Between the Heirs of Dean Acheson and Franklin Roosevelt: THE GREAT BETRAYAL
Posted by The Nation on October 23, 2026
"As Nation contributing editor James W. Carden shows in The Great Betrayal: How the Democrats Became the Party of War, Truman and his hawkish secretary of state, Dean Acheson, steered the party in a direction not intended by Truman’s predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Truman and Acheson’s embrace of the burgeoning national security state and their adoption of the paranoiac anti-communism that heretofore had been characteristic of the American right led them headlong into an unnecessary war of choice in Korea. Korea set the precedent for Vietnam, for Iraq, and for Iran—it was the first of many wars waged in the absence of constitutional authorization on the flimsiest of pretexts."