The Winnowing Fan

The history of 20th Century America is one of great courage, leadership and heroism. Those virtues describe Secretary George C. Marshall, whose service after World War II is easily as important as his leadership during it. Little known, however, was a crucial mistake, made by the young Harvard MBAs he sent to Europe after the war to implement the Marshall Plan. That mistake made no headlines at the time. In fact, though it was kept secret in the 1940s and beyond, its results only occurred thirty years later. It gave rise to a silent, but deadly conspiracy to take control of governments on both sides of the Atlantic, and to restore the pre-war regime of the great capitalists who ruled like emperors through the sheer power of wealth. A small group of very private men who had controlled entire economies before and during the War had added new members, including a single American who quickly became their Chairman. They were intent on restoring that control, by whatever means were available to them. Against them are no Presidents, no Prime Ministers, no armies. Only a single man, who leaves his career as a columnist for the Washington Post to research and document the lives of the great pre-war industrial leaders - not recognizing at first that they are the very men who are determined to protect their privacy until they resume their seats of power. With no power beyond his professional skills, he finds himself literally at war, and very much alone after losing his wife and daughter in a random car-jacking and murder. The Winnowing Fan is the story of that war, and of the sacrifices Craig Hadden must make to prevent the destruction of his nation and perhaps a dozen others.