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Bookplate inserted; inscribed in blue ink on front endpaper: “To Robert Menzies with the affection and esteem of his friend and admirer Dean Acheson. Washington, April 1956”; written in pencil above inscription: “acknowledged 4 / 5 / 56”. Several highlights made throughout book including: [p. 12] underlining and two exclamation marks marking: “To be sure, tensions were relaxed by the first Geneva meeting. But so were effort and will on one side and not on the other. Tension is bad for people with weak nerves, but very little is ever accomplished without it. When the relaxing of tensions becomes an end of policy, it is time to examine one’s own and one’s opponent’s moves”; [p. 13] marking: “Signs were multiplying that, as in Aesop’s fable, the wind having failed to blow off the traveller’s coat, the sun would try to warm and relax him into shedding it.”; [p. 15] underlining “Mr. Khrushchev has been extraordinarily frank about what the Soviet Government intends to do with this breathing spell […] it will make no concessions on any of the questions – Germany in the forefront – which now render so unstable and perilous the relations of East and West. In other words, the Russians will stand pat, and smile, and see what happens. ‘Our nerves are pretty good,’ they say, ‘how are yours?’”; [p. 17] underlining: “This is always so where authority rests upon consent through persuasion rather than upon discipline, with force in the near background.”; [p. 21] underlining: “a world rushing with fearful speed to 1914 and forty years of intermittent war, of revolution and realignment.”; [p. 23] highlighted in margin: “‘The Sidewalks of New York’, still moves me as ‘Dixie’ moves a Southerner, and no Highlander welcomed the return of Bonnie Prince Charlie more enthusiastically than I welcomed Al Smith’s nomination for the Presidency in 1928. And with about the same results.”; [p. 26] “It is adventurous, imaginative, more governed by hopes than fears. And it has another special characteristic of youth. It responds to leadership of strong and vibrant personalities, who so often have come to the fore through its own virile process.”; [p. 44] “But perhaps the strongest influence towards conservatives comes from the South, where for historical reasons all interests, business and otherwise, are predominantly Democratic […] It does not seem extravagant to say the Democratic party is one of the strongest cohesive factors in American life, holding together and reconciling, as it does, sectional and economic interests.” ; [p. 47, also earmarked] “The Republican party is cool to intellectuals, unless they are lawyers, when they talk about government […] The failure of President Hoover had not been so much due to the lack of understanding of the facts of the depression or of sympathy with the victims. It was a failure of leadership and lack of willingness to use the powers of government to do what became a wholly inadequate one as the disaster grew. The government in Washington should plan, advise, exhort, and encourage business and local government. But it should not act, direct, or order. It would be wrong for it to throw its own credit and resources into the gap left by the collapse of private, state, and municipal credit. The Federal government had no responsible and no proper authority to reactivate finance and industry or to deal with relief. To the millions who were suffering physicial priation and the loss of their farms, homes, businesses, jobs, bank account, and inverstments, this attitude seemed callous and defeatist.”; [p. 49] “During the talk with my client which I mentioned earlier, he freely agreed that after fifteen years of Democratic control in Washington his own business was larger, stronger, more virile and independent, more confident of its future that it had ever been. He complained of taxes and unorthodox finance and the antitrust laws, but he did not believe anyone had attempted to socialize him. Even the activities of Washington in the field of relief, which had seemed to him to contain no threats to the balance of our federal system, had pretty well disappeared along with the need which inspired them.”; [p. 54] “A danger which is always run in the administration of politics – I have often seen it in foreign policy – is that means tend to become confused with ends. A particular programme or measure tend to become identified with the policy which it is intended to further. Programmes are always easier to identify and support the more distant the purposes which they serve”; [p. 70] “One of the great delusions, so current in our times, is that victory in war puts the victorious powers in a position in which all they need to do is pick up the spoils of war in the form of their postwar objectives.”; [p. 71, also earmarked] “So I think atomic war has no positive place as an element of policy. It must be reserved as we weapon in a desperate death struggle. […] except in these circumstances we cannot employ it, nor should we threaten to employ it.” [p. 72] “What is it which foreign policy needs from military policy to aid in working through the present situation as it is and keeping to the minimum chance of nuclear warfare? [/] What is needed, I believe, is capacity in three areas: 1. Striking power with nuclear weapons great enough to deter the use of such weapons against us and our friends. 2. The development, with the greatest energy and inventiveness, of defence against such attacked […] 3. A military establishment capable of meeting – we would hope jointly with our friend – force which might be employed against our interests, without involving the world in nuclear warfare.”; [p. 73] “To ‘shoot the works for victory with everything at our disposal may well blow us all up. It might produce a famous victory. But there might not be many left to applaud it, much less to realize the purpose for which it had been won.”