Book Category

Published in November 2012 by Arlington Hall Press, an imprint of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, this collection contains 115 brief essays by past and present USAID staff and administrators, organized by decades. To celebrate USAID’s 50th anniversary, the editors, Janet C. Ballantyne and Maureen Dugan, reached out...

In this personal, multifaceted memoir, Hala Buck, a professional artist and integrative therapist, reflects on her mixed Muslim and Christian family, her marriage to an American diplomat, their nomadic life between the Arab World and North America, raising a “Third Culture” daughter, and navigating cultures. Buck’s story finds her as...

Danger Zones is the autobiography of John Gunther Dean, a career Foreign Service officer, five-time U.S. ambassador, and a leading diplomat of the twentieth century. Published by New Academia Publishing, his book is the 12th in the ADST Memoirs and Occasional Papers Series. It is drawn from documents, including the...

Judy Heimann entered the diplomatic life in 1958 to join her husband, John, in Jakarta at his American Embassy post, setting her on a path across the continents as she mastered the fine points of diplomatic culture. Drawn from memories of fifty years of life in the U.S. Foreign Service...

This book is an account of the author's sometimes comical, sometimes frustrating, but always enlightening adventures as a diplomat in seven countries. As a former academic who had worked and traveled in some sixty countries of the world before joining the Foreign Service, Huffman provides trenchant commentary on the history,...

In 2001 Helen Lyman began writing about the more humorous incidents she witnessed as the wife of an American diplomat. She observed the overseas life with a somewhat detached and wry view, through the prism of someone who never thought of herself as being born to the trappings of diplomatic...

"Present At The Footnote: Personal Commentary on American Diplomacy" is a book by Henry E. Mattox, which compiles a collection of his personal essays, editorials, and commentary on American foreign policy that were originally published online on the journal "American Diplomacy" between 1996 and 2008; essentially offering an insider...

Lu Rudel describes his unique experiences with U.S. economic aid programs during some of the most dramatic international events since World War II. These include Iran after the fall of Mosaddegh (1956–1960); Turkey after the military coup of 1960 and continuing to the start of the Cuban Missile crisis; India...

Ambassador (Dr.) Robin Renee Sanders’ new book on The Rise of Africa’s Small & Medium Size Enterprises (SMEs) is an insightful examination of the dramatic shift in the development paradigm for Sub Saharan Africa — driven in large part by the imaginative, innovative, and insta-impact leadership of the region’s small...

Dr. Robin Renee Sanders, having lived in Africa for several years, was always struck by the ancestral, socio-historical and educational aspects of certain African cultural practices, especially languages, artifacts, and sign and symbol systems from the Ovahimba in Namibia and Pygmies in Congo, to the Horom, Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, and...

This memoir of Theresa Tull’s thirty-three-year career as a twentieth-century diplomat begins with recollections of her childhood during the Second World War in the small town of Runnemede, New Jersey, and culminates with her two ambassadorial appointments. Her first overseas assignment as a Foreign Service officer, at Embassy Brussels, was...

Peregrina is the story of Ginny Carson Young, a young Foreign Service widow and mother who finds an unexpected second life as an American consular officer in India, Mexico, Hong Kong, and Romania. She deals with the hippies of the 1970s in New Delhi, is courted in Hong Kong by...

A memoir of dramatic moments in recent history. On June 4, 1989, Joanne Grady Huskey was in Tiananmen Square and witnessed the horror of a government attacking its own people. On August 7, 1998, she was in the basement of the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, with her two small...

An intimate glimpse into life in the diplomatic corps, recalling pre-World War II London, Moscow during the early days of the Cold War, and Taiwan after the split from Mao Tse-tung's China.

Based on over forty years' consideration of Vietnam's history, the author aims (a) to put the Vietnam War within the context of Vietnam's overall history; (b) to examine the historical interaction of the United States and Vietnam in war and peace; (c) to understand U.S. and Vietnamese policies and perceptions...

The ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series has now reached fifty volumes with the publication of Early American Diplomacy in the Near and Far East by the late Ambassador Hermann F. Eilts, a leading twentieth-century diplomat and scholar.

From the inception of the republic to the Civil War, the United States eschewed political...

