President Truman's Secretary of State (1949-53), Dean Acheson was a crucial figure in the shaping of the postwar world. In an astonishingly creative and demanding tenure Acheson was involved to a degree seldom realized today in a huge range of issues: from the creation of NATO to the Korean War. The result of a major commemorative conference, this volume brings together ten distinguished diplomatic historians, commissioned to write on various aspects of Acheson's career, based on primary archival research.