.; [p. 75] “I pointed out that Mr. Hoover’s Administration had believed that the federal government was limited in dealing with the problems which faced the country. It believed that it would be wrong for it to throw its own credit and resources into the gap left by the collapse of private, state, and municipal credit […] Mr Truman believed as strongly as anybody in reducing and balancing the budget. He had been remarkably successful in doing both. But fiscal considerations were not given by him the place of first importance. He was prepared to give them second place if that was necessary in doing what had to be done in the interest of national safety.”; [p. 83] “But, as a practical matter, we are confronted by a power combination which also has its limitations of resources, different from ours to be sure, but in total more severe; and it cannot be said that we are unable, if we will it, to do our part in creating and maintaining a counterbalancing power system.”; [p. 85] “A former colleague has wisely observed: ‘The essence of leadership is the successful resolution of problems and the successful attainment of objectives which impress themselves as being important to those whom one is called upon to lead.’”; [p. 87] “This is almost a classic illustration of the way a leader among free nations should not proceed. For it disregarded the most elementary precepts. First it threatened, or appeared to threaten, nuclear warfare. If, as we have [p. 88] seen, one of the basic goals of our policy is to avoid and prevent nuclear warfare, no subsidiary policy can be based on threatening to engage it […] one of the chief purposes of American foreign policy, which supplements and is necessary to that other high purpose of avoiding nuclear war, is to develop the unity and strength of coalitions of free nations as a balance of power of the Sino-Soviet system.”; [p. 91] “The Congress, in short, is not, was not intended to be, and cannot be an Executive. [p. 92] Nevertheless, under Republican party doctrine, it persists in trying to be one, with results that hobble the Executive impulse in the conduct of foreign affairs.”; [p. 97] “In a free society the relationship between the State and the individual – between authority and order, on the one side, and individual freedom and liberty on the other – is never settled and fixed. It is a kinetic relationship, the resultant of constant struggle back and forth.”; [p. 98] “What is the state of affairs in the non-Communist world, in what we call the free world, and in our own country? How strong, how vigorous is belief in the moral foundations of freedom? […] Values which spring from our conception of the central importance of the individual spirit and are flatly and bluntly denied by the Communist system […] It is only freedom of choice which makes the choice of good significant […] However we state it, the moral basis of our common civilization is founded on belief in the dignity and worth of the individual and the necessity for his freedom.”; [p. 99] “To the Communists men are born to be used by those who have the strength and will to use them to accomplish the purposes of the Party, and through the Party, of the State.”; [p. 100] “There is nothing new in the appeal to passion and prejudice by falsehood and fraud. Until our own time it has been done more by gifted amateurs than by professionals train in a science, evil in its cynical basis that the individual upon whose dignity and worth we build our free society is merely an indistinguishable part of a mass to be manipulated.; [p. 101] “To impair the liberty we are seeking to protect, through fear of subversion by so small a group, would be as foolish as it would be tragic.”; [p. 103] “The marks of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind. We may be grateful for such honest comforts as it supports, but we must be unafraid of its incertitudes. Without open minds there can be no open society. And if society be not open the spirit of man is mutilated and becomes enslaved.”; [p. 153] “All the youthful vitality of the Democratic party of which I have written, all the bold imaginativeness of its empirical nature, the common sense of its conservatism, and its broad base among many different groups with their many interests […] To provide this, I have said earlier, a party oriented and largely directed by business and the business point of view seems to me to be handicapped by too constricted a view of what is, from time to time, necessary and permissible, and by too narrow a popular base to provide the confidence in difficult times.”; [p. 157] “Can we keep the hard realities clearly before us, and not deceive ourselves into believing that the facts are as we so much wish them to be? Have we the will and constancy to keep on doing what needs to be done when it involves foregoing, in the present, things that we would like to have and do and say, for the sake of the future? Have we the necessary powers of self-discipline? If we do not do it, only the consequence of our folly can. Then it will be too late.”; [p. 160] “I believe that in this fellowship we can best serve the deepest needs of our country and of that larger civilization of which it is a part; and have tried to set forth the reasons for that belief. If the reader disagrees, I shall not be unhappy, provided only that he acts, pulls high full weight in the boat, whether it is ours or the other. These are years of decision which will not come again. The need is for doers of the word and not hearers only.”