Zitate von Dean Acheson

„Always remember that the future comes one day at a time.“

—  Dean Acheson

„No people in history have ever survived, who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies.“

—  Dean Acheson

„How could the USA champion individual freedom in the world generally while denying it to an important minority in its own country.“

—  Dean Acheson

Civil rights in the USA, 1863 - 1980 , 2001, Page 107.

„The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.“

—  Dean Acheson

Oxford dictionary of quotations

„The experiences of the years…have brought the country, particularly its young people, to a mood of depression, disillusion, and withdrawal from the effort to affect the world.“

—  Dean Acheson, buch Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), Purpose of the Book

„On the need to respond to the crisis in Greece, and broaching the subject of the Truman Doctrine ("it must be the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures.") with Congress: "In the past eighteen months, I said, Soviet pressure on the Straits, on Iran, and on northern Greece had brought the Balkans to the point where a highly possible Soviet breakthrough might open three continents to Soviet penetration. Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east. It would also carry infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy and France, already threatened by the strongest domestic Communist parties in Western Europe. The Soviet Union was playing one of the greatest gambles in history at minimal cost. It did not need to will all the possibilities. Even one or two offered immense gains. We and we alone were in a position to break up the play. These were the stakes that British withdrawal from the eastern Mediterranean offered to an eager and ruthless opponent."“

—  Dean Acheson, buch Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), Truman Doctrine, Cold War

„Only immediate assertion of leadership by the United States could prevent war in the next decade…The President and the Secretary of State must shock the country into a realization of its peril…“

—  Dean Acheson, buch Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), Truman Doctrine, Cold War

„Throughout the Near East lay rare tinder for anti-Western propaganda: a Moslem culture and history, bitter Arab nationalism galled by Jewish immigration under British protection and with massive American financial support, the remnants of a colonial status, and a sense of grievance that a vast natural resource was being extracted by foreigners under arrangements thought unfair to those living on the surface. This tinder could be, and was, lighted everywhere…“

—  Dean Acheson, buch Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), Middle East

„No change (Marshall replacing former SecDef. Louis Johnson, who, soon after he resigned, was diagnosed with a fatal "brain malady") could have been more welcome to me. It brought only one embarrassment. The General (Marshall) insisted, overruling every protest of mine, in meticulously observing the protocol involved in my being the senior Cabinet officer. Never would he go through a door before me, or walk anywhere but on my left; he would go around an automobile to enter it after me and sit on the left; in meetings he would insist on my speaking before him. To be treated so by a revered and beloved former chief was a harrowing experience. But the result in government was, I think, unique in the history of the Republic. For the first time and perhaps, though I am not sure, the last, the Secretaries of State and Defense, with their top advisors, met with the Chiefs of Staff in their map room and discussed common problems together. At one of these meetings General Bradley and I made a treaty, thereafter scrupulously observed. The phrases 'from a military point of view' and 'from a political point of view' were excluded from our talks. No such dichotomy existed. Each of us had our tactical and strategic problems, but they were interconnected, not separate.“

—  Dean Acheson, buch Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), State Department Management, Leadership Perspectives

„Among the roles the Budget Bureau (now OMB) was that of constant critic and improver of administration in the federal executive branch. In my day this work had fallen to the products of graduate schools in civil administration. Their ideas…seemed to me theoretical nonsense.“

—  Dean Acheson, buch Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), State Department Management, Leadership Perspectives

„On the France's Indochina involvement: "They were engaged in the most dangerous of all activities – deceiving themselves…France was engaged in a task beyond her strength, indeed, beyond the strength of any external power unless it was acting in support of the dominant local will and purpose."“

—  Dean Acheson, buch Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), Vietnam

„General Marshall was "impatient with a type of nonsense particularly prevalent in the State Department known as 'kicking the problem around.' All of us who have work with General Marshall have reported a recurring outburst of his: 'Don't fight the problem, gentlemen, solve it!' With him the time to be devoted to analysis of a problem, to balancing 'on the one hand' against 'on the other hand,' was definitely limited. The discussion he wanted was about plans of action"“

—  Dean Acheson, buch Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), State Department Management, Leadership Perspectives

„My memory…is of a department without direction, composed of a lot of busy people working hard and usefully but as a whole not functioning as a foreign office. It did not chart a course to be furthered by the success of our arms, or to aid or guide our arms. Rather it seems to have been adrift carried hither and yon by the currents of war or pushed about by collisions with more purposeful craft.“

—  Dean Acheson, buch Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), State Department Management, Leadership Perspectives

„In response, Acheson wrote to "tell a tale of large conceptions, great achievements…Its hero is the American people."“

—  Dean Acheson, buch Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), Purpose of the Book

„Acheson's State Department "comrades…played a vital role in setting the main lines of American foreign policy for many years to come and…they may feel in their hearts that it was nobly done."“

—  Dean Acheson, buch Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), Principles

„… talk should precede, not follow, the issuance of orders.“

—  Dean Acheson, buch Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), Principles

„Vietnam was worse than immoral — it was a mistake.“

—  Dean Acheson

Reported in Alistair Cooke, Letter from America: 1946-2004 (2004), page 378.

„Unfortunately, the hyperbole of the inaugural outran the provisions of the budget.“

—  Dean Acheson, buch Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), Budget Perspectives

„The heads of these divisions, like barons in a feudal system weakened at the top by mutual suspicion and jealousy between king and prince, were constantly at odds if not at war…For the most part the barons were knowledgeable people performing in a way the times had completely outdated, a fact of which they were quite unaware.“

—  Dean Acheson, buch Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), State Department Management, Leadership Perspectives