Acheson
The Secretary of State Who Created the American World

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CHAPTER ONE

ET IN ARCADIA EGO

    DESPITE LATER APPEARANCES, Dean Acheson was not an American patrician. Nor was he born to great wealth. To him, his childhood seemed golden, but its pleasures were the ordinary ones of an American boy allowed to roam free in the safe and seemingly uncomplicated world of a small town in the late nineteenth century. No matter what his studies were during the day, or his scraped knee, or a scuffling argument with his sister at supper, each day at twilight he could anticipate two major events: first of all, the boys and girls would race down to the firehouse, "where every evening," as he recalled years later, "the shining wagon and the well-brushed horses were brought into the street." Firemen slid down poles. Then the horses and wagons were put back into the firehouse. That was all, but this enormous pleasure was followed hard upon by another race to the wharf to watch the arrival of the boat from the state capital at Hartford to pick up passengers en route to New York. To young Dean Acheson, "it seemed that the ladies and gentlemen promenading the deck of that ship were the most fortunate people on earth, and watching them night after night, I imagined myself plowing across the open sea, some nights to Europe, some nights to China, some nights to darkest Africa."

    This golden age of childhood, Acheson believed, was able to be fixed quite accurately in the Connecticut valley, in a town in the exact center of the state and "appropriately called Middletown." The Middletown of young Dean Acheson still bore the marks of prosperity because it had once been the head of navigation of the Connecticut River, flowering briefly when clipper ships of the China trade dropped anchor there to service trade to the northern frontier. It was also the site of Wesleyan University. One of the "juicy thrills" of Dean's boyhood was to make for the Wesleyan ball field and hang around the outfield for an hour or so during batting practice. "Sometimes," he said, "if you hung around long enough, a fly ball might come your way and you were allowed to catch it and toss it back to some big boy with a `W' on his sweater, who could actually say, `Thanks, kid.' A rather impressive moment." The pattern of one's life seemed to have an "ordered regularity." Life, Acheson believed, "flowed easily and pretty democratically."

    At the turn of the century Middletown was a market town with a few small factories--textile, silver, marine hardware. Its great wealth was behind it, but at one time Middletown had promised to be the most important city in Connecticut. Townsfolk prospered by their eager participation in the "triangle trade"--exchanging mm and farm products in the West Indies for slaves, sugar, and molasses, then returning to England for manufactured goods to sell to the colonies. But this trade largely evaporated after the War of 1812, and Middletown turned its energies to manufacturing.

    The town remained dominated by sea captains, merchants, and traders, such as the powerful Russell family, which established a merchant house in Canton from 1818 to 1831, importing opium and exporting tea and silk. Perhaps for this reason the ruling families emphasized river and sea over land routes, and Middletown lost out to cities such as Hartford and New Haven that were on the main rail lines. Had Middletown not been bypassed by the railroads, it would have doubtless grown into a large city. Instead it remained a small town of about fifteen thousand when Dean Acheson was born on April 11, 1893, in the brick rectory of Holy Trinity Church, where his father had arrived as pastor a year earlier.

    Holy Trinity rose up on Main Street, at the bottom of the hill, which was dominated by the great mansions of the Alsops and the Russells. The rector and his family moved to a more rural part of town and built a large white stucco house, whose door was framed by Ionic pillars and whose bay windows overlooked a flagstone terrace and inviting woods.

    In this atmosphere of genteel living, nothing presented any visible hazard to the children. "No one was run over," Acheson recalled. "No one was kidnapped. No one had his teeth straightened. No one worried about the children, except occasionally my mother, when she saw us riding on the back step of the ice wagon and believed, fleetingly, that one of the great blocks of Pamecha Pond ice would fall on us. But none ever did. Unharmed, in hot weather we sucked gallons of ice chips from what was doubtless polluted ice."

    As the son of an Episcopal clergyman, Dean Acheson would appear to have adjusted to a world where values were fixed and unquestioned. He was even the proud owner of a pony that did not share its master's passion for imaginative games. "Mean, as well as lazy, and uncooperative," Acheson wrote of the animal, "he knew who was afraid and who would fight back. The timid did well to feed him sugar on a tennis racquet; but he was gentle as a lamb if one had one's fist cocked for a fast punch in the nose." The lesson stayed with Acheson throughout his life.

