The Diplomacy of Silence: The American Foreign Service is an examination of the attitudes of the members of the United States Foreign Service toward the Soviet Union from 1933-1947. Hugh DeSantis draws upon extensive archival records, manuscripts, oral histories, and personal interviews in writing this book. Additionally, he combines a quick history of the diplomatic events with a record of American diplomats' commentaries on these events in the construction of his thesis. He argues that American diplomats steadfastly counseled neither cooperation with Moscow nor a hostile stance; instead, the images of the Soviets fluctuated and so did policy dispositions. Finally, the larger focus of the work is to fill the then existing gap in the literature by exploring the development of American images of the Soviet Union from the 1933 diplomatic recognition to the 1947 declaration of the Cold War with the Truman Doctrine.

This book is an extraordinarily interesting...