The Cold War Read Online Free

also without guile or self-importance. Although he appeared to some the personification of a British diplomat, his close friend and colleague Sir Oliver Franks, the British ambassador to Washington, described him more accurately as “not at all an English or British type. He is a pure American type of a rather rare species. He is imbued with a love of cabinet making and gardening, never forgetting and ever going back to the roots from which it all springs.” Acheson was, said Franks, “profoundly American in this regard” and, above all, “a blade of steel.”
    Acheson was a realist, not an ideologue. Despite his distaste for the Soviet regime, he believed that the United States had to deal with the Soviet Union as a great power whose interests might well conflict with those of the United States, but whose cooperation should be sought whenever possible.
    During the tough negotiations with Moscow over Soviet withdrawal from Iran earlier that year, and in his efforts to persuade Stalin to internationalizeatomic energy, Acheson had persisted in trying to find ways to satisfy the Soviet Union's security concerns. But he was also becoming convinced that the United States would have to assume a more prominent moral, military, and economic role in confronting any Soviet probe.
    The problems bedeviling American foreign policy were not like headaches, he said that June—when you “take a powder and they are gone.” Instead, “They are like the pain of earning a living. They will stay with us until death.”
    Most of the books that lined the front room of his redbrick house in Georgetown were biographies and treatises on nineteenth-century British statesmen— Melbourne, Palmerston, Disraeli, Salisbury—and Acheson was steeped in their thinking and history. At the end of World War II, he had been prepared to concede Great Britain its traditional sphere of influence in Iran and to let Britain contest Russia there, as it had a century before in the so-called Great Game of Asia. But now he perceived how weak Britain actually was, and he recognized its consequent reliance on America to back it up in the Middle East.
    Even while the United States had been following a policy of trying to cooperate with the Soviet Union on a whole range of issues, Acheson was determined to demonstrate America's commitment to Turkey. Unlike northern Iran and Eastern Europe, which Soviet troops occupied as a result of World War II, the Straits were a strategic point that had been free of Russian control. If Moscow intended to seize them, the truly expansionist nature of Soviet foreign policy would be revealed.
    The opportunity to take a stand presented itself a bit ghoulishly, in the per-son—more precisely, the body—of Mehmet Munir Ertegun, the Turkish ambassador to the United States, who had died in Washington during World War II. Traditionally, chiefs of mission who died in service were returned by warship. Acheson decided that he would return Ertegun's body to Istanbul on the battleship
Missouri.
Although the direct Soviet threat to Turkey was on the ground, the majesty of the
Missouri,
with its 16-inch guns, its enormous bulk, and its especially strong armor, made it a perfect symbol of U.S. resolve.
    Despite the arrival of the battleship at Istanbul in early April, the Soviets kept their pressure on the Turks; nonetheless, the presence of the
Missouri
as an emblem of American protection allowed the Turks more freedom to reject Soviet demands. The Dardanelles was, as Acheson saw it, the “stopper in the neck of the bottle,” and if Great Britain was too weak to take action, America must be prepared to step in.
    Two days after the Soviet memo of August 7 demanding that the Turks allowthe Russians to share in the defense of the Straits, the Yugoslavs, under Stalin's then ally Marshal Tito, forced down an unarmed U.S. Army transport plane. Acheson, impatient to take action, began meeting with high-level officials from the State, War, and Navy