Using recently declassified documents, Messer traces Byrnes's performance from the Yalta Conference through the postwar dealings with the Soviet Union. He sees the failure of the Soviet-American collaboration to continue into the postwar years as the result of several unrelated events--the struggle between Byrnes and Truman to become Roosevelt's successor in 1944, Roosevelt's use of Byrnes as his Yalta salesman, and Byrnes's distorted view of the...