Dean Acheson

Acheson was born in Middletown, Connecticut, the son of an English-born clergyman who worked his way up to Episcopal bishop, and a mother whose family owned a Toronto distillery fortune. Groton and then Yale gave him the manner that defined him later — tailored, needling, faintly bored — and he admitted afterward that he disdained most of the curriculum while earning a reputation as a partier and a prankster. A summer laying track for the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway in 1911 taught him, he said, ''a priceless possession, joy in life.'' At Harvard Law he fell under the influence of Felix Frankfurter, finished 5th in his class, and clerked for Justice Louis Brandeis from 1919 to 1921 — an apprenticeship in exacting prose that never left him.

He practiced law at Covington and Burling, served briefly as Franklin Roosevelt's undersecretary of the Treasury before resigning over monetary policy in 1933, and returned to government in 1941 to run Lend-Lease aid to Britain and help design the oil embargo that pushed Japan toward war. He led the American delegation at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, which built the IMF, the World Bank and the postwar trading system. As under secretary and then secretary of state from 1949 to 1953, he wrote the congressional request that became the Truman Doctrine, helped design the Marshall Plan and NATO, and turned a wartime alliance into a permanent one aimed at Moscow. He called his 1969 memoir Present at the Creation, and it won the Pulitzer Prize — a title that undersold how much of the creating had been his.

The same man who built the containment doctrine could not contain the politics it created at home. When his friend and former State Department colleague Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury in January 1950, Acheson said publicly that he would not turn his back on him, a sentence Republicans quoted for years as proof he coddled Communists. Richard Nixon mocked him on the House floor as head of ''Acheson's College of Cowardly Communist Containment.'' Joseph McCarthy blamed him for ''losing'' China. Then, in 1968, the architect of the doctrine that had justified two decades of American intervention sat on Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam advisory panel, the so-called Wise Men, and told the president that the war he had helped make possible could not be won by more force. Johnson began winding it down within weeks.

He died at his writing desk on his Sandy Spring, Maryland farm on October 12, 1971, felled by a stroke at 78, not long after breaking with Richard Nixon over the invasion of Cambodia. He is buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, a short walk from the department he ran. What survived him is almost entirely institutional — NATO, the World Bank, the IMF and the Marshall Plan all outlasted the man who helped write their charters, and his memoir remains a staple of foreign-policy reading lists. What has not survived as well is the confidence behind it: the assumption, plain in his own title, that men like him got to do the creating.

Dean Acheson's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Bretton Woods institutions mission
  Led the U.S. delegation that created the IMF and the World Bank 1944
• Truman Doctrine speech
  Wrote the congressional request for Greek and Turkish aid that became the doctrine 1947
• Marshall Plan law
  Helped design the European Recovery Program as under secretary of state 1948
• North Atlantic Treaty Organization mission
  Helped negotiate the founding treaty as secretary of state 1949
• Present at the Creation book
  Memoir awarded the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for History 1969

• April 11, 1893 aged 0 Born in Middletown, Connecticut
• May 15, 1917 aged 24 Marries Alice Stanley
• 1919 aged ~26 Begins clerking for Justice Louis Brandeis
• February 1941 aged 47 Returns to the State Department as Assistant Secretary
• 1944 aged ~51 Leads the U.S. delegation at Bretton Woods
• January 21, 1949 aged 55 Sworn in as Secretary of State
• January 12, 1950 aged 56 Gives the National Press Club speech defining a Pacific 'defense perimeter' It omitted Korea and Taiwan, and critics later blamed it for inviting the invasion of South Korea.
• 1968 aged ~75 Tells Lyndon Johnson the Vietnam War cannot be won militarily
• October 12, 1971 aged 78 Dies of a stroke at his Maryland farm

• Alger Hiss 1904–1996
  State Department official whose perjury conviction made Richard Nixon's career and split American opinion for decades. defended against perjury charges
• Joseph McCarthy 1908–1957
  Senator whose unsupported accusations and investigations gave “McCarthyism” its name and damaged civil liberties. accused him of losing China
• George C. Marshall 1880–1959
  Army chief of staff who organized U.S. victory in World War II and later designed the Marshall Plan. colleague in building the postwar order
• Lyndon B. Johnson 1908–1973
  36th President who signed the Civil Rights Act and launched the Great Society programs. advised to de-escalate Vietnam
• Richard Nixon 1913–1994
  37th President whose foreign policy achievements were overshadowed by the Watergate scandal. broke with him over Cambodia