Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World.

By James Chace Simon and Schuster $30

Dean Acheson, secretary of state in the early days of the Cold War and one of the main architects of "containing" the Soviet Union, was easy to caricature. Right-wing populists liked to make fun of his guardsman's mustache, his "fake British accent" (Joe McCarthy), his "British tweeds" (Richard Nixon), his lordly manner which translated as disdain for the less bright and lesser born. As a man he is remembered today, if he is remembered at all, as the personification of the old East Coast Establishment -- the "Wasp Ascendancy," as Joe Alsop called the white-shoe bankers and lawyers and coupon clippers who ran things, more or less, for the first half of the 20th century.

Acheson was without question or apology an elitist. At the end of his life, in the early 1970s, he embarrassed the East Coast foreign-policy establishment, which was becoming increasingly liberal, by supporting continued white domination of Rhodesia and Angola. Acheson was not really a racist. Rather, as James Chace explains in his new biography of Acheson, he was a paternalist. He refused to believe that Africans, or any Third World population, could rule as well as post-colonial Europeans. Acheson was proudly Eurocentric; he would have choked on the multicultural curricula of today's universities. He enjoyed the trappings of privilege and lapped up discrete luxuries -- he loved, for instance, to march in his gown at Yale commencement or to drink rum cocktails after a game of croquet at the Mill Reef Club in Antigua. And he never hid his scorn for soft or sloppy thinking. He once famously quipped that Adlai Stevenson "has a third-rate mind he can't make up"

But the image of Acheson as a striped-pants snob is stale, and misses the real point about his essential character. It is more interesting and useful to look at Acheson not as a rigid exemplar of class conformity, but rather as the opposite: as a rebel. It is his outspokenness -- his brazenness -- that is worth studying and remembering. Acheson consistently showed a kind of willfulness and courage in public that stands in contrast to modern policy makers, whom Acheson would have regarded as craven, or to use one of his Britishisms, "wet."

His pedigree is deceiving. He went to all the right schools (Groton, Yale, Harvard Law) and met all the right people (he roomed with Cole Porter and Archibald MacLeish). But he did not come from wealth and he was at first an outcast -- too "fresh" for the stuffy sixth-formers -- as well as a failure as a student, graduating last in his class from Groton. He was exiled from his home when he called his father, an Episcopal Bishop, a "fool." He seems to have grasped right away that the mavericks, not the senior-prefect types, would be the true leaders. In 1938, he was in London observing Neville Chamberlain, then the British Prime Minister, who was eagerly seeking to appease Hitler, and Winston Churchill, who was at the time just emerging from exile. "Chamberlain doesn't understand what he's up against," Acheson told a friend, "but he would be a great student at Groton. Churchill does understand it. He would be kicked out of Groton in a week."

If he had followed the usual career path of his kind, Acheson would have never left his upper-crusty law firm, Covington and Burling, to serve in government. For all the sermons about public service by the Rector, most Groton boys found government work demeaning. Acheson betrayed his class with FDR to become a New Dealer. He was a pragmatist, not an idealist or a limousine liberal. He called do-gooders "Christers" and avoided them. He was drawn to brave and plain-spoken men of any class. At international conferences after World War II he bonded with Britain's working class foreign minister, Ernie Bevin. In just the kind of stunt Acheson relished, the roughhewn Bevin and the elegant Acheson once entered a conference hall at the Quai d'Orsay, arm-in-arm, singing songs -- Bevin bellowing the Labor Party anthem, "The Red Flag," Acheson trilling "Maryland, My Maryland," which had the same tune.

Acheson's great and abiding friendship was with Harry Truman. While others at first condescended to the former failed haberdasher, Acheson was always faithful and genuinely respectful of FDR's successor. Acheson earned Truman's undying loyalty by standing on the train platform at Union Station, erect and proper in his cutaway, when President Truman returned to Washington after the Democrats had lost control of Congress in the disastrous 1946 elections. Acheson, then the number two man at State, was alone. No one else in Truman's Cabinet or sub-Cabinet had bothered to turn out. The affection between the two men deepened as Truman and Acheson, along with Gen. George C. Marshall and other early Cold War stalwarts, fashioned the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the Western Alliance, the lasting pillars of American foreign policy in the Cold War. These accomplishments were by no means as straight-forward as they seem today. After World War II, most Americans, as Acheson's old friend Averell Harriman once said, "just wanted to go to the movies and drink Coke." It took courage and will to make the people and their congressmen, most of whom regarded foreign aid as "operation rat hole," to face American responsibilities abroad.

