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

Dean Acheson was the US Secretary of State under President Truman, and his time in that role was arguably the most fruitful, from Australia’s perspective, of anyone to hold the office. This was because Acheson oversaw the granting of an unprecedently large World Bank loan – that allowed Menzies to fulfill a key election promise abolishing petrol rationing – and the signing of the enduring ANZUS Treaty. Coincidently or perhaps facilitating this outcome, was the fact that Acheson and Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies were close friends for more than two decades.

Menzies appears to have first met Acheson on his 1941 wartime trip to the United States, when Acheson was then Under-Secretary of State in the Roosevelt Administration. They had a productive discussion about trade relations and tariff reduction, but there was little to indicate the convivial relationship that was to follow. That began in 1948, when Menzies returned to America and had dinner with both Acheson and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter at the latter’s ‘cliff hanging dwelling’ in Georgetown. The three got along so well that the dinners quickly became a regular fixture of all of Menzies’s subsequent visits to the United States. Menzies became so enamored by the friendship and warm conversation that he dedicated an entire chapter in his memoir Afternoon Light to the two men and the times they had shared together:

‘Nobody could sit down as frequently as I was lucky enough to do with Frankfurter and Acheson without realizing that he was in the presence of two men of indomitable activity of mind; two duellists each doubly armed with the sword of the mind and the sword of the spirit.’

Menzies also used a speech from Acheson about the limitations of the concept of ‘the verdict of history’ to open the book, and aptly described his friend as having a ‘somewhat Mephistophelian appearance’.

This affection was clearly mutual, with Acheson reciprocally providing a range of anecdotes about Menzies in his own memoir Present at the Creation. Describing how exceptional it was that Menzies ‘slipped into town hardly noticed and in a day and a half was gone again with a loan of two hundred fifty million dollars from the World Bank’. His unsuccessful efforts to secure for Australia direct access to the US Chiefs of Staff. And Menzies being accosted at a party by ‘a somewhat inebriated bore’ who told him that his problem was that he didn’t suffer fools gladly. To which Menzies replied, ‘what do you think I’m doing now’.

After Acheson passed away in 1971, a collection of his letters were posthumously published under the title Among Friends, and this featured a number of exchanges with Menzies. Including a humorous display of sympathy after Menzies had had an unfortunate accident while bathing:

‘I hear through our Australian underground, which is Owen Dixon to Felix to me, that you have had a mean fall in the most dangerous mantrap yet devised — the bath. The report goes on that you have had a lot of pain from it. For all of this I am most distressed and send you the most affectionate commiseration. I had a roommate in the law school who insisted that it was bathing that undermined the Roman Empire, but he got killed by an automobile. So I can’t promise that giving up the practice will keep you out of trouble.’

There was also an open display of political support:

‘I have never seen any reason for being neutral in Australian politics — at least, as long as you and Evatt are involved. So my warmest wishes that you give him hell… The omens are good for sensible people. We have just given those who richly deserved it a royal trouncing and it looks as though Harold Macmillan would [win] next year.’

And even some more melancholy observations of Sir Robert’s deteriorating health in retirement in letters to others:

‘Bob, I regret to say, was not looking well — greatly overweight and with only a portion of his old verve. To see one’s friends get old brings one’s own condition home to one even more acutely than the mirror’