A collective biography of six U.S. statesmen and the foreign policies which dominate our actions to this day: Averell Harriman, the diplomat and Roosevelt's special envoy to Churchill and Stalin, Dean Acheson, the secretary of state who was more responsible for the Truman Doctrine than Truman and for the Marshall Plan than General Marshall, George Kennan, self-cast outsider and intellectual darling of the Washington elite, Robert Lovett, assistant secretary of war, undersecretary of state, and secretary of defense througout the formative years of the Cold War, John McCloy, one of the nation's most influential private citizens, and Charles Bohlen, diplomat and ambassador to the Soviet Union.

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