This history, twenty years in the research and writing, relates the story of Americans living in Kuwait, beginning with the establishment of the American Mission Hospital in 1911. It covers the first century of community experience ending in 2011, which is also the fiftieth anniversary of Kuwait's emergence as an...

This is a collective memoir of yesteryear when the Cold War was still icy. The Reagan-Gorbachev Arms Control Breakthrough analyzes the limitation of intermediate-range nuclear force missiles from the vantage point of history, drawing primarily on the reflections of the INF Treaty negotiators in 1988, immediately following the treaty’s completion and ratification, but also providing...

In Uncle Sam in Barbary, Richard Parker tells the story of the young American republic’s first hostage crisis, and earliest encounter with Islam, which began in 1785 when Algerine corsairs–the Barbary pirates–captured two U.S. vessels off the coast of Portugal. The situation dragged on until 1796, when the United States paid...

China Boys offers a close-up view of the U.S. opening to China and the pioneer days in U.S.-China relations that followed. Former ambassador and Asia Society president Nicholas Platt recounts the preparations and interplay surrounding the historic Nixon visit to China in 1972, the setting up of America’s first resident diplomatic...

Dr. Robin Renee Sanders, having lived in Africa for several years, was always struck by the ancestral, socio-historical and educational aspects of certain African cultural practices, especially languages, artifacts, and sign and symbol systems from the Ovahimba in Namibia and Pygmies in Congo, to the Horom, Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, and...

Ambassador (Dr.) Robin Renee Sanders’ new book on The Rise of Africa’s Small & Medium Size Enterprises (SMEs) is an insightful examination of the dramatic shift in the development paradigm for Sub Saharan Africa — driven in large part by the imaginative, innovative, and insta-impact leadership of the region’s small...

Since its inception, the United States has sent envoys to advance American interests abroad, both across oceans and to areas that later became part of the country. Little has been known about these first envoys until now. From China to Chile, Tripoli to Tahiti, Mexico to Muscat, Peter...

Defiant Diplomacy depicts the extraordinary life of diplomat Henrik de Kauffmann (1888–1963), a major figure in U.S.-Danish relations during World War II and the first decades of the Cold War as Denmark’s envoy to Washington.

The book highlights the dramatic story of Kauffmann’s courageous decision, after Nazi Germany seized his homeland...

Fifteen men and women have occupied the position of Assistant Secretary for African Affairs. They charted the course of U.S. Africa policy for fifty years that spanned the dawn of African independence to the present era of globalized engagement. In these pages each Assistant Secretary describes his or her stewardship...

Since its inception, al Qaeda has aspired to create a safe haven in Yemen, where it has operated against U.S. and Yemeni interests. From 2001 to 2004, when Edmund Hull was U.S. ambassador to Yemen, U.S. and Yemeni counterterrorism efforts successfully seized the initiative against al Qaeda, severely degrading its...

François de Callières is the author of “On Negotiating with Sovereigns,” an iconic work on diplomacy that has rarely if ever been out of print in English translation since first published in 1716. But Callières, who lived 1645–1717, was more than the author of a single book. From modest provincial...

Some of the finest political analysis in the world –– the classified reporting cables sent from U.S. embassies to Washington––never reaches the public eye. Now Ray Smith has filled this gap in the literature on diplomacy with The Craft of Political Analysis for Diplomats (Potomac Books, 2011). Smith explains how to write...

Fifteen men and women have occupied the position of Assistant Secretary for African Affairs. They charted the course of U.S. Africa policy for fifty years that spanned the dawn of African independence to the present era of globalized engagement. In these pages each Assistant Secretary describes his or her stewardship...

Diego Asencio met Nancy Rodriguez in 1951, and the young couple married in 1953. Diego entered the U.S Foreign Service in 1957, and thus began his, Nancy's and their children's life as a U.S. Foreign Service family.

Diego's first overseas assignment was to Mexico, where he assisted jailed or troubled...

Published in November 2012 by Arlington Hall Press, an imprint of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, this collection contains 115 brief essays by past and present USAID staff and administrators, organized by decades. To celebrate USAID’s 50th anniversary, the editors, Janet C. Ballantyne and Maureen Dugan, reached out...

