Word: thayer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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DIPLOMAT (299 pp.) - Charles W. Thayer-Harper...
After almost 20 years as a U.S. career diplomat (he resigned in 1953) and onetime head of the Voice of America, Charles W. (for Wheeler) Thayer does not believe in lying diplomacy. In this urbane, witty and information-packed volume of shoptalk about the diplomatic life, West Pointer ('33) Thayer outlines his notion that diplomats ought to rely on patience, sound education, a controlled temper-and honesty. That, feels Thayer, is the basis of the West's diplomatic tradition, despite occasional blunders and deceits. But there is another diplomatic school, the Byzantine, and its deceitful and violent tradition...
...Thayer cites the case of a loth century ambassador named Liudprand. who represented the Holy Roman Emperor in Constantinople and in the process was insulted, nearly starved, and quartered in a house with a leaking roof, which also lodged several unfriendly lions. Nearly 1,000 years later, in 1934, when U.S. Ambassador William Bullitt set up the first post-revolution U.S. embassy in Moscow, he was not troubled by lions, but otherwise, suggests Thayer, he got equivalent treatment...
...Author Thayer also believes that the style of Russian diplomacy has not fundamentally changed since the 16th century, when a local Cossack leader addressed the Turkish Sultan Mahomet III in a letter whose milder passages read: "We will lick you on land and sea, you hostile son-of-a-bitch . . . You Alexandrian goatherd, you Babylonian cook, you Macedonian wagonmaker, Jerusalem's traitor, Kamchatka cat, Podolian villain, swindler of the world, and evildoer of the underworld...
Poodle Diplomacy. Author Thayer totally disagrees with the frequently heard opinion that the speed of modern communications has reduced diplomats to the status of their governments' Western Union boys. He illustrates the point by a detailed account of the life at the U.S. embassy during the 1958 Lebanon crisis (he was on the scene as an interested visitor). Ambassador Robert M. McClintock's problems ranged from the influx of new code clerks required for the emergency ("No serious love affairs resulted," said one of the resident clerks later) to the matter of just how to cope with...