Achesonsâ Georgetown house. At it Truman thawed from his icy excursion with Eisenhower to the Capitol, and the party was described by his daughter as âan absolutely wonderful affair, full of jokes and laughter and a few tears.â Truman went back to Missouri, and Acheson, once more, to Covington and Burling. Subsequently, such is the role of circumstances in personal relations and in spite of their mutual respect and survival of shared vicissitudes, they did not see much of each other for their remaining two decades, although they exchanged some good letters. Acheson died on 1 October 1971, at the age of seventy-eight, and Truman followed two months later and nearly ten years older.
In these later years Acheson wrote a moderate amount (two slim volumes of reminiscence and a serious, sharply amusing but none the less too long tome of memoirs). He earned substantial fees for Covington and Burling but was never ensnared in the obsessive pursuit of mammon. He remained a firm although increasingly right-wing and hardline Democrat. I remember staying a weekend in 1959 at John Kenneth Galbraithâs house to which the host returned from a meeting of the Democratic Advisory Committee in a state of half-controlled exasperation at the cold war intransigence of the former Secretary of State.
Acheson never had much view of Adlai Stevenson, who was too hesitating and ambiguous for his taste. Nor was he an early Kennedy supporter, but he responded to the success and verve of the young President. At the time of the Cuban missile crisis hewas temporarily recruited back into active service, and became a rash and leading âhawkâ in Excom, as the directing body was called. Although discontented with the Presidentâs desire to get a negotiated solution, Acheson undertook crucial missions to Britain, France and Germany with the photographic evidence of the Soviet build-up. In the first and the third countries the evidence was studied with sympathetic interest. In France it was swept aside as police court stuff. General de Gaulle asked one central question. Was he being consulted or informed of a decision already taken by the President? Acheson had the firmness to say clearly that it was the latter. De Gaulle expressed himself satisfied by the directness. He was in favour of independent decisions, he said. âYou may tell your President that on this occasion he will have the support of France,â he grandly concluded.
The last time I saw Acheson was at the end of 1970. He expressed some fairly outrageous opinions, partly as a tease. Unfortunately Senator Muskie, who was present and who was desperately trying to get Achesonâs support for his then strong bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, purported to take them seriously, but adding the gloss that policy had to be democratically decided. Acheson turned on him like a matador on an old bull. âAre you trying to say, Senator, that United States foreign policy should be determined in a series of little town meetings in the State of Maine? Donât ask them, Senator, tell them. When I believe you will do that, I will support you. Until then, not.â
It was one of the last cries of the thirty-year history of Democratic Party world leadership. Acheson was a splendid exponent of it, arrogant, élitist, courageous, and very clear-sighted to the middle distance. He was in many ways too unsqueamish for British taste in the third quarter of the twentieth century, but Britain was none the less fortunate to have him âpresent at the creationâ of so many of the institutions of the post-war Western world.
Konrad Adenauer
Konrad Adenauer was the oldest statesman ever to function in elected office, beating Gladstone by a good two years. He became the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949 at the age of seventy-three, and very reluctantly gave way to a successor in 1963 at the age of eighty-seven.
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