The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made

In The Wise Men, Walter Isaacson and his co-author Evan Thomas profile six individuals who helped craft post-war American foreign policy: Dean Acheson (Secretary of State under Truman), George Kennan (US Ambassador to the USSR, among other roles), W. Averell Harriman (Special Envoy under FDR), Robert Lovett (Secretary of Defense under Truman), Charles Bohlen (US Ambassador to various countries), and John McCloy (President of the World Bank). The biographical profiles of each individual range from ok to very good, but unfortunately they are spread too thin, and the authors attempt to draw conclusions that are too often unsupported. As a result, the book fails to rise to the level of Isaacson’s later biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein.