For more than 225 years extraordinary men and women have represented the United States abroad. In 1996 the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST) and DACOR, an organization of foreign affairs professionals, created a book series to increase public knowledge and appreciation of American diplomats and their role in advancing our national interests. The books in this series demystify diplomacy by telling the story of American diplomats, the lives they led, and the world events they helped to shape.
For much of the early 1990s, Haiti held the world’s attention. A fiery populist priest, Jean Bertrand Aristide, was elected president and deposed a year later in a military coup. Soon thousands of poor Haitians started to arrive in makeshift boats on the shores of Florida. In early 1993, the...
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...
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...
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...
Eye on the World is the autobiography of diplomat Anthony C. E. Quainton, the story of a long and varied life lived in eleven countries on six continents. Rather than a formal history, this is Quainton’s reflection on his interactions with the events of those times, beginning with George VI’s...
As the initial US observer, David Rawson participated in the 1993 Rwandan peace talks at Arusha, Tanzania. Later, he served as US ambassador to Rwanda during the last months of the doomed effort to make them hold. Despite the intervention of concerned states in establishing a peace process and the...
In a lively, personal style with self-deprecating humor, John Richardson traces the evolution of his worldview from his prep school days and service as a World War II paratrooper through a lifetime in pursuit of a better world. After starting as a lawyer (Sullivan & Cromwell) and investment banker (Paine...
Yale Richmond’s latest book, Practicing Public Diplomacy: A Cold War Odyssey, published by Berghahn Books of Oxford and New York, is the thirty-second volume in the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series. In it Richmond details the doings of a U.S. Foreign Service cultural affairs officer in five Cold War hot spots...
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 this first biography of Ellsworth Bunker (1894–1994), Howard Schaffer traces the life of one of America’s foremost diplomats–from his formative years as a successful businessman through his long diplomatic career. Schaffer highlights Bunker’s seasoned views on the craft of diplomacy, explains the principal “rules” of negotiating strategy Bunker employed,...