Dean Acheson

Dean Gooderham Acheson was born on April 11, 1893, in Middletown, Connecticut, the son of Edward Campion Acheson, an Episcopal bishop of Connecticut, and Eleanor Gooderham. He was educated at Groton School and Yale College, graduating in 1915, then went on to Harvard Law School, and after finishing in 1918 he spent two terms, from 1919 to 1921, as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. He joined the Washington law firm Covington and Burling and served a brief stint as Under Secretary of the Treasury in 1933, resigning within months over a dispute with President Franklin Roosevelt's gold policy. He returned to government during the Second World War as an Assistant Secretary of State, helping to design Lend-Lease and the institutions born at Bretton Woods, and rose to Under Secretary of State under President Truman in 1945, where he helped shape the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. In January 1949 he was sworn in as the fifty-first Secretary of State, presiding over the founding of NATO and the early months of the Korean War, and weathering fierce political attack, much of it for refusing to turn his back on his convicted former colleague Alger Hiss. He left office with Truman in January 1953, returned to the practice of law, and remained a trusted, if unofficial, adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, eventually counseling Johnson toward negotiation in Vietnam. His memoir of his State Department years, Present at the Creation, appeared in 1969 and won the Pulitzer Prize for History the following year. He died of a stroke at his farm in Sandy Spring, Maryland, on October 12, 1971, at the age of seventy-eight, having been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction in 1964.

In January 1950, days after Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury, Acheson told reporters he would not turn his back on him. The remark, loyal to an old friend and colleague, cost him politically for years. Nixon and McCarthy seized on it, and Acheson later called the ensuing McCarthy-era assault 'the attack of the primitives.'