SECRETS OF STATE: The State Department and the Struggle Over US Foreign Policy

by Barry Rubin ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 23, 1985

No matter how one interprets the title, the content is disappointing. Rubin, a Senior Fellow at the Georgetown U. Center for Strategic and International Studies (and author of the solid Paved with Good Intentions: The American Experience with Iran), says that he wants to show how policy-making goes on; but what he produces is a fairly conventional history of the State Department and its leading personalities. He goes back to the beginning, when foreign affairs were treated almost as an afterthought; and, starting with Jefferson, the first Secretary of State, follows the trajectory from early arguments about the propriety of sending US ambassadors to aristocratic courts, through the growth of the apparatus to present-day arguments over the relative weight of Secretaries of State and National Security Advisers. The episodes in that history--the successful diplomacy of the Civil War period, the emergence of the Foreign Service as a haven for rich kids--are pretty well known. Rubin keeps track of pay scales, numbers of staff employees, etc., and follows such further, internal developments as the advent of area specialists, a new breed represented by Soviet experts Charles Bohlen and George F. Kennan. Once he gets to World War II, during which the Department expanded enormously, the story gets even more familiar--the purging of the China hands, the Hiss case, the morale boost of George Marshall and the Marshall Plan, the dominance of Acheson and Dulles. Rubin chronicles the rise and fall of State Department influence on policy, as well as the uneven relations between presidents and their Secretaries. (Roosevelt wouldn't even bring his, Cordell Hull, to his summits.) The more recent material includes the current structure of State--career trajectories within the Foreign Service, conflicts between careerists and appointees, the bureaucratic wars at Foggy Bottom. Rubin takes the story up to the Reagan term, providing a serviceable history for a general audience--but not telling any secrets to anyone.

Pub Date: May 23, 1985

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Oxford Univ. Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1985

Categories: NONFICTION