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.
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...
If the twentieth century was the American Century, James Spain was its classic product. From Chicago in 1926 to Sri Lanka in 1998, he has blazed a trail of high adventure and highly intelligent public service. Along the way he published several books on the Pathans of the Khyber, one...
Gifted Greek is a reflection on twentieth-century Greek history and politics, as well as a character study of its first socialist prime minister, Andreas Papandreou. Monteagle Stearns witnessed the transformation of Papandreou from an affable American economist to a stormy, anti-American Greek, over Stearns’s three diplomatic assignments to Athens, the...
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...
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...
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...
Drawing upon fifty ADST-created oral histories and one from Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, Nancy Bernkopf Tucker weaves together a wide r range of interviews with key players in making and executing U.S. policy toward China since World War II. Interviewees included Arthur Hummel, James Lilley, John Stewart Service, Winston Lord, Marshall...
Abroad for Her Country: Tales of a Pioneer Woman Ambassador in the U.S. Foreign Service, published by the University of Notre Dame Press, is the 33rd volume in the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series. It is the life story of Jean Wilkowski, only the fourth female career diplomat to follow...
The 51st volume in the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series, this book tells the story of the unusual man sent to perform a vexing, but largely forgotten diplomatic mission at the height of the War of 1812. As war with Britain intensified in the summer of 1813, President James Madison...