* * *

The life of a middle-class American was something to which Dean Acheson's father, had he known of it in his early youth, might well have aspired. An Englishman of Scotch-Irish descent, Edward Campion Acheson was born in Woolwich, Kent, in 1857. The Acheson family had apparently lived for centuries in Edinburgh, Scotland, and then migrated to Armagh in Ulster (northern Ireland) in the early seventeenth century, and finally to England. A master sergeant, Edward's father, Alexander Acheson, married Mary Campion, a south Irish woman from Cork, served in the Crimean War, and fought in the baffle of Balaclava. There are no family records, but after Edward and his three brothers were born, Mary Campion died, and Alexander married again. Edward was apparently unhappy with his new stepmother and in his teens escaped his unhappy fate and emigrated alone to Canada.

    In 1881 this strikingly handsome young man had secured a job in a dry goods company in Toronto as an elevator boy. But soon he found a way to enter University College of the University of Toronto, where he also seems to have inherited his father's bent for military action; while still a student, he enlisted in the Queen's Own Rifles, a militia regiment.

    In 1885 his service was in the Northwest Territories to put down a settler-Indian rebellion organized by Louis Riel, a Canadian partially of Indian descent who wanted to establish a separate nation. At the battle of Cut Knife Creek, Acheson was wounded. It appears that the battalion had been ambushed in a clearing and pulled back to seek coven Edward, seeing that a fellow soldier had been hit and was lying in no-man's-land, ran out to pick him up. After shouldering back the dead man, he then returned to rescue another rifleman who was also wounded. For this he received the Victoria Medal for Bravery.

    Perhaps it was his wartime exploits that convinced him to enter divinity school, for he reputedly conducted the first church service at Fort Qu'Appelle west of Winnipeg. In any case, upon returning to the university, he completed his education by studying for the Anglican ministry at a theological seminary, Wycliffe College of the University of Toronto, from which he graduated in 1889, and was made a curate at All Saints' Church in that city. Edward Acheson's sense of order and discipline may well have been reinforced by his military service and his own undoubted self-control and ambition.

    Wycliffe College had been founded in 1877 by a local Anglican evangelical movement that had rebelled against the powerful "high-church" Anglicanism that then prevailed at Toronto's Trinity College. Out of this tradition, emphasizing the supremacy of the Scripture accompanied by evangelical fervor, Edward Acheson practiced a Christianity that stressed moral imperatives within a "low-church" ritual.

    It was through Wycliffe that he met the Gooderham family, which had long been involved in the Anglican evangelical movement. Soon the handsome young curate was courting Eleanor Gooderham, and in 1892, three years after he was appointed assistant rector of Saint George's Church in New York City, he married her.

    Eleanor was the daughter of George Gooderham, one of thirteen children. The Gooderhams had also emigrated from England, but in their case early in 1832, and had become in due course prosperous millers, which had been their calling in England. The processing of grain as a drink soon took the place of the milling of flour, and distilling became the main source of the family's money in the firm of Gooderham and Worts. Only two years before Eleanor's marriage to Edward Acheson, George Gooderham had built a massive red-stone-and-granite house at 135 St. George Street, a mere few blocks from Wycliffe College.

    Eleanor herself had been sent to England for schooling. "My mother's enthusiasm for the Empire and the Monarch," Acheson wrote, "was not diluted by any corrupting contact with Canadian nationalism. Eleanor's family was not prepared to have her live as poorly as a clergyman's wife might be expected to. Her father provided her with enough to lead a comfortable existence, and then in 1904, a considerable sum was settled on her, so that the Achesons lived a fairly prosperous life among the gentry of Middletown, where the young couple relocated after less than a year at Saint George's. Their first son, Dean, was born on April 11, 1893.

