About Dean Acheson
Dean Gooderham Acheson was an American politician and lawyer. As the 51st U.S. secretary of state, he set the foreign policy of the Harry S. Truman administration from 1949 to 1953. He was also Truman's main foreign policy advisor from 1945 to 1947 during early years of the Cold War. Acheson helped design the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, as well as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He was in private law practice from July 1947 to December 1948. At first Acheson was conciliatory towards Joseph Stalin. In 1970, he won the Pulitzer Prize for History for his memoirs of his tenure in the State Department, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department. His father, Edward Campion Acheson, was an English-born Canadian (immigrated to Canada in 1881) who became a Church of England priest after graduating from Wycliffe College, and later a bishop of the Episcopal Church. Both he and Secretary of Defense George Marshall came under attack from men such as Joseph McCarthy; Acheson became a byword to some Americans, who tried to equate containment with appeasement.
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