ACHESON AND EMPIRE: The British Accent in American Foreign Policy.

• Author: Cockburn, Andrew
• Position: Review

ACHESON AND EMPIRE: The British Accent in American Foreign Policy by John McNay University of Missouri Press, $34.95

AMONG THE MANY CONVENIENCES introduced in official Washington in recent times has been the convention that those aspiring to statesmanship do not actually have to behave like states-persons. Aspirants need only to conspicuously bury their noses in Professor James Chace's benign biography of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Even before his inauguration, George W. Bush figuratively brandished Acheson, apparently with the aim of demonstrating a scholarly preoccupation with diplomatic history while simultaneously proving that the 43rd president can actually read. A few years earlier, the Clinton administration, judging by press reports, fought the war over Kosovo with a gun in one hand and Acheson in the other.

It's not hard to see why today's placemen and women find such inspiration in the tale of this tweedy hero. While they struggle to find some purpose in American foreign policy in a fractured post-Cold War world, Acheson was presented with the simpler challenge of confronting Joseph Stalin, fighting the Korean War, rearming Western Europe, and stomping on the last flickering embers of American isolationism. He did the job nicely, while apparently behaving in a decent and gentlemanly manner--viz, his reluctance to abandon Alger Hiss.

John McNay's Acheson and Empire, the British Accent in American Foreign Policy comes therefore as a welcome palliative to the prevailing hagiography. McNay's view, in brief, is that Acheson was so solicitous of the welfare of the British Empire that, time and again, he acted against the best interests of the United States out of irrational deference to policy. In the course of expounding this thesis, the author reminds us that there was much not to like in Dean Acheson--his tireless efforts, for example, on behalf of the racist Rhodesian regime that fought through the latter 1960s and 1970s to preserve white minority rule in what is now Zimbabwe. Chace, for reasons we can only conjecture, makes no mention of this.

McNay traces his subject's unappealing affections to the Acheson family's Ulster Protestant roots, a culture in which Irish Catholics and subject peoples everywhere were viewed with lofty derision, and the Empire as guardian of the privileges of the master race. Acheson retained lifelong affectionate memories of celebrating the British monarch's birthday in Middleton...