This autobiography by Dean Acheson, who was President Harry S. Truman’s trusted Secretary of State, is filled with information that would be interesting to anyone wanting to know more about the people and policies of the Truman administration. It is a very long book (over 700 pages excluding notes, references, and the index), and it is in small font. The title is derived from a quote from King of Spain Alphonso X, the Learned, 1252-1284, “Had I been present at the creation I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.” I certainly had the impression that Mr. Acheson had no lack of confidence in his ability to make wise decisions about solutions to problems or making accurate judgments about people. There were a few cases where he writes that decisions proved to be a mistake, but those were the exception. He either writes with admiration and often affection for people or with open contempt. I don’t recall anyone being described other than in the two extremes. I also don’t recall a single circumstance where he describes Harry S. Truman with anything other than admiration. I have read in other sources that the respect was mutual; Harry considered Acheson his “second in command.” The office of the Vice President was vacant until Truman and his running mate, Alben Barkley took office in 1949 after winning the election in 1948. I don’t recall Barkley being prominently mentioned.
The book follows Acheson’s State Department career chronologically from being an Assistant Secretary of State 1941-1945, Under Secretary of State 1945-1947, to his tumultuous years of Secretary of State 1947-1953. My primary interest in reading the book was the decisions of the Truman administration in containment of the Soviet Union during the Cold War and whether Acheson and others in the State Department were, as described by critics, “in the pocket of the Soviets.” To the contrary, Acheson describes relations with the Soviets in a non-flattering manner beginning early in the book. He says the Soviet diplomats “…cultivated boorishness as a method of showing their contempt for the capitalist world, with which they wanted minimum contact…” He mentions one Soviet diplomat named Oumansky who was killed in “…a plane crash of suspicious cause…” and that “…we felt no sense of loss.” Acheson would eventually come under constant attack and suspicion during the “red scare era,” but I never found an instance in the book where he displayed anything but distrust of Stalin and the Soviets.
As a sidebar to my primary interest, Acheson mentions that no one in the government understood that the tightening of economic blockade of Japan had put them in a position where they felt their conquest of Asia and eventual attack on Pearl Harbor were not based on ambition but on what they thought they needed to do to survive. Acheson also reveals that he did not know anything about the atomic bomb until the reports it had been used.
Acheson’s early contact with Henry Wallace, who would later be replaced as Vice President by Harry Truman by FDR, led him to believe him as “an empire builder.” I found nothing to disagree with the wisdom of FDR, who probably knew he would not live through another term, that Wallace would not be a good successor. One section of the book is titled “Henry Wallace’s Great Invasion,” and describes the process Wallace established to bureaucratically attack those who disagree with him. Some describe that FDR encouraged battles in the ranks “…which permitted him to keep power in his own hands…” Acheson writes, “This, I think is nonsense.” His reasoning is that strategy would be used by a weak person, and FDR was not weak. He had no trouble commanding strong men but was “…tone deaf to the subtle nuances of civil governmental organization. This was messed up by his administration for the simplest of reasons: he did not know any better.”
There are several mentions of people accused of having Communist sympathies or outright spying for the Soviets. Acheson defended each of those mentioned, and that included Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss. Hiss was eventually convicted of perjury for his denials he had provided information to the Soviet Union. Acheson defended Hiss as a friend while saying he would not condone anyone disloyal to the United States. Acheson was clearly misled by misplaced trust. Both White and Hiss were proven to have helped the Soviet Union.
There is an interesting discussion of the U.S. call on Japan to surrender unconditionally. “The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.” Hiroshima was destroyed a few days after this demand on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9th.
Acheson was introduced to the issue of atomic energy by President Truman in September 1945. Colonel Stimson was resigning, and had created a problem by writing a memorandum that was misinterpreted to suggest “sharing the atomic bomb with Russia.” There was a lengthy and contentious process of trying to decide what to do about International control of atomic weapons that came to nothing because the Soviets weren’t interested in international control.
Acheson was assigned to give a speech at a rally sponsored by the National Council of Soviet-American Friendship in Madison Square Garden. He added a paragraph to his speech stating “…an acknowledgment of the Soviet Union’s reasonableness in desiring friendly governments along her borders.” He then added “…the interest in security must take into account and respect other basic interests of nations and men…and take place short of the point where persuasion and firmness become coercion, where a knock on the door at night strikes terror into men and women.” Acheson had to be hurried out to boos and catcalls. During the “McCarthy period” the speech at the meeting was judged to be evidence of his sympathy for communism.
There were long discussions with General George Marshall including what led him to favor Operation Overlord, the invasion of France across the English Channel instead of Churchill’s plan to invade the “…soft underbelly of Europe…in the eastern Mediterranean.” (This is a subject that has always fascinated me, because I had developed the impression Stalin had pressed for Overlord knowing it would be easier for him to control Eastern Europe after the war despite the fact there would be countless more allied casualties.) Marshall said he weighed both the military aspects “…and the usual political ones. He thought of the vast amount of shipping involved in shifting the allied army, its supplies and base, from England two thousand miles or more eastward, of the delay of perhaps a year in the final move on Japan, of a million additional casualties. He was aware of President Roosevelt’s obviously deteriorating health…and interacting effect of these momentous developments.”
Stalin was steering Soviet foreign policy on an ominous course. He gave a speech to a vast “election” audience in Moscow on February 9, 1946 in which “…he stated with brutal clarity the Soviet Union’s postwar policy. Finding the causes of the late war in the necessities of capitalist-imperialist monopoly and the same forces still in control abroad, he concluded that no peaceful international order was possible.” He directed that emphasis be placed on trebling production of iron and steel, doubling coal and oil, and that consumer goods must wait on rearmament. George F. Kennan found “…at the bottom of the Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs centuries of a Russian fear of physical, a tyranny’s fear of insecurity…penetration by the Western world was its greatest danger. In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value in their methods and tactics. Today they cannot dispense with it. It is (the) fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability.” Kennan predicted that Soviet policy would be to use every means to infiltrate, divide, and weaken the West. Acheson said his analysis “…might or might not have been sound, but his predictions and warnings could not have been better. We responded to them slowly.”
This is only a sampling of the details revealed by the book. I recommend it to anyone who interested in the history of the Cold War, but be prepared to find more detail than you wanted.