Distinguished Grotonian
David Campion Acheson ’39 Since 1977, Groton School has presented the Distinguished Grotonian Award to a graduate whose life of highly distinguished service reflects the essential values of the School.
The 2014 Distinguished Grotonian, David Campion Acheson ’39, embodies the Groton School motto, Cui Servire Est Regnare, for he spent the majority of the past 75 years, since his graduation from Groton, in service to our country and to the world. After Groton, David entered Yale. Believing a war was imminent, he joined the Naval ROTC and became president of the Yale Political Union. He also spent a summer working for the National Defense Mediation Board, created by President Roosevelt (1900) to mediate strikes in defense-related industries. In December 1942, David was commissioned to serve four years
in the U.S. Navy; for his bravery in World War II, he received the Campaign Ribbon for Pacific and Philippine Theaters and four battle stars. Upon leaving the Navy, David attended Harvard Law School, then worked at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, attracted by its mission to “harness wartime technology to produce electric power and radioactive isotopes for medical research.”1 After the Soviet Union exploded an experimental nuclear device, signaling the beginning of the arms race, the commission began building bombs for the Pentagon, and David soon left for Covington & Burling, a prominent Washington
law firm. David also was elected to the Democratic Central Committee of the District of Columbia, and in 1961 took a leave from the law firm to campaign for John F. Kennedy. President Kennedy appointed David U. S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. David later joined the newly created Communications Satellite Corporation, established to pursue commercial exploitation of space technology. In 1986, President Reagan appointed him to the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident. He co-authored “A More Effective Civil Space Policy” for the Center for Strategic & International Studies and later worked for the Institute for Technology & Strategic Research at George Washington University. David served on several boards, including those of the
Committee on the Present Danger (an American anti-terrorism, foreign policy interest group), the Washington Cathedral, the International Economic Studies Institute, and the Smithsonian Institution, and he was board president for the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan think tank on international affairs. The 2014 Distinguished Grotonian has written several books, including Effective Washington Representation, Affection & Trust: The Personal Correspondence of Harry S. Truman and Dean Acheson, and a memoir, Acheson Country. 1
From the interview with David Acheson conducted by Charles Stuart Kennedy in May 2008 for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project
David C. Acheson could not attend the ceremony but sent the following acceptance, which Ann Bakewell Woodward ’86 read:
Y
ou can well imagine my humil-
ity in accepting the Distinguished Grotonian Award, as my memory casts back to Franklin Roosevelt, Sumner Welles, Dean Acheson, and Averell Harriman, whose public service achievements comprise a standard that I can admire, but hardly satisfy. But I am struck by the fact that our nation, when Groton was founded, had major similarities to today’s, particularly in that 1884 was a time of headlong and pretty rough capital formation, characterized by a few immense fortunes, guided by a very weak social ethos. We are seeing that again today, and seeing with it ethical commitments by the
owners of great fortunes that are, with a few notable exceptions, way below the scale of their accumulation of wealth. The Rector, usually once or twice a year, gave a Chapel sermon about the abuses of that earlier age of capital formation. Some of us were amused by the notion that we were being asked, when we controlled a great bank or railroad, to act with a more sensitive social conscience. But after World War II, many of us chose to work in government for a time, to act on the admonitions that we had heard from the Rector some years earlier. Somehow, our teenage brains had not filtered all these admonitions out.
In just a few years past, the power and willfulness of the financial community have reminded us of the rough early years of capital formation and the cynical attitudes of business leaders at the dawn of Groton’s history. The Rector’s life span and my own connect the two periods, and the mission of Groton, to turn out men and women who wish to improve their political and social environment, has deep historical roots going back to the time of Endicott Peabody and George Rublee. I see, in this award, a laudable effort to keep this tradition alive.
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