Don Gregg spent thirty-one years as an operations officer in CIA and ten years in the White House under Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. Pot Shards is his memoir. It tells of a philosophy graduate in 1951 who immediately joined the CIA when told, “You’ll jump out of airplanes and save the world!” His book is a window...

A detailed chronicle of the working life of an idealistic, action-oriented World War II veteran’s lifelong search for peace through strengthening democracies and the international institutions that unite them.

Stabilizing Fragile States: Why It Matters and What to Do About It is a masterclass on intervening to help fragile states stabilize in the face of internal challenges that threaten national security and how the United States can do better at less cost with improved chances of success. Written from the...

This book explores the bilateral relations between the United States and the Vatican from 1975 to 1980, a turbulent period that had two presidents, three presidential envoys, and three popes. This previously untold story shows how the United States and the Vatican worked quietly together behind the scenes to influence...

In emergency medicine “the golden hour” is the first hour after injury during which treatment greatly increases survivability. In post-conflict transition terminology, it is the first year after hostilities end. Without steadily improving conditions then, popular support declines and chances for economic, political, and social transformation begin to evaporate. James...

Since September 11, 2001, U.S. public diplomacy has come under increased scrutiny along with renewed debate about its necessity. Until 1999, the United States Information Agency (USIA) was responsible for what is now called “public diplomacy,” conducting media, cultural, and educational exchange programs. Nine Lives recounts successful public diplomacy programs...

This book is an account of the author's sometimes comical, sometimes frustrating, but always enlightening adventures as a diplomat in seven countries. As a former academic who had worked and traveled in some sixty countries of the world before joining the Foreign Service, Huffman provides trenchant commentary on the history,...

The life story of John Kormann, an adventurous diplomat, soldier, and intelligence officer, offers an inside view of significant events of the twentieth century. Following engaging boyhood experiences, paratrooper training, and combat in Europe in World War II, Special agent Kormann goes behind the lines to apprehend Nazi war criminals...

"Present At The Footnote: Personal Commentary on American Diplomacy" is a book by Henry E. Mattox, which compiles a collection of his personal essays, editorials, and commentary on American foreign policy that were originally published online on the journal "American Diplomacy" between 1996 and 2008; essentially offering an insider...

On August 7, 1998, three years before President George W. Bush declared the War on Terror, the radical Islamist group al-Qaeda bombed the American embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where Prudence Bushnell was serving as U.S. ambassador. Terrorism, Betrayal, and Resilience is her account of what happened, how it happened, and...

Based on over forty years' consideration of Vietnam's history, the author aims (a) to put the Vietnam War within the context of Vietnam's overall history; (b) to examine the historical interaction of the United States and Vietnam in war and peace; (c) to understand U.S. and Vietnamese policies and perceptions...

Thompson Buchanan's memoir describes the challenges facing a Foreign Service political officer during the Cold War in a career focused primarily on the Soviet Union and Africa. Born in 1924, Thompson Buchanan joined the State Department in 1948 as an intelligence analyst on the Soviet Union. In the Foreign Service...

In this personal, multifaceted memoir, Hala Buck, a professional artist and integrative therapist, reflects on her mixed Muslim and Christian family, her marriage to an American diplomat, their nomadic life between the Arab World and North America, raising a “Third Culture” daughter, and navigating cultures. Buck’s story finds her as...

John Chapman “Chips” Chester offers up an often whimsical but highly informative memoir of an active life in international affairs. His exploits cover U.S. Army service in occupied Germany; a career in the U.S. Foreign Service in Germany, Croatia, Malawi, and the State Department; and a second career on Capitol...

The Lady of Silk and Steel, From Everest to Embassies tells the rags to riches story of a woman who grew up in nearly destitute circumstances on a small California farm to live in Elizabeth Taylor s former penthouse on the Potomac. A graduate of Stanford University, Sue Cobb became...

In his 38-year career as an American diplomat, the author experienced many encounters with African leaders, which he describes in this memoir. Following his youthful attraction to international service and early postings to Paris and the world of cultural exchange, h

In his 38-year career as an American diplomat, the...

Danger Zones is the autobiography of John Gunther Dean, a career Foreign Service officer, five-time U.S. ambassador, and a leading diplomat of the twentieth century. Published by New Academia Publishing, his book is the 12th in the ADST Memoirs and Occasional Papers Series. It is drawn from documents, including the...

