Rogue Diplomats

This elegant volume, based on six case studies, examines flagrant disobedience by American diplomats. In all these cases, the diplomats' views prevailed over the instructions of their superiors. Seth Jacobs starts with the settlement of the War of Independence (1783), and the U.S. diplomats who were conducting the negotiations against the framework set by Congress. The history of the Louisiana Purchase (1803) features next. The diplomats in that case were tasked with purchasing New Orleans but acquired from France 800,000 square miles of land from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. The most entertaining of all Jacobs's studies is the case of Nicholas Trist's signing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848). Although Trist had been recalled and acted without proper authorization, the Senate ratified the treaty. Rogue Diplomats thereafter addresses the Anglo-American “special relationship.” After the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, U.S. ambassador Walter Hines Page assailed U.S. neutrality. Page was “violent for war,” argues Jacobs, but President Woodrow Wilson was “too proud to fight” (pp. 214, 215). The U.S. ambassador to London despised his superior: “I would hang [Secretary of State William Jennings] Bryan for treason and hang his followers on the nearest lampposts” (p. 224). Page ended up providing false oral messages to the president to service the cause of war. The intercepted German Zimmermann telegram, which offered Mexico German support for a reversal of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, settled the affair in Page's favor, when the United States joined the war to end all wars. Jacobs quotes Harry Elmer Barnes, who claimed that Page “bore a greater degree of guilt and responsibility than any other single American ... for the entry of the United States into the World War” (p. 238). Chapter 5 focuses on U.S. neutrality in World War II. Joseph Kennedy, who represented the United States in London under Franklin D. Roosevelt, backed Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy. Germany needed a free hand in the East and Southeast of Europe, Kennedy asserted, and believed the continental squabbles were not “worth shedding blood for” (p. 261). Kennedy also asked Charles Lindbergh to write a report on German air superiority. Fdr feared to recall Kennedy. The last chapter of this marvelous book is on Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge II, who instigated the removal of the South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. Diem, who met Lodge hours before the coup, said to the U.S. ambassador, “every time the American Ambassador leaves, there is a coup against the government” (p. 347). At 1:45 p.m. on the same day, a coup occurred. Diem rejected the offer furnished by Lodge to provide for his physical safety and died. The coup had been organized by Lodge, without the support of John F. Kennedy

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