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.