Kissinger on Acheson: We're Again Present At The Creation & Learning

Once in a while, the New York Times Book Review section actually has a reviewer who knows what he’s talking about. Then it’s a must read.

Henry Kissinger’s review of Robert Beisner’s bio of Dean Acheson, A Life in the Cold War, is such a must read.

For those, most alive today, for whom WWIII, the Cold War, is a distant memory, if at all understood, the review is an essential introduction to the issues and the context of the late-1940’s and early 1950’s in which Secretary of State Dean Acheson, along with a stellar cast of seasoned statesmen, worked with a bravely intuitive President Truman to define the Western response to the Soviet menace.

The contemporary importance of this bio for today is pointed out by Kissinger:

Acheson served as under secretary of state and then as secretary during the period when a people that had known no direct continuing threat to its security since the early days of the Republic had to be brought to recognize that its permanent participation in the world was indispensable for peace and security. Inevitably this realization was painful and slow in coming, if indeed it has been fully achieved to this day.

It’s been many years since I read Dean Acheson’s Present At The Creation, essential to experiencing the thoughts, quandaries and choices of that period. I most clearly recall the core optimism that Dean Acheson and most of our leaders, of both parties, lived by, along with their civil gloves covering steel wills. I, also, most clearly recall their confidence that despite uncertainty and risk, they could wend their way forward, as Acheson is famous for saying “a day at a time,” learning and adjusting bravely and humbly to create a sane world order that would defend, survive and ultimately triumph, because it was right about human nature. Mistakes were made, but they moved forward, not back, and had faith in what’s right and necessary, if painful.

By contrast, I clearly recall my disagreement with Henry Kissinger’s world view, which I labeled existential defeatism, late in the Cold War. Kissinger seemed more wrapped in a realpolitik, however brilliant, that was just marking time to slow the inevitable triumph of communism, as the U.S. and the West – particularly its elites, but also its conflict-weary public opinion – appeared to have lost the vision and the will to fight or take other difficult measures and sacrifices.

Of late, Kissinger seems to have recovered from this malaise, and has been quite strong in differing from his fellow Snowcroft-Baker realpolitik friends, who today counsel withdrawal from forward-engaging the World War IV threat from Muslim jihadists. Kissinger, instead, has been a visiting counsel of strength and firmness to President Bush, perhaps even lending the intellectual support that Acheson lent to Truman.

Kissinger discusses the difference between the Acheson and George Kennan emphases. Acheson believed in building positions of strength from which to negotiate, while Kennan thought negotiations independently could yield worthwhile results.

Acheson treated diplomacy as the more or less automatic consequence of a strategic deployment; Kennan saw it as an autonomous enterprise depending largely on diplomatic skill. The danger of the Acheson approach has been stagnation and gradual public disenchantment with stalemate. The danger of the Kennan approach has been that diplomacy might become a technical exercise in splitting differences and thus shade into appeasement.

Such more recent Kennanesque endeavors during the Clinton administration result in North Korea's brazenness today, along with the Saddam effronteries that continued throughout Clinton’s administration, and the encouragement that terrorists took from American weakness of response to pre-9/11 attacks.

My friend, historian Stan Sandler, reminds me that history does not repeat, but historians do. With that caveat for analogies, maybe 2006’s possible elections’ results will be like 1946’s (when the isolationist Republicans took seats from the Truman Democrats), and let’s hope that 2008 will be like 1948 when Truman confounded the chattering class by his election victory. Republicans and Democrats who remember the lessons of WWIII’s learning curve for WWIV’s, and care about national security, are looking for their 2008 Truman behind whom to unite.

Postscript: Condi Rice is no Dean Acheson.