DISTRACTING YEAR FOR SECRETARY OF STATE

Press, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 26030, 6 February 1950, Page 6

DISTRACTING YEAR FOR SECRETARY OF STATE

U.S. FOREIGN POLICY

[By

JOSEPH and STEWART ALSOP

in the “New York Herald-Tribunel

(Reprinted by Arrangement)

Washington. January 19.—1 t is just a year since Dean Gooderham Acheson was sworn in as Secretary of State of the United States. He has already celebrated the anniversary, a little m advance, by routing his enemies on the Formosa issue. It is still in order, however, to try to assess Acheson s performance in what is now perhaps the most important single office in the free world. , . . . The most obvious thing about Acheson is that he is outstanding. He was an outstanding public servant in other times, when the competition vvas more severe than it is to-day. On the current Washington scene, as the stature of the surrounding crowd progressively diminishes. Acheson looms larger and ever larger. But although Dean Acheson has the intellectual power, the strong character, and the personal and moral style of a big man, it is also true that his job might overwhelm a giant. No great foreign minister of the past, no William Pitt .or John Quincy Adams, ever had to deal with human societies grown so insanely complex as to be almost uncontrollable. And even Acheson’s immediate predecessors, confronted though they were with a world in ruins, laboured in happier circumstances than he. Relaxing of Effort It is now very clear, in the first place, that President Truman made up his mind to a general slowdown in defence and foreign policy about the time of his electoral victory in 1948. In part the motive was budgetary. In part, however, the President’s cam-paign-borne dislike of Secretary of Defence James V. Forrestal and Under-Secretary of State Robert A. Lovett had also caused him to distrust their methods and councils. ..... For these reasons, the effort initiated by Forrestal and Lovett, by James F. Brynes and George C. Marshall and Acheson himself, began to be materially relaxed at the very moment when it was just beginning to succeed. The foreign and defence slow-down’ confronted Acheson when he entered on his office. . In addition, the former close partnership between the State and Defence Departments was soon replaced, on the top level at least, by the guerrilla warfare typified by son’s Formosa intervention. The old, close collaboration of bipartnership inforeign policy soon broke down, so that Acheson faced a hostile Congress. Even within the State Department, he began to lose the help of certain of the most experienced men who advised his predecessors. All this meant, in turn, that Ache-

son had to tackle an incredibly uphjU job, in a state of almost incredible loneliness and isolation. The American effort might slow down, but the tempo of world events woTild not slow down. Day after day, month after month, great decisions have crowded in upon Acheson, insistently, clamorously, confusing. Yet he was, and is, called upon to make these decisions in solitude, alone to convince the President of the need for painful, and even dangerous action. And alone to point the way for the county. No man on earth could do all this without long [hesitation. No wonder, then, that Acheson’s first ytar has been a year in which the world horizon has ominously darkened. There are items on the plus side, of course. European recovery has progressed. The Atlantic Pact has been passed. In the German negotiations in Paris, Acheson showed himself a brilliant diplomat. Here at home, he has just won a victory on Asiatic policy. Yet the items on the plus side are heavily overweighed, by the long, grim list on the minus side. China and the Soviet Bomb China has been lost, and all Asia has been brought into peril. The Soviet Union has achieved an atomic bomb and has simultaneously begun to surmount almost every other major difficulty of the immense Russian rearmament programme. In contrast, this country has offered the world the extraordinary spectacle of rapid though unadmitted disarmament, thus far more than negating the Atlantic Pact The British have suffered a shattering economic crisis, and although their situation is lookirtg up for the present no firm steps have been taken to prevent another British crisis in 12 to 18 months. Finally, the hydrogen bomb has hideously emerged as a new factor in world politics and strategy. Such is a partial list of Dean Acheson’s unfinished business. The least of these problems can lead to the severest setback in the world contest with Soviet imperialism. Most of them, if left unsolved, are quite capable of producing total catastrophe. Yet Acheson must try to solve all of them, all at once, on his own, and despite the complacent general, commitment of business-as-usual. In truth, Dean Acheson is like the. only sober man on a raft of drunken lumberjacks,- whose bellowing of “Mademoiselle From Armentieres” obscures the approaching thunder of Niagara Falls. The raft, which also carries all our futures, can yet be saved. But hardly any man in history has been so burdened with such agonising and desperate responsibility.