Abstract
Harry Truman was fond of observing that a statesman was nothing more than a dead politician. The diplomatic career of Dean Acheson does not conform to that cynical definition. He was a statesman while he was alive. On the other hand, for all his famous disdain for those he called ‘primitives’ in the media and politics, he was not immune to the politics of foreign policy. In exploring how he dealt with an entirely new factor in both diplomacy and politics, nuclear weapons, we see Acheson as both statesman and politician.
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Notes
Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York, 1969) 36, 113.
Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York, 1948) 644–5.
Byrnes’s fall from grace as an indicator of a policy shift is treated in Robert L. Messer, The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman and the Origins of the Cold War ( Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982 ) 150–80.
David E. Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal: The Atomic Years, 1945–1950 (New York, 1964) 10, 27.
Richard Hewlett and Oscar Anderson, The New World, 1939–1946 ( University Park, Penn., 1962 ) 536–53.
Bernard M. Baruch, The Public Years (New York, 1960), 369–72. Hewlett and Anderson, New World, 611–19. Mark Oliphant, ‘Three Men and the Bomb’, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 45, 2 (March, 1989): 41–2. For fuller accounts of the Baruch Plan’s place in early Cold War atomic diplomacy see Greg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War (New York, 1980 ) 151–70;
Larry Gerber, ‘The Bartsch Plan and the Origins of the Cold War’, Diplomatic History 6 (Winter 1982): 69–95;
McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York, 1988) 161–96.
Richard Hewlett and Francis Duncan, Atomic Shield, 1947–1952 (University Park, Penn, 1969) 384. Even before receiving the GAC report, the President, with unanimous NSC support, had approved an accelerated fission bomb program. FRUS, 1949 v. 1, 561–4.
Lewis L. Strauss, Men and Decisions (New York, 1962) 219.
George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950 (Boston, 1967) 472–4.
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© 1993 Douglas Brinkley
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Messer, R.L. (1993). Acheson, the Bomb, and the Cold War. In: Brinkley, D. (eds) Dean Acheson and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22611-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22611-5_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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