Return To Private Life
He retired as secretary of state on Jan. 20, 1953, and served on the Yale Board of Trustees along with Senator Robert A. Taft, one of his sharpest critics. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1955.
Acheson returned to his private law practice. Although his official governmental career was over, his influence was not. He was ignored by the Eisenhower administration but headed up Democratic Policy Groups in the late 1950s. Much of President John F. Kennedy's flexible response policies came from the position papers drawn up by this group.
Acheson's law offices were strategically located a few blocks from the White House and he accomplished much out of office. He became an unofficial advisor to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, he was dispatched by Kennedy to France to brief French President Charles de Gaulle and gain his support for the United States blockade. Acheson so strongly opposed the final decision merely to blockade that he resigned from the Executive Committee. (LaFeber 234) During the 1960s, he was a leading member of a bipartisan group of establishment elders known as The Wise Men, who initially supported the Vietnam War, but then turned against it at a critical meeting with President Lyndon Johnson in March 1968. He reconciled with his old foe Richard Nixon and quietly became a major advisor to Nixon when he was president.
In 1964, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 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. The Modern Library placed the book at #47 on its top 100 non-fiction books of the 20th century.
In 1971, Dean Acheson died of a massive stroke at his farm in Sandy Spring, Maryland, at the age of 78. He was survived by a son, David C. Acheson, and a daughter, Mary Acheson Bundy, wife of William P. Bundy.
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Famous quotes containing the words private life, return to, return, private and/or life:
“In private life he was good-natured, chearful, social; inelegant in his manners, loose in his morals. He had a coarse, strong wit, which he was too free of for a man in his station, as it is always inconsistent with dignity. He was very able as a minister, but without a certain elevation of mind necessary for great good, or great mischief.”
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“This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.”
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“Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing—to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.”
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“Lisa Fremont: Surprise is the most important element of attack. And besides, you’re not up on your private eye literature. When they’re in trouble it’s always their girl Friday who gets them out of it.
L.B. Jeffries: Well, is she the girl who saves him from the clutches of the seductive show girls and the over passionate daughters of the rich?
Lisa Fremont: The same.
L.B. Jeffries: That’s the one, huh? But he never ends up marrying her, does he? That’s strange.”
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“My life I never held but as a pawn
To wage against thine enemies’ nor fear to lose it,
Thy safety being motive.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)