Acheson, Dean, 1893-1971 (Personal Name)

Power and diplomacy, 1958: title page (Dean Acheson)

Britannica Academic Edition, via WWW, July 11, 2013 (Dean Acheson; in full Dean Gooderham Acheson; born April 11, 1893, Middletown, Connecticut, U.S.; died October 12, 1971, Sandy Spring, Maryland, U.S.; Secretary of State (1949-1953) and adviser to four presidents; became the principal creator of U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War period following World War II; he helped to create the Western alliance in opposition to the Soviet Union and other communist nations; a graduate of Yale University and of Harvard Law School, Acheson served as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis; in 1921 he joined a law firm in Washington, D.C.; his first government post was in the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt as undersecretary of the Treasury in 1933; he entered the Department of State in 1941 as an assistant secretary and was undersecretary from 1945 to 1947; he shaped what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine (1947); in the same year he outlined the main points of what became known as the Marshall Plan; appointed secretary of state by President Harry S. Truman in January 1949, Acheson promoted the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); after leaving office Acheson returned to private law practice but continued to serve as foreign-policy adviser to successive presidents; his account of his years in the Department of State, Present at the Creation, won the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1970; other works include Power and Diplomacy (1958), Morning and Noon (1965), The Korean War (1971), and Grapes from Thorns (posthumous, 1972))