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

• Author: Thomas, Evan

By James Chace Simon and Schuster $30

Dean Acheson, secretary of state in the early days of the Cold War and one of the main architects of "containing" the Soviet Union, was easy to caricature. Right-wing populists liked to make fun of his guardsman's mustache, his "fake British accent" (Joe McCarthy), his "British tweeds" (Richard Nixon), his lordly manner which translated as disdain for the less bright and lesser born. As a man he is remembered today, if he is remembered at all, as the personification of the old East Coast Establishment -- the "Wasp Ascendancy," as Joe Alsop called the white-shoe bankers and lawyers and coupon clippers who ran things, more or less, for the first half of the 20th century.

Acheson was without question or apology an elitist. At the end of his life, in the early 1970s, he embarrassed the East Coast foreign-policy establishment, which was becoming increasingly liberal, by supporting continued white domination of Rhodesia and Angola. Acheson was not really a racist. Rather, as James Chace explains in his new biography of Acheson, he was a paternalist. He refused to believe that Africans, or any Third World population, could rule as well as post-colonial Europeans. Acheson was proudly Eurocentric; he would have choked on the multicultural curricula of today's universities. He enjoyed the trappings of privilege and lapped up discrete luxuries -- he loved, for instance, to march in his gown at Yale commencement or to drink rum cocktails after a game of croquet at the Mill Reef Club in Antigua. And he never hid his scorn for soft or sloppy thinking. He once famously quipped that Adlai Stevenson "has a third-rate mind he can't make up"

But the image of Acheson as a striped-pants snob is stale, and misses the real point about his essential character. It is more interesting and useful to look at Acheson not as a rigid exemplar of class conformity, but rather as the opposite: as a rebel. It is his outspokenness -- his brazenness -- that is worth studying and remembering. Acheson consistently showed a kind of willfulness and courage in public that stands in contrast to modern policy makers, whom Acheson would have regarded as craven, or to use one of his Britishisms, "wet."

His pedigree is deceiving. He went to all the right schools (Groton, Yale, Harvard Law) and met all the right people (he roomed with Cole Porter and Archibald MacLeish). But he did not come from wealth and he was at first an outcast -- too "fresh"...