The Foreign Service Journal, November 2005

HISTORY American Diplomats: The Foreign Service at Work William D. Morgan and Charles Stuart Kennedy, eds., iUniverse, 2004, $22.95, paperback, 315 pages. In American Diplomats , retired Senior Foreign Service officers William D. Morgan and Charles Stuart Kennedy present 40 accounts of diplomats’ experiences in the years from 1920 to 1997 mined from the Foreign Affairs Oral History archives of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. The stories bring readers into the room, so to speak, when Mao-Tse Tung drops by for a chat, when Sukarno moves Indonesia into the communist camp, when Khrushchev calls Kennedy an SOB, when fighting erupts in the Congo over Katangan secession, when the NATO treaty is secretly formulated, when Kremlinol- ogy is born and more. Accounts are grouped into chap- ters by period; the editors provide context for the chap- ters as well as for each piece. The result is a fascinat- ing sampling of the rich history of American diplomacy. Charles Stuart Kennedy is the founder and director of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training’s Foreign Affairs Oral History Program. He served in Germany, Saudi Arabia, Yugoslavia, South Vietnam, Greece, South Korea, Italy and Washington, D.C. William Morgan served as U.S. consul general in Beirut, Paris and Montreal. American Diplomats is the second in ADST’s Memoirs and Occasional Papers Series, created in 2003 to preserve such firsthand accounts and informed observations on foreign affairs, and make them more accessible to the public. Toussaint’s Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution Gordon S. Brown, University Press of Mississippi, 2005, $32.00, hardcover, 321 pages. From 1790 through 1810, the young American nation watched anxiously as its wealthy trading part- ner Haiti, a rich hothouse of sugar plantations and French colonial profit, exploded in a rebellion led by a former slave, Toussaint L’Overture. The supporters of Toussaint’s rebellion against France conducted a bold policy of American intervention in favor of the rebels. But Southern slaveholders, such as Jefferson, eyed the slave-general’s ascendance with alarm, and eventually engineered a reversal of U.S. poli- cy. The Haitian Revolution was one of the chief foreign policy crises faced by the founding fathers, testing their capacity for internal debate and balance. In this book, retired ambassador Gordon S. Brown documents the intricate history of this defining moment for America’s foreign policy. During a 35-year Foreign Service career, Gordon S. Brown served mainly in the Middle East and North Africa, including assignments as General Schwarzkopf’s political adviser in the first Persian Gulf War and ambas- sador to Mauritania. Since his retirement in 1996, he has F O C U S 26 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 5 and seven memoirs of Foreign Service life. As in the past two years, a significant portion of our titles are self-pub- lished. Our primary purpose in compiling this list is to celebrate the wealth of literary talent within the Foreign Service community, and to give our readers the opportunity to support colleagues by sampling their wares. Each entry con- tains full publication data along with a short commentary. As has become our custom, we also include a listing of books “of related interest” that were not written by FS authors. While many of these books are available from bookstores and other sources, we encourage our readers to use the AFSA Web site’s Marketplace to place your orders. (See p. 48 for details.) We have created a Bookstore there with links to Amazon.com. For the few books that cannot be ordered through Amazon.com, we have provided alternate links and, when the book is not available online, the necessary contact information. But enough crass commercialism. On to the books! — Susan Maitra, Senior Editor