In a decade of growing conservatism, the intellectual and moral assumptions of liberalism from the New Deal to the Great Society have been frequently questioned, criticized, and , at times, distorted. In this, the first full-length biography of Adolf A. Berle, Jr. - braintruster to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Fiorello H. LaGuardia - Jordan A. Schwarz provides a sharply etched portrait of a man who personified the ideas, the vision, and the aspirations that shaped American liberalism in modern times. Drawn from Berle's own writings, including his private papers and diaries, extensive historical research, and in-depth interviews with Berle's colleagues, family, and friends, this monumental study touches upon some f the most important events and figures of the century. Beginning with Berle's intellectually gifted family, and his unusual, accelerated education that created a daunting combination of brilliance and arrogance, an examination of his early years reveals the origins of his lifelong passion for Latin America, his equally long-standing animosity toward Felix Frankfurter, and the serendipity that made him a twenty-three year old advisor on Russia at the Paris Peace Talks after World War I and a colleague of Joseph C. Grew, Walter Lippmann, William Bullitt, John Foster Dulles and brother Allen, and the historian Samuel Eliot Morison.... A truly comprehensive work that looks in to political back rooms, "braintrusting," and informal networks among the most powerful men of the century, Liberal clarifies and revises our understanding of the vision that stoked a half-century of American idealism and well being. -- publisher description.