Books: The Hexagon the Wise Men

They were the Establishment personified: six men who went to the same East Coast schools, chatted at the same Georgetown dinner parties and cozily made American foreign policy for decades. Devoted to serving their country, pragmatists rather than ideologues, internationalists with an instinct for the center, they raised nonpartisanship in diplomacy to an art form. Their names: Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson, Charles (“Chip”) Bohlen, George Kennan, Robert Lovett and John McCloy.

When the six began their period of greatest influence, after World War II, the Soviets were our staunch allies, and the thought of becoming international policemen was anathema to a nation that Harriman said wanted nothing more than to “go to the movies and drink Coke.” Harriman was the only Wise Man ever elected to public office, and that was for a single term as Governor of New York. He and the other solons shuttled between Government and business, “substituting for each other,” note the authors, “like lines in a hockey game changing on the fly.”

The Wise Men encompasses this center of influence with vigor and style. Walter Isaacson, the Nation editor of TIME, and Evan Thomas, Washington bureau chief for Newsweek, rely heavily on anecdotes and quotations to convey the nuances of personality and politics. Harriman, son of an American robber baron, was hampered by mumbled diction and a seeming inattention to details. Lovett, who would serve as Secretary of Defense, was a childhood friend of % Harriman’s. Acheson, Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953, was more responsible for the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine than the general and President whose names are forever associated with the policies.

McCloy began as a poor boy from Philadelphia and rose to head the World Bank. He was a master at bringing consensus out of chaos, sometimes with grim results. The decision not to warn Japan about the atom bomb, for example, was made without a full discussion of the consequences. McCloy, then Assistant Secretary of War, shaped a vague “declaration” to Japan that was agreeable to other U.S. officials but that did nothing to avert the use of the Bomb. Bohlen, a career man in the Foreign Service, was instrumental in getting the views of his lifelong friend and fellow Ambassador to Moscow George Kennan accepted in Washington. “A curious blend of arrogance and insecurity, haughtiness and self-pity” is how Isaacson and Thomas describe Kennan. Yet they have no doubts about his unmatched foresight. He predicted the Sino- Soviet split and accurately saw that Russia would continue to be a threat because “its perverse paranoia and historical expansionism had been abetted and amplified, but not caused, by the Marxist doctrine.” Kennan gave the Wise Men a persuasive tool; when they wanted to argue for an increased U.S. role in international affairs, they invoked the Red menace. It was an effective ploy, but it also proved to have unforeseen and cataclysmic consequences. In making their arguments, the sages of Foggy Bottom created a bogeyman fierce enough to frighten America into a war in Viet Nam that the Wise Men came to believe was unnecessary. Acheson was especially acerbic about the turn of events in Southeast Asia. His impression of Lyndon Johnson: “A real centaur — part man, part horse’s ass.” Astute political history has rarely been this engaging and engrossing.