Summary of the Oral History of David Campion Acheson
By Elizabeth Runyan Geise
David C. Acheson was in practice as a lawyer in D.C. from the late 1940s through the 1990s. Over that 50-year period, Acheson served in a variety of positions in the government, private law firms, think tanks and commissions, and a university. His oral history was taken by Kurt J. Hamrock on January 27, February 26 and March 24, 2010. The history provides a fascinating account of Acheson’s childhood in pre-World War II Washington, D.C., and of a varied and eclectic legal career.
Acheson was born on November 4, 1921, and died on August 16, 2018. His father was Dean Acheson, who served as Secretary of State under President Harry Truman. Acheson was born during the middle of his father’s clerkship on the United States Supreme Court with Justice Louis Brandeis. After the clerkship, Acheson’s father decided to remain in D.C. and to work at a new firm formed by Edward Burling. Acheson related that his father was skeptical that a lawyer of Burling’s caliber would be interested in opening a firm in D.C., where the law practice had always been very local. But Burling assured him that, in his view, a federal government that had “formed the habit of regulating businesses during this late war…will find that habit hard to break.” Burling was correct of course, and the new firm became Covington & Burling where both Acheson and his father practiced.
Acheson grew up in D.C., attending the Potomac School, St. Albans, and then high school in Massachusetts at the Groton School. He described pre-war Washington as a “sleepy southern town,” which was racially segregated and run by a committee composed of three white men. The city did not really change until the time of President Lyndon Johnson and thereafter, when home rule was instituted. Acheson could ride his bike “all over town.” His family lived first near DuPont Circle and later in Georgetown, a neighborhood which, Acheson said, “was not, in those days, a very elegant part of town.” The Acheson family also had a farm in Sandy Spring, Maryland, where they retreated on weekends and where Acheson recalls President Truman coming for lunch in the late 1940s.
Acheson attended Yale in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He received “pretty good grades,” but also “succumbed like most of my friends…to the racoon coat values.” His father, who had served in the Roosevelt Administration, felt that war was coming and encouraged Acheson to participate in ROTC. Due to the war, his class’s graduation was accelerated to December 1942, and he spent the next four years serving in the Navy all over the Pacific. Acheson considered staying in the Navy at the end of the war, but, on the recommendation of his father’s friend, Justice Felix Frankfurter, Acheson enrolled at Harvard Law School.
Acheson had little good to say about Harvard Law School in the years right after World War II. The classes were large, the professors were difficult to hear in large lecture halls, and the faculty, most of which had had their positions for many years, had “kind of blind adherence to the case method with little patience for discussing the consequences, implications, possible critiques.” Acheson found that the Harvard faculty prided themselves on a “chilly, narrow definition of legal education,” “as if there was no real world,” compared to the “social law” taught at Yale. Still, Acheson got through it, graduating in 1948.
Upon graduation, Acheson went to work for the Atomic Energy Commission because he wanted “to be on [the] forward edge of a new technology that had the potential of changing society.” He liked the job very much, but once the Soviet Union exploded a test atomic weapon in April 1949, “overnight the primary mission of the AEC then became military and everything else became a side show.” Acheson was disappointed at the change in focus, and so, in 1951, opted for private practice at Covington & Burling (which was possible because his father had left the firm to serve as Secretary of State).
At Covington, Acheson worked on antitrust cases with later U.S. D.C. District Court Judge Gerhard Gesell, who he describes as a “very energetic, very bright, imaginative litigation partner.” Acheson eventually became a partner at Covington, but none of his subsequent work at Covington was as interesting as the antitrust work with Gesell. He took a leave of absence in 1956 to do some advance work for presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson and then ran John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in New York in 1960.
Due to his political connections, Acheson became the U.S. Attorney in D.C. in 1961. He enjoyed that job immensely, hiring “really high caliber” recent law school graduates, cutting back on when his office would seek the death penalty, curbing the use of confessions obtained from defendants before they had counsel, and helping to change standard for the insanity defense in D.C.
After leaving the U.S. Attorney’s office in 1965, Acheson worked for Secretary of the Treasury Henry Fowler. There he dealt with the report on the Kennedy assassination by the Warren Commission, performed a “radical overhaul” of the Secret Service, and reformed the Bureau of Narcotics, which then moved from Treasury to the Department of Justice.
Acheson served from 1967 until 1975 as Vice-President and General Counsel of Comsat, a private satellite company. After that, he returned to private practice, first at Jones Day (1974-78) and then at the newly-formed D.C. office of Drinker Biddle & Reath (1978-88). But Acheson became “increasingly disenchanted” with his ability to generate new work, and never found the work in the various firms very interesting or exciting.
From the 1970s through the 1990s, Acheson became involved with various think tanks and similar groups. From 1976-2004, Acheson served as a member of the Board of Directors and then President and CEO of the Atlantic Council, which was formed in in the 1960s to foster transatlantic cooperation. He was a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, a group formed to lobby against U.S. participation in the SALT II Nuclear Arms Agreement. In 1986, after the Shuttle disaster, Acheson served as part of the Commission to look in the disaster. He ended up writing the Commission’s report with Astronaut Neil Armstrong. And, from 1989-91, Acheson served as the Director of the Institute for Technology and Strategic Research at George Washington University.
In short, Acheson had a diverse and varied legal career. The history is well worth reading.
