In the Time of the Americans

Profiling five Americans whose careers shaped the course of history, a political study examines the shared goals and distinct personalities of FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Marshall, and MacArthur.

From Publishers Weekly

Inspired by President Woodrow Wilson's idealistic internationalism, three subsequent U.S. presidents?Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower?steered Americans away from isolationism to support an active, major role for the U.S. on the world stage. Under their leadership, America helped defeat Hitler, waged a Cold War against Soviet tyranny and checked Chinese communist aggression in Korea. Fromkin's dramatic, engaging political, military and diplomatic history yokes FDR, Truman and Ike in a group portrait with George Marshall, architect of America's postwar financial program to reconstruct Western Europe, and General Douglas MacArthur, WWII hero and commander of U.S. and U.N. forces in Korea. In a panoramic canvas peopled by George Kennan, Joseph Kennedy, John Foster Dulles, Felix Frankfurter, William Randolph Hearst and many others, Fromkin (A Peace to End All Peace) argues that America, acting with mixed motives but without imperial designs, opposed Europe's imperialisms, whether British, German, French or Soviet, and played a key role in destroying them. Fromkin is a Boston University professor of international relations, history and law.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal

The generation born in the 1880s came of age in the cataclysm of World War I, bore the brunt of leading our nation in World War II, and laid the ground rules for the Cold War. Although this generation has passed from the scene, Fromkin (A Peace To End All Peace, Holt, 1989) has created an exceptional collective biography in examining the forces that shaped the thinking and decision-making of that memorable group of men, led by FDR, who in turn shaped the political world in which we live. Similar to Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas's The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (S.&S., 1988) and, more recently, David Mayers's The Ambassadors and America's Soviet Policy (LJ 2/1/95), Fromkin's book ranges widely among his subjects in weaving together a sophisticated survey of our century as we moved from a nation intent on isolationism to one with world leadership responsibilities thrust upon it. This well-written history is highly recommended for all collections.?Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames