Dean Acheson; The Cold War Years, 1953-71

New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1992. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Good. xiv, [2], 429, [5] pages. DJ has small flaw at the top of the spine. Gift inscription (not from the author) on the front free endpaper. Includes 19 black and white illustrations after page 174. Also includes Acknowledgments, Introduction; Epilogue, Notes, Bibliography, and Index, as well as chapters on Into the Fray against John Foster Dulles; A Democrat Looks at His Party and at Eisenhower's Foreign Policy; The Changing Political Climate in Europe,1957-60; JFK, NATO Review, and the Berlin Crisis of 1961; The Cuban Missile Crisis; Strains in the Atlantic Alliance, 1962-63; Repairing Cracks in NATO, 1964-67; The Vietman War, 1961-68; Reconciled with Nixon; Southern Africa Policy, 1961-71. Dear Acheson is best remembered as President Harry Truman's powerful secretary of state, the American father of NATO, and a major architect of U.S. foreign policy in the decade following the Second World War. But Acheson also played a major role in politics and foreign affairs after his tenure in the Truman administration, as an important Democratic Party activist and theorist during the Eisenhower presidency and as a valued adviser during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. This book, the first to chronicle Acheson's postsecretarial career, paints a portrait of a brilliant, irascible, and powerful man acting during a turbulent period in American history. Douglas Brinkley (born December 14, 1960) is an American author, Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and professor of history at Rice University. Brinkley is the history commentator for CNN, and a contributing editor to the magazine Vanity Fair.[2] He is a public spokesperson on conservation issues. He joined the faculty of Rice University as a professor of history in 2007. Brinkley worked closely with his mentor, historian Stephen E. Ambrose, then director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans. Ambrose chose Brinkley to become director of the Eisenhower Center, a post he held for five years before moving to Tulane University. Brinkley's first book was Jean Monnet: The Path to European Unity (1992). His second was Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years (1992). He then co-edited a monograph series with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and William vanden Heuvel in the 1990s. Brinkley also edited a volume on Dean Acheson and the Making of US Foreign Policy with Paul H. Nitze (1993). In 1999, he published The Unfinished Presidency about Jimmy Carter's active and influential post-presidency. In 2004, Brinkley released Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, about U.S. Senator John Kerry's military service and anti-war activism during the Vietnam War. The 2004 documentary movie, Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry is loosely based on Brinkley's book.[8] Brinkley also wrote the Atlantic Monthly cover story of December 2003 on Kerry. Brinkley's book The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast is a record of the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast. The book won the 2007 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was a Los Angeles Times book prize finalist. He also served as the primary historian for Spike Lee's documentary about Hurricane Katrina, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. Critic Nancy Franklin in The New Yorker noted that Brinkley made up a "large part" of the film's "conscience." Brinkley's biography of Walter Cronkite, Cronkite was published in 2012. It was selected as a Washington Post Book of the Year. Derived from a Kirkus review: Cool, lucid account of the later years of a towering cold-war figure; by Brinkley. Dean Acheson had two careers: one a nearly seamless ascent to secretary of state under Truman; the other, beginning with a testy 50's interregnum as gadfly to the Republican Party. Bedeviled by McCarthyist charges that he had ``lost China'' and was soft on Communism, Acheson emerged as a bellicose adviser to several Presidents. Acheson, said Chester Bowles in 1963, ``likes not only to disagree with people, but to destroy them if he can.'' Brinkley reveals the furies unleashed in this determined anti-Communist by right-wing attacks, showing Acheson's evolution into a power-player whom men like Robert Kennedy and Dean Rusk saw as ``heedless and unrelenting...deformed in the crucible of McCarthyism.'' The author balances history and biography expertly, maintaining clear focus on Acheson's analysis of events and his complex personal interplay with the statesmen of his time. A superhawk on Vietnam, Acheson managed to work with the cautious JFK not only because Acheson was a loyal Democrat and consummate professional but also, as is clear throughout, because of his need to be close to power. Though perceived by Kennedy as ``an old man from another era,'' Acheson became a valued adviser from the Berlin Wall and Cuban missile crises through the events in Cyprus and Vietnam, but particularly in Europe, where he shored up relations with de Gaulle, Adenauer, and others. Acheson performed similar services for LBJ and, amazingly, for his old enemy Nixon, provoking Acheson's wife to regret that ``her husband had fallen prey to a campaign of flattery waged by Nixon and Kissinger.'' Even Acheson, for all his crustiness, would have respected the clear, concise writing and objectivity of this fine political biography.