Dean Acheson and the Creation of an American World Order.

• Author: Heineman, Robert
• Position: Book review

* Dean Acheson and the Creation of an American World Order

By Robert J. McMahon

Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2009.

Pp. xii, 257. $25.95 cloth, $16.95 paperback.

Dean Acheson and the Creation of an American World Order is the first book in the Shapers of International History series edited for Potomac Books by Melvyn P. Leffler, the Edward Stettinius Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Robert J. McMahon, the inaugural author, has published several previous works on international affairs and is currently the Mershon Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio State University. McMahon provides a short overview of Dean Acheson's early life and then a detailed chronological examination of important policy decisions he made or influenced. Whatever one's views on the merits of Acheson's foreign-policy decisions, most knowledgeable persons would agree that he is a reasonable choice for the opening book in the series, and McMahon ably portrays him both as a private person and as a public figure.

Reared in comfortable circumstances in New England, Acheson found life at Groton difficult. At Yale, he began to develop socially, but McMahon argues it was Harvard Law School that left a lasting imprint on Acheson. Finishing fifth in his class at Harvard Law, Acheson immersed himself in legal study and established a relationship with Felix Frankfurter that developed into a lifelong friendship. From Harvard, he moved to a clerkship with Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis and then, at the young age of thirty-two, to a partnership in the prestigious Washington law firm Covington and Burling. McMahon is convinced that Acheson's association with Frankfurter, Brandeis, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. shaped him into a pragmatist who focused on practical problems and avoided abstract rhetoric, and throughout the book he describes numerous critical situations in which Acheson's skills in negotiation and persuasion carried the day.

McMahon portrays Acheson's relations with the Roosevelt administration as strained throughout much of the 1930s. After a brief period in the Treasury Department--part of it as acting secretary--his disagreements with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's cavalier approach to financial policy forced him to step down and return to private practice. The specter of aggression by totalitarian regimes abroad, however, brought him back into the public eye as he ardently supported efforts to help the Allies, especially in...