Indochina, advising Truman to make what proved
to be a fateful commit-
ment of American assistance to anti-Viet Minh forces in 1950. Acheson all
but ignored Africa and Latin America, mainly because neither region was as
yet on the front lines of the Cold War. Like those who preceded him, Ache-
son viewed Britain as an indispensable American ally and partner.
A primary target of Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticom-
munist witch hunt, Acheson was lambasted for being friendly with alleged
spy Alger Hiss, “losing” China to communism, and being unable to end the
Korean War, which Acheson’s enemies wrongly believed he provoked by
publicly excluding it from America’s “defense perimeter” in a January 1950
speech. Acheson also provided fodder for other Republicans, namely
Richard M. Nixon, who in 1952 derided Democratic presidential nominee
Adlai Stevenson for having graduated from “Dean Acheson’s College of
Cowardly Communist Containment.”
Acheson retired from public life in 1953 but was not disengaged from
public policy. He soon became the main Democratic critic of President
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s foreign policy. Acheson regarded NSC-68, which
advocated the strengthening of conventional military forces to provide
options other than nuclear war, as the foreign policy bible for the Cold War
era. When the Eisenhower administration committed itself to a policy of
massive retaliation that emphasized nuclear responses over conventional
responses to crises, the former secretary of state reacted with utter disbelief
to what he termed “defense on the cheap.”
In the 1960s, Acheson returned to public life as the head of NATO task
forces, special envoy, diplomatic troubleshooter, and foreign policy advisor
for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Acheson was
noted for his hawkish advice to Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis of
1962. Acheson died of a heart attack on 12 October 1971 in Sandy Spring,
Maryland.
Caryn E. Neumann
See also
Containment Policy; Cuban Missile Crisis; Eisenhower, Dwight David; Hiss, Alger;
Indochina War; Kennan, George Frost; Korean War; Lend-Lease; Marshall
Plan; McCarthy, Joseph Raymond; National Security Council Report NSC-68;
North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Origins and Formation of; Truman, Harry S.;
Truman Doctrine; United Kingdom; United Nations
References
Acheson, Dean. Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department. New York:
Norton, 1969.
Brinkley, Douglas. Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, 1953–71. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1992.
Chace, James. Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1998.
McNay, John T. Acheson and Empire: The British Accent in American Foreign Policy.
Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001.
56
Acheson, Dean Gooderham
In the 1960s,
Acheson returned
to public life as the
head of NATO task
forces, special envoy,
diplomatic trouble-
shooter, and foreign
policy advisor for
Presidents John F.
Kennedy and
Lyndon B. Johnson.
Irish politician and Sinn Féin party leader in Northern Ireland. Born on
6 October 1948 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Gerard “Gerry” Adams Jr. left
school early and worked as a bartender. In 1964, he joined Sinn Féin, the
political arm of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Although Adams has always
denied being a member of the IRA, British and Irish official sources suggest
otherwise. Incarcerated in 1972 under the Special Powers Act, he was set free
for peace talks that same year. However, he was imprisoned again from 1973
to 1977 and for a brief period in 1978.
After his release from prison in 1978, Adams assumed the vice presi-
dency of Sinn Féin. As early as 1979, he tried to convince his party to give up
violence and turn to political action. In 1983, the year he was elected to the
House of Commons, he and the northern cadres took control of the republi-
can movement. As the new president of Sinn Féin, Adams ended the party’s
policy of abstention so that party representatives could be seated in Parlia-
ment. A skillful political tactician, Adams has since managed to steer his fol-
lowers toward a peaceful solution to the Northern Ireland conflict without
causing the party to break apart. Although by no means an uncontroversial
figure, he is viewed as one of the major engineers of the 1998 Good Friday
Agreement.
Matthias Trefs
See also
Ireland, Northern; Ireland, Republic of; Irish Republican Army; Paisley, Ian; Sinn
Féin; United Kingdom
References
Adams, Gerry. Before the Dawn: An Autobiography. London: Heinemann, 1996.
Moloney, Ed. A Secret History of the IRA. New York: Norton, 2002.
Sharrock, David, and Mark Devenport. Man of War, Man of Peace? The Unauthorized
Biography of Gerry Adams. London: Macmillan, 1997.
German politician, mayor of Köln (Cologne) from 1917 to 1933, chancellor of
the Prussian State Council from 1922 to 1933, and first chancellor of the Fed-
eral Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany) from 1949 to 1963. Born
5 January 1876 in Köln, Konrad Adenauer studied law in Freiburg, Munich,
and Bonn. In 1897 he began his long career in government service in the
Prussian justice administration before spending a brief time as an attorney in
private practice. Sponsored by the Catholic Center Party, he was elected to
the Köln city council in 1906; by 1909, he had become deputy lord mayor of
the city. After being assigned oversight for Köln’s food supplies from 1914 to
Adenauer, Konrad
57
Adams, Gerard, Jr.
(1948–)
Adenauer, Konrad
(1876–1967)