Suzanne Gluck became my agent when my last book was caught in a publishing situation that everybody else said was hopeless. She did the seemingly impossible and rescued me and my book from a black hole. What she asked in return was that I write a book for her; so here it is.
I was the beneficiary of great generosity in the course of doing my research. John Taft loaned me the large collection of William Bullitt papers that he had assembled at great effort for his important book American Power. Shareen Brysac let me read and quote from sections of her biography in progress of Mildred Harnack-Fish. Rick Gentile allowed me to read and quote from chapters of his biography in progress of Secretary of State Christian Herter. Caleb Carr let me see his paper on Henry Cabot Lodge. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan sent me his enormously impressive Ph.D. thesis on the ILO.
Donald Oresman, keenest of bibliophiles, sent me essential but long-out-of-print books that nobody else could find. And Stanley Mallach, a scholarly resource, led me to a collection of secondhand books containing basic works that the New York Public Library no longer possessed but I could not do without. Professor Christian Herter kindly took me to lunch in Washington and answered questions about his father.
Professor Robert W. Tucker generously invited me to lunch at his home in Washington and saved me much time by steering me to books that would best answer my needs in writing about Wilson and his team at the Paris Peace Conference.
Dr. Nicholas Rizopoulos was, as always, an invaluable guide to archives, archivists, scholars, and scholarship. Professor Charles Kupchan showed me around the Princeton libraries.
Ashbel Green at Alfred A. Knopf is the editor, and the kind of editor, that writers dream of having but that few have the luck to encounter. He and his always helpful assistants Jennie McPhee and Jennifer Bernstein have cheered up my life; they do it so well, and they make it all so easy.
Marge Danser takes my longhand, which looks less legible than that of a Dead Sea scribe, and through the miracle of word processing turns it into what looks like a printed book. Roger Kimball did me yet another favor (he has done many) by finding Marge for me.
No task is more a true act of generosity than the critical reading of a manuscript. In addition to my editor and my agent, and to James Chace, those who went over the manuscript were Professors John Morton Blum, John Lewis Gaddis, and Alain Silvera, and Mr. Fareed Zakaria. As in places I have stubbornly insisted on doing things my way in the face of forcible objections, it seems especially appropriate to emphasize that none of these readers are responsible in any way for shortcomings in the book or for views expressed in it.
My deepest thanks to them all.
I also want to thank the libraries that have helped in my research, particularly: the Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower presidential libraries and their staffs; the Harvey S. Firestone and Seeley G. Mudd libraries at Princeton University and their staffs; Judith Schiff, Chief Research Archivist at the Yale University Library; and Judy Simonsen and the Milwaukee County Historical Association.
In the Time of the Americans Page 79