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A pretty good club: The founding fathers of the U.S. Foreign Service
A pretty good club The founding fathers of the US Foreign Service Author:Martin Weil Not long after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt remarked jocularly to a friend that his State Dept. was neutral in this war and that he hoped it would at least remain that way. Behind that lighthearted remark lay 8 years of disagreement between the White House and the State Department over policy toward the dictatorship of Nazi Germany and Sovi... more »et Russia.
This book is the story of those differences and the people who struggled to have their ideas become foreign policy at a critical time in American history. On one side were Roosevelt and his New Deal lieutenants...Harry Hopkins, Henry Wallace, Harold Ickes, Henry Morgenthau. On the other were the professional diplomants...Joseph Grew, J. Pierrepont Moffat, William Phillips, Hugh Gibson, James Dunn, Loy Henderson. Although the president opposed them, they had a key, durable ally...Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who looked out for 'his boys.'
The songs, by and large, of wealthy New England families, these men modeled themselves on the aristocrats of pre-World War I Europe and they ran the diplomatic corps like a fashionable Washington club.
These diplomats rode out the Roosevelt years to play a key role in moving America toward the cold war.
CONTENTS: The American Diplomatic Profession * The New Deal and the Foreign Service * The War Years * Death and Transfiguration« less