Books in Brief: Among Friends: The Personal Letters of Dean Acheson

Among Friends: The Personal Letters of Dean Acheson, edited by David S. McLellan and David C. Acheson (Dodd, Mead, 314 pp., $17.95). I know by rote, as does any good conservative, the sins of Dean Acheson. Yet more often than he was wrong, he was right, and he expressed his views with such arrogance, such withering condescension, that he frequently reduced his opponents to blithering incoherence and eternal enmity. This book is an edition of his personal letters. Of his early years and his time in public office, there is little; the name Alger Hiss appears not once. But in semi-retirement, from 1953 onward, Acheson let loose in his personal correspondence with barrages of the most enraging and engaging observations. On Henry Kissinger (1957): “. . . the damned cuss has brains and has thought a lot. How well I want to know . . .” He was disappointed in John Kennedy (an “Indian snake-charmer”), Dean Rusk, and Lyndon Johnson. By President Nixon and the people in his Administration, he was surprised: “. . . good men, intelligent, high-minded . . .” History’s players from Oliver Wendell Holmes to William C. Westmoreland move through these letters like ducks in a shooting gallery, and Acheson rarely misses. At its best, his prose is reminiscent of that of certain conservative harpsichordists I have known. As for his statesmanship, well, remember Cy Vance telling us how we do not really need “Chrodesian rhome,” and yearn for the likes of Acheson. As he himself once wrote of his mentor, Louis D. Brandeis: “Suppose he has been the subject of some undiscriminating praise. He is worthy of the urge which led to it.”

JA

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Joseph A. Rehyansky

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Among Friends: The Personal Letters of Dean Acheson, edited by David S. McLellan and David C. Acheson (Dodd, Mead, 314 pp., $17.95). I know by rote, as does any good conservative, the sins of Dean Acheson. Yet more often than he was wrong, he was right, and he expressed his views with such arrogance, such withering condescension, that he frequently reduced his opponents to blithering incoherence and eternal enmity. This book is an edition of his personal letters. Of his early years and his time in public office, there is little; the name Alger Hiss appears not once. But in semi-retirement, from 1953 onward, Acheson let loose in his personal correspondence with barrages of the most enraging and engaging observations. On Henry Kissinger (1957): “. . . the damned cuss has brains and has thought a lot. How well I want to know . . .” He was disappointed in John Kennedy (an “Indian snake-charmer”), Dean Rusk, and Lyndon Johnson. By President Nixon and the people in his Administration, he was surprised: “. . . good men, intelligent, high-minded . . .” History’s players from Oliver Wendell Holmes to William C. Westmoreland move through these letters like ducks in a shooting gallery, and Acheson rarely misses. At its best, his prose is reminiscent of that of certain conservative harpsichordists I have known. As for his statesmanship, well, remember Cy Vance telling us how we do not really need “Chrodesian rhome,” and yearn for the likes of Acheson. As he himself once wrote of his mentor, Louis D. Brandeis: “Suppose he has been the subject of some undiscriminating praise. He is worthy of the urge which led to it.”