Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World.

• Author: Ellsworth, Robert
• Position: Review

James Chace, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 512 pp., $30.

He was colorful and brainy, stylish and witty, hot-tempered and domineering, visionary and pragmatic - and a near genius with the written and spoken word. He was a partisan Democrat, and the skillful architect of an enduring bipartisan foreign policy. He was also an indefatigable workhorse who was always and everywhere a passionate seeker after excellence. He was a brilliant manager, leader, and administrator of the Washington bureaucracies of his day. He was not just an immaculately tailored Washington figure: he enjoyed barnstorming the country on behalf of his policies - sharing the spotlight with Mayor Hubert Humphrey at a huge civic affairs seminar in Minneapolis, speaking to a convention of the Machinists Union in Kansas City, sharing a three-day, 5,000-strong "family" gathering of planters in the Mississippi Delta. He was equally and completely at ease in the palaces of Europe and the cities of Asia. He staved off Soviet hegemony in Western Europe and bound the Federal Republic of Germany into NATO: the democratic, political, economic, and military alliance of the West. He fashioned a balance of power in Europe so that American soldiers would never again have to fight a great war there, and so far - that is, fifty years on - they haven't had to.

This theatrical, egotistical, serious, exuberant master of power politics at home and abroad was surely miscast as a mere secretary of state. Still, what else could Dean Acheson have been in the world of the 1940s and 1950s?

As James Chace points out in Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World, being secretary of state also fed Acheson with "the adrenaline of power." He loved it, and wrote to his daughter that his life in office was "a seductive drug" that helped him exercise his "vital power . . . far beyond what we had thought of as his strength." In turn, this power worked to the benefit of the nation in a tumultuous era of fateful, high-risk gambles. He was a street-fighter type whose gentlemanly experiences at Groton, Yale, and Harvard had not impaired in the slightest his keen ability to see, without illusion, where power lay. His indomitable character then gave him the self-discipline to pursue his interests (and the nation's) accordingly.

Acheson's strength of character did not fade with age. One of the most arresting anecdotes that Chace reports tells how an aging Acheson, then fully eight years out of office, advised President Kennedy when asked for his views - before the fact - on the CIA's planned invasion of Cuba in April 1961. With some asperity Acheson observed to the President that it didn't take Price Waterhouse to figure that an...