"Where the Styles Brook Waters Flow: The Place I Call Home by Lorraine Duvall is a love song to 'The Glen' and to the richness and importance of the Styles Brook Watershed, part of the wildlife corridor called the Split Rock Wildway in NY's eastern Adirondack Mountains. Like a river,...

Ambassador to a Small World is a highly personal portrait of Chad from the vantage point of Christopher E. Goldthwait, the longest-serving U.S. Ambassador to N’Djamena. The book touches on Chad’s politics, economy, and society and on U.S. foreign policy, foreign aid, and the life of the small American community...

In the Aftermath of Genocide: The U.S. Role in Rwanda deepens understanding of the Rwandan genocide and the Congolese war that engulfed Central Africa in the 1990s and America’s policy response to the crises. Gribbin draws on his thirty years of diplomatic experience in the region to analyze U.S. perceptions...

Since September 11, 2001, U.S. public diplomacy has come under increased scrutiny along with renewed debate about its necessity. Until 1999, the United States Information Agency (USIA) was responsible for what is now called “public diplomacy,” conducting media, cultural, and educational exchange programs. Nine Lives recounts successful public diplomacy programs...

The fifty-seven short essays in this book set the scene for the difficulties that now threaten Egypt. They were written during 1990–1995 while Lillian Harris, a former American Foreign Service officer married to Alan Goulty, a British diplomat, lived in Cairo.

The essays explore Egypt’s cities, deserts, societies, monasteries, and...

Deane Hinton’s memoir presents a reliable firsthand account of the development of U.S. strategic economic policy and the new institutions that became the framework for trade, aid, economic growth, and monetary policy. Hinton was one of a handful of experts on these issues to serve in high policy positions throughout...

A detailed chronicle of the working life of an idealistic, action-oriented World War II veteran’s lifelong search for peace through strengthening democracies and the international institutions that unite them.

A memoir of dramatic moments in recent history. On June 4, 1989, Joanne Grady Huskey was in Tiananmen Square and witnessed the horror of a government attacking its own people. On August 7, 1998, she was in the basement of the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, with her two small...

This is a collective memoir of yesteryear when the Cold War was still icy. The Reagan-Gorbachev Arms Control Breakthrough analyzes the limitation of intermediate-range nuclear force missiles from the vantage point of history, drawing primarily on the reflections of the INF Treaty negotiators in 1988, immediately following the treaty’s completion and ratification, but also providing...

After the 2001 ouster of the Taliban from Afghanistan, the United States and its allies found themselves in a country devastated by a series of wars. This book looks at how, working with their Afghan counterparts, they engaged in a complex effort to rebuild security, development, and governance, all while...

The life story of John Kormann, an adventurous diplomat, soldier, and intelligence officer, offers an inside view of significant events of the twentieth century. Following engaging boyhood experiences, paratrooper training, and combat in Europe in World War II, Special agent Kormann goes behind the lines to apprehend Nazi war criminals...

In 2001 Helen Lyman began writing about the more humorous incidents she witnessed as the wife of an American diplomat. She observed the overseas life with a somewhat detached and wry view, through the prism of someone who never thought of herself as being born to the trappings of diplomatic...

In A Professional Foreigner (Potomac Books/U of Nebraska Press), volume #74 in the Diplomats and Diplomacy Series, Ambassador Edward Marks describes his life as a workaday American professional diplomat, including several close encounters with the U.S. military. Serving primarily in Africa and Asia, Marks was present during the era of...

Join Robyn McCutcheon, an out and proud transgender woman, on her journey as a diplomat with the U.S. Department of State. Follow her on travels that took her through the Soviet Union as a historian, to the stars as an engineer in the Hubble Space Telescope project, and onward to...

In Quiet Diplomacy, Armin Meyer recounts and analyzes the wide-ranging experiences and lessons learned in his remarkable life and extraordinary diplomatic career. He also offers valuable guidance for today’s diplomacy.

Ambassador Meyer’s distinguished public career spanned more than thirty tumultuous years of hot and cold war, beginning in World War...

Diplomats provide the first line of America’s defense as they formulate and implement our country’s foreign policy. Too often, the stories of their experiences and insights remain untold. In 2003 the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST) created the Memoirs and Occasional Papers Series to preserve such firsthand accounts...

Curious about a senior American diplomat’s perspective on working for a U.S. Secretary of State and the inner workings of foreign policy?

Are you interested in what a diplomatic career and family life can look like? Or insights into the Vietnam war and lessons learned and not learned? Or insights...

Nicole Prévost Logan’s overview of the life and work of an American diplomatic family over thirty years in ten countries on three continents reveals her hands-on approach and her pride at a career spent mostly in the field. The couple’s cosmopolitan upbringing enriched the empathy they felt toward the different...

Ambassador (ret.) Edward L. Peck presents a concise, organized framework for navigating international relations in Peck’s Postulates, a new volume in the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Memoirs and Occasional Papers Series. With touches of gentle humor, the author offers four concepts, each explicated with supporting statements and examples....

U.S. intelligence specialist James Potts tells the story of how covert French military aid changed the course of history by enabling the rebellious Americans to hold off the forces of Britain’s King George III, most notably in the pivotal battle of Saratoga in October 1777. Potts probes the actions of...

Lu Rudel describes his unique experiences with U.S. economic aid programs during some of the most dramatic international events since World War II. These include Iran after the fall of Mosaddegh (1956–1960); Turkey after the military coup of 1960 and continuing to the start of the Cuban Missile crisis; India...

Bushels and Bales: A Food Soldier in the Cold War covers Howard Steele’s encounters with the people, problems, and opportunities in forty-three countries and a variety of U.S. government programs. Along the way, he survived gun-toting Bolivian revolutionaries, Viet Cong artillery fire, deadly anarchy in Sri Lanka, a shakedown by...

In 1956 John Tinny began his brief years on the “Golden Road to Samarkand,” his vision of the pinnacle for a State Department Foreign Service officer. The murder of Her Britannic Majesty’s vice consul, a grim portent, climaxed Day One at his first post, San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Around this...

A lifelong lover of opera and classical music, Hans N. “Tom” Tuch served 35 years in the United States Foreign Service, retiring in 1985 as a Career Minister. This book recalls his devoted engagement with music, especially opera, in the context of that career. His love of opera began in...

This memoir of Theresa Tull’s thirty-three-year career as a twentieth-century diplomat begins with recollections of her childhood during the Second World War in the small town of Runnemede, New Jersey, and culminates with her two ambassadorial appointments. Her first overseas assignment as a Foreign Service officer, at Embassy Brussels, was...

Former ADST Executive Director Dan Whitman has written an account of two tumultuous years and three elections in Haiti, where he served as Counselor for Public Affairs in 1999–2001. A Haiti Chronicle: The Undoing of a Latent Democracy, 1999–2001 puts on the record some disputed or forgotten events and efforts...

Arabian Nights and Daze: Living in Yemen with the Foreign Service provides a timely and needed understanding and appreciation for this vulnerable country, its history and culture, and the enormous challenges it faces today.

Journey back to 1970 and enjoy the “never in a lifetime” adventure of the author and...

Peregrina is the story of Ginny Carson Young, a young Foreign Service widow and mother who finds an unexpected second life as an American consular officer in India, Mexico, Hong Kong, and Romania. She deals with the hippies of the 1970s in New Delhi, is courted in Hong Kong by...

A lifelong lover of opera and classical music, Hans N. “Tom” Tuch served 35 years in the United States Foreign Service, retiring in 1985 as a Career Minister. This book recalls his devoted engagement with music, especially opera, in the context of that career. His love of opera began in...

AFRICAN WARS: A DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE PERSPECTIVE by William G. Thom, former senior Africa specialist in the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, provides a concise summary of four decades of warfare in sub-Saharan Africa. An experienced, highly respected senior U.S. intelligence officer, Thom also offers a primer on how the intelligence business...

Hart’s three tours of duty in Saudi Arabia, the last as ambassador from 1961 to 1965, gave him a unique appreciation of that desert kingdom’s culture and people. Helping forge the critical U.S.-Saudi security partnership, a relationship that remains to this day a key aspect of U.S. diplomacy, engaged all...

Fifteen men and women have occupied the position of Assistant Secretary for African Affairs. They charted the course of U.S. Africa policy for fifty years that spanned the dawn of African independence to the present era of globalized engagement. In these pages each Assistant Secretary describes his or her stewardship...

