Dean Acheson

Dean Acheson as Secretary of State

Dean Acheson (1965)

Dean Gooderham Acheson (born April 11, 1893 in Middletown , Connecticut , †  October 12, 1971 in Sandy Spring , Maryland ) was an American politician and from 1949 to 1953 Secretary of State of the United States .

Life

Acheson attended Yale University from 1912 to 1915 and Harvard Law School from 1915 to 1918 . Before he was named Secretary of State in the Treasury Department by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 , he worked for a law firm in Washington . During the Second World War he was employed in the State Department, as its Deputy Chief ( United States Under Secretary of State ) he served from 1945 to 1947; previously he was since 1944 State Secretary for Congress Relations ( Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs been). During his tenure as Under Secretary , Acheson played a key role in planning the European Recovery Program and the Truman Doctrine . Although he was seen as a strict anti-communist, right-wing politicians attacked him after his appointment as foreign minister, saying he should be harder with communists. His main opponent here was Joseph McCarthy , who, in a 1950 speech, claimed he had a list of 250 State Department employees who were members of the Communist Party . Some of them would spy for the Soviet Union .

Acheson McCarthy offered renewed attack opportunities when he sided with Truman in the dispute over General Douglas MacArthur . When Truman MacArthur left Korea in 1951, Acheson was McCarthy's main target, who accused him of influencing the president's policies too much. He even called for impeachment proceedings against Acheson ( "in name only because the Acheson group has almost hypnotic powers over him. We must impeach Acheson, the heart of the octopus." ).

Acheson received the Medal for Merit in 1947 , at that time the highest civilian honor in the USA. When Harry S. Truman decided not to run for the presidential election again in 1952, Adlai Stevenson , a close friend of Acheson, was chosen as the Democratic presidential candidate. But Stevenson could not hold his own against the sometimes dirty campaign of the Republicans ; therefore, after Eisenhower's election, Acheson decided to withdraw from political business. In 1955, Acheson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

He worked as a lawyer again until his death in 1971. During this time he wrote several books, including a. Power and Diplomacy (1958), Morning and Noon (1965) and The Korean War (1971). For his memoir, which he published under the title Present At The Creation: My Years In The State , he received the Pulitzer Prize in the history section in 1970 .

literature

• Michael F. Hopkins: Dean Acheson and the Obligations of Power. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham 2017, ISBN 978-1-5381-0002-8 .
• Robert L. Beisner: Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War. Oxford University Press, New York 2006, ISBN 978-0-19-504578-9 .
• James Chace: Dean Acheson. In: Edward S. Mihalkanin (Ed.): American Statesmen: Secretaries of State from John Jay to Colin Powell . Greenwood Publishing 2004, ISBN 978-0-313-30828-4 , pp. 1-19.
• John Lamberton Harper: American Visions of Europe: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George F. Kennan, and Dean G. Acheson. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996, ISBN 978-0-521-56628-5 .

Web links

Commons : Dean Acheson  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Biography at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (English)
• Literature by and about Dean Acheson in the catalog of the German National Library
• Dean Acheson in the Miller Center of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia (English)
• Newspaper article about Dean Acheson in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Dean G. Acheson , Internationales Biographisches Archiv 45/1971 of November 1, 1971, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of the article freely available)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael F. Hopkins: Dean Acheson and the Obligations of Power. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham 2017, ISBN 9781538100028 , p. 192.
2. ↑ 1970 Pulitzer Prize Winners & Finalists. In: pulitzer.org. August 16, 1969, accessed September 30, 2019 .