Book reviews

Frontline Diplomacy: The U.S. Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection (Arlington, VA: Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, 2000). CD-ROM.

Peter Jackson, France and the Nazi Menace: Intelligence and Policy Making, 1933-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xii + 446 pp. £48, ISBN 0-19-820834-0.

R.A.C. Parker, Churchill and Appeasement: Could Churchill have Prevented the Second World War? (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), xi+290 pp. ISBN 0-333-67583-5.

David Carlton, Churchill and the Soviet Union (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000). vi +234 pp. £45hb. ISBN 0-7190-4106-6; £11.99 pb. ISBN 0-7190-4107-4.

Jill Edwards, Anglo-American Relations and the Franco Question 1945-1955 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) xviii + 291 pp. ISBN 0-19-822871-6.     

JFK's ambassadors and the cold war

The importance of sound representation abroad was plain to President J.F. Kennedy. This survey of Kennedy's diplomats is selective, confined to the three most telling cases in the Cold War drama: Moscow, New Delhi, London. The countries corresponding with these capitals shaped America's world, as chief rival, preeminent neutral and pluckiest ally. Ambassadors in distinctive posts do not constitute the whole of JFK's foreign policy, but this account do shed light on significant achievements, thereby challenging those critics who have attributed every manner of blunder to Kennedy. His diplomatic record may not have been as brilliant as court historians suggested. Yet, to JFK's credit, the practical effect of his ambassadors in three major countries was to advance US security and prestige.     

Neither War Nor Peace: FDR's Ambassadors in Embassy Berlin and Policy Toward Germany, 1933–1941

American policy toward Germany in the years before Pearl Harbor can be approached from any number of angles. A rich literature already exists that emphasizes the geopolitical dimension of the German–U.S. relationship, as well as its economic and ideological complexities. I shall here explore an interpretative line that has been less fully developed in the historiography, namely, the viewpoint of U.S. diplomats posted in Berlin. Their experience in the 1930s throws into vivid relief the dilemmas posed by the Third Reich to FDR's America and its equivocal response.