A remarkably revealing view of how this greatest of Cold War strategists came to doubt his strategy and always doubted himself.

In a narrative both panoramic and intimate, Chaffin captures the four-decade friendship of Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette. Thomas Jefferson first met the Marquis de Lafayette in 1781, when the young French-born general was dispatched to Virginia to assist Jefferson, then the state's governor, in fighting off the British. The two could not have seemed more different. When Jefferson moved to Paris three years later as a diplomat, speaking...

"Ambassador William J. Burns is the most distinguished and admired American diplomat of the last half century. Over the course of four decades, he played a central role in the most consequential diplomatic episodes of his time -- from the bloodless end of the Cold War to post-Cold War relations with Putin's Russia, from post-9/11 tumult in the Middle East to the secret nuclear talks with Iran. Upon his retirement, Secretary John Kerry said Burns belonged...

"The Kremlinologist chronicles major events of the Cold War through the prism of the life of one of its top diplomats, Llewellyn Thompson. His life went from the wilds of the American West to the inner sanctums of the White House and the Kremlin. As the ambassador to Moscow, he became an important advisor to presidents and a key participant in major twentieth-century events, including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War. Yet, unlike his contemporaries...