Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas's The Wise Men suggests that the United States's highly successful postwar foreign policy, especially economic, was owed to a group of six distinguished Easteners - Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kerman, Lovett and McCloy, half of whom went to St. Paul's or Groton Schools, and all of whom attended Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Little room was left in their account for two Southerners, George C. Marshall and William L. Clayton, the former a graduate of V.M.L., the latter a man whose formal education stopped with the eighth grade. The omission in Secretary (and General) Marshall's case is repaired in the four volume biography by Forrest Pogue. The historical vacuum surrounding Clayton has been filled at long last by Gregory Fossedal's Our Finest Hour (Hoover Institution Press, 1993), an account of his life in business and public affairs. Fossedal insists that Clayton was the architect and builder of US economic foreign policy, partly during, but mostly after World War II. The case is made with elaborate detail.

As one who served in the Department of State for a few of those years far below the undersecretary level, and whose Pantheon of former high bosses consists of Marshall, Clayton, General Bradley and Allan Sproul of the New York Fed., I will not dissent from Fossedal's overall assessment, though on occasion he does lay it on a bit thick. Working primarily from Clayton's papers deposited at the Hoover Institution - they might more appropriately have gone to the Truman Library as befits a lifelong Democrat of the free trade persuasion - there is a risk of skewed perspective. It is held, for example, that Clayton played a major role in the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, which in one passage is called the Keynes White-Clayton blueprint. But it is acknowledged that Clayton participated only in Washington talks before July 1944, that he was too busy to attend the conference itself, and lacked familiarity with the details of the agreement. One major early contribution, however, was to fend off an attempt by Keynes to combine commodity price stabilization with the monetary duties of the IMF by proposing for commodities stabilization the Hot Spring conference of March 1943 that produced the Food and Agriculture Organization. His eloquent persuasion, moreover, was critical in getting the legislation passed. And there is of course no doubt of Clayton's leadership roles in the rise and fall of UNRPA, of the British loan, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and with others, especially Secretary Stimson of the War Department, in derailing the Morgenthau Plan.

In the prewar passages, I was particularly interested in the discussion of "Southern delivery" of cotton when he was a commodity broker in Anderson and Clayton. Middle men and places in economic history often lose out to "direct trading," after sellers and buyers learn to deal with one another without the intermediation of an entrepot center - in this case New York. Clayton made a fortune of $75 million from this sort of business acumen. His reputation rests largely, however, on his public contributions.

Fossedal's account of the development of the Marshall plan in the spring of 1947 is riveting. One of the earliest outlines of something like such a program appears in Mr. Clayton's memorandum of March 5 - the text is given - before his trip to Europe on April 10. What he saw there produced an agonized memorandum of May 19, whole paragraphs of which were incorporated with editorial changes in Secretary Marshall's Harvard speech of June 5. Equally fascinating is the account of Clayton's European tour after the speech, making dear to the Europeans what the speech meant without taking over the production of the plan itself, an assignment given to Europe.

One issue that has troubled and divided historians is whether the offer of participation to the Soviet Union was genuine or a ploy. Fossedal makes clear that the offer was a genuine one, although Clayton, along with everyone else in the Department, was relieved when the Soviet Union excluded itself.

Fossedal does not evaluate the success of the Marshall Plan much beyond "The Triumph of Democracy" in the subtitle of the book, although he does refer to revisionist opinions. There is no mention of Alan Milward's The Reconstruction of Western Europe with the view that the exercise was not needed and its snide footnotes, for the most part about American participants: Marshall "A national hero, as yet unsullied," and Clayton "a militant free trader who became an author of political tracts in his seventies. Dalton called him ideological Willie." Nor is it mentioned that Clayton's staff member, Harold van Buren Cleveland, who was among the most enthusiastic supporters of a European recovery program in 1947, later apostasized, converted to monetarism, and thought that recovery could have been achieved by reducing the monetary supply and adjusting the exchange rate. The latest round of discussion at international conferences, however - its proceedings not yet published - concludes that the aid of the Marshall Plan and the open-trade advice were critical to recovery.

Much of the book emphasizes Clayton's vitality, enthusiasm and capacity for work. A sad thread runs through the biography, however to the effect that his services to the country and world economic reconstruction came at a cost to his family life. He retired in October, 1947, but had difficulty in slowing down, to such and extent that Mrs. Clayton divorced him in May, 1949, though they remarried in August of the same year, It must have been complicated keeping track of the anniversaries.

Charles P. Kindleberger is a Professor of Economics Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology