might be the right one, but that a man was actually alive and breathing once he had made it.
- A good workman can work with poor tools.
- Whatever you have anything to do with, your first thought should be to improve it.
- Great wealth is an obligation and responsibility. Money must work for the country.