| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Acheson and Empire: The British Accent in American Foreign Policy. By John T. McNay. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. xii, 219 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-8262-1344-8.)

This book makes a couple of good points, along with a number of unconvincing ones. The first good point is that Dean Acheson was not a textbook "realist," but a man of strong emotional attachments. He saw himself as a product of Anglo-American civilization and looked with nostalgia on the relatively prosperous and stable world of the Victorian era. Like many of his generation he believed that U.S. policy should aim to reconstruct an international system incorporating some of the features of the Pax Britannica. By the same token, as John T. McNay argues, Acheson believed deeply in the Anglo-American "special relationship." That relationship, said Acheson, "was at the very heart of what we must do to try and hold the world together." 1

This does not mean, as McNay argues, that Acheson was generally deferent to British policy. He did not stand, as McNay says, "in sharp contrast to the free traders [in the State Department], such as Cordell Hull and Will Clayton." McNay would have realized this if he had looked at Acheson's wrangling with the British over Article VII of the Lend-Lease agreement early in the war. As secretary of state, Acheson clashed with London over European integration and over how to deal with China after the U.S. defeat in Korea in late 1950. The book glosses over these questions. . . .

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