THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY-JUNE 2026 99 cally, Matthewman and her team have brought this important history to life in a way that is interesting and accessible. The chapter on Europe, for example, includes vignettes of embassy officials helping evacuate citizens from Warsaw in 1920, defying orders to close down as Russian troops encircled the city, and of the creative ways a consular employee issued visas to Jews escaping Paris in 1939. There is also a tour-de-force series by officers who were involved in the 1980s nuclear negotiations and the reunification of Germany. The excerpts on Asia highlight the dangers of working under fire: closing Yokohama in 1941 while burning classified documents under threat of detention by the Japanese military; one officer’s extraordinary chronicling of the emerging atrocities of the Khmer Rouge in 1973 in Cambodia; the heroic individual decisions in Saigon in 1975 that saved hundreds of people without State Department support; and the dangerous onsite coverage of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests up to the moment the mass killings began. In Latin America, the accounts include the 1980 Dominican embassy siege in Bogotá, where the U.S. ambassador, one of the hostages, was the key interlocutor with armed guerrillas. The central role of U.S. diplomats in negotiating peace between Ecuador and Peru in 1995, migration agreements with Mexico, and the Inter-American Democratic Charter on 9/11 are all recounted. In addition, light is shed on the attempted coup against the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2002, which was assumed, wrongly, to have U.S. support. Given current headlines, the Middle East section is a must read. From the 1948 founding of Israel through the stories of diplomats involved in the 1978 Camp David accords, the selections are riveting. They include the experiences of the hostages in Tehran in 1979 and the survivors of the 1983 Beirut embassy bombing. The comments by ambassadors on the First Gulf War in 1990–1991 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq offer priceless insights into what went right as well as wrong. The sections on Africa and South and Central Asia include efforts to slow Pakistan’s nuclear program in the 1980s and end apartheid in South Africa. In the account of work during the 1994 Rwanda genocide, one officer’s statement—“I could have a clear bureaucratic conscience from Washington’s standpoint and still have a soul filled with shame”— embodies the contradictions of so much of diplomatic work. We learn, too, that offices we take for granted had surprising origins. The Operations Center, for example, was the result of President John F. Kennedy trying to call Foggy Bottom after hours and not being answered. And in the chapter on public diplomacy, where officers recount the formidable jazz diplomacy of the 1950s and other cultural initiatives, there is an BOOKS Those Who Serve, in Their Own Words Representing America: Firsthand Accounts from a Century of U.S. Diplomacy (1924 – 2024) Robin Matthewman, ed., Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, 2025, $29.95/paperback, e-book available, 374 pages. Reviewed by P. Michael McKinley Today the U.S. Foreign Service is facing some of the biggest challenges to its professionalism since its founding a century ago. Representing America: Firsthand Accounts from a Century of U.S. Diplomacy (1924 – 2024) comes not a moment too soon to remind every American of how much has been achieved by the generations of public servants who served (and still serve) overseas and at home, in war and peace. This book should be required reading for everyone seeking to understand what the State Department and U.S. embassies do for national security and our economy, to promote our values, to respond to humanitarian crises, and to assist thousands of U.S. citizens every day. Drawing on the wealth of roughly 3,000 oral histories compiled by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST) since 1986, Robin Matthewman and her team have done a masterful job of compiling the personal experiences of 281 of our Foreign Service colleagues through the past century. Part 1, titled “Diplomats’ Stories from Around the World,” features accounts by region; part 2, “Behind the Scenes of What Diplomats Do,” focuses on diplomatic workflows; and part 3, “Encore,” contains stories that are “too good to miss.” In structuring the selections thematiSome of the most moving entries are from officers engaged in assisting Americans who are overseas.
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