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Dean Acheson and the Creation of an American World Order. By Robert J. McMahon. Washington: Potomac Books, 2009. 257 pages. $25.95.
Robert J. McMahon has written a compact and readable biography that critically assesses the life, career, and accomplishments of Dean Acheson, who can justifiably be called the principal architect of the non-Communist world order which the Administration of Harry Truman established in the wake of World War II. As a top State Department official from 1941-47 and as Truman's Secretary of State from 1949-53, Acheson shaped many of the key US foreign policy initiatives of those years, including the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, the rebuilding of Germany and Japan, Franco-German reconciliation, America's intervention in the Korean War, and the subsequent decision to launch a massive expansion of US military power. More than any other individual, Acheson was responsible for the design and implementation of the ultimately triumphant strategy of containing the expansion of Soviet power and influence. Not for nothing did Acheson, never known for his modesty, title his memoirs Present at the Creation.
McMahon, the Mershon Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University and the author of several books on the Cold War and the Vietnam War, is both admiring and critical of his subject. Acheson was an exemplar of the then-Eurocentric American foreign policy elite whose educational trajectory-Groton,...