This study examines 324 oral history transcripts and explains the recruitment, training, and deployment of US diplomats. Amid growing feminist hostility to Foreign Service treatment of spouses, some couples resented postings to distant Australasia but most enjoyed a welcoming English-speaking environment. While New Zealand assignments involved complex negotiations with Pacific islanders, diplomats in Australia were powerless to control the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean, including the fortification of Diego Garcia and peace negotiations threatening US Navy access to the port of Fremantle. When the Australian Labor Party won power in 1972 the vulnerability of vital military and intelligence facilities alarmed the US more than opposition to nuclear ship visits that removed New Zealand from the ANZUS alliance in the 1980s. Notable exceptions to a principal focus on diplomats below the highest ranks are Marshall and Lisa Green. After meeting John Stewart Service in post-1945 New Zealand they remained for years his loyal defenders against the assaults of McCarthyism. Lisa's interview implicitly but decisively refutes allegations that, as US ambassador to Australia, Marshall plotted the dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975. Despite persistent rumors of a CIA coup, declassified cables reveal resident US diplomats' hostility to the governor general's unprecedented action.

This Historical Dictionary of U.S. Diplomacy during the Cold War offers readers a comprehensive, accessible survey of the principal actors and events involved in the making of United States foreign policy during a crucial period in the nation’s history. The Cold War saw the United States acquire superpower status, and to be closely involved in events around the globe. Foreign policy became a central issue in domestic politics. The confrontations with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its allies and satellites, and with the forces of international communism dominated U.S. interactions with the world throughout this period. This book covers this turbulent period through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 900 cross-referenced entries on key persons, policies, events, institutions, and organizations, along with issues such as the division of Germany after World War II, the creation of the People’s Republic of China, European economic recovery, communist movements in the third worlds, decolonization, the Vietnam War, and the nuclear arms race. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about U.S. diplomacy during the cold war.

There is much discussion these days about public diplomacy—communicating directly with the people of other countries rather than through their diplomats—but little information about what it actually entails. This book does exactly that by detailing the doings of a US Foreign Service cultural officer in five hot spots of the Cold War - Germany, Laos, Poland, Austria, and the Soviet Union - as well as service in Washington DC with the State Department, the Helsinki Commission of the US Congress, and the National Endowment for Democracy. Part history, part memoir, it takes readers into the trenches of the Cold War and demonstrates what public diplomacy can do. It also provides examples of what could be done today in countries where anti-Americanism runs high.

The so-called Colonels&’ coup of April 21, 1967, was a major event in the history of the Cold War, ushering in a seven-year period of military rule in Greece. In the wake of the coup, some eight thousand people affiliated with the Communist Party were rounded up, and Greece became yet another country where the fear of Communism led the United States into alliance with a repressive right-wing authoritarian regime. In military coups in some other countries, it is known that the CIA and other agencies of the U.S. government played an active role in encouraging and facilitating the takeover. The Colonels&’ coup, however, came as a surprise to the United States (which was expecting a Generals&’ coup instead). Yet the U.S. government accepted it after the fact, despite internal disputes within policymaking circles about the wisdom of accommodating the upstart Papadopoulos regime. Among the dissenters was Robert Keeley, then serving in the U.S. Embassy in Greece. This is his insider&’s account of how U.S. policy was formulated, debated, and implemented during the critical years 1966 to 1969 in Greek-U.S. relations.

An insider's account of the Cold War as seen by a key diplomat abroad and in London. A privileged view of work that won the Cold War, written with humour and insight.

Focusing on the attitudes and experiences of American female diplomats and spouses, this book examines the social, political, and cultural dimensions of American interactions with the Middle East and North Africa in the five decades after the Second World War. A turbulent period, marked by conflicts associated with the Cold War and decolonization, it was also characterized by changing attitudes to women at odds with those in Moslem societies. The impact of those changes is explored throughout this book, principally drawing on personal oral histories included in the 'Frontline Diplomacy' collection, but reinforced by cables passing between regional U.S. embassies and the State Department in Washington DC.