Present at the Destruction

Martin Sieff on Dean Acheson’s True Legacy

Martin Sieff received three Pulitzer Prize nominations for international reporting for The Washington Times. He served as Chief Political Correspondent at United Press International (UPI) from 1999 to 2009.

For 20 years after his departure as the most reviled secretary of state in United States history, Dean Acheson was toxic. He was a non-person in among Democrats. His unbelievable combination of arrogance, incompetence, and contemptibly bad judgment in Korea stood for itself.

However, after the political, strategic, domestic and moral collapses of President Lyndon Johnson and his fabled team of the “Best and Brightest,” succeeding generations of Democrats fled foreign policy but remained desperate for any False Prophets or titans from the past they could lay their hands on.

Zbigniew Brzezinski eagerly, even desperately, sold his ties to the Democrats to David Rockefeller as a “big intellectual” strategist and respectable pundit to balance Rockefeller’s lifelong friend and personal favorite, Henry Kissinger, with the dominant Republicans.

Thus it was that Zbig, later working through his loyal, clueless, yet widely despised protege Madeleine Albright, became the Pied Piper for half a century of Democrat phony-tough guy national security “experts.” Albright’s PhD thesis was nearly rejected at Columbia University until Brzezinski pulled some strings (with Rockefeller behind him) to ensure she got the parchment, thereby setting her up as a vital member of the anti-communist intellectual front.

But from what foreign policy tradition—aside from the starry-eyed, unworldly idealists like Franklin Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, and Henry Wallace- could the Democrats draw upon? Another needed to be conjured up for the purposes of the Cold War. And to do that, one reputation in particular needed to be resurrected.

The election of Republican Richard Nixon (a brooding Othello if ever there was one, along with his Iago, Kissinger, by his side) unleashed a new era of unprecedented sleaze. Along with catastrophic inflation of the LBJ and Nixon-Ford administrations went an unprecedented devaluation in the credibility and moral standing of the Presidency and government in the eyes of the American people.

It was Watergate that unleashed the secrets and the sleaze upon us all. The documented, in-your-face-evidence of Nixon’s own odious ravings - which the ridiculous Wile E. Coyote buffoon had even insisted on having recorded himself - revealed an Oval Office beset with foul-mouthed posturing that broke the 20th century veneration of the United States Presidency that had really only started during the postwar era.

And there was even a new American Homer or Livy, a true fraudulent mythmaker, ready to hand!

His name was Merle Miller, a puffed-up, self-important mediocrity.

As a writer, Miller had done it all--and failed. He had published “as told to” history, novels, plays, Hollywood screenplays, and worked in journalism. None of it worked. He had even interviewed former President Harry Truman for a proposed series of interviews for the CBS network. CBS passed on the idea.

Truman, like Acheson, was still toxic with the American public and with President John F. Kennedy and his associates in particular. Truman was bitterly jealous of the young president and fought ceaselessly for his personal favorite, Lyndon Johnson, for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. As long as JFK lived, Truman’s hatred for him was seething and unrelenting.

However, Truman had no time for Merle Miller either. When Miller proposed writing an article based on his interviews with Truman, the ex-president reacted violently. He despised and distrusted Miller and threatened legal action against him.

Although also from the Midwest, he was a bespectacled, pretentious, self-styled intellectual: the kind of person Truman instinctively despised. He was a homosexual and relatively open about it in an intolerant era in 1961-62 when the interviews were made. And Truman was notoriously intolerant and judgmental on that subject. Like many unathletic, small, and insecure boys from modest backgrounds, Harry was fake macho all his life.

Most of all, Merle Miller was on the far left and had been blacklisted by Senator Joe McCarthy. But Truman no sympathy at all for McCarthy’s victims and wanted nothing to do with any of them.

In 1963 Truman wrote a letter to Miller which read: “I thank you for sending me the article which you [Miller] proposed for the Saturday Evening Post. I am not in favor of such articles, especially this one which has so many misstatements of fact in it. I am sorry that that is the case and if you publish it I shall make that statement public.” According to eminent historian Robert Hugh Ferrell, Truman did not mail the letter to Miller, but instead chose to hire a law firm and threatened to sue, which forced Miller to withdraw the proposed article for the Saturday Evening Post,

But after Harry Truman died in December 1972, it was finally safe for Merle Miller to dust off the tape recordings he had of his CBS conversations with Truman and shape them into a book. It was called “Plain Speaking. It was published in 1974 and it became an enormous instant hit and even acclaimed classic. It was in print continuously over the next half century and it instantly transformed Truman into a beloved American demigod.

