What effect did personality and circumstance have on US foreign policy
during World War II? This incisive account of US envoys residing in the
major belligerent countries – Japan, Germany, Italy, China, France, Great
Britain, USSR – highlights the fascinating role played by such diplomats as
Joseph Grew, William Dodd, William Bullitt, Joseph Kennedy, and
W. Averell Harriman. Between Hitler’s 1933 ascent to power and the
1945 bombing of Nagasaki, US ambassadors sculpted formal policy –
occasionally deliberately, other times inadvertently – giving shape and
meaning not always intended by FDR or predicted by his principal
advisors. From appeasement to the Holocaust and the onset of the Cold
War, David Mayers examines the complicated interaction between policy,
as conceived in Washington, and implementation on the ground in Europe
and Asia. By so doing, he also sheds needed light on the fragility, ambiguities, and enduring urgency of diplomacy and its crucial function in international politics.