More than friendship and mutual confidence, however, account for Truman’s near-total reliance on Acheson for foreign policy leadership. Some of his dependence reflected Truman’s uncertainty about his command of foreign affairs, especially early in his presidency. But it also stemmed from his straightforward view of the primacy of the State Department within the president’s cabinet and of the responsibility of all cabinet members to command in the areas covered by their departments.

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Truman, unlike so many of his successors, was not tempted to create a competitive foreign affairs center in the White House. He understood the kinds of problems that competitive bureaucratic initiatives could create and wanted nothing like that in his administration; rather, he wanted unity on large issues. Thus, Truman’s personal trust of Acheson, his view of the administrative order within the executive branch, and his sense of what made a government work well made it almost inevitable that the secretary of state would dominate the area of foreign policy in this administration.

Truman and Acheson crafted their teamwork with exceptional skill. They had a deft understanding of each other’s roles. “I never thought I was the President, and he never thought he was the Secretary,” recalled Acheson, who nonetheless once told Truman that the National Security Council was a place where the president “should listen to everybody who has anything to say on foreign affairs” but that “when it comes to final advice, it must come from your Secretary of State.”

The relationship between the president and his secretary of state had to be quite frank, “sometimes to the point of being blunt,” Acheson said. “And you just have to be deferential. He is the President of the United States, and you don’t say rude things to him–you say blunt things to him. Sometimes he doesn’t like it. That’s natural, but he comes back, and you argue the thing out. But that’s your duty. You don’t tell him only what he wants to hear. That would be bad for him and for everyone else.”

Because the two men had such a good understanding of their respective roles, it could almost always be assumed that if Acheson spoke about an issue to other government officials, and certainly if he spoke about it in public, he and the president had already discussed it and there was no point in appealing to Truman for a reversal. In 1951, the president told a visiting statesman that he “could speak with Mr. Acheson just as though he were speaking to the President himself.”

Both men were excellent at keeping secrets. They also relished teaming up on public statements, coordinating what they would say in their weekly press conferences. Since Acheson’s usually preceded Truman’s by a day, they concocted deliberate one-two punches to emphasize government unity and resolve. When the administration announced its decision to build the hydrogen bomb in February 1950, reporters first asked Acheson about it. At a presidential press conference the following day, Truman, in response to similar queries, declared that Acheson “spoke for the State Department, which is supposed to represent my . . . foreign policy.”

Whenever Acheson met the press, he would inform the president about what he had said and send him a transcript. “And over and over again,” he recalled, Truman “would say, ‘The Secretary of State, after consultation with me, has stated our position’ and that is all there is to it.” This approach foiled reporters’ attempts “to put a screwdriver in between the President and me.” The Truman-Acheson teamwork “smothered the fire.”

Almost every time Acheson came under public attack–such as in the aftermath of the “fall” of China to the communists in 1949 or following his public refusal to disavow Alger Hiss, a former State Department officer accused of spying for the Russians, who was convicted of perjury in 1950–Truman went out of his way to defend him. In just one of many instances, the president declared in a March 1950 briefing: “I think I made myself perfectly clear that I think Dean Acheson is–and will go down in history as one of the great Secretaries of State.”

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