Historian’s book draws national attention

BY SALLY ACHARYA

Robert Beisner knew the book he retired to write would get some attention. After all, the Cold War is a hot topic, and biographies have an intrinsic appeal. But he didn’t expect a review by Henry Kissinger, or the cover of the New York Times Book Review.

The just-released Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War is an exhaustive look at President Harry Truman’s controversial secretary of state, who was instrumental in changing America’s role in the world and setting it on a lasting course of global engagement.

But the book’s interest to reviewers has been more than scholarly. The portrait of a secretary of state in daily, intimate contact with a president as the United States worked out its response to a new global threat has a deep resonance in 2006. “Coming when it did, Acheson becomes of political use to people,” Beisner notes.

Kissinger, for instance, found that one of the book’s points was that America in the late 1940s “had to be brought to recognize that its permanent participation in the world was indispensable for peace and security. Inevitably this realization was painful and slow in coming, if indeed it has been fully achieved to this day.”

Another pointed conclusion came in still another review in the New York Times, which was headlined “Facing a Global Threat with Nonpartisan Clarity.” Reviewer Walter Isaacson contended that “as [Acheson’s] current heirs at the State Department seek to temper the democracy-crusade idealism at the heart of the Bush Doctrine with a dose of practicality, pragmatism and realism, Mr. Beisner’s book can offer some lessons about balancing commitments and resources, interests and ideals.”

But Beisner didn’t set out to write a book that offered lessons about the Iraq War, partisan politics, or America’s role in global peace and security. The first George Bush was president when the idea came to the professor of diplomatic history to write a book of essays on Cold War leaders. The first essay he planned, on Acheson, evolved into what he knew would become a book in its own right.

Long intrigued by the sharp-tongued, debonair secretary of state, “I had a sneaking suspicion his contributions had been underestimated,” Beisner says. Acheson is known for the central role he played in the creation of the Marshall Plan, NATO, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and much of the other architecture of the post–World War II world.

But over time, as Truman grew to iconic stature, many historians treated Acheson “as if he were just there.” More attention was often paid to controversies, such as Acheson’s support of accused Communists in the McCarthy era—including Alger Hiss, whose role as a spy was eventually proven—than to his role in setting the course of foreign policy.

Beisner’s book describes a secretary of state who was, in many ways, the pilot steering the ship. “The Truman who comes across in my book has very few ideas about foreign policy,” he said. “He’s basically doing what his advisors say. When he goes on his own, it’s often reckless.”

Acheson became powerful in part because he became very close to Truman, who came to trust him and the State Department. “One reason he was able to gain trust is Truman needed help,” Beisner said. “Acheson educated him over time,” regularly giving the president 60- to 80-page papers to read, and invariably coming to meetings prepared with several foreign policy options. The option he recommended was generally the one that Truman followed.

As for Acheson’s tough approach to the Soviets, which was instrumental in setting the course of the Cold War, “I had the impression, over many years, that historians who admired the Truman period often made apologies for how rough it was in foreign policy,” Beisner said.

The term “Cold Warrior,” for instance, has often been used critically, and there were implications in some scholarly quarters that Acheson and Truman might have negotiated an end to the Cold War if not for the growth of McCarthyism, which, allegedly, pushed them to take a tougher stance.

This was not a conclusion that Beisner supports in the hefty book, with its 656 pages of text and 112 pages of footnotes. The book was actually pared down mercilessly from its original 1,200 pages and is the result of more than a decade of work.

There was no dearth of source material. Acheson had written a Pulitzer Prize–winning autobiography, left a huge number of letters, and was represented by an enormous number of archival documents. Beisner chose not to interview the few people still living who remembered Acheson, because they were in their 80s or 90s, with fading memories, and had already gone on record with oral histories when their memories were far fresher. He did make extensive use of oral histories, hundreds of which are stored at the Truman Library in Independence, Mo.

Much of his archival detective work for the Acheson study had been completed by the time he decided to retire and concentrate on turning it into a book. As a diplomatic historian, Beisner had taught at AU since 1965, joining the university around the time he won the prestigious Allan Nevins Prize for the best dissertation in the field of U.S. history. He chaired the Department of History from 1981 to 1990 and served as director of General Education until 1997. He has been professor emeritus since 1998.

Beisner has served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and is the author of a number of major books on U.S. foreign relations history. “He’s a very distinguished historian,” says Robert Griffith, chair of the history department.

But the topic he took on in Acheson is certainly “a challenging topic for anybody,” Griffith notes. “He is a preeminent secretary of state, and the most important figure in terms of setting the course of U.S. foreign policy and hence U.S. history. More than anyone else, he was the architect of U.S. policy in the Cold War. For better or worse, we are all living in a world he helped create.”

What might the Acheson approach to foreign policy look like in today’s world? The conditions, of course, are vastly different—both in the world, and in Washington. And armchair speculation can go in many directions.

On the one hand, Beisner says, Acheson felt strongly that the United States should work in alliances. But he also felt that the United States should take the lead and function, in Acheson’s words, as “a locomotive, and the rest of the world is the caboose.”

He felt allies would follow more willingly the more the United States exercised restraint on its power. “But in a pinch,” Beisner said, “he was willing to go it alone.”

So the pundits are welcome to speculate. As for Beisner, he’s satisfied that more than a decade spent at the historian’s favorite task of “grubbing in archives” and making sense of the results has not only been completed and published. It’s being read, and avidly discussed.