Image Source — National Museum of American Diplomacy, The Great Seal of the United States.
The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986) co-authored by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas is a unique book. Nothing quite like it has been written before, and I do not think it is possible for any book like it to be written ever again, at least for a very long time.
It tells the story of the construction of the postwar American diplomatic establishment through the joint biographies of six men in particular:
- Dean Acheson (1893-1971)
- W. Averell Harriman (1891-1986)
- George Kennan (1904-2005)
- Chip Bohlen (1904-1974)
- Robert Lovett (1895-1986)
- Jack McCloy (1895-1989)
These are not household names we often remember today, but all of these men had presidential connections and advisory responsibilities from FDR through LBJ, with some called upon up through the Reagan administration. These were behind-the-scenes men who may have surfaced in the public spotlight but often worked outside it without interest in glossy fame.
The story arc begins in the closing years of World War II and proceeds into the twilight and decline of this generation in the Vietnam years.
As becomes evident as the book unfolds, it is not quite as simple as treading the path of six parallel lines in the walk of history, for these six individuals are bound like a constellation together with criss-crossing relations at different points in their lives and careers.
Averell Harriman was captain of the Yale rowing team when Dean Acheson joined as a freshman. While stationed in Moscow prior to the Cold War, Harriman would interrogate Bohlen and Kennan as his analysts. Kennan would serve under Acheson briefly before their falling out. Lovett grew up with Averell Harriman since his father worked for Harriman Sr., a railroad magnate.
The authors go to great lengths to emphasize the diversity of this cast of characters both temperamentally as well as socioeconomically.
While Harriman belonged to one of America's wealthiest families, and Lovett was also independently wealthy, Kennan was born to a modest family in Milwaukee, McCloy was raised by a single mother who worked as a hairdresser.
Some were born insiders, others were born outsiders. Some more closely rooted in Wall Street, others in Washington, some like Kennan with neither.
Almost all were Ivy League men. Two were even part of that Yale secret society "Skull and Bones" which has since attracted conspiracy theories. (How can we say we have open elections when the presidential election of 2004 was between two members not only of Yale but of one specific society there.)
This reflects of course one of the inner tensions of the book's historiographical narrative, but it is interesting to see how the authors cast this small elite world milieu not as concerning or dangerous but as a positive which produced healthy kineticism. Something to consider later.
Part of what makes this book so irreplicably unique can be found on the page after the concluding sentence at the end of the book.
The acknowledgements section opens by thanking the "subjects of their book". Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, and McCloy were still alive and apparently gave full, extensive interviews on their own life's work and recollected perceptions of events as they unfolded. The endnotes corroborate the extent to which much of this book's material reflects a collective impressionistic tale of the founding American Cold War establishment.
Drawn as living witness from men now long dead.
What I think is most impressive considering the attitudes and optics and paranoia that characterize more recent generations is that while these men heartily divulged details of their own lives and thoughts on rather critical aspects that may impact their legacy, apparently none of them asked for editorial influence over the book or even requested to see the manuscript before publication.
The Wise Men, while generally sympathetic to its characters, often going out of its way to explain what can safely be considered poor decision-making in retrospect, is not afraid to be critical of these six men, to editorialize on their behavior, or to attribute certain events to character flaws.
Of course perhaps the interviewees did not know what would unfurl but given that all of them had been lambasted throughout their lives by Congress or media, it indicates a mature security of conscience, that what they had done would by-and-large hold up to historical scrutiny, and any failings could serve as lessons.
Six men is hard to keep track of in one continuous thread, especially as secondary characters such as Harry Stimson, Paul Nitze, Dean Rusk, and others enter and exit stage with their own dedicated micro-biographic entries. The book presupposes the reader has a somewhat strong familiarity with these events and administrations, largely because they were much more firmly in public memory in the eighties when this book was published.
For us today, Mike Mansfield or Hubert Humphrey may not quite ring a bell outside the reams of history, but Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are still recognizable household names, though it is dubious they would be publicly recognizable as names forty years from now.
All that being said, part of the difficulty of reading this book is keeping track of the various peculiarities, professions, and roles of these six individuals as the narrative bounces between crises year after year.
This is intrinsic to the ambitious enterprise of biographing six men at the same time.
But the book does offset through the frequent use of epithets, moderate repetition, and retelling memorable anecdotes to remind you of who is what.
Because of the book's length, this strategy does largely work and by the denouement of World War II roughly two or three hundred pages again, the mnemonic exercises baked into the storytelling will for the most part have implanted broad strokes of the individual portraits of these six men as characters.
If there is one thing this book excels at, it is in casting narrative and historical episodes in terms of the concrete personality traits of their characters.