When anti-communism became hysterical, Acheson refused to cater to McCarthyism. He told reporters that he would not turn his back on Alger Hiss, the Harvard-trained diplomat accused of treason by Richard Nixon. As a result, Acheson was branded the "Red Dean" by the right-wingers and received so many death threats that guards had to be posted outside his house. Acheson urged Truman to fire Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1951 when the megalomaniacal commander of U.S. forces in Korea became insubordinate, and then patiently endured nine days of testimony on Capitol Hill explaining the decision to inflamed congressmen. (When he was done, Acheson, who liked his martinis, retreated to his farm in Maryland to "test the human capacity for alcohol.")

Acheson's grandeur verged on the grandiose. He was, as he put it in his memoirs, "present at the Creation," but he could seem a little too God-like to his critics. His statements, while bold, were not always wise. His remark about standing by Alger Hiss was, in retrospect, foolish. Hiss, after all, was almost surely guilty of spying for the Soviets, and Acheson's defiance just stimulated the right-wingers to lay siege to the State Department. Acheson was known to exaggerate for effect -- in his words, to make things "clearer than the truth." It can be argued that he overstated the communist threat in order to achieve the worthy goal of funding for the Marshall Plan. Acheson himself had a fairly realistic view of the threat -- and was careful not to overcommit American resources to meet it. But less sophisticated minds educated by his rhetoric -- like Lyndon Johnson, at the time a young congressman -- tended to miss the nuances.

Acheson may have been arrogant and overbearing at times, but he had qualities that are in notably short supply today. He did not freelance with the press to undermine his political opponents, and though he was wickedly funny, he did not gossip about his work. Indeed, he generally avoided the Georgetown cocktail circuit while he was in office. He was decisive. Watching one of his less worthy successors, Dean Rusk, waffle over some tough calls in the early 1960s, Acheson wrote a friend, "The decisions are hard, but they don't, like Bourbon, improve with age."

Acheson loved power and missed it when he was out of office. After leaving government in 1953, he admitted to another friend that he found himself in a state of "bewildered emptiness at being so wholly uninformed, impotent, and on the outside." He found a niche as a Wise Man, the term used by McGeorge Bundy (a bit mockingly) to describe elder statesmen brought in to counsel the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. In his role as consigliere, he had that rare quality, the willingness to speak truth to power. In early April 1961, John F. Kennedy confided to Acheson that he was about to launch a secret invasion of Cuba by CIA-backed Cuban emigres at the Bay of Pigs. Acheson was caustic and blunt in his pessimistic assessment. It was not necessary to call in Price Waterhouse, Acheson said, to discover that 1,500 invading Cubans weren't as good as 25,000 Cuban regulars under Castro. Unwisely, Kennedy did not heed his warning. Lyndon Johnson, on the other hand, did finally listen to Acheson's assessment of the failed American war effort in Vietnam. In March of 1968, Acheson, along with other Wise Men, were summoned for a briefing by some military advisers at the White House. Acheson led a revolt of the elder statesman. When one general tried to explain that American forces were not trying to win a "classic military victory," Acheson cut in, "Then what in the name of God are five hundred thousand men out there doing? Chasing girls?" A few days later, LBJ announced that he was going to seek a negotiated settlement of the war.

In his book, Chace, a respected foreign-policy scholar, retails these and other Achesonian moments in a straightforward, unadorned narrative style. Still, the book will be a little disappointing to Acheson watchers and Cold War historians, who had been expecting Chace to deliver the definitive biography. Chace is a cautious, careful scholar, which is all we.. and good, but the fact is that most of the raw material of Acheson's life has been pretty well picked over by now. Disclosures from Soviet archives will add to our knowledge of the Cold War, but that information is really only beginning to trickle out. What Acheson demands is a biographer who is willing to explore his subject's complicated psyche -- something Chace did not even attempt to do. Still, Acheson is a such an inherently interesting figure that Chace's biography is rewarding to read. Acheson's contemporaries understood his power. "Voila un homme!" exclaimed Charles de Gaulle. It's doubtful anyone will say that about his modern successors, and not just because Madeleine Albright is a woman.

Evan Thomas, an assistant managing editor at Newsweek, is writing a book an Bobby Kennedy.