We hear this talking point everywhere now that the Trump administration does not know what it is doing with the war against Iran. It is also supposedly clueless about what to make of Ukraine or the Russians. The president is described like a king who does what he feels like and no one really questions him. He only has experience in real estate, casinos and showbusiness. This hyperfocus on presidents is a terrific smokescreen.
The US is a very experienced and very dominant system employing the smartest people that can be found and trained. Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas’s The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made became a classic because it told a truth that the public often only half-sees: American foreign policy is not really made by presidents.
It is shaped by a narrower circle of highly connected advisers, bankers, lawyers, diplomats, and institutional brokers who outlast administrations and give continuity to U.S. strategy. The six men at the center of the book—Dean Acheson, Charles Bohlen, W. Averell Harriman, George F. Kennan, Robert A. Lovett, and John J. McCloy—are presented as the “original best and brightest,” men who helped build the postwar American order and advised presidents from Franklin Roosevelt through Lyndon Johnson. Contemporary summaries of the book emphasize exactly that role: they were the hidden architects behind containment, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the broader Cold War settlement.
What makes the book especially revealing is not just policy substance. It is the social anatomy of power. The “wise men” were not merely smart individuals who appeared out of nowhere. They came out of particular institutions, neighborhoods, law firms, banks, schools, and dinner tables. Some of them were linked by Yale and its secret societies. Many of them moved in what later became known as the Georgetown Set. And above them stood older patrician mentors—especially Henry L. Stimson—who exemplified the bipartisan establishment style they inherited. To understand the book properly, you have to read it not only as a history of ideas, but as a history of recruitment, trust, social selection, and elite reproduction.
The public memory of American politics, especially popular memory, remains stubbornly presidential. People remember Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon. But the actual operating system of American statecraft has long depended on cadres of experts who feed presidents options, provide doctrine, build consensus across agencies, and carry relationships across administrations. Modern descriptions of the National Security Council make this explicit: the president decides, but the interagency process exists to generate recommendations and policy options, integrating perspectives from State, Defense, Treasury, intelligence, and the White House. In other words, the “wise men” were not an anomaly. They were an especially visible early form of a recurring American pattern.
The six men and the social world they shared
Isaacson and Thomas organized the story around six figures who, taken together, represented the postwar U.S. foreign-policy establishment: Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, and McCloy. Reviewers at the time described them as “architects of the American century,” while the book’s own official descriptions stress that they were the statesmen who shaped the role America would play after World War II. The point was not that all six were identical, or even equally powerful at all moments. The point was that they formed a durable advisory class.
The six were also socially heterogeneous in a limited, establishment way. Acheson and McCloy were lawyers. Harriman and Lovett came out of banking and finance. Bohlen and Kennan were diplomats and Soviet experts. Some were born into great wealth. Others, like McCloy, began from more modest circumstances but entered elite circles through talent, law, and wartime service. Yet all of them, by mid-century, belonged to a recognizably Atlantic, northeastern, upper-tier governing class. Their importance lay not only in their ideas, but in their reliability to one another and to the institutions they served.
This is where the Yale and Georgetown angles matter. They were not incidental decorations. They were parts of the trust infrastructure.
Yale secret societies: not all six, but an important subset
George Kennan went to Princeton. Charles Bohlen was a Harvard man. John McCloy went to Amherst and Harvard Law. But a significant cluster at the core of the group did carry Yale secret-society ties, and that mattered because those ties were embedded in the broader northeastern establishment from which the wise men emerged.
Dean Acheson attended Yale and belonged to Scroll and Key. Yale’s own historical materials and the Yale Daily News archive identify him as a member of Scroll and Key, as well as Delta Kappa Epsilon. That places him squarely inside one of Yale’s central senior-society pipelines.
W. Averell Harriman attended Yale and joined Skull and Bones. Published biographies identify Harriman as a Bonesman during his Yale years, before he moved into rail, banking, and then diplomacy. That link mattered not because Skull and Bones is a magical hidden government, but because it was one of the institutions through which upper-tier trust, familiarity, and future elite recognition were cultivated.
Robert A. Lovett also attended Yale and was a member of Skull and Bones. Standard biographical accounts and official historical summaries identify him as a Bonesman and later as a partner at Brown Brothers Harriman before he moved into the War Department, the State Department, and ultimately the Pentagon. Lovett is one of the clearest examples of the interlocking nature of Yale, Wall Street, and the national-security state.
That distribution matters. The Yale secret-society influence was not universal across the six, but it was substantial enough to show how part of the wise-men world was recruited. Yale did not produce the whole circle; it produced an important wing of it. And because Yale also fed Wall Street law, banking, and public service, those society links plugged directly into larger institutions of power.
