During a 1986 protest in Santiago, Chile against the human rights abuses of Augusto Pinochet’s regime, teenagers setting up barricades…
The Battle to Create the Foreign Service Institute
The art of diplomatic relations and negotiations is as old as civilization itself. However, the State Department did not have…
George Shultz: “Your Country is the United States”
George P. Shultz was Secretary of State for President Reagan from 1982 to 1989, the longest such tenure since Dean…
Selwa Roosevelt: The Lucky Chief of Protocol
Selwa “Lucky” Roosevelt is best known for her role as Chief of Protocol of the United States from 1982 to…
Charles Z. Wick: Diplomacy Hollywood-Style
Before being absorbed and restructured by the State Department in 1999, the United States Information Agency (USIA) was an independent…
The INF Treaty, Part III — Crossing the Finish Line
A unified stance by NATO members and Gorbachev’s realization that it was better to go to global zero than to…
The INF Treaty, Part II — Moving from Arms Control to Arms Reduction
From November 1983 to March of 1985 negotiations between the United States and the USSR languished, leading the U.S. to…
Paul Nitze and A Walk in the Woods — A Failed Attempt at Arms Control
In 1976, the USSR deployed hundreds of intermediate-range SS-20s (pictured), which were an upgrade of the older SS-3 and SS-4…
A Crack in the Iron Curtain: Freeing Sharansky
As General Secretary of the Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev authorized the release of thousands of Soviet Jews who wanted to leave the…
A Blind Eye — Fighting Terrorism in the 1980s
The U.S. focus on terrorism began to intensify in the late 1970s and 80s. However, it was often difficult to…