The Foreign Service Journal, March 2007

uto, representing the moral and legal (if not material) clout of the United Nations and the Organization of American States; his deputy, Leandro Despouy; and (sometimes) Haitian Prime Minister Robert Malval. Pezzullo gives us an insider account full of frustrations. Both in Washing- ton and Port-au-Prince, some detested Aristide as a populist authoritarian who incited the poor and was desper- ate to attack and kill his opponents, often by placing tires around their necks, filling them with gasoline and igniting it. Others admired him as a charismatic leader who, having sur- vived three assassination attempts, sought to rid Haiti of the thievery and thuggery of holdovers from the two Duvalier regimes. Caught in the mid- dle, Haitian politicians and military officers eschewed compromises and avoided taking responsibility, looking to Pezzullo’s team to craft scenarios to resolve crises. Meanwhile, Aristide played hard to get and reneged on commitments. He threatened to abrogate the pact empowering U.S. ships to intercept Haitian refugees at sea (which he crit- icized as racist compared to the treat- ment of Cubans), forcing them to land or wash up on Florida beaches. The entire delicate framework soon fell apart. Pentagon officials, smarting from the Mogadishu debacle of the year before and bluffed by dockside demonstrators, ordered the USS Harlan County not to disembark the military and police trainers authorized by the January 1994 Governors Island Accord, the Pezzullo team’s great achievement. As a result, Pezzullo quit, Clinton changed course, and a multinational force occupied Haiti. Aristide’s tactics attained his goals: the destruction of the military junta and a virtually unconditional (if short-lived) return to power. Neither book is entirely satisfactory in its treatment of its chosen subject. Ralph Pezzullo did not (and perhaps could not) interview Haitian military figures, or Aristide’s Haitian partisans and American lawyers; for that reason, their views (as related by the author’s sources), appear distorted in some instances. Pezzullo also misspells Haitian names throughout Plunging into Haiti. Brown’s book evinces sim- ilarly lax proofreading: to cite but one example, the French “exclusif,” refer- ring to a ban on other states’ trading with Haiti, is often rendered as “excul- sif.” Despite such lacunae and errata, however, both books are well worth the time of anyone who is interested in Latin American history, or who seeks lessons applicable to our rela- tions with other small countries. A former FSO, Richard McKee is the executive director of Diplomatic and Consular Officers, Retired, Inc., and the DACOR Bacon House Founda- tion. He wishes to note that both these books were published in the Diplomats and Diplomacy series of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and DACOR. These views are his own. A Cautionary Tale Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome Robert Harris, Simon & Schuster, 2006, $26.00, hardcover, 320 pages. R EVIEWED BY S TEVEN A LAN H ONLEY Except in our annual compilation of books by Foreign Service-affiliated authors (“In Their Own Write”), the Foreign Service Journal seldom reviews fiction. However, I am happy to make an exception to that informal policy for Robert Harris’s master- piece, Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome — and not just because I stud- ied Latin for six years. When Tiro, the confidential secre- tary (and slave) of a Roman senator, opens the door to a terrified stranger on a cold November morning, he sets in motion a chain of events that will eventually propel his master into one of the most suspenseful courtroom dramas in history. The stranger is a Sicilian, the latest victim of the island’s corrupt governor, Verres, and the senator is none other than Marcus Tullius Cicero — an ambitious young lawyer and spellbinding orator who, at the age of 27, is determined to attain “imperium” — supreme power in the state. But the obstacles in his way become more and more danger- ous, as Pompey, Caesar, Crassus and many other famous (and infamous) Romans contend for power. Compellingly written in the voice of Tiro, the inventor of shorthand and author of numerous books, Imperium is a re-creation of his biography of his master (lost in the Dark Ages, alas). The novel — the fourth by Harris, a television correspondent with the BBC and a newspaper columnist for The London Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph — is full of great lines, many taken from Cicero’s speeches, and detailed observations of daily life in Rome that are grounded in meticulous research yet never bog the reader down. All in all, the novel is one of the best works of historical fic- tion I have ever encountered. Even so, some of you are doubtless wondering why the Journal is review- ing it. To answer that question, I first need to reference a historical event that occurred offstage, if you will, just before the period in which Harris sets his tale. In the autumn of 68 B.C., the Roman Republic — the world’s only M A R C H 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 85 B O O K S