The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2009

62 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 9 fairs during his amazing last 27 years (and six books) as an academic and writer. They reveal a rare gift of reflec- tion by a diplomat with an almost unri- valed acquaintance with events, parti- cularly in the developing world, since World War II. He ends the memoir challengingly, with this thought: “I would be deeply disturbed to feel that my generation was passing on to those that will follow a na- tion vulnerable to the tragic instability I have observed in so many other soci- eties in the six decades of my adult life.” Roscoe (Rocky) S. Suddarth is a retired Foreign Service officer who served under David Newsom as a political of- ficer in Tripoli (1967-1969), Libyan desk officer (1969-1971) and executive assistant to the under secretary for po- litical affairs (1979-1981). Mr. America Dean Acheson and the Creation of an American World Order Robert J. McMahon, Potomac Books, 2009, $16.95, paperback, 272 pages. R EVIEWED BY S TEVEN A LAN H ONLEY Now that I’ve been out of the For- eign Service for a dozen years, I think it is finally safe for me to confess a deep, dark secret: I’ve never read Dean Acheson’s 1969 memoir, Present at the Creation. Somehow I’ve managed to lead a reasonably full, rich life despite that sin of omission, but my nagging sense of guilt over it has been rekindled by Robert J. McMahon’s superb new biography, Dean Acheson and the Cre- ation of an American World Order. McMahon, the Mershon Distin- guished Professor of History at Ohio State University, has a rare gift for cov- ering a lot of ground succinctly yet thoroughly. For instance, while Mc- Mahon appropriately devotes the bulk of the book to Acheson’s per- formance as Secretary of State (1949- 1953), he also discusses the six years his subject spent in Foggy Bottom prior to that. The first of those stints, from 1941 to 1945, was as assistant secretary for economic affairs, an appointment that came about due to Acheson’s political connections and his record as a high- powered Washington, D.C., attorney. As the author notes, the responsibil- ities Acheson assumed were “as mod- est as they were ambiguous, offering a rather limited field of action for a man of Acheson’s activist proclivities.” But soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Acheson “began planning for the tran- sition… to a postwar world sure to face gargantuan readjustment and recovery challenges,” a process he would con- tinue to pursue as under secretary of State (the number-two position in the department at that time) from 1945 to 1947. And because Secretary James Byrnes was absent on travel for 350 of his 562 days in office, Acheson effec- tively ran the department during that period — invaluable preparation for succeeding George Marshall in 1949. No revisionist, McMahon gives Acheson full credit for shaping many of the key U.S. foreign policy initiatives of the Cold War years: the Truman Doc- trine, theMarshall Plan, the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the rebuilding of Germany and Japan, among others. Yet he also cites Dean Rusk’s damning observation that Acheson, a lifelong Anglophile, “did not give a damn about the brown, yellow, black and red people in various parts of the world.” And he draws a convincing B O O K S