Henry L. Stimson: the elder statesman behind the wise men
If Yale secret societies form one strand of the story, Henry L. Stimson is the bridge that turns pedigree into statecraft. Stimson was not one of Isaacson and Thomas’s six, but he stands behind the book like a patriarch. He was a Yale graduate, a member of Skull and Bones, later a Wall Street lawyer under Elihu Root, and eventually Secretary of War under Taft, Secretary of State under Hoover, and Secretary of War again under Roosevelt and Truman. Yale’s archival description of his papers explicitly notes that he was tapped for Skull and Bones, and standard historical accounts stress how the society furnished him with lifelong contacts.
Stimson’s importance lies in three things.
First, he embodied the bipartisan establishment ideal. He served Republicans and Democrats. He stood for continuity of statecraft over party theatrics. That is exactly the spirit Isaacson and Thomas were trying to recover in The Wise Men. Stimson represented the idea that a certain class of lawyer-statesman should move above ordinary partisan churn when national security was at stake.
Second, he was a recruiter of talent. One modern review of Stimson’s wartime leadership puts it plainly: one of his major achievements was recognizing talent, and among his most important appointees were John McCloy and Robert Lovett. Official biographies confirm that McCloy began his high-level public service in 1940 as an adviser to Stimson and then Assistant Secretary of War, while Lovett became Stimson’s special assistant and then Assistant Secretary of War for Air. In other words, Stimson was not just an elder symbol; he was a hiring mechanism through which the next generation entered command.
Third, Stimson transmitted a style. He linked the late nineteenth-century Elihu Root tradition to the mid-twentieth-century wise-men tradition. One legal-history article even describes McCloy and Lovett’s strategic prudence as originating with their mentor Henry Stimson and, behind him, with Root. That is a succinct way of saying that the wise men did not just invent a doctrine; they inherited a habitus.
So when the book is read as a story of six friends, Stimson should be understood as the elder template: the previous-generation Bonesman who modeled the way a New York lawyer with establishment credentials could move from elite private practice into the management of war and grand strategy.
Georgetown: not a formal cabal, but a real social operating system
If Yale secret societies represent the educational and class filter, Georgetown represents the lived social environment of postwar power. The Georgetown Set was not a secret society in the Yale sense. It was a neighborhood world: a dense, elite social ecology of houses, dinner parties, journalists, diplomats, intelligence hands, publishers, and policymakers concentrated in a few square blocks of Washington. A review of Gregg Herken’s The Georgetown Set summarizes the basic picture vividly: the history begins with Dean Acheson’s purchase of a Georgetown house in 1926, and the key actors of Cold War Washington—Acheson, the Harrimans, Chip Bohlen, the Alsops, the Grahams, the Dulles brothers, and others—operated through social interactions that were also political interactions.
This is the right frame for reading The Wise Men. The “wise men” were not just intellectuals advising from abstract institutions. They lived in a world where policy, gossip, leaks, marriage, journalism, and social life mixed constantly. The Hudson review of Herken’s book notes that decisions in the “councils of state” were often made among neighbors, and that policy battles occurred not just in offices but at Georgetown cocktail parties and Sunday night gatherings. It even lists the homes of Averell Harriman and Chip Bohlen in that tight Georgetown geography.
This is important because “Georgetown Set” does not simply mean “people who lived in Georgetown.” It means a governing style built on social proximity. Familiarity created trust. Trust made candid conversation easier. Leaks, backgrounding, alliance-building, and cross-institutional coordination all became easier in a world where a secretary of state, a columnist, a publisher, and an ambassador might all pass through the same houses in the same week. Herken’s reviewer even quotes Henry Kissinger’s line that “the hand that mixes the Georgetown martini is time and again the hand that guides the destiny of the Western world.” It is a witty line, but it captures the point.
The Georgetown Set also overlapped heavily with the wise men. Acheson clearly belongs in it; Harriman and Bohlen do as well; McCloy and others operated in the same social field even if not every one of the six was equally rooted in the neighborhood ritual. That is why it is fair to say that a great deal of The Wise Men is really about the national-security establishment as it functioned inside Georgetown’s social world.
What these networks actually did
The easiest mistake is to read Yale secret societies and Georgetown as though they were occult causes. They were not. They were filters and accelerators.
Yale senior societies did not automatically make someone secretary of state. What they did was identify and socialize men from already high-potential backgrounds into a dense trust network. Georgetown parties did not single-handedly create containment. What they did was speed up communication, create interpersonal confidence, and fuse official and unofficial power. The book’s six men still had to perform at a high level. Kennan still had to write the Long Telegram. Bohlen still had to master Russian affairs. Acheson still had to operate the State Department. Lovett still had to handle air mobilization and later defense policy. McCloy still had to master the administrative machinery of war and occupation. But these achievements occurred within a networked environment that amplified certain people over others.
