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Breaking Protocol tells the story of the first female ambassadors in US history (1933–1964): Ruth Bryan Owen, Florence Jaffray Harriman, Perle S. Mesta, Eugenie M. Anderson, Clare Boothe Luce, and Frances E. Willis. This is the first group biography of the Big Six, one that places these women in a wider historical context based on deep and broad research in archival sources. It restores these women to their rightful place in history, and it assists the larger project of rendering women in international history visible. It begins by establishing the historical context, the male-dominated world of American diplomacy in the first half of the twentieth century. It then devotes one chapter each to the six female ambassadors, describing their backgrounds and appointments, analyzing the issues they faced and experiences they had on the job, and assessing their performances. It also traces the ambassadors’ reception by host countries; their sometimes fraught relations with the male-dominated State Department; the press coverage they received; the complications of protocol and the spouse issue; and how they practiced “people’s diplomacy”—getting to know, and representing America to, the host country’s whole society, not just its ruling elite. It ends by outlining the progress made and obstacles faced by women since the mid-1960s, and it concludes that, through their successful performances, the Big Six significantly contributed to gender progress in US foreign relations.

As the Civil War began, President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Henry Seward formed a most unlikely, but exceedingly successful foreign policy partnership. While functioning as the senior partner, Lincoln instituted a one-war policy as the cornerstone of US diplomacy, brilliantly articulated the international importance of preserving the nation’s republican experiment, linked freeing the slaves to the Union’s survival, and oversaw the North’s military efforts. By threatening war with any nation that intervened in the American conflict, Seward practiced a purposeful brinkmanship that was essential to precluding potentially decisive European aid to the Confederacy. The secretary of state combined these ongoing threats with timely compromises at crucial junctures, such as the Trent affair; joined Lincoln in the skillful use of public diplomacy aimed at both domestic and foreign audiences; and adeptly responded to Napoleon III’s intervention in Mexico. The US victory advanced the cause of republicanism and nationalism in the western world; it also enabled the United States to resume its imperial growth toward great power status. Seward played a formative role in that imperial growth. Following Lincoln’s assassination, he remained secretary of state during the Andrew Johnson administration. Over those four years, Seward purchased Alaska and outlined an elaborate agenda for US commercial and territorial expansion, an agenda that forecast with remarkable specificity US actions at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Legacy of J. William Fulbright: Policy, Power, and Ideology offers a fresh retrospective on the influential career of Senator J. William Fulbright, a leading foreign policy thinker and the longest-serving chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in American history. Juxtaposing Fulbright’s career as a foreign policy intellectual, including his powerful framing of post–World War II liberal internationalism, with his advocacy for the eponymous educational exchange program that he devised, this book contextualizes liberal internationalism within a broader sweep of US foreign policy thinking. Especially relevant is the role of American culture and political institutions in the formulation of liberal internationalism as well as the erosion of liberal internationalist confidence in the years after the Vietnam War, all exemplified by Fulbright’s public utterances, his conduct in office, and the foreign influence of the famed scholarly exchange program that bears his name.

This book documents the formulation and execution of US foreign policy in Cambodia during the Eisenhower administration. Based on exhaustive research at the US National Archives, the Eisenhower Library, and other public and private collections of primary sources, the book is a detailed narrative of the Eisenhower administration’s diplomatic struggle with Norodom Sihanouk. A difficult leader who was, at least initially, pro-Western in his political orientation, Sihanouk offended top US officials with his “neutralism.” For much of Eisenhower’s presidency, national security policy supported those who worked against Sihanouk. The book pays particular attention to US relations with anticommunist Cambodian dissidents, especially Dap Chhuon and Son Ngoc Thanh, and with their patrons in South Vietnam and Thailand. This book argues that covert intervention in the internal political affairs of neutral Cambodia proved to be a counterproductive tactic for advancing US anticommunist goals. A contribution to a still-emerging understanding of covert operations in the cold war, the book contends that the US experience in Cambodia in the 1950s deserves more attention in histories of the Indochinese wars and in assessments of Eisenhower’s performance as president. Although some historians have documented President Eisenhower’s moderation, prudence, and restraint in managing the nation’s foreign affairs, these qualities were often lacking in his administration’s relations with Cambodia, which were largely defined by hostility to Sihanouk’s conception of neutrality, by contempt for the prince personally, and by a covert effort to encourage his overthrow.

