Facing a Global Threat With Nonpartisan Clarity

By WALTER ISAACSON

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/04/books/04isaa.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

In 1946, just after fascism had been defeated, America’s leaders found themselves confronted by a whole new global threat, the spread of Soviet-backed Communism. They reacted creatively and boldly by devising an imaginative array of institutions, like NATO and the Marshall Plan, and by formulating a clear and nonpartisan sense of mission, expressed in the Truman Doctrine and the strategies of containment.

Today America is once again confronted by a new global threat, that of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. But so far no new NATO or Marshall Plan has been birthed, and the Bush Doctrine is not yet as clear nor as nonpartisan as some might hope. That is one reason that it is worth welcoming another biography of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who was more responsible for the Marshall Plan than Gen. George Marshall and as responsible for the Truman Doctrine as President Harry S. Truman.

Acheson has been blessed with good and generally sympathetic biographers: Gaddis Smith, David McLellan, James Chace and, for his later years, Douglas Brinkley. The man himself conveyed his own flair in what may be the most luminous memoir by any American statesman, “Present at the Creation,” published in 1969, as polished and elegant as its author.

Robert L. Beisner, a diplomatic historian whose previous works have focused on the 19th century, has now produced a welcome addition to this shelf, a solidly researched and balanced tome that focuses mainly on Acheson’s years as the undersecretary and then secretary of state. It serves as the perfect companion to “Present at the Creation.” It is not as rollicking and witty, but Mr. Beisner’s prodigious mining of archives and oral histories makes it actually far more reliable and accurate than Acheson’s martini-lubricated memories.

Mr. Beisner meticulously traces the evolution of Acheson’s attitude toward the Soviet Union in 1946. Acheson began the year pushing a plan to bring Moscow into an international system for controlling atomic weapons. But by September, in what Mr. Beisner calls a “sharp and decisive turn,” he joined the growing bipartisan consensus that Stalin had to be resisted rather than accommodated. He concluded, as he later wrote, that the Soviet threat was “singularly like that which Islam had posed centuries before, with its combination of ideological zeal and fighting power.”

With Marshall as secretary and Acheson as undersecretary, the State Department embarked on meeting this challenge. Their first step was laying a solid, carefully conceived and clearly articulated foundation, which became known as the Truman Doctrine.

The process began in early 1947 when the British informed Washington that they could no longer keep their commitment to support the Greek government in its struggle against Communist forces. Acheson realized that the United States must step into the breach, and that this presaged a whole new international role. He worked throughout the weekend with his advisers to produce an official request for aid to Greece and Turkey, and then “drank a martini or two toward the confusion of our enemies.”

Recognizing the need for bipartisanship in embarking on a mission that might take decades, Acheson consulted Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. At a meeting with Truman and Vandenberg in the White House, Acheson put the aid request in the context of the larger struggle by using a metaphor about how one or two rotten apples could spoil a barrel.

Acheson oversaw the process of writing the presidential speech to define the new doctrine. The challenge was cast in sweeping terms of a world split between freedom and repression. But the commitment at the core of the doctrine was carefully calibrated to be pragmatic, definable and doable. The United States would, Truman proclaimed, “support free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”

Acheson realized that it was important for the new doctrine to set limits as well as visions. The United States could not help every free nation, and it would be guided by its own security interests in deciding how to react to each case. He eventually got into trouble by seeming to exclude Korea from America’s security perimeter, which some thought contributed to Stalin’s calculations in encouraging the North Korean invasion in 1950.

Mr. Beisner is defensive on Acheson’s behalf, explaining the Korea comment as a minor “afterthought in a busy month” that did not truly alter United States policy. But the incident was significant because it showed that there were risks as well as benefits in making sure that doctrines were clearly articulated and circumscribed. On balance, Acheson felt, the benefits were greater.

When Truman later loosely declared that “whenever and wherever we are challenged by the Communists we must meet the challenge,” Acheson privately wrote him: “You cannot mean this,” adding that confronting Moscow required “lots of sense and coolness in making decisions of where and how.”

After becoming secretary of state in 1949, Acheson helped shape the NATO military alliance with Western Europe and was generally able to preserve the bipartisan consensus behind the cold war strategy. But he was not able to inoculate himself personally from the anti-Communist fervor that arose in the early 1950’s. With an intellectual brilliance only partly leavened by wit, and a veneer of aristocratic arrogance polished by mustache wax, Acheson became a natural target, especially after he defended the honor of his employee and acquaintance Alger Hiss from allegations that he was a Russian spy.

American foreign policy has historically fluctuated between idealism and realism. Acheson’s career showed that it is best when these strands are woven together, as they were in the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. As his current heirs at the State Department seek to temper the democracy-crusade idealism at the heart of the Bush Doctrine with a dose of practicality, pragmatism and realism, Mr. Beisner’s book can offer some lessons about balancing commitments and resources, interests and ideals.

Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute, is co-author of “The Wise Men” and author of biographies of Henry A. Kissinger and Benjamin Franklin.