About this ebook
“Clarity, serenity and precision are the marks of this major contribution to an understanding of American foreign policy during the past 40 years. The book deserves to be compared with Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation (but less self-satisfied) and George Kennan’s Memoirs (but less introverted). Although the author is best known to the general public for his opposition to American military involvement in Vietnam, the historian will find his discussion of European issues the most interesting part of the book.” — Gaddis Smith, Foreign Affairs
“[A] first-rate memoir of American politics and foreign policy over half a century. It is literate, lively and amusing, and in places it clarifies basic questions about the foreign policy of the United States... The Past Has Another Pattern is a colorful and thought provoking tour of the recent and not-so-recent past, conducted by a skillful guide.” — Daniel Yergin, The New York Times
“[O]ne of the great, examined public lives of our time.” — Kirkus
“A distinguished lawyer and public servant with experience of Presidents stretching from Roosevelt to Reagan, [George Ball] has written an impressive book of memoirs.” — Douglas Johnson, London Review of Books
“A few years ago I read some 70 volumes of biography and autobiography as a Pulitzer Prize juror. George Ball’s memoirs are everything that most of the art is not. While he does not neglect his achievement, he is candid on the things that went wrong. His public life has provided him with a very great deal of very great importance to tell. He writes admirably well. And much of his story is amusing. This year there will, I promise, be no other biography that will be as good.” — John Kenneth Galbraith
“George Ball is that rarity — a distinguished public servant who can write; and his memoir is not only indispensable for the historian but absorbing for the general reader.” — Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
About the author
Born in Des Moines, Iowa, George Wildman Ball (1909-1994) graduated in 1930 from Northwestern University where he majored in English, founded a literary magazine, and earned a law degree in 1933. Ball worked in the Farm Credit Bureau and the Treasury Department in Washington but returned to Chicago in 1935 to join a tax law firm, where Adlai Stevenson was a partner. Stevenson helped Ball join the Lend-Lease Administration as a lawyer in 1942. Ball then headed the US Strategic Bombing Survey in London in 1944-45, where he met Jean Monnet who would become the driving force for European integration.
As a founding partner of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Ball, a law firm which represented European institutions, Ball pushed for Britain to join the Common Market. When Governor Stevenson of Illinois ran for President in 1952, Ball joined his campaign as chief of volunteers. In 1960, Ball backed John F. Kennedy who made him Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and in November 1961, Under Secretary of State, a position he kept in the Johnson Administration and in which he argued forcefully against US involvement in Vietnam and mediated crises in Cyprus, Pakistan and the Congo. Ball was a member of President Kennedy's inner circle during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
He resigned in 1966 to join the investment banking firm of Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb in New York, from which he retired in 1982 as senior managing director. While in the private sector, Ball advised several Presidents, including when the Pueblo was captured by North Korea in January 1968. In May 1968, President Johnson named Ball US delegate to the United Nations, a position he resigned after three months.
