96 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Harvard professor William L. Langer, that morphed into the intelligence institutions of the national security state. The Cold War is the policy framework for most of the subsequent chapters— from chapter 9, “Managing the Cold War,” through chapter 14, “Winning the Cold War”—but the optic for these chapters generally remains the presidencies (from Eisenhower through Reagan). During these four decades, the environment that the intelligence community operated in was increasingly buffeted by politics, as chapter 11’s title, “The End of the Cold War Consensus,” indicates, and as one might expect from the era of Nixon, Kissinger, and the Vietnam War. The final third of the book covers the past 35 years, the post–Cold War era dominated by regional wars, 9/11, and the rise of China—the world in which most readers of The Foreign Service Journal have worked. The same is true, of course, of the book’s author, and his account reads in part as memoir, since he himself was an actor in one institution of government or another during that era. Though Lowenthal is well informed about all the great spy stories of our time, his history sets them in the larger institutional context of policymaking. And while acknowledging the “excitement of secret operations,” he is at pains in his conclusion to stress that the role of intelligence professionals is not to make policy—since that “would put their objectivity at risk”—but rather to inform policy, and make it smart. n Since retirement from the U.S. Foreign Service following a 27-year career, Charles Skinner has taught courses at Duquesne (2008) and the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (2009–2020). Vigilance is most useful as an overview of the emergence of the intelligence function during the 20th century.
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