Polk's Folly: An American Family History

NY: Doubleday. Very Good in Near Fine dust jacket. 2000. Stated First Edition. First Printing. Hard Cover. 0385491506 . Quarter bound in publisher's burgundy cloth over ivory boards, silver lettering on spine, maps on endpapers. Illustrated with B&W photographs. This is the saga of the descendants of the Scots-Irish Robert Pollock, who fled Ireland in the 1680s, including an Indian trader, an early drafter of the Declaration of Independence, one of our greatest presidents, and heroes and rascals on both sides of the Civil War, Indian fighters, a World War I diplomat, and Polk's own brother, a journalist who reported on the Nuremberg Trials. Full of stunning detail and based on primary historical documents, Polk's Folly is a grand American chronicle that allows history to include the lives that made it happen. The author, William Roe Polk (born 1929) is a veteran foreign policy consultant, author, and relation of president James Knox Polk . He is a former professor of history at Harvard University and the University of Chicago. Polk was appointed by President Kennedy to the State Department's Policy Planning Council focusing on the Middle East and North Africa. While there he served as a member of the Cuban Missile Crisis management team. In 1961 Polk was a Guggenheim Fellow in Near Eastern Studies. Polk resigned from the federal government to join the University of Chicago as Professor of History in 1965. Polk became president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs, which hosted the 20th Pugwash Conference on nuclear weapons problems, and contributed to planning the United Nations Environmental Program. During the 1967 Six-Day War he wrote a draft peace treaty and to serve as an advisor to McGeorge Bundy, who was President Johnson's representative during that crisis. Polk was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He has lectured at the Canadian Institute of International Relations, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and the Institute of World Economy and International Affairs of the Soviet (now Russian) Academy of Sciences, as well at over a hundred universities and colleges. William Polk was also the foreign policy adviser for Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich's presidential campaign. . Former owner's label on fep, just a hint of foxing on edges only, otherwise unmarked, tight, square and clean. The unclipped dust jacket has one very small, very light abrasion on the front panel, else fine. VERY GOOD/NEAR FINE. . Photographs and Maps. Thick 8vo 8" to 9" tall. xxxi, 512 pp .