Acheson served in the Department of State under both Roosevelt and Truman, and the contrasts were striking as each President approached foreign affairs in strikingly different ways. FDR was keenly sensitive to the difficulties that foreign affairs can create in partisan politics. Having served in the Wilson administration, he was aware of the obstacles a president can face in achieving his foreign policy goals because of congressional opposition, an experience he meditated upon and took to heart. In appointing Cordell Hull as his Secretary of State, Roosevelt tried to neutralize and conciliate possible opposition in Congress. He was careful throughout his term of office to handle the Senate with tact and political prudence.

A Dolf Hitler passed the long, summer days of his 1924 incarceration in the Landsberg fortress reliving his past. Each day he retired to a large and sunny room to dictate the story of his “Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice” to his admirers, Emil Maurice and Rudolf Hess. As he paced the room, Hitler subjected his memories of childhood in upper-Austria, youth in Vienna and Munich, young manhood at the Western front, and political awakening in postwar Munich to the scrutiny of his accumulated political wisdom at thirty-five. He vindicated his ideas by an examination of his life revealing how personal experiences led him to knowledge and truth in page after page of poor prose.

Among the foreign policies of the new states which have emerged from the Western colonial empires, that of India occupies a leading place. The first non-Western nation to become a member of the British Commonwealth, India became a symbol and catalyst of self-determination for several nationalist movements. India proceeded on an “independent” path in world politics and had numerous emulators in the world. Where India's role in the state-making revolution has met with considerable approval, its strategy of nonalignment has been debated in the West, and even in India since the open appearance in 1959 of the Sino-Indian dispute. The criticism has included questions about the wisdom of nonalignment, doubts as to its feasibility, and charges that its application has shown preference for the communist states during periods of the Cold War. The Indian defense includes assertions that nonalignment serves India's welfare and often the world's, answers about its workability, and claims that application has been consistent with professed ideals.