The Foreign Service Journal, June 2010

J U N E 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 61 cause it brings out aspects — the human factor, in particular — that too many treatises on the subject ignore. The book should also appeal beyond the classroom to history buffs and those intrigued by the negotiating strategies and tactics of great leaders. Stanton’s book humanizes a process often shrouded in secrecy — one that deserves far better understanding in a country that only imperfectly realizes that expertise at the negotiating table is as important in maintaining our peace and security, if not more so, than prowess on the battlefield. Patricia H. Kushlis was an FSO with the U.S. Information Agency from 1970 to 1998. A longer version of this review appeared on WhirledView, the world politics, public diplomacy and national security blog she co-writes with former FSO Patricia Lee Sharpe (http://whirledview.typepad.com) . The German Question The Atlantic Century: Four Generations of Extraordinary Diplomats Who Forged America’s Vital Alliance with Europe Kenneth Weisbrode, Da Capo Press, 2009, $30.00, hardcover, 470 pages. R EVIEWED BY E DWINA S. C AMPBELL The late Professor Ernest May made many contributions to the study of American foreign policy, but we should all be especially grateful that he encouraged his student, KennethWeis- brode, to write his Harvard doctoral dissertation on the role and influence of the Bureau of European Affairs. That dissertation became this book, a thoroughly researched, elegant and in- sightful account of the (many) men and (few) women who shaped EUR and, through it, the policies of successive U.S. administrations toward Europe in the critical decades of the mid-20th century. At the working level, most of those figures had served in the military dur- ing World War II, and many also worked with theMarshall Plan or in the American occupation zone of Ger- many. While an older generation of American diplomats had been tied more closely, culturally and linguisti- cally, to Britain and France, by the 1970s they were passing from the scene. The relationships rooted in fam- ily ties and shared wartime experience that had linked elites in London, Paris and Washington gave way to networks created by think-tanks and exchange programs that produced an American “successor generation” focused onGer- many. Weisbrode documents the bureau’s transformation from a small cadre of professionals on the eve of World War II into the powerhouse led by Arthur Hartman, in which I served in the 1970s. The sheer magnitude of EUR’s reach — from the State Department and National Security Council staff to USNATO and the U.S. Mission to the European Community, bilateral em- bassies from Lisbon to Moscow and delegations to multilateral negotiations in Geneva, Vienna, Stockholm and elsewhere — enabled it to build up unique expertise, experience, cultural sensitivity and linguistic competence. With these tools, it shaped a confident and creative Atlanticism. The “German question” remained central for EUR throughout the period, but it evolved from a focus on what the United States should do about West Germany in the 1940s and 1950s to what it could do with the Federal Re- public about many other things in the 1970s. I had the pleasure and the privilege of working with, and learning from, many of the figures profiled here. For my bosses and their colleagues throughout EUR, as Weisbrode writes, “There was always another problem to manage, another aggrieved party to as- suage, another job to do.” They ac- complished all those things, brilliantly. Still, I do not want to do Weisbrode a disservice by implying that this book is a hymn to the trans-Atlantic relation- ship and the people who managed it. He makes no secret of his admiration for their labors, but that does not color his scholarship or his judgments. The Atlantic Century is, quite sim- ply, the finest, most balanced work of diplomatic history that I have read in many years. Its primary and secondary sources span two continents, three lan- guages, a 35-page bibliography and 107 pages of endnotes. Scholars of American diplomatic history and international relations will find themselves and their students well served by this book’s archival and tex- tual richness. And practitioners of American diplomacy will have the added pleasure of reading a work that recognizes the importance of their work, not only in EUR but throughout the State Department and around the world. ■ Edwina S. Campbell, a former FSO who served in the Office of European Security and Political Affairs from 1974 to 1977, is a professor of national security studies at the Air Command and Staff College of Air University at Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala. B O O K S