The Odd Couple: NATO’s Founding Fathers

Today’s politics suggest an electorate divided on foreign policy: voters without college educations more inclined toward isolationism on one side, and “elites” with college degrees who favor strong transatlantic relations on the other. It might appear strange that the men behind NATO would largely fit into the former, rather than the latter.

Ernest Bevin, widely credited as NATO’s main architect, was raised in Somerset by an illiterate single mother who died when he was eight years old.