This extensive group-portrait by two Time news editors trumpets the role of six policymakersDean Acheson, Averell Harriman, George Kennan, John McCloy Jr., Charles Bohlen, Robert Lovettin taking postWW II America from isolationism to a recognition that the U.S. "would have to assume the burden of a global role." The irony is that, as elder statesmen, they sometimes warned against the interventionist momentum they had helped create, as this behind-the-scenes account makes clear. The authors' portrayal of the six as the hidden architects behind the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and Cold War containment will certainly provoke debate. Based on prodigious research, including interviews with four of the six, the tome often sounds like an official biography ("Kennan had tortuously conflicted feelings about being tapped to be part of the American elite") and the prose echoes Time's style (Dean Rusk, "the round-faced Georgian"). History buffs will follow with interest the minor revelations that spill forth as the six advise presidents from F. D. R. to L. B. J.
The authors, Time editors, chronicle the activities of six gifted friendsDean Acheson, Charles E. Bohlen, W. Averell Harriman, George Kennan, Robert Lovett, and John J. McCloywho were instrumental in developing U.S. diplomacy from the 1930s to the Vietnam War. Nurtured in the innocent internationalism of Woodrow Wilson, they applied their Ivy League educations to a variety of crises. Their successes outweighed their failures, and their service promoted the values of free trade, democratic capitalism, international cooperation, and pragmatism. Their lives provide a history of America's policy-making elite. But elitism breeds insularity, and the shift away from great wars between industrialized nations and toward small unit actions in wars of national liberation was not recognized by these men. Though superbly written, this book's primary value is anecdotal.