In the tense aftermath of the 1992–95 Bosnian War, U.S. diplomat Bill Farrand was assigned the daunting task of implementing the Dayton Peace Accords in the ethnically divided Balkan city of Brčko in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Serb, Muslim, and Croat political leaders alike had blocked agreement over Brčko’s political status...

Here is the untold story of how, in the wake of independence in July 1946, the U.S. Department of State and selected U.S. Foreign Service posts trained the first officer corps of the Philippine Foreign Service, affectionately dubbed the “State Department Boys.” These pioneer Filipino diplomats eventually played pivotal roles in  Philippine diplomacy...

Veteran RFE insider J. F. Brown’s story of the critical role Radio Free Europe played during the Cold War is the 53^rd volume in the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series. Brown, a widely recognized expert on Eastern Europe who served as RFE director in 1978–83, offers a balanced and penetrating analysis...

Herman Cohen draws on both the documentary record and his years of on-the-ground experience to provide a uniquely comprehensive survey and interpretation of nearly eight decades of US policy toward Africa. Tracing how this policy has evolved across successive administrations since 1942 (beginning with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's third term...

In his 38-year career as an American diplomat, the author experienced many encounters with African leaders, which he describes in this memoir. Following his youthful attraction to international service and early postings to Paris and the world of cultural exchange, h

In his 38-year career as an American diplomat, the...

Don Gregg spent thirty-one years as an operations officer in CIA and ten years in the White House under Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. Pot Shards is his memoir. It tells of a philosophy graduate in 1951 who immediately joined the CIA when told, “You’ll jump out of airplanes and save the world!” His book is a window...

Witness to a Changing World is the life story of David Dunlop Newsom, a Foreign Service officer who rose through the ranks from third secretary and vice consul in Karachi in 1948 to the top career post of Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in the Carter administration. Along the...

Nicole Prévost Logan’s overview of the life and work of an American diplomatic family over thirty years in ten countries on three continents reveals her hands-on approach and her pride at a career spent mostly in the field. The couple’s cosmopolitan upbringing enriched the empathy they felt toward the different...

Dick Parker was renowned in the State Department for his dry acerbic wit. From his early youth on U.S. Cavalry posts across the Southwest to his World War II experiences, through a successful Foreign Service career as a leading Arabist in the Near East, he observed and commented on everything.

In this autobiography...

Ambassador (ret.) Edward L. Peck presents a concise, organized framework for navigating international relations in Peck’s Postulates, a new volume in the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Memoirs and Occasional Papers Series. With touches of gentle humor, the author offers four concepts, each explicated with supporting statements and examples....

Arabian Nights and Daze: Living in Yemen with the Foreign Service provides a timely and needed understanding and appreciation for this vulnerable country, its history and culture, and the enormous challenges it faces today.

Journey back to 1970 and enjoy the “never in a lifetime” adventure of the author and...

Fifteen men and women have occupied the position of Assistant Secretary for African Affairs. They charted the course of U.S. Africa policy for fifty years that spanned the dawn of African independence to the present era of globalized engagement. In these pages each Assistant Secretary describes his or her stewardship...

Since its inception, al Qaeda has aspired to create a safe haven in Yemen, where it has operated against U.S. and Yemeni interests. From 2001 to 2004, when Edmund Hull was U.S. ambassador to Yemen, U.S. and Yemeni counterterrorism efforts successfully seized the initiative against al Qaeda, severely degrading its...

In Slovakia on the Road, Paul Hacker tells of volatile political changes and intrigues; administrative challenges of operating a small diplomatic outpost in Bratislava and its dependence on the embassy in Prague; Slovak-Czech and Slovak-Hungarian minority tensions; the legacy of the Holocaust; the final move to independence; and post independence Slovakian...

Donn Piatt (1819–1891) was a celebrated diplomat, historian, journalist, judge, lawyer, legislator, lobbyist, novelist, playwright, poet, well-known humorist, and consummate Washington insider. Having served as an American diplomat in France in the 1850s, he had a strong and influential interest in foreign affairs. After the Civil War, Piatt became famous...

Former assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific John H. Holdridge was intimately involved in the historic events surrounding the establishment of relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. With responsibility for East Asia on the National Security Council staff in 1969–73, he...

