Dean acheson biography book

In this acclaimed biography, Robert L. Beisner paints an indelible portrait of one of the key figures of the last half-century.

Dean Gooderham Acheson was an American politician and lawyer.

His book, From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865-1900, has been widely used in undergraduate and graduate courses in American diplomatic history since the.

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Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War

December 23, 2023

In the years immediately after the Second World War, the United States found itself navigating a new world order created by the outcome of the conflict. With all of the other major belligerents either defeated or exhausted by their martial exertions, the nation enjoyed an unprecedented predominance in world affairs. With this hard-won ascendancy Americans found themselves playing a major role in determining the postwar settlement, and received calls for help in recovering from the devastation caused by the fighting. In performing these roles, the U.S. soon clashed with its wartime ally, the Soviet Union, over the direction of global affairs, a clash that quickly devolved into a decades-long contest for global dominance.

During this period, the course of American strategic policy for the next four and a half decades was shaped by just a handful of public officials and their advisers. Among the most important of these men was D

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Dean 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 engrossing 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.
Drawing on the recently opened Acheson papers as well as on interviews with Acheson's family and with leading public figures of the era, Douglas Brinkley tells an intriguing tale that is part biography, part diplomatic history, and part politics. Brinkley considers Acheson's role in numerous NATO-related deb

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Dean Acheson and the Creation of an American World Order

“McMahon’s book is both an insightful biography of Dean Acheson and a compelling konto of American foreign policy during World War II and the Cold War. In his focus on what Acheson called the international ‘political economy of freedom,’ McMahon provides one of the most succinct and provokativ accounts of how diplomacy, military power, and economics intersected in the making of the American Century. McMahon reminds readers of the enduring power of a röst like Acheson’s and of the sophistication required for effective utländsk policymaking. Anyone interested in international affairs would profit from reading this excellent book.”—Jeremi Suri, professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and author of Henry Kissinger and the American Century

“Robert McMahon’s Dean Acheson and the Creation of an American World Order is a true triumph of both historical scholarship and