The transition from World War II into the Cold War is not of statistics, determinism, or historical necessity but rather the variegated human traits of the actors sitting in the offices making the decisions based on the information at hand and trying to learn from the mistakes of the previous slough of political crises.
Dean Acheson was brilliant, sharp, blunt, and witty but incredibly arrogant and stubborn.
Averell Harriman was intense, driven, unfailingly practical and loyal, but extremely unsociable and perhaps a little too ambitious.
George Kennan was a far-reaching visionary whose depth of insight anticipated many developments decades in advance, but his intellectual melancholic spirit rooted his identity in being misunderstood. A contrarian who rarely offered the decision-makers concrete actionable guidance in his wordy expositions.
Chip Bohlen was a socializer extraordinaire who effectively developed relationships around the world with an easygoing manner, yet he was an overspender and too much of a people pleaser to take a stand on resisting bad policy.
Robert Lovett was equally easygoing with an acerbic, sardonic sense of humor, but a hypochondriac and prone to reduce problems to statistics and numbers.
Jack McCloy was tireless, and a strong consensus builder among disagreeing parties, straddling public and private spheres like no other, but a technical problem solver who often could not comprehend strategic or big picture problems.
These traits emerge time and again over the dynamic course of these men's respective careers. Exceptions occur now and again whether it be Harriman cracking a joke to Stalin or Kennan straightforwardly recommending military involvement in Korea, but the patterns are clear and shape the contours both privately and publicly of world affairs.
One of this book's unique virtues is its praise of the synergy of such contrasting personalities and their work styles.
One endemic outlook of our post-Romantic culture is that the solitary genius is the primary agent who shapes history. At the other extreme of course is a deterministic outlook which understands history as the unfolding of systems and dynamics apart from human volition.
This book lends itself to a qualified great-man-of-history approach. These individuals and their presidents would by the book's telling have clearly failed or bungled decisions if left on their own but through their collaborative efforts and underlying shared ethos, they were able to foster a robust diplomatic culture of an unprecedented kind of global empire.
Ironically, given Walter Isaacson's prolific career writing biographies of history's most famous "genius" types (Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs), it is funny reading the quips here and there emphasizing the relational character of the establishment's success rather than a solitary man's efforts.
This can be seen most clearly in the book's evaluation of George Kennan who was the most ostracized of the six biographed men.
His more intellectual temperament, his fascination with the contradictions of the Russian soul, his wrestling with questions of national destiny and geography, are routinely dismissed by both the bureaucratic establishment before, during, and after the involvement of the Wise Men generation. He had a few moments to shine and he had certain unique influence on his colleagues, but such theoretical gallivanting becomes an endorsed running joke over the course of the book.
Kennan's eggheadic disposition clashed with the excessive pragmatists who wanted to solve problem after problem even if the solutions have no particular endgame.
The authors in general are rather dismissive of intellectuals and the theoretically minded. While they will concede the particular ways Kennan offset the pragmatists, it is clear they do not think America would have come out nearly so well if its newly minted diplomatic establishment sourced its talent from academia rather than career bureaucrats. Considering the twentieth century is referred to as the century of intellectuals, it is interesting by the book's telling how little role any academics had to play in the postwar order.
The only cited value these men received from educational institutions was the ascetic Spartanism they learned at Groton.
The Wise Men were not necessarily a committee of genius; their exceptionalism lies in practical traits and spirit as well as a shared commitment to a post-Christian moral framework that governed their outlook and behavior.
This can be seen most acutely when during the Truman administration, Harriman is passed over for Secretary of State in favor of Acheson. Harriman was attached to the White House as National Security Advisor. Though requested to exercise an under-handed opportunity to embarrass and humiliate Acheson with the idea being that Harriman could then secure his dream job, Harriman rejected firmly and immediately reported the political saboteur to Truman.
As the authors point out, although many of these newly minted Washington roles could clearly lead to departmental bickering and maneuvering based on their responsibilities and org charts (something that had become evident by the Carter and Reagan years and of course even more so after the book's publication), the simple character and friendship of these particular men by-and-large prevented the systemic vices of poor organizational thinking from arising at the outset though unfortunately it would imbue these offices with precedent and respect that would do more to entrench such political structures than lend them to reform.
All the same, it is fairly rare to find a sharply favorable account of oligarchic cooperation, even if this particular instantiation of oligarchy is exceptional rather than normal.
Which leads into some deeper questions and stances the book takes.
While I do not know the personal opinions of the authors on this question, within the universe of this book, Six Wise Men is very overtly and clearly critical of democracy on several counts. This is perhaps obvious from the title itself.
The authors have no hesitation to disavow Kennan's unpublishing scribblings of how women and "blacks" can only abuse the vote, and both would be better off living off generous dispensations from white men.
They distance themselves from some of Acheson's aristocratic "snobbishness" when it comes to the mob.