    Despite the Achesons' financial security, they were hardly in the same class as the Alsops and the Russells. They were neither considered, nor considered themselves, part of an American aristocracy. Mrs. Acheson, however, dressed in a stylish manner, rode horseback, and was one of the first in town to own a car. She was also an accomplished sportswoman: her father had taught her to shoot and ride and fish during her childhood summers spent camping in rural Canada. She also got to be a very good shot by practicing at shooting galleries on the Atlantic City boardwalk. The story is told that at dinner Mrs. Acheson, although characteristically dressed in her "long, swishy silks," would spy a squirrel on the terrace, leap from her chair, seize a shotgun from inside the door of the verandah, and bag the importunate intruder who scared birds and broke up their nests. As Dean's wife described it, "on her high heels and her pearls on--always real ones--she'd take a shot and drop the body of the squirrel."

    She was an often intimidating woman and became a kind of social arbiter in Middletown. She tended to dominate groups, and, as her granddaughter characterized her, "with her imposing air, she became something of a grande dame." Her friends were "slightly obsequious" and were easily given to flattering her. From a wealthy, relatively cosmopolitan background, she may well have found life in Middletown too confining for her talents, too provincial for someone of her education and upbringing.

    Two more children were born to Edward and Eleanor Acheson--Margaret, two years younger than Dean and who was known as Margo, and, a few years later, Edward, who was called Ted. The father's temperament, what Dean called his "wild Ulster streak," was reflected in the children, all of whom seemed determined to avoid conformity. Dean was especially close to his mother, with whom he shared a vivid sense of humor. A boyhood companion remembers the delight in their repartee, and Dean's wife recalled that the first time she visited the Achesons on a college vacation she came up the walk with his sister to see Dean "standing just behind his mother in the open doorway, the two of them laughing over some mutually shared joke." Dean inherited from his mother her forceful character and that somewhat theatrical part of her nature that made her want to stand out from the crowd, to organize things, and to dominate.

    Relations with his father were more formal. His father maintained an "Olympian detachment" from the ordinary details of raising children. In the evenings he would retire to his study immediately after dinner, and his most direct influence on the formation of his children tended to come on summer vacations, first on Long Island Sound at Indian Neck not far from New Haven, later at Round Mountain Lake in west-central Maine.

    It was a long, rough journey to the north, though it began peacefully enough on the night train, as Acheson later described it, "the rhythm of the clicking wheels beneath, the window curtain raised a cautious inch on the kaleidoscope of dark shapes outside punctuated by a flash of play from lights, the shiver at the lonely, lost-soul wail of the engine ahead." The train dropped off a rail car that took the family to the town of Farmington, and then a short ride to the end of a narrow-gauge logging railroad, where the "buckboards waited for the last excruciating trek to camp." The final few miles were tough ones--"when the forests dosed in and the mountains began in earnest, only the luggage rode."

    The rector was at ease with his family in the woods. He taught the children canoeing, fly casting, and backpacking, and his stoical attitude was imparted on these camping trips. For he was a man who, though widely read in theology and Christian doctrine, rarely spoke of either. Reflecting his evangelical background he dealt with ethics and conduct rather than revelation and redemption. "If his goal was the salvation of his soul, it was salvation by works, performed with charity and humor as well as zeal," his son wrote. His code of conduct was "instilled on the trails of our camping trips." Any tendency "to whine or grouse resulted in ignominious dismissal to the end of the line."

    Like his father, Acheson was not given to abstract thinking. Like his father, he preferred a code of conduct "based on the perceptions of what was decent and civilized." His father, he said in later years, did not burden him with a guilty conscience; rather, when the boy misbehaved the rector's discipline appeared as "a force of nature." Acheson characterized this aspect of his relationship with his more demanding parent as follows: "The penalty for falling out of a tree was to get hurt. The penalty for falling out with my father was apt to be the same thing. Result followed cause in a rational, and hence predictable, way but left no spiritual wound. The judgment of nature upon error is harsh and painful, but it is not a lecture or a verdict of moral and social obloquy."

    While Dean Acheson came to believe that his father's punishment left no "spiritual wound," he was nonetheless deeply hurt when he sought his father's approval and found it lacking. Time and again he would search for affirmation where he could find it--if not in his family, then within the larger circle of friends whose applause he craved.