Neocons in particular rushed to embrace him. In the era of Watergate, the corruption, ineptitude, and endless fiascoes and failures of first LBJ and then Nixon made Truman look good.Acheson, Truman’s right hand man, the gallant Sir Galahad to Give-’Em-Hell Harry, also benefited from the apotheosis of the mean little Man from Missouri. Miller shamelessly transmuted Acheson into Socrates.

Miller died still awash in riches, fame, and reverence in 1986. But it should come as no surprise that his masterpiece in hagiography has since been shredded. In 1996, the historian Ferrell found that Truman never said many of the most devastating and scathing claims that Miller attributed to him.

Turman never referred in the interview record to General Douglas MacArthur as a “dumb-son-of-a-bitch.” Nor did Truman assert that Dwight D. Eisenhower, his successor in the Oval Office, tried to divorce his wife Mamie in order to marry Kay Summersby, his English chauffeur and secretary during World War II (although that may have been true).Nor is there any other documented evidence for many of Truman’s supposedly fearless and witty comments recorded in Miller’s book.

It was doubly ironic, therefore, that it was the shifty, lying, sleazy, frustrated hack Merle Miller who single-handedly invented Harry Truman’s reputation as a Great President and a Great Man. And he did it in a popular, lowest-common-denominator “I made it up as a I went along” piece of pulp trash that was then acclaimed as an instant classic and has remained in the American pantheon of golden heritage ever since.

Acheson benefited from Miller’s sleight of hand in exactly the same way. Miller presents him as a figure of boundless wisdom, decency, restraint, and innate, incorruptible dignity. According to Miller, Acheson always advocated the correct, courageous policies for the correct, courageous reasons. And he always kept his head and his dignity when all about him were losing theirs. He was indeed, in 14^th-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer’s words, “a verray, parfit, gentil knyght.”

The reality, of course, was very different.

Acheson owed his career to President Franklin Roosevelt, and he repaid the president with disloyalty, treachery, and incompetence. He sabotaged the president’s most important policies not just once but twice. And he was directly responsible for provoking two of the most avoidable and initially disastrous wars in United States history before he went on to passionately support a third major conflict that was also ruinous.

He opposed FDR’s moves to deflate the dollar by controlling gold prices in 1933 and was an open critic of the policy despite his complete ignorance of national finance. He resigned in November 1933. The New Deal made many financial and economic mistakes
But seeking to increase the amount of liquidity in the US economy, as Roosevelt and his secretaries of the treasury sought to do, was not one of them.

Roosevelt then gave Acheson a second chance and brought him back as assistant secretary of state on February 1, 1941. The move proved catastrophic. Acheson was a passionate, shameless Anglophile, but he was also a stupid, hard-charging, bungling bull in a china shop, much like his hero, Winston Churchill.

FDR wanted an assistant secretary of state who would remain loyal and quietly implement his potentially politically explosive policy of secretly sending Britain all aid short of war, behind Congress’s back. Roosevelt also froze Japan’s assets in the United States, believing this would deter Tokyo from pouncing on the British and European colonies in Asia left wide open by Adolf Hitler’s conquest of Western Europe.

However, Acheson went much further. While FDR was away meeting Churchill off the coast of Newfoundland, where they announced the Atlantic Charter, Acheson used his powers at the State Department to cut off all Japan’s oil imports from the United States too. Faced with this typical Acheson shoot-from-the-hip fake macho action, Roosevelt went along with it.

Acheson’s decision provided the motive for the imperialists and militarists in Tokyo to make the crucial decision to go to war with the United States. Acheson’s actions therefore led directly to the deaths of more than 2,400 Americans, almost all of them servicemen at Pearl Harbor and the sinking of eight US battleships. My own future father-in-law was there as a US Army enlistee at the time and was lucky to survive it.

After FDR’s death, Acheson was quick to turn on the memory of the man to whom he owed so much. His later lordly recollections and assessments of Roosevelt are filled with malice, jealousy, and hate hidden beneath his surface air of fraudulent English, aristocratic and courtly imperturbability.

