The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made

by Walter Isaacson, Evan Thomas

Overview

This “engrossing narrative” examines the six American statesmen who rebuilt the world after WWII—with a new introduction by the authors (The New York Times).

Blending personal biography and geopolitical history, Wise Men introduces six close friends who used their power and influence to shape the role their country would play in the dangerous years following the Second World War. They were the original best and brightest, whose towering intellects, outsize personalities, and dramatic actions would bring order to the postwar chaos and leave a legacy that dominates American policy to this day.

The Wise Men shares the stories of Averell Harriman, the freewheeling diplomat and Roosevelt’s special envoy to Churchill and Stalin; Dean Acheson, the secretary of state who was more responsible for the Truman Doctrine than Truman and for the Marshall Plan than General Marshall; George Kennan, self-cast outsider and intellectual darling of the Washington elite; Robert Lovett, assistant secretary of war, undersecretary of state, and secretary of defense throughout the formative years of the Cold War; John McCloy, one of the nation’s most influential private citizens; and Charles Bohlen, adroit diplomat and ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439126530
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	02/13/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	873
Sales rank:	13,306
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. He is a professor of history at Tulane and was CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of Time. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023. Visit him at Isaacson.Tulane.edu.

Date of Birth:

May 20, 1952

Place of Birth:

New Orleans, LA

Education:

Harvard, B.A. in History and Literature, 1974; Oxford (Rhodes Scholar), M.A. in Philosophy, Politics, & Economics

Editorial Reviews

Isaacson and Thomas have fashioned a Cold War Plutarch.

San Francisco Chronicle

A wealth of new information and insights on the people and events that shaped the first four decades of the Cold War.

The Boston Globe

Must be read if we are to understand the postwar world.

Robert A. Caro

A richly textured account of a class and of a historical period.

New York Times Book Review

Isaacson and Thomas have fashioned a Cold War Plutarch.

San Francisco Chronicle

This highly detailed account of the lives of six prominent architects of American foreign policy in the Cold War era offers an illuminating perspective on many important decisions from Lend-Lease to the hydrogen bomb. The six protagonists embody “the Establishment” in an era when the phrase had real meaning. They formed part of a network of men with similar values and backgrounds who truly did shape the world. The book, first published in 1986, lacks the perspective of a post-Cold War world and, perhaps, revelations from Russian archives opened in the 1990s. Narrator Jonathan Reese does a workmanlike job of conveying an enormous amount of information with interest. Reese seems completely at home with the language of the Cold War. F.C. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2013 - AudioFile

This highly detailed account of the lives of six prominent architects of American foreign policy in the Cold War era offers an illuminating perspective on many important decisions from Lend-Lease to the hydrogen bomb. The six protagonists embody “the Establishment” in an era when the phrase had real meaning. They formed part of a network of men with similar values and backgrounds who truly did shape the world. The book, first published in 1986, lacks the perspective of a post-Cold War world and, perhaps, revelations from Russian archives opened in the 1990s. Narrator Jonathan Reese does a workmanlike job of conveying an enormous amount of information with interest. Reese seems completely at home with the language of the Cold War. F.C. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2013 - AudioFile