This book examines how Syngman Rhee and the Korean independence movement used the rhetoric of American exceptionalism to lobby the U.S. government and the American public for support between 1905 and 1945. Alleging that Theodore Roosevelt violated the 1882 Korean-American Treaty when he tacitly supported the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1905, Rhee argued that Germany was not the only nation guilty of regarding treaties as “mere scraps of paper” and exhorted Americans to right this historical wrong by supporting Korean independence. He argued that doing so would prove Americans were the exceptional people many of them believed themselves to be. Rhee’s message gained credibility, not only because the concept of American exceptionalism resonated with Americans, but also because at various junctures certain Americans found the Korean cause useful. During the fight over the Versailles Treaty, the so-called Irreconcilable senators used the Korean issue to criticize President Wilson and to deflect the charge that they were isolationists. During the denouement of World War II, anticommunist politicians and civic organizations argued that Korea must not be abandoned to communism and that the United States’ treatment of Korea would be a test of American resolve in establishing a new rules-based order. The publicity Korea received from these and other episodes transformed Korea into an issue that could not be ignored in the postwar period. The irony and tragedy of Rhee’s efforts is that not only did they fail to regain Korea’s independence, but they directly contributed to the decision to divide Korea—an outcome he never foresaw or supported.

Throughout the twentieth century, American male soldiers returned home from wars with foreign-born wives in tow, often from allied, but at times from enemy, nations, resulting in a new, official category of immigrant: the “allied” war bride. These brides began to appear en masse after World War I, peaked after World War II, and persisted through the Korean and Vietnam wars. GIs also met and married former “enemy” women under conditions of postwar occupation, although at times the US government banned such unions. This book uses relationships between American male soldiers and foreign women as a lens to view larger issues of sexuality, race, and gender in US foreign relations. It draws on a rich array of sources to trace how war and postwar anxieties about power and national identity have long been projected onto war brides, and how these anxieties translate into public policies, particularly immigration.

Legalist Empire explores the intimate connections between international law and empire in the United States from 1898 to 1919. Though many histories treat Woodrow Wilson’s plans for the League of Nations as the beginning of America’s substantive engagement with international law, this book demonstrates the broad influence of legal concepts and expertise in the years before World War I. It follows such lawyers as Elihu Root, John Bassett Moore, James Brown Scott, and Robert Lansing as they created an American profession of international law, promoted the creation of international courts, represented corporations with business overseas, and served as high-ranking policymakers in Washington. A widespread belief in the inevitable progress of “civilization” simultaneously justified American empire and underwrote the claim that international adjudication could bring world peace. Legalist Empire shows how international lawyers justified the conquest of the Philippines, the taking of Panama, and interventions throughout the Caribbean, and also explains why the law of neutrality helped lead the United States into World War I. The book also offers a new history of the origins of the American international law profession. Research in the papers and publications of lawyers and their organizations shows how political, ideological, and cultural assumptions shaped the emerging profession. A conclusion tracing developments to the present further emphasizes that rather than being antagonists, empire and the international rule of law have frequently reinforced each other in American history.

Freedom fighters. Guerrilla warriors. Soldiers of fortune. The many civil wars and rebellions against communist governments drew heavily from this cast of characters. Yet from Nicaragua to Afghanistan, Vietnam to Angola, Cuba to the Congo, the connections between these anticommunist groups have remained hazy and their coordination obscure. Yet as Kyle Burke reveals, these conflicts were the product of a rising movement that sought paramilitary action against communism worldwide. Tacking between the United States and many other countries, Burke offers an international history not only of the paramilitaries who started and waged small wars in the second half of the twentieth century but of conservatism in the Cold War era. From the start of the Cold War, Burke shows, leading U.S. conservatives and their allies abroad dreamed of an international anticommunist revolution. They pinned their hopes to armed men, freedom fighters who could unravel communist states from within. And so they fashioned a global network of activists and state officials, guerrillas and mercenaries, ex-spies and ex-soldiers to sponsor paramilitary campaigns in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Blurring the line between state-sanctioned and vigilante violence, this armed crusade helped radicalize right-wing groups in the United States while also generating new forms of privatized warfare abroad.