Nevertheless, Acheson had the most important quality needed to rise to influence and power in Washington. He was a shameless flatterer and courtier. In plain American language, he knew how to kiss ass.

By the end of 1945, Acheson was already Truman’s strongest supporter and sycophant in the State Department. He watched with glee as Truman relentlessly purged every one of the veteran Cabinet members who had served FDR with such distinction. Acheson rapidly became the right-hand man and eminence grise of Secretary of State George Marshall in 1947. Then, when Marshall retired, he was Truman’s immediate choice to succeed him as secretary of state in January 1949.

Once again, Acheson’s elevation proved catastrophic for his president and for the nation. He was completely blindsided by Mao Zedong’s communist takeover of China at the end of 1948, even though he had been a top policymaker at the State Department and Truman’s main foreign policy adviser since 1945.

Acheson was also a close friend of his fellow snob and senior State Department official Alger Hiss. After Hiss was convicted of passing classified documents to the Soviet Union, Acheson publicly stated he would not turn his back on him. However, a congressional investigation spearheaded not by the drunken sot Senator Joe McCarthy but by the formidable young California Congressman Richard M. Nixon had found incriminating evidence that Hiss was guilty. Acheson rightly came under withering public criticism, though the witless Truman blindly stood by him.

It was while this political firestorm was raging - only two weeks later, in fact - that Acheson made his next extraordinary catastrophic bungle. On January 12, 1950, he announced in another speech at the National Press Club a list of the nations around Northeast Asia that the US was determined to protect from any communist aggression. He never bothered to include South Korea. It is possible he was so ignorant that he did not even know it was there. The blundering bull in a china shop had unwittingly unleashed his latest war.

Only a few months later, on June 25, 1950, North Korea, backed to the hilt by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, invaded South Korea. Truman and Acheson were taken completely by surprise. They sent the US armed forces to roll back the attack. At least 2 million Koreans, probably more than twice as many, died in that three-year war. Some 36,500 Americans died in the war, too. Acheson and Truman’s admirers blindly lauded them for their “courage” in sending them to die.

Acheson made many other miscalculations and catastrophic foul-ups during his years of real power, along with his boss, Truman. Together, they ignored newly independent India, then the second-most populous nation in the world and the largest successful democracy in human history, after it gained independence from Britain in 1947. Instead, he showered aid and favors on neighboring Muslim Pakistan.

Acheson also supported France’s doomed efforts to reestablish its prewar empire over all of Indo-China - the modern nations of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Had he and Truman followed Franklin Roosevelt’s clearly expressed principles, policies, and wishes, they would have insisted on a full French pull-out immediately. Thirty years of endless total wars and millions of unnecessary violent deaths would have been avoided. But Acheson was a pro-European imperialist snob and proud of it.

His three great hatreds were India and its Hindu majority, the Irish (of course) and curiously Israel, even though he owed his career to the patronage and generosity of two eminent Jewish US Supreme Court Justices, Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter. Israel faced the threat of widespread famine in 1951-52 largely as a result of the infant state’s naively socialist, though certainly not communist, policies. But Truman and Acheson refused to issue a cent of civilian – or, for that matter, military - aid to the widespread famine in 1951-52. Widespread suffering and mass death from starvation in the new Jewish state was only avoided, despite Truman and Acheson’s indifference, thanks to massive and rapid generous financial aid from the new Federal Republic of West Germany, pushed through with determination by its Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. Coming only six years after the end of the Nazi Holocaust, it marked one of the most extraordinary reversals of fortune in history.

In his 20 years of well-remunerated political retirement serving as an eminence grise and legal wheeler and dealer in Washington Acheson never grew, never mellowed, never changed, never learned.

He eagerly egged on John Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson into their calamitous plunge into the jungles of Vietnam in the 1960s. It was, therefore, darkly fitting that Acheson played such a central role in ending the long liberal interventionist era of Democratic Party national dominance, which he had even done his best to embarrass and capsize at its inception in 1933, a third of a century before.

I have not even touched on Acheson’s still most revered achievement - his crafting of the NATO alliance in 1949, which for the past 77 years has locked the United States into the embrace of mutually assured destruction with the Soviet Union and its main successor state, modern Russia.

Thus, the full harvest of the endless bungles and arrogance that comprise the legacy of Dean Acheson. It is a legacy that continues to propel the United States and the American people remorselessly towards destruction.