    In the years immediately ahead, however, at school and at college, Dean almost willfully challenged authority. He seemed to flaunt his rebellious temperament, that "wild Ulster streak" he believed he had inherited from his accomplished father--who in 1915 rose to Episcopal heights as bishop of Connecticut.

CHAPTER TWO

A WORLD APART

    "AFTER THE GOLDEN AGE, life lost this pristine, unorganized, amoral freedom," Acheson wrote years later. "The organization of the boarding school, like the wolf, in Icelandic saga, which ran up the sky and devoured the sun, devoured my early freedom." First formally educated at a local private school, Dean continued to enjoy the "amoral freedom" of life in Middletown. It was especially the freedom of "wild things" that he enjoyed, "whose discipline came from pains and penalties externally and impersonally imposed, not penalties devised and inflicted by one's own kind with connotations of personal disapproval." At nine years old, however, he was sent to a nearby boarding school, Hamlet Lodge, in Pomfret, Connecticut; this nonetheless permitted weekend visits from his parents, and he was not yet expelled from the valley that had seemed to him another Eden.

    His close boyhood friend, Joe Lawton, remembered driving out with Dean's father to visit the boy. When they reached the top of the steps that led down to the school, they ran into another boy who was walking back and forth. When the minister asked him what he was doing, he explained that he was being punished. Dean's father admonished him to mend his ways and then asked where he might find his son. The boy answered: "He's over there being punished, too." As Lawton recalled it, Dean "did everything that came into his head. He was a good mixer, but very, very independent."

    It was an independence that would cost him most dearly in the years ahead, for in 1905, at the age of twelve, he was sent to Groton School northwest of Boston, and the dream of his lost freedom intensified in an atmosphere in which, as a former Grotonian described it, "obedience and conformity were commended by one's teachers as well as by one's peers. Independence, in almost any form, was punished."

Groton was the creation of Endicott Peabody, "the Rector," whose powerful presence was inescapable. He could inspire fear, love, hatred, and loathing, but always respect. As the thirteen-year-old Averell Harriman wrote to his father, "You know he would be an awful bully if he wasn't such a terrible Christian." A man of absolute integrity, from a wealthy and distinguished New England family, Peabody was determined to make Groton New England's new Winchester, and to a remarkable degree he succeeded.

    From the outset, Groton School attracted the children of the rich from New York as well as the more patrician offspring of Boston. Peabody saw himself, unlike most headmasters of similar church schools, as the equal of the rich and wellborn, not as their servant. He was eager to enroll the children of American capitalism, in no small part because he believed that certain moral careers, such as public service, were less available to those who had to make money.

    Dedicated to service--both to God and to society--Peabody devised as the motto of the school Cui Servire Est Regnare. "To Serve Him Is to Rule" is the literal translation, but what Peabody intended was the translation from the Book of Common Prayer: "Whose service is perfect freedom." To Peabody, public service was, above all, the worldly analogue to his rather muscular Christianity. "If some Groton boys do not enter public life and do something for our land," he said, "it will not be because they have not been urged."

    Along with his unshakable rectitude, Peabody's imposing height and strength could easily overwhelm those with whom he came in contact. To a boy who was in the wrong, Peabody could be a truly terrifying figure, not because the Rector would harm the boy personally, but because any transgressions on the boy's part would be seen as a violation of right and justice, and Peabody had clearly designed the life of the school to reflect these virtues.

    Although Peabody admired the English public school system, he was careful to modify its traditions to American ways. There was no "fagging," whereby older boys held the younger ones as virtual slaves and were allowed to cane miscreants. But Peabody did institute a system of prefects, older boys who were expected to set standards for the younger ones. More important, boys were given "black marks" for misconduct. To receive a black mark, however, did not mean boys were beaten; instead Peabody's system required a boy to work off each black mark with some assigned task, such as shoveling snow or mowing the lawn. The most severe punishment, six black marks, meant a visit to the Rector's study. This subjected the youth to the Rector's Jovian wrath, and that may well have been more daunting than corporal punishment.