With some sympathy, they record the disparaging remarks the six men had about the activists of the sixties. Although ironically Kennan largely agreed with the substance of the peace and anti-nuclear movements, he fastidiously rejected any attempt to be lumped into what he saw as an abhorrent movement.
For suit-and-tie Ivy League men, the coarse and crude character of the youth movements was exceptionally disheartening as they realized this would characterize the successors of their lifelong work.
But even before then, there are frequent and recurring snips from the forties onward about the nugatory, or more often negative effects of public opinion, the press corps, and Congress on foreign establishment policy.
How electable Congressmen and even presidents should stay out of the long game of foreign policy.
This is a narrative that clearly favors technocrats over populism, bureaucrats over generals, centrist hard-liners over extremists, career public servants over presidents themselves.
The presidential administrations provide overarching epochs for the multi-decade influence formal or informal of the Wise Men. Many held no post and merely operated as an intergenerational kitchen cabinet (LBJ staffers would call them the WOMS.)
One of the advantages of this perspective is a refreshingly honest examination of US Presidents and their own flaws and capacity to undermine American interests.
While FDR is paid hagiographic lip service in broad strokes, there is surprising lucidity around the details of his behavior and character.
His equivocal non-statements and rhetorical gestures on matters of policy, his secretive double-dealing with subordinates to play them off one another, his preference for empty platitudes over practical interests or negotiation, the frequent use of backchannels and subsequent undermining of his own allies and supporters to promote his image, and most regrettably his remarkable obsequiousness to Stalin.
When the torch passes to Truman, the authors rather candidly editorialize on the advantages of Truman's honest, decisive leadership to FDR's who "thought he could operate an entire foreign policy out of his back pocket".
Truman of course is not without his flaws but shines quite clearly as the man with the keys who enabled the collaborative construction of the American foreign policy establishment, and he earns a great deal of praise for his candid and forthright attitude coupled with a humility to those with far more knowledge and expertise on subjects than him.
Perhaps his own acerbic barbs were a bit excessive to the Soviets as the alliance began to crumble in San Francisco, but after FDR's endless obsequious concessions to Stalin, it felt like a refreshing dose of poetic justice within the narrative.
It says much about Truman that though he retired from public affairs, the Six Wise Men's correspondence with him in the years to follow marked how strong their relationship was with him.
The same cannot be said for Eisenhower though, who is personally portrayed somewhat favorably and is clearly dismissed as a man swallowed by the corrupt Republican machine surrounding him.
JFK is treated as a capable man whose weaknesses come from his youth and inexperience with the machine of diplomacy, yet his interest and deference to the Wise Men is accredited to him in the years of his administration.
LBJ by no means escapes sardonic, lashing treatment. Characterized as perpetually insecure yet self-important, always seeking to please the establishment while also downplaying their opinions and expertise, unforgivingly hostile to disagreement, and stubborn to the end on the Vietnam question.
While LBJ perhaps does not deserve too much sympathy, there is a certain irony in the book's presentation here. For the Wise Men at the outset strongly encouraged him to escalate Vietnam when it remained an open question, and the book observes this as unfortunate and regrettable.
In general, they remained silent yes-men as matters got worse until it became a breaking point in 1967 or so as Acheson and others flipped.
It is funny that despite the Wise Men's explicit then implicit support for the botched American effort in Vietnam (except for Kennan and to some extent Harriman), the book squarely places the ultimate blame on LBJ who in this case as an incoming president had deferred to these advisors.
The initial meeting where they give the go-ahead lends additional color to this framing, because the authors explained that LBJ was wailing self-pityingly about his problems to these advisors for a prolonged period of time, when Acheson stood up and chastised the president about needing to show a stiff upper lip and how Vietnam is a matter of honor and principle. In effect, the authors argue the Wise Old Men advocated Vietnam escalation as a therapeutic confidence booster for LBJ because they were so embarrassed as boarding school Spartans to see a president behave that way.
But again the book leads itself to an interpretation that the wills and whims of electoral tides will introduce through sheer accident these presidents whose flaws require the delicate massaging and navigation of their long-tenured experts.
Elections do more to undermine effective policy and government than to promote it, in this reading.
This moral of the story, so to speak, appears most blatantly in the book's primary antagonist, Joseph McCarthy.
McCarthy receives little to no sympathy in historical treatment today, and it is no surprise he is not necessarily "one of the good guys here".
But it is peculiar at first glance that in a book which often takes a dispassionate and liberally-minded approach to figures and decisions, McCarthy is presented as a cosmic evil with fulminating language that occasionally lapses into a tone that suggests froth in the mouth.