This is one reason the book remains so valuable. It demystifies presidential centrality without descending into cartoon conspiracy. The world these men made was not built in a hidden cave. It was built through schools, law firms, banks, wartime appointments, dinner tables, and advisory roles.
Why the public fixates on presidents anyway
The public focus on presidents is understandable. Presidents are elected. They are visible. They speak for the nation. They serve as the face of war, peace, recovery, and crisis. But modern U.S. government, especially in foreign policy, is too large and complex for presidents to act as solitary strategists. Today’s official descriptions of the National Security Council make clear that the interagency process is designed precisely to convene departments and agencies, synthesize views, and recommend options to the president. The president decides; experts build the menu.
This is not only a contemporary truth. It was already true in the world of The Wise Men. The book’s own framing, as reflected in reviews and summaries, centers on April 1945, when Harry Truman—an “untutored” new president in foreign affairs—found himself dependent on men who knew much more than he did about the Soviet Union, diplomacy, wartime settlements, and the institutional architecture of power. Isaacson and Thomas’s whole point was that presidents often enter office, or enter crises, needing a cadre.
That is why Stimson matters so much in the prehistory of the book. That is why Acheson, Harriman, Lovett, and McCloy loom so large. And that is why the Georgetown Set matters: it was part of the informal support system through which expert consensus became usable presidential policy.
The democratic tension at the heart of the book
There is, however, a tension in all this. The Wise Men can be read in two opposite ways.
One reading is admiring: these were serious men in a serious age, and their social coherence allowed the United States to act with continuity and competence in a dangerous world. This is the reading that stresses NATO, the Marshall Plan, the stabilization of Western Europe, and the construction of postwar order.
The other reading is more critical: this was an East Coast establishment whose educational, financial, and social homogeneity narrowed debate, insulated policymakers from public accountability, and made disastrous overconfidence possible—especially later in Vietnam. The New Yorker-style and Georgetown-Set literature leans harder on this second reading: a tightly woven social world can produce groupthink as easily as wisdom.
Both readings contain truth. Secret societies and Georgetown salons did not produce a single ideological outcome. They produced a class style: confidence, discretion, anti-populism, fluency in institutions, and a presumption that foreign policy belonged to those prepared to manage it. That style could yield strategic brilliance and strategic blindness.
Stimson, Yale, and the old republican-democratic establishment
It is also worth noting that Stimson himself captures a now-weakened American pattern: the high official who moved across party lines because he was understood as serving the state rather than merely a party. His Yale and Bones connections were part of an older northeastern Protestant establishment, but his importance exceeded tribal alumni solidarity. He stood at the junction of elite schooling, Wall Street law, and wartime command, and he then pulled McCloy and Lovett into positions where they could become the next generation’s indispensable men.
This is typical of how American governments work when they are under pressure. Presidents turn not only to campaign loyalists but to people who have already been tested inside elite institutional settings. Those settings can be universities, law firms, banks, military staffs, think tanks, or diplomatic corps. In the 1940s and 1950s, the specific pathways ran through places like Yale, Harvard Law, Cravath, Brown Brothers Harriman, and Georgetown drawing rooms. Today the pathways look somewhat different, but the underlying logic remains the same.
What the book gets right about American power
The lasting strength of The Wise Men is that it refuses the most naive version of democratic storytelling. The United States did not become a superpower simply because presidents gave speeches or won elections. It became one because a cadre of interconnected elites—some from Yale secret societies, some from Wall Street, some from the diplomatic corps, many from Georgetown’s social matrix—had the skill and access to translate broad presidential authority into working doctrine and institutions.
That is also why the book still feels relevant. The public continues to over-focus on presidents. Campaigns, cable news, and social media all reward that mistake. But foreign policy remains, to a great extent, the work of networks of experts, administrators, and informal elders. The names and neighborhoods change. The structural fact does not.
Conclusion
In the end, The Wise Men is not just a book about six men. It is a book about how the American establishment reproduced itself at a moment of global transition. Dean Acheson’s Scroll and Key membership, Averell Harriman’s and Robert Lovett’s Skull and Bones memberships, and Henry Stimson’s older Skull and Bones pedigree all point to one recruiting channel within that world. The Georgetown Set points to another: the social geography through which those men interacted with journalists, publishers, diplomats, and policymakers in Cold War Washington. Stimson stands above the group as mentor, exemplar, and recruiter, the elder Bonesman who helped move Lovett and McCloy into the wartime state and thus into history.
The public, then and now, tends to see presidents. Isaacson and Thomas ask the reader to see something else: the hands behind the president, the neighborhoods behind the cabinet, the schools behind the neighborhoods, and the mentors behind the schools. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is how elite governance usually works.