    There was, however, a method of punishment that was not officially sanctioned but was nonetheless permitted. When younger boys were deemed to have broken the Groton code--by cheating, for example--or were considered too "fresh," physical punishment was inflicted. There were two ways of doing so: the less severe, "boot boxing," consisted of being put into a basement locker assigned to each boy for the boots he wore outdoors. While in the box, the culprit would be painfully doubled up for as long a time as he was forced to remain in his tiny prison.

    The second and more terrifying punishment was "pumping." This consisted of having one's face shoved under an open spigot in the lavatory for as long a time as it took to induce a sensation of drowning. If a boy was consistently out of line, two or three pumpings usually sufficed to curb any outward expression of his rebellion?

    The hierarchical nature of the system, coupled with the Rector's uncompromising moral stance, produced in Groton a rigid discipline whose effect, as the artist George Biddle (Groton 1904) described it, was "to stifle the creative impulse. Its code could tolerate a feeling of shame for one's brother, and by and large, in many small ways, it was intellectually dishonest."

    The curriculum reflected the classical training of the English public school system. Latin was required, Greek optional with a choice between it and extra mathematics, physics, or chemistry. In history, Greece held two and a half years, Rome one year, western Europe and England each one year; the United States was restricted to half a year. French was not taught after the sophomore year (or fourth form), and German was taught the last two years. English was required throughout, but there was no geography, no biology, no music or art, no manual training. There was, of course, sacred studies, taught by the Rector, whose cry "Nails and notebook, boy!" traditionally opened the class.

    The true measure of achievement at Groton, however, was athletic prowess. Everyone was expected to play football and baseball no matter how much a boy might dislike them or how indifferently one played. Although scholarship was important to the Rector because the boys had to be prepared properly to enter Harvard or Yale, athletics was believed to build character and excessive bookishness seen as a flaw. When Joseph Alsop, later a globe-trotting columnist, was brought to the school for the first time, his mother started to boast of her son's bookish habits, at which point the Rector told her not to worry, "We'll soon knock all that out of him."

    While most Grotonians spent their lives serving Mammon rather than God, a remarkable number entered public service--Groton's first thousand graduates included one president, two secretaries of state, two governors, three senators, and nine ambassadors; few indeed were those who either entered the ministry or pursued the arts.

    It was a spartan world that greeted young Acheson as he entered the first form. Bedrooms were six-by-ten cubicles with bare walls, save for the hooks on which suits could be hung. There was no privacy, no door, walls just seven feet high, and only a curtain to be drawn across the entrance to the corridor. Furnishings were minimal: a plain bureau, a table, a chair, a rug, and a narrow bed. At the end of the dormitory was a lavatory with showers and long sinks of black soapstone with tin basins in them.

    The regimen began a little before seven in the morning, when the boys were marched to the lavatory, where, under the uncompromising supervision of a prefect, they took a cold shower. After that ordeal, the boys were served breakfast at seven-thirty, followed by morning chapel at eight. Classes began at eight-thirty and continued without interruption until noon, when the main meal of the day was served. In the afternoon were two forty-five-minute sessions, followed in fall and spring by sports. Then, before supper, the boys donned a stiff collar and dress shoes. Evening chapel followed supper, and that was followed by a study period.

    At the close of each day every boy lined up to say good night to the Rector and Mrs. Peabody. The Peabodys shook hands with them, and the Rector would often add some personal word. It was a moment when boys would be cast down, should the Rector proffer an unsmiling handshake or a curt "Good night"; on the other hand, should the Rector add a special word of praise and give an especially warm handshake, the boy would be extremely pleased. It was the headmaster's notion of the school as a Victorian family, and even for those boys who never fitted in, it was virtually impossible to rid oneself of the moral shadow of Endicott Peabody.

"We knew that we moved in a world apart--and always of course in a world above," one graduate, who did become an artist, wrote years later. It was this world that Dean Acheson became a part of in the fall of 1905, and it was one that he never accepted. Not only was the regimentation anathema to a boy who had enjoyed an unusual degree of freedom, but also the style of his dress was that of a country boy, as compared with the swells from New York. Schoolboy snobbishness flourished at Groton, and Acheson was hardly in a class with an Auchincloss or a Harriman, yet these were the boys who now attended Groton School. Perhaps the very slights that he may have suffered over his clothes contributed to his later concern with what he wore.