To put this into better perspective, Hitler and Stalin are treated rather neutrally. Hitler is barely treated at all, and mainly as an inanimate historical fact they are dealing with. Stalin is a paranoid though uncompromising man who will do whatever it takes to protect his interests and the Soviet state. He is placed alongside Churchill and FDR as three political sovereign operators.
This aligns with the favorable view of realpolitik and somewhat mocking view of internationalist liberals such as Wilson, Stimson, and FDR. Again the Cold War establishment is founded by a generation horrified by what their rosy-eyed predecessors had thrown away or given up because they saw Soviet international cooperation as an ultimate end, and reacting with a firm line.
This eminently practicable ethic is used to rationalize (i.e. walk through the thinking behind) questionable American decisions in World War II such as fire-bombings, internment camps for Japanese-American citizens, refusal to block concentration camp activity at minimal cost, and of course the atomic bombs. German National Socialism is even cast as some moral aside that merely needed to be "treated".
To be fair, the authors do recognize the moral concerns of these decisions and present a case so that the reader may try to judge a decision like the Hiroshima bombing in fairness, but there is never sweeping condemnation of really any historical "misstep" by the Establishment, up to and including Vietnam.
The same cannot be said for McCarthyism which again is made out to be the greatest historical evil in the universe of the book.
The language the authors use to condemn McCarthy is perhaps some of the most telling of their outlook across the eight hundred pages of this mammoth history.
In the eyes of the authors (and really also the subjects of this book), McCarthy was scum of the lowest common denominator, who liked to wheel and deal, showboat and make noise, all to increase his clout and influence.
Coddling the hard Republican right for useless Cold War grandstanding was certainly one of his sins.
Creating a showroom for Communist purges when such purges had already been largely completed is another.
But if a cardinal sin can be grafted like a syllogism out of the authors' presentation, McCarthy's fundamental evil is that he opportunistically exploited the moralistic outrage of the American population whose black-and-white thinking fails to grasp nuance and shades of gray, and weaponized public opinion, media, and populist hysteria to target the bipartisan consensus and establishment for partisan ends that ultimately undermined American interests both domestically and abroad, costing trust in America's government and jobs for talented civil servants. He mobilized a dark facet of the American populace, one full of resentment and hatred for everything.
While the book does not do so, one may easily find names they could substitute into this perennial American pattern from centuries before or the century since.
I am not interested in defending or criticizing this thesis in particular, but it will be obvious to most readers how such terms and claims readily trigger an emotional register in politically engaged Americans, either for or against.
I will say that despite the seeming disparate attention paid to McCarthy, it ultimately does make sense why it should receive the most passionate and polemical representation within the context of this book.
For if this book is an adulatory encomium of the postwar American foreign policy establishment, McCarthy and the spirit he represents are its most critical existential threat from within the United States.
It is when democratic populism is whipped up against unelected technocrats whose positions are guaranteed across elections through the revolving door, granting them lifelong security, that they are most at risk of losing not simply their role, but the world they belong to.
Being on the out when Republicans like Eisenhower or Nixon were elected was not nearly as tragic for the Wise Men as a politiker showboat attempting to publicly ostracize core members of the Establishment as Communist sympathizers (which certainly when it comes to Acheson seems incredibly laughable).
All the same, and despite how satisfying it is when McCarthy self-sabotages and essentially putters into nothing, the ramblings on McCarthyism by the authors veer a bit too far into histrionic territory for a historical account whose tone is equally a bit too self-congratulatory.
From the viewpoint of a subjective "founding myth" however, the apologia and polemics work together quite well.
The bipartisan consensus is a cornerstone of the Six Wise Men mythology.
Lovett and McCloy were Republicans but actively engaged in Democrat administrations. So much so that FDR remarked once on the phone to McCloy, "Dammit I always forget you're not one of us."
The ethos of the Wise Men is that they belong to an American elite that lives on both sides of the political aisle. Theirs is a society set apart from electoral vicissitudes. They put American policy and security before the opportunistic temptations of electoral spoils or political pressure, even often at great personal cost.
The tables may turn, the other shoe may fall, but they will dutifully pack up or be called upon even by presidents or administrations with whom they share no party but a country and patriotism for that country.
Forty years since the publication of the Six Wise Men, this high-minded ethos seems naive and antiquated. Impossible even. I am sure it will continue to grow more remote as time unfolds.
But this was a sincere ideal, likely for the authors as well as for the subjects. We may witness the fading of this ideal as cynics of subsequent generations, but I think the book provides clear evidence of real men living in real times and concrete circumstances abiding by that ideal even at the cost of personal advantage.
Again as the global American digitalism has doubled down on self-promotion culture, this seems laughable today but was surely not for men educated in the age of Theodore Roosevelt.
Of course at the same time, the book is not immune to the somewhat hypocritical nature of this purported outlook.
