The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

He became a Democratic icon of the fifties both because he had been viciously attacked by McCarthy and had stood the attack without flinching (personally, if not professionally), and because he would not turn his back on Alger Hiss (who was of course a member of the Establishment in very good standing; a remarkable amount of what Acheson was committed to was at its heart class). His reputation in the fifties because of those McCarthy years, a quirk of history really, was somehow that he was a soft-liner, and that Dulles was the hard-liner. If anything, the reverse was true. It was not so much that Dulles was softer, but for all the bombast of his speeches, the verbal righteousness in public, there was an element of private flexibility (the great corporation lawyer who can make a resounding appeal in the courtroom and then a more subtle private deal in the judge’s chambers), whereas Acheson was the hard-liner who felt that Dulles’ policies were extremely dangerous and that the defense budget was too small. Acheson was always the true interventionist who deeply believed that the totalitarians might exploit the democracies. He was not soft, Acheson, he never was. He was Wilsonian, but new-generation Wilsonian, Wilson flexing old ideals with new industrial and technological might, Wilson with a longer reach.

Dean acheson