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...

"From the award-winning author of The Unwinding--the vividly told saga of the ambition, idealism, and hubris of one of the most legendary and complicated figures in recent American history, set amid the rise and fall of U.S. power from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, wholly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and detested, he was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan...

"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 the collapse of 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 in 2014, Secretary John...

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