For all its talk of bipartisan cooperation, the narrative and tone seems to confirm it sees the bipartisan framework as an inner/outer party model rather than a collaboration of equals across the aisle.
This is most blatantly obvious in the pacing of the book, where a deep lacuna craters the narrative during the eight-year Republican Eisenhower administration sandwiched between the glory days of Democratic Truman and short-lived renaissance of JFK after.
All that remains of the majority of the 1950s is one chapter titled "Exile: The wilderness years" which largely recounts the blunders of the Republican Dulles, the second-ranking antagonist of the narrative, as a series of reactions by various Wise Men in their outrage, disgust, or head-shaking.
The chapter lasts 27 pages for 1952-1960.
By contrast, the short-lived Kennedy administration receives 52 pages, and by itself the Berlin blockade airlift receives nearly as much page count as the entire administration.
Similarly, the narrative largely ends with the LBJ administration, with the Nixon/Carter/Reagan years carved into an episodic epilogue beyond the pale of time. The Wise Men by this point are portrayed as honorary advisors, although the distinction does not quite make sense when Nixon seems to have readily called upon Acheson and a few others as LBJ had done. (Nixon is unsurprisingly a background antagonist in this history though Watergate receives only the briefest mention. His chief repeatedly recounted sin is his alignment with Joseph McCarthy in the Communist witch trials.)
It is an amusing panache of partisan narcissism that these two Republican administrations largely seem to be ahistorical nothingburgers compared to Democrat administrations, even as the virtues of bipartisan consensus and nonpartisan strategy are uttered again and again.
It may of course be more credible to have these lacunae from the vantage point of reading the book as an impressionistic history from the perspectives of these six men, but this reading cannot be fully borne out across the board. Before we get to that, there are two double-edged-sword characteristics of The Wise Men to unpack here a bit, apart from the tensions outlined above.
First, it was written in 1986 at the very tail end of the Cold War. The conclusion even notes that it seemed likely that the threat of Cold War and atomic annihilation would hang over the bipolar world order for decades to come.
Thus the Cold War and its antecedents are framed very much as presentist concerns whose architects informed the writing of this narrative.
The advantage of this is that it is able to articulate rather sharply and clearly the inner thinking of the American foreign policy establishment from within a first-person lens of the Cold War. Through virtue of lacking historical perspective and third-party distance from the events depicted, the apologetics and founding myth nature of The Wise Men grant us clear insight into a logic that grows increasingly remote to us today as memory of the Cold War fades.
In its best possible light, this book can be seen as a meta-primary source which is able to gather an abundance of details and present a cogent, practical narrative of events that just happened that faithfully reflects the thoughts and attitudes of the American establishment elite in its own articulated, collective self-identity.
The downside of this of course is also the brevity of historical retrospect at its disposal.
Aside from obvious things such as knowing when Soviet Communism would collapse, what China's relationship with the United States would evolve into, or even the fall of the Berlin Wall (all of which would certainly impact how many episodes of the book would be narrated today), this also undermines its objective hold for us today.
I mean objective in the sense of us as viewing the Cold War as an object in the past that has a historicizing relation to us today. It conditions our world. We live in the shadow of its institutions.
What is remarkably absent from contemporary American thinking is how recent and novel much of the American foreign policy establishment is.
Most of the alphabet agencies and executive departments we take for granted today are largely inventions primarily of the Truman years, even more so in some ways than the far longer FDR New Deal period. The CIA and NSA were born after World War II. The way the authors talk about many of these new departments and roles, they were simply expedients to find ways to have smart men like Harriman around in some formal capacity.
We are talking less than a century for almost all of the American governmental apparatus widely reported on today. (The authors even point out there simply was no foreign policy function until Theodore Roosevelt. Before then diplomat and ambassador positions were spoils system rewards for aging politicians.)
For the intents and purposes of a public discourse whose imagination and memory often reach a hard limit for events before 1945, this often means that these institutions and establishments are all-or-nothing. For its defenders it is sacrosanct. For its most ardent opponents it requires complete destruction in a death of God sense.
There really is no public cognizance of the arbitrary nature of these functions which were largely engineered around Cold War considerations and the fact that American government has evolved through several quite radical upscalings and restructurings over the centuries, all while the country went on its path.
If the book had better historical perspective and depending on the authors' courage, it may perhaps ask with optimism how such departments may be restructured to meet new times and demands and to reconsider which temporary bureaucratic expedients no longer belong with our time.
Usually such questions collapse into simplistic vandal or arsonistic attitudes toward government with high emotional registers on the subject.
But it seems like it would be faithful to the spirit of the book to ask with some degree of optimism what the future may hold for a new generation.
Interestingly even though the authors were relatively young men at the time, the tone falters into gerontocratic opining and nostalgia for the past and a pessimism of the future.
Because the book is written from inside the bubble of the Cold War establishment, its authors and subjects seem to hold the establishment and its inventions as eternal creation and laws which are tragically unwinding at the seams. An ironic outlook for a book that lightly criticizes its subjects for not thinking in terms of the long term in their eminently practicable but often short-sighted solutions. If we are critical of myopic expedients, why is there a religious attachment to this midcentury establishment?
Let us pause for a slight digression.
I say religious because of "The Last Supper" episode in the "Judgment Days" episode.
The basic plot arc is that after years of quietly humming approval for LBJ's Vietnam policy, Acheson and others have come around to colossal failings of the Vietnam situation and its unwinnability. With almost "conspiratorial" energy, the kitchen cabinet of old men meet with each other in private in homes and hushed conversations, coming to agreement that they need to disavow Vietnam and advocate withdrawal.
This culminates in a private late night dinner meeting, i.e. The Last Supper. "It was possible the most distinguished dinner party of the American Establishment ever held."
It is the weakest scene of the book.
Because of the scope of events covered, the book does very little in terms of providing descriptive landscape of events and episodes. The style of narration favors the economic selection of a few choice details to help paint the scene rather than lavish detail.
Here though the tone shifts quite noticeably into a rather overstylized vignette where nothing really ostensibly occurs. All that happens is a hushed dinner where aged men more or less agree to tell LBJ the next morning it would be better to disentangle from Vietnam.
This dinner is chalked up to world-historical symbolic significance, with an almost unreadably embarrassing self-seriousness that fortunately is not strongly forced anywhere else in the book.
The idea is that the Wise Men had worked together to build the postwar establishment in their early middle-aged years, and now twenty years later in their bowed and decrepit state must seek to dismantle the very order they helped create.
This is completely nonsensical on both literary and historical grounds.
If we are reading this as a narrative, this is posited as the climax of the entire book.
The symbolism really does not hold up though under further examination.
First, one could equally posit the plot structure of the Korean War and the subsequent "exile" of the Truman establishment as a climax and denouement on far stronger grounds than this Vietnam one. The McCarthy trials are more fiery and contentious than this here. There were many cases where Wise Men were ostracized or fired in certain climactic moments. The primary significance of this moment is that the assembled group has reached a consensus to reverse course on Vietnam. Nothing certifies this as uniquely climactic for the whole biographical story arc.
Second, almost none of the six are at this dinner or even involved at this stage. Kennan had accepted academic exile long before this point. The book notes that Lovett and McCloy had recused themselves as Vietnam escalated. Bohlen was hosting parties in Paris. Harriman had long been anti-Vietnam and simply prodding Acheson to come around. Only Acheson was at this dinner of "Wise Men" and he had already individually given LBJ some blunt food for thought on the Vietnam question.
Third, everything after this dinner should be seen as denouement, but the Wise Men continue to play active advisory roles in subsequent years as the LBJ administration finished, and going on into the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan years. McCloy for example actively managed US-Arab relations for decades, even lobbying Carter to allow the deposed Shah of Iran to receive hospital treatment in the United States. There is simply no real discontinuity between the function the Wise Men served before or after this Last Supper.
Fourth, if it is significant as a last gathering of these aged minds, it is strange that the book should forego naming the attendants only vaguely referring to the guests as "The Cold War Knighthood" and naming a few remarks in the subsequent meeting with LBJ.
Historically it does not quite compute either.
The book describes this as a self-destruction of the Establishment's raison d'etre, of the apex of American hegemony, of the beginning of a long decline.
It should then be asked what practical, institutional, or de facto changes were wrought by this change in course by the Wise Old Men against Vietnam.
It is almost cast in terms of the final State Department meeting prior to dissolution. Nothing specifically changes from a departmental perspective after this Last Supper.
If one seeks to argue it is rather a de facto shift of influence, it is not clear what is decisive about this event.
LBJ had alienated or fired each subordinate or advisor who had slowly come out against the Vietnam War. The book makes this abundantly clear, particularly for Acheson's son-in-law who was quite personally affected by the stress of the prolonged conflict.
After the meeting where the Wise Old Men collectively came out to LBJ as against the conflict, LBJ seems to have written down some notes seeming to align with the advisors, but then simply doubled down. The book argues that LBJ withdrew his campaign for re-election because of Vietnam and this dinner specifically, but that seems a highly tenuous claim.
The Wise Old Men shifting course seems to have had no impact on America's Vietnam policy.
But if that is taken up as an argument for the significance of this dinner that fails too as something uniquely climactic, for the Democrat Establishment simply cycled out as Nixon came into office, much like with Eisenhower. More than that, it seems that through Kissinger the Wise Old Men had far more influence and advisory capacity in the Nixon years (despite their disapproval of the Cambodian offensive) than in Eisenhower's time.
