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The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made |
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| Author: Walter Isaacson Published: 1997-06-04 |
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List price: $22.00 Our price: $14.96 |
Usually ships in 7 to 11 days As of: November 19th, 2008 05:36:18 PM |
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Customer comments on this selection. Too long and unorganizedI am very fascinated by this subject, but these authors repeats the same basic concepts throughout this long and droll piece of work. There was no reason to repeat that these wise men were dubious regarding Russian intentions during post WWII Europe over and over. I got it the first time.  A Reminder...... of a ten-year-old book that shouldn't be forgotten, the "biography" of American foreign policy from the Truman years to the apotheosis of Reagan. Like most biographies, this one concentrates on the childhood of the Cold War containment/exhaustion strategy, the DNA so to speak of neo-conservatism, born of a Democratic mother and a Republican father. Any reader of my other reviews, who doubts my assertion that Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Bush were mere inheritors of a foreign policy as rigidly sustained as if by primogeniture, should take on this book as ferociously as you dare. The six Wise Men -- McCloy, Bohlen, Acheson, Lovett, Harriman, and Kennan -- would be the last to blush at being identified as "The Greatest Generation" or "The Best and the Brightest." Their egos and their sense of elite entitlement to lead are central to their story. This is a deeper portrait of their intellectual mode than either of those two just-mentioned best-sellers. Authors Isaacson and Thomas are clearly of the same "old school" as their subjects. Their admiration is in a sense self-adulation; even when the Wise Men acknowledged errors, the very nature of their errors turned out to reflect wisdom. My own admiration for the six is considerably more limited, but it's hard to deny the authors' thesis that these Yale and Harvard whiz-kids and their colleagues were the movers-and-shakers of administration after administration. Even as some of them lost a portion of their self-assurance in light of the massive failure in Vietnam, they continued to limn the hegemonist, exceptionalist conception of America which has continued to fail up to the current massive failure in Iraq. Given that all six were perceived as "liberals" aligned with Democratic administrations, some partisans of the other party may come to this book with an established antipathy toward its subjects. All I can say to that is "read it and learn!" Essential for understanding WWII to VietnamAll sorts of things no one knows about how decisions were made after WWII that have affected all of us ever since. Well written too.  Where are the next Wise Men?This is "an excellent read",, but it left me wondering why we have had no such minds in government in the last 30 years. It made me look back to our national leaders and great minds from the Founding Fathers through the short-lived Kennedy administration. From 1970 on, the bottom has fallen out. We have become late Rome. Will Change Your View of the WorldNot only kept me entertained, but completely changed my views on the post WWII era. A must read for anyone remotely interested in history or politics. |
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