The Wise Men Six Friends and the World They Made: ACHESON, BOHLEN, HARRIMAN, KENNAN, LOVETT, McCLOY by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas (Simon & Schuster: $22.95; 853 pp., illustrated) Home Edition

• Published in: The Los Angeles times
• Main Author: Nelson, Bryce
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, Calif Los Angeles Times Communications LLC 30.11.1986
• ISSN: 0458-3035

To exemplify this earlier "selfless tradition," [Walter Isaacson] and [Evan Thomas] concentrate on "two bankers, two lawyers and two diplomats"-W. Averell Harriman, Robert A. Lovett, Dean Acheson, John J. McCloy Jr., George F. Kennan and Charles Bohlen. All six were united by their concern with the Soviet Union and the need to contain Soviet power, especially in Europe. Three in the group, Harriman, Kennan and Bohlen, served as U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. Acheson served as President Truman's secretary of state from 1949 to 1953. McCloy and Lovett, the "Heavenly Twins" who aided Secretary of War Henry A. Stimson during World War II, went on to play important roles in the Truman Administration. An intriguing part of the authors' approach is that they examine the social and class connections of these men as well as their foreign policy concerns. All of their subjects went to private preparatory schools, two (Harriman and Acheson) to Groton. These two, plus Lovett, went to Yale College, Bohlen to Harvard, Kennan to Princeton and McCloy to Amherst. Although the authors do not mention it, the six were all Episcopalians or Presbyterians. Their Establishment ties were knotted at the New York banks, New York and Washington law firms and New York's Council on Foreign Relations. Nevertheless, the authors clearly respect their six heroes and have whetted our interest in these men, especially Harriman, Acheson and Kennan, the insecure visionary who doesn't quite belong with the others. To better understand Harriman, we will have to await Rudy Abramson's forthcoming book. We can hope that biographies will be undertaken on the others, and that Isaacson and Thomas will be able to find more time to write at length. In their first major book, Isaacson and Thomas have written an engrossing work of popular history that will live well beyond the 1980s.