    He was doubtless "fresh" and, unlike Franklin Roosevelt a decade earlier, unwilling to bend easily to the rules of the game. Above all, he was unwilling to accept the guidance of Peabody. Not surprisingly his grades suffered, and he was held in low esteem by both the Rector and the masters. Early on, Peabody wrote, "I find [Acheson] a very unexpected sort of person. Irresponsible. Forgets books. Does not remember lessons. Makes excuses. Not quite straightforward. Black marks show conduct not satisfactory. Should have stiff reprimand from home." By spring, Peabody was exasperated and simply noted, "Immature." Four years later, things were no better. "The masters find him disagreeable to teach at times." And a year later, "He is full of immature prejudices."

    While there were notations of some improvement from time to time, the overall evaluation was highly unfavorable. At one point the Rector wrote to his parents to ask them to come up and talk with him about their son because he was having such a difficult time with him. His mother took the journey north, and when she was with the Rector, he reputedly said, "Mrs. Acheson, I think it is clear that we will never be able to make a Groton boy out of Dean, and he would do well to go to another school." In her version Mrs. Acheson replied, "Dr. Peabody, I didn't send Dean here to have you make a `Groton boy' out of him. I sent him here to be educated." "Oh, we can educate him." "Then I suggest you do it. I will leave him here as long as I think you can succeed, though you give me considerable doubt."

    The story is indicative not only of the Rector's view of Dean, but of his mother's willingness to defend him at all times, something the boy never doubted. He wrote to her at thirteen, "How dearly I love you and how necessary you are to my happiness."

    Acheson graduated at the very bottom of his class of twenty-four, with a sixty-eight average on his final report card. He did, however, make the first crew in his final year. One classmate remembered that "among his schoolmates at Groton Dean was conspicuous for his nimble wit, the independence of his opinions and his courage in declaring them. When the monthly marks were announced by the Rector, his name was seldom, if ever, among the first; because in those days Dean's agile and versatile intelligence was not focused on his classroom assignments to a notable extent, but was spent diffusely, if not capriciously, often to amuse, shock, dazzle, or discomfort."

    "At Groton I didn't feel like conforming," Acheson wrote years later. "And to my surprise and astonishment, I discovered not only that an independent judgment might be the right one, but that a man was actually alive and breathing once he had made it." Reflecting on his experience at Groton, Acheson concluded: "The authoritarianism of the English `public' school, upon which ours was modeled, was not for all temperaments. To adapt oneself to so sudden and considerable a change required what is now called a `well-adjusted' personality. Mine apparently was not. At first, through surprise, ignorance, and awkwardness, later on and increasingly through willfulness, I bucked the Establishment and the system. One who does this fights against the odds. The result was predictable painful, and clear."

    In his last year he published an essay in the school magazine, the Grotonian, called "The Snob in America." In it he spelled out his attachment to democratic values and, one presumes, his implicit criticism of the snobbery that was rampant at Groton and from which he had suffered. He opened his piece by defending the ideal of self-respect and urged the reader not to confuse this with snobbishness. Moreover, "in America especially, the institution of snobbery finds its lot a hard one [for] there is something in the ideal of democracy which is the death knell of snobbery.... [T]he essence of democracy is belief in the common people, and the essence of snobbery is contempt of them."

Following his "belief in the common people," and his contempt for the "idle rich," a "class [which] is not American," Acheson, upon graduation, sought out the world of the workingman. Through family connections he obtained a job with the work crew of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway (now the Canadian National), then being pushed westward across northern Canada. This was to be the great adventure of his youth, and it came none too soon for a boy who felt more than "a measure of self-doubt."

    Acheson's eagerness to work on the railroad under conditions of severe hardship reflected what the social historian Nelson Aldrich has called "the ordeal." Working in the wild becomes an occasion for testing oneself in the "rough mercies of the wilderness." There was in the West--whether American or Canadian--a hint of romance and a sense, as Aldrich describes it, "that through a willing exposure of the self to the forces of luck, good and bad, [you] will be led to develop a sense of personal power and consequence, and thereby acquire pride, but not overweening pride." In Acheson's case the summer ordeal was to give him back, as he later recalled, "a priceless possession, joy in life."

