ACHESON COUNTRY

A loving son's captivating reminiscences of his famous father. While starchy Dean G. Acheson played a leading role in shaping America's post-WW II foreign policy (e.g., as Harry Truman's secretary of state), the author focuses on the private rather than the public man. The episodic text offers, among other matters, anecdotal accounts of the senior Acheson's at-ease relationships with Truman, Felix Frankfurter, Endicott Peabody (Groton's headmaster), his own father (an Anglican bishop), attorney-partners (at the Washington, D.C., firm of Covington Burling & Rublee), and other notables. Included as well are details on what the elegant attorney-diplomat wore and how he tended his modified guardsman mustache, plus notes on divisions of labor at the family's Georgetown home and rural Maryland farm. A fond if demanding paterfamilias, Acheson päre also stands revealed as a lover of martinis, avid tennis player, occasional prankster (whose Fourth of July feats with cherry bombs kept local cattle herds on edge), and skilled woodworker—albeit a failed equestrian. Engaging, human-scale perspectives on a worldly wise eminence whose personal principles and foibles help explain his accomplishments on a large stage. (Photographs, plus a foreword by David McCullough—not seen)