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Though he occupied the oval office for less than three years, Gerald Ford made several key political decisions that helped reunite the country following the divisions over the Vietnam War and helped restore the faith of Americans in their government following the Watergate scandal. This book provides a complete history of Ford's presidency from August 9, 1974, to January 20, 1977 (with two chapters on the Nixon administration events leading up to Ford's succession).
In the decade preceding the first U.S. combat operations in Vietnam, the Eisenhower administration sought to defeat a communist-led insurgency in neighboring Laos. Although U.S. foreign policy in the 1950s focused primarily on threats posed by the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, the American engagement in Laos evolved from a small cold war skirmish into a superpower confrontation near the end of President Eisenhower's second term. Ultimately, the American experience in Laos foreshadowed many of the mistakes made by the United States in Vietnam in the 1960s. In Before the Quagmire: American Intervention in Laos, 1954--1961, William J. Rust delves into key policy decisions mad...
What do the men and women of America's diplomatic corps do? William D. Morgan and Charles Stuart Kennedy, themselves career diplomats, culled over 1400 oral interviews with their Foreign Service peers to present forty excerpts covering events from the 1920s to the 1990s. Insiders recount what happens when a consul spies on Nazi Germany, Mao Tse-Tung drops by for a chat, the Cold War begins with the Berlin blockade, the Marshall Plan rescues Europe, Sukarno moves Indonesia into the communist camp, Khrushchev calls President Kennedy an SOB, and our ambassador is murdered in Kabul. "You are there" accounts deepen readers' understanding, as diplomatic and consular officers talk about the beginni...
This definitive study of the U.S. Consular Service examines its history from the Revolutionary War until its integration with the Foreign Service in 1924. As a British colony, Americans relied on the British consular system to take care of their sailors and merchants. But after the Revolution they scrambled to create an American service. While the American diplomatic establishment was confined to the world’s major capitals, U.S. consular posts proliferated to most of the major ports where the expanding American merchant marine called. Mostly untrained political appointees, each consul was a lonely individual relying on his native wits to provide help to distressed Americans. Appointments w...
This volume examines the United States' efforts to lure Cambodia from neutrality to alliance during the Eisenhower presidency. William J. Rust conclusively demonstrates that, as with Laos in 1958 and 1960, covert intervention in the internal political affairs of neutral Cambodia proved to be a counterproductive tactic for advancing the United States' anticommunist goals.
How do American citizens become ambassadors, and how do they serve as U.S. representatives overseas during such troubled times? What is embassy life really like? How do ambassadors deal with host governments and with officials back in Washington and conduct operations during emergencies and serious crises? Seventy-four senior diplomats give us personal and insider accounts of important experiences. Their comments provide useful insights into the business of diplomacy and will interest students, teachers, practitioners in international affairs, not to mention the general public. Following a brief historical introduction, the interviewees describe their reasons for becoming ambassadors, the appointment process, their training, the management of an embassy, problems in dealing with heads of state and officials at home. They discuss troubles in Korea and Laos, the Six-Day War in 1967, the Jonestown Affair, hostilities in Cyprus, the Fall of Saigon, civil strife in Nicaragua, along with terrorism, coups, and other demonstrations of violence in the 1970s and 1980s. They point to the future role of ambassadors.
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This book is a history of the United States Consular Service, an unheralded, but significant element in the promotion of American commerce and influence abroad from the Revolution onward. A group of relatively minor officials, appointed by the vagaries of political patronage and virtually ignored by successive Secretaries of State, American consuls were established in most major foreign ports and trading centers early in the history of the Republic. Consular officers were major players in America's overseas presence because of their special responsibility for seamen and shipping. They were the officials most concerned with the Barbary pirates and worked with the United States Navy to remove ...
This oral history interview, conducted by Charles Stuart Kennedy, covers Marshall Adairs family background and his lifetime experience with the U.S. Foreign Service, in which his father served from 1937 to1972 and he served from 1972 to 2007. It describes his own entry into the service, his overseas postings, and his work in the Bureaus of Economic Affairs and European Affairs. Among other things, Adair was involved with international commodity negotiations (1970s), with China and Burma (1980s), with Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus, ending the war in the Balkans, and strengthening democracy and national independence in Eastern Europe (1990s), and with NATO peacekeeping forces in Bosnia and the Special Operations War on Terror (2000s).
The author looks at how the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar was formed to create the new nation of Tanzania. He contends that Anglo-American geopolitical interests in the context of the Cold War were not the driving force behind the merger but the initiatives taken by the leaders of Tanganyika and Zanzibar to unite their countries. He also states that the leaders who played the biggest role in forming the union were President Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika, Tanganyika's minister of foreign affairs, Oscar Kambona; President Abeid Karume of Zanzibar, and Zanzibar's vice president Abdallah Kassim Hanga - but especially Nyerere and Kambona because of the decisions they made and implemented to lay...