China Boys offers a close-up view of the U.S. opening to China and the pioneer days in U.S.-China relations that followed. Former ambassador and Asia Society president Nicholas Platt recounts the preparations and interplay surrounding the historic Nixon visit to China in 1972, the setting up of America’s first resident diplomatic...

The Limits of Influence, the 36th volume in the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series, is the first systematic study of U.S. efforts to help forge a settlement between India and Pakistan on the sixty-year-old “Kashmir question.” Veteran diplomat Howard B. Schaffer, a former U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh, draws on interviews...

From the moment Pakistan gained its independence in 1947, its relations with the United States have careened between intimate partnership and enormous friction — reflecting the ups and downs of global and regional geopolitics and disparate national interests. Although the Cold War is over, Pakistan retains strategic importance for Washington,...

Wilson Dizard offers the first comprehensive account of public diplomacy’s evolution within the U.S. foreign policy establishment, ranging from World War II to the present. Public diplomacy–the uncertain art of winning public support abroad for one’s government and its foreign policies–constitutes a critical policy instrument in the face of today’s...

Published in November 2012 by Arlington Hall Press, an imprint of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, this collection contains 115 brief essays by past and present USAID staff and administrators, organized by decades. To celebrate USAID’s 50th anniversary, the editors, Janet C. Ballantyne and Maureen Dugan, reached out...

In this personal, multifaceted memoir, Hala Buck, a professional artist and integrative therapist, reflects on her mixed Muslim and Christian family, her marriage to an American diplomat, their nomadic life between the Arab World and North America, raising a “Third Culture” daughter, and navigating cultures. Buck’s story finds her as...

This book is an account of the author's sometimes comical, sometimes frustrating, but always enlightening adventures as a diplomat in seven countries. As a former academic who had worked and traveled in some sixty countries of the world before joining the Foreign Service, Huffman provides trenchant commentary on the history,...

In 2001 Helen Lyman began writing about the more humorous incidents she witnessed as the wife of an American diplomat. She observed the overseas life with a somewhat detached and wry view, through the prism of someone who never thought of herself as being born to the trappings of diplomatic...

Lu Rudel describes his unique experiences with U.S. economic aid programs during some of the most dramatic international events since World War II. These include Iran after the fall of Mosaddegh (1956–1960); Turkey after the military coup of 1960 and continuing to the start of the Cuban Missile crisis; India...

Dr. Robin Renee Sanders, having lived in Africa for several years, was always struck by the ancestral, socio-historical and educational aspects of certain African cultural practices, especially languages, artifacts, and sign and symbol systems from the Ovahimba in Namibia and Pygmies in Congo, to the Horom, Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, and...

François de Callières is the author of “On Negotiating with Sovereigns,” an iconic work on diplomacy that has rarely if ever been out of print in English translation since first published in 1716. But Callières, who lived 1645–1717, was more than the author of a single book. From modest provincial...

François de Callières is the author of “On Negotiating with Sovereigns,” an iconic work on diplomacy that has rarely if ever been out of print in English translation since first published in 1716. But Callières, who lived 1645–1717, was more than the author of a single book. From modest provincial...

Diplomats provide the first line of America’s defense as they formulate and implement our country’s foreign policy. Too often, the stories of their experiences and insights remain untold. In 2003 the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST) created the Memoirs and Occasional Papers Series to preserve such firsthand accounts...

Diversifying Diplomacy tells the story of Harriet Lee Elam-Thomas, a young black woman who beat the odds and challenged the status quo. Inspired by the strong women in her life, she followed in the footsteps of the few women who had gone before her in her effort to make the...

In 1956 John Tinny began his brief years on the “Golden Road to Samarkand,” his vision of the pinnacle for a State Department Foreign Service officer. The murder of Her Britannic Majesty’s vice consul, a grim portent, climaxed Day One at his first post, San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Around this...

In The Anguish of Surrender, Ulrich Straus recounts the painful dilemma that intensely indoctrinated Japanese soldiers and sailors faced when forced to confront the reality of becoming captives, something forbidden by Japan’s no-surrender policy. He examines in depth how Japanese POWs dealt with this dilemma in extremis – between life and...