The point of this extended coda is that the self-understood narrative arc of The Wise Men really fails and is an unfortunate shortcoming of the book.
Much of the foreign policy establishment continued to live and thrive under various administrations for decades to come, even within the chronological timeline of the book, as well as after.
It is a forced attempt to romanticize and bring closure where there is none, and though minor and shorter than perhaps my commentary on it here, undermines the unity of the book by artificially inserting a "The End" where history does not admit one.
As Dilthey put it, history may be locally teleological, but it never has a telos.
This brings us back on topic to the second double-edged sword.
The book is at first glance highly localized to the perspectives of the six Wise Old Men navigating these events of history. It is a joint biography.
This general impulse and principle conflicts with a second one.
At other times however, the book is structured as an event-by-event history told from a more omniscient perspective even at times (such as with McCarthy) when the Wise Old Men were barely involved. It is a Cold War zeitgeist history, often looking backward or forward or at simultaneous events.
There is nothing wrong with either approach or even mixing the two (i.e. free indirect discourse), but this requires considerable precision and balance especially when dealing with history, if you do not wish to expose yourself to the criticism I would offer on this count.
While the book I would say by and large handles these alternating perspectives somewhat well, there are many points where the conflated concerns of the two styles of historical storytelling create rather questionable pacing and structuring decisions.
I have already described the curtain of silence concerning the Eisenhower administration where events like the Suez Crisis or the U2 plane downing are alluded to as passing background events rather than concrete episodes in geopolitical relations, often only in retrospect.
But the uneven historical pacing emerges in many other areas.
The most blatantly striking is the JFK assassination which is jarringly skipped over.
JFK had his fair share of narrative space for the past fifty pages or so, as would make sense.
The book progresses into JFK's Vietnam policy where nearly four pages are spent on the deliberations on what to do with the American-backed South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem who was permitting rather severe atrocities and corruption under his watch while being equally intransigent with his American sponsors (Harriman remarked how he liked negotiating with the North Vietnamese more than the South).
After some indecision, JFK authorized a coup which led to Diem's death in November 1963.
Here is the verbatim text of this section:
"The generals finally revolved on October 31, but the coup was messy. Diem's body was found riddled with bullets and stab wounds.
John Kennedy was himself shot to death three weeks later. Bill Sullivan found Averell Harriman that afternoon sitting on the edge of his chair, in front of a television set, holding his head in his hands.
Lyndon Johnson had opposed the coup against Diem. Publicly, he had called Diem 'The Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia.' To journalist Stanley Karnow, he remarked, 'Shit, man he's the only boy we got out there."
The JFK assassination is a footnote to the Diem coup and never really receives any mention again, except once later on when the Wise Men were invited to participate in the Warren Commission, as part of the LBJ reshuffling.
Such an almost irreverently terse reference to the JFK assassination is even stranger considering the often "where were they and what were they doing" anecdotes that detail what Wise Men were where when Pearl Harbor happened, the atomic bomb was dropped, or even the Berlin blockade of 1946. Two sentences meanwhile for the assassination of a sitting United States president, as a footnote to a discussion on Diem's assassination.
One could try to argue the JFK assassination is passed over because this book is concerned with foreign policy not domestic events, but that does not quite hold up.
There are a number of historical episodes that are elided or skipped over like this one for unclear reasons.
Brief mentions about planning for the Bay of Pigs come up now and again, but the event itself slips by without mention until it is alluded to as a past mistake. This is quite clearly a foreign policy matter.
The bombing of Nagasaki likewise receives a one-sentence acknowledgement.
Hitler's suicide transpires as a background event mentioned after the fact.
MacArthur's peculiar military regime over Japan is only referred to as an external entity during the Korean War.
Europe largely vanishes from material view following the Marshall Plan. As Korea and Vietnam unfurl, the authors repeatedly allude to Europeanists like Acheson who wanted to get policy focused back on Europe but without any clear mention of what specific events concern them in the European theater.
It is never directly treated in detail how Germany was initially partitioned then consolidated into West Germany and East Germany, only that such things were happening and were being negotiated.
The Vietnam War itself is a vague abstraction where names of events occur without much explanation or detailed grounding. This would make sense if the idea is that the Wise Old Men had lost all acuity, but Acheson allegedly does a deep dive and uncovers all the truth. What this truth is never discussed in the same level of detail as the expositions on World War II and the Korean War are.
There are more, but this provides for uneven quality of historical storytelling.
From a subjective point of view the book shines best when describing the American missions to Moscow in the thirties and forties as well as what I would argue is the true climax of the book, the Korean War, as the apex of establishment trust and power.
