THE WISE MEN
Six Friends and the World They Made
Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett,
McCloy Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986
853 pp., $22.95
The economics of American book publishing has become such that most commercial houses shy away from large works of serious nonfiction except where special circumstances offer promise of breaking into the mass market. More often than not in recent years those exceptions have been first-person accounts by highly visible public figures - a president, secretary of state, or at least national security adviser. Historians and philosophers may continue to debate the role of the great man in history. There is no question, however, that the lay public wants its history personalized. The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made, by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, fits into this genre. The authors are Time magazine journalists rather than themselves movers and shakers. But their topic is the inside story of the shaping of American foreign policy from the end of World War II through the Vietnam War. Their vehicle for telling that story is a collective biography of the six men whom they place at the center of "the postwar policy Establishment": W. Averell Harriman, Dean G. Acheson, Robert A. Lovett, John J. McCloy, Jr., Charles E. ("Chip") Bohlen, and George F. Kennan. "They were the original brightest and best," the authors tell us, "men whose outsized personalities and forceful actions brought order to the postwar chaos and left a legacy that dominates American policy to this day."
Although their text runs to 741 pages, Isaacson and Thomas succeed in keeping the reader's interest via a mix of biographical detail, lively portrayals of persons and places, anecdotal sidelights, and apt quotations. The work avoids the major pitfall of collective biography - the tendency to homogenize individual differences. The six protagonists remain distinct personalities. Harriman and, to a lesser extent, Lovett were born to wealth and power. From a gentry background, Bohlen had the social credentials, personal smoothness, and charm for entrée into the patrician boarding school-Ivy League world. Son of a Connecticut Episcopalian minister (later bishop), Acheson combined an aloof and intimidating manner, a keenly incisive legal mind, and stern moralism that exalted doing one's duty into an almost religious commandment. McCloy was a poor boy from Philadelphia who, pushed by a domineering mother and his own ambitions, made his way up the ladder by cultivating the rich and influential. Kennan was the moody and introspective son of a marginally successful Milwaukee lawyer who was a loner at Princeton and never fully comfortable thereafter in elite circles. Harriman, Lovett, and McCloy made their marks in Wall Street banking and law. Acheson gained his niche - thanks to the patronage of Harvard Law School professor Felix Frankfurter and Justice Louis D. Brandeis - in the Washington world, where law and politics overlapped. Bohlen and Kennan found their way into a foreign service that still viewed itself as a gentlemen's club where men of good family could devote their lives to public service without contamination by the vulgarities of democratic politics.
At the same time, the authors illuminate the commonalities warranting the treatment of their subjects as a distinctive group. They had no doubts about
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