John O'Brien - Public domain photograph, glass negative

The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made is a 1986 book by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas about a group of U.S. government officials and members of the East Coast Establishment. The book starts with post - World War I period and continues in the immediate post-World War II international development, describing how the group of six men of quite different political affiliations developed the containment policy of dealing with the Communist bloc during the Cold War and crafted institutions such as NATO, the World Bank, and the policies of the Marshall Plan. Six people who were influential in the development of Cold War: 1. Dean Acheson, Secretary of State under President Harry Truman 2. Charles E. Bohlen, U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, the Philippines, and France 3. W. Averell Harriman, Special Envoy for President Franklin Roosevelt 4. George F. Kennan, Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia 5. Robert A. Lovett, Truman's Secretary of Defense 6. John J. McCloy, a War Department official and later U.S. High Commissioner for Germany.