And again its flavorful, acerbic criticism of certain presidents or the military brass or even foreign leaders does play to the strengths of the book in its storytelling.
But put simply Wise Men is trying to operate both as a biography and a grand history which leads to mixed purposes that are not handled perfectly. Of course it is far easier to say this now with the level of digital research and editing resources now as well as from the vantage point of after the Cold War, so this is not to disparage the skill of what the authors have accomplished with this book, only that it could be improved in its craft in this respect.
Michael Massing's Fatal Discord is perhaps the best example I have seen of coupling biography with grand history and is masterfully written for a popular audience, handling these pacing concerns and questions with more poise and balance than what I have pointed to in Wise Men.
I say this is a double-edged sword because certainly the advantage is that the first-person impressionistic perspective is of value in detailing how these men as human beings who sat at desks through late night meetings under stress and strain and physiological ailments executed world-historical decisions. That is a powerful and authentic representation of historical narrative.
And it does so by always gauging that present decision against what had happened before. American assistance to Soviet Russia pivoting into the Truman Doctrine. Vietnam as a second Korea. Vietnam in light of wanting to prove how anti-Communist you were after the McCarthy witch trials. Without any knowledge of what the world would look like after the fact. The authors are right to point out the six may have acted differently had they known their pronouncements would have locked the world into an entrenched bipolar Cold War with risk of global annihilation. But it is not for us to say.
But the disadvantage is of course the gaps this leaves open from the vantage point of general history that the authors inconsistently try to fill in sometimes with I would call less than success.
Again a more extreme but still representative point of this happening is a weird editorial observation by the authors that none of the Soviet informers really leaked anything of material significance anyway in the end.
They logically say this in the context of McCarthyism to delegitimize the Communist purges.
But it is rather laughable from our vantage point now considering Harry Hopkins, Harry Dexter White, and Oswald Chambers were all individually Soviet promoters who operated in the upper echelons of American government and secured extremely prodigious and generous material gifts for the Soviet government at the expense of America.
Barring the fact that more has come to light since the book was written, this is also internally ludicrous an assertion when the authors explained both before and after this section that Soviet sympathizers like Klaus Fuchs leaked the atomic bomb to the Soviet government enabling the Soviets to become a nuclear power shortly thereafter.
It is not clear how the atomic bomb can be seen as a revolutionary paradigm shift in geopolitical thinking, and it is admitted that the American project's atomic bomb details were leaked to the primary geopolitical rival, but then to also say that Communist insiders or sympathies had not leaked anything of importance.
This is why I referred to the anti-McCarthyism as a bit histrionic, as if he is worse an enemy than the Soviet state itself.
This is still quite an exceptional book, and the authors obviously went through enormous effort to interview and compile all these details and somehow arrange the labyrinth of the Cold War into a quite readable, and sometimes irresistible page-turning narrative.
It is not clear when again a book could be written about the founding of a global order by a small group of men who deliberately planned and founded it.
In a world of colossalism with gigantic committees and advisory bodies, the small startup feel of the postwar establishment is very clearly delineated as a positive in the book (which notes conflict-of-interest was not considered an issue at the time.)
But in closing I will return to one of the most notable flaws of the moral, normative outlook this history provides.
In its admixture of pragmatic and mythological tone, it does not recognize how ephemeral and arbitrary many of its praised inventions are. This is not to undermine or subtract from their significance, but simply to note that many institutions come and go, such is the nature of things. The closing pessimism of an American foreign policy establishment entering senescence presumes that nothing new may be created again, a viewpoint which has only grown and solidified in the public psyche since the 1980s.
It fails to recognize the inter-generational dynamic of institutions across time and place.
What one generation builds, the next may maintain or simply flounder.
If you design an organization around temporary, exceptional personalities you are only committing yourself to failure in the long run as people come and go but the positions remain the same.
True long-term thinking for the architecture of organizations requires an understanding of the economics of human talent and that one whiff of exceptional, morally upright elites cannot be used to safeguard a multi-generational system when selfless actors step aside from the reins of power and more common elements of human nature such as self-serving and self-promotional political figures inherit the reins.
While the Wise Men embody the Jeffersonian spirit of a natural aristocracy leading oligarchically in a broadly democratic, progressive system (and they do so quite well), they are also susceptible to John Adams' critique of his friend that there should be no hereditary aristocracy because the variations from one generation to the next are too severe to protect a system of government from internal decay and collapse.
For Adams, the separation of powers was essential to the longevity of government across generations.
For us today, we live in the aftermath of this unelected foreign policy body dictating American policy and interests. Even when wrought and operated with the best of intentions, we must ask ourselves whether a unified body of American political establishment, immune from elections, can uphold these institutions that have been with us less than a century. Or will they crumble with the natural entropy of time and the passing of generations.