    On a June day in 1911, Dean set out for the wilderness called James Bay, about 160 miles south of the southern tip of Hudson Bay. From a town called Cochrane, a railroad camp and supply depot, a transcontinental line was being built east and west. This was "Indian country," and after a night spent at the "Four Macs Hotel," he was sent off by construction freight train yet another 160 miles to work at the lowest job available at the residency of the engineer in charge--an axman. Riding in a caboose, Dean was assaulted by smoke, mosquitoes, and blackflies, but, as he later wrote, "Smoke, crying eyes and ravenous insects were as nothing compared to the intoxication of knowing that this was `life.'"

    Summers in the Maine woods proved a boon for the young axman, and within a few days he was sent farther west to the absolute wilderness, where four or five log cabins housed the second group of workmen. There he learned to smoke a pipe and in due course was sent farther into the forest primeval. In a swamp clearing, four or five structures were joined together by a boardwalk. Three or four feet of the walls were made of log; the rest and the ceiling, of canvas: "To have been told that I would become fond of this dreary spot would have been unbelievable. But so it was to be."

    Together, Dean and a "French-Indian lad," in addition to working as axmen, took over the jobs of rodman and force accountant--Dean walking over ten miles every day to check off the condition of the thousand or so men working on the railroad.

    Life at the residency in the swamp was filled with "songs and talk" that were "noisy, bawdy, often vulgar in the extreme." Dean thrived in this atmosphere of digging latrines, splitting wood, dealing with drunken knife fights--even death "from causes unknown." When he left the camp at the end of the summer to enter Yale College, he was filled with sadness. "These men," he wrote, "had done more for me than they would ever know and, in doing it, had become a part of me. They had given me a new eagerness for experience. The simple, extroverted pattern of their lives had revived a sense of freedom amidst uncoerced order, extinguishing the memory of `pain as exquisite as any,' in John Adams's words, from suffocating discipline and arbitrary values."

    With the money he earned, he bought in Toronto a small gold-filigree brooch studded with pearls for his mother, who wore it until her death. Six months later, on the occasion of her birthday, the eighteen-year-old wrote her a note (which she valued "above all my other treasures") in which he referred to himself in the third person as returning "from his first argosy, bringing his first golden fleece." He goes on to say that "it was not an easy argosy; it was not an easy golden fleece, and it taught him many things. But in one respect he has never changed, that feeling in his heart is the same now as it was in the child's heart over a decade ago. Perhaps there is not the same blindness about it which there was in the child. While to him the mother meant a great, comforting, all-understanding being, now he sees in her all love, patience, goodness, purity."

    Through his ordeal in the wilderness, Dean was freed from the unhappiness of Groton, the unremitting discipline, and the Rector's moral strictures. But after graduating from Yale and while a student at Harvard Law School, he came to recognize that he had frittered away too much of his time at the school and tried to make up for it in a letter to Endicott Peabody. This began by apologizing for neglecting his "associations with the school." Yet "I do not want you to think that my attitude has been one of piqued hostility.... It was entirely one of shrinking from a place where I knew that I had been a failure and where I felt that the masters and the boys who knew me had an opinion of me far less charitable than the present one of the world at large.... All such feeling on my part is quite gone. Of course, I can't deceive myself about my career in school or the memory that everyone has of it. But there was an open mindedness, or rather an eagerness, on the part of every one to find the signs of a redemption which I appreciated a great deal."

    A few years later, after the birth of his son, David, he wrote Peabody to ask that the boy be put down for Groton, and years later, in response to an inquiry from Peabody about David's impending admission, Acheson wrote: "I may be wrong about this, but it seemed to me in my own case that being pressed too fast to accept ideas, standards and activities which were foreign to me, led me for many years to take a dissenting point of view--which included dissent from many things which later on I found thoroughly acceptable."

    While the mature Acheson admitted the blemishes of a misspent youth, he never became the rebel fully tamed. If anything, he had learned that his refusal to adopt values imposed on him only strengthened his desire for independence. His years at Yale would reveal a temperament that was still far from ready to accept imposed discipline.