Aide to Fate

Silent Missions By Vernon A. Walters Doubleday, 654 pp., $12.95 When Vernon A. Walters entered the army in 1941, his loftiest ambition was to become a major. Thirty-five years later, he retired a major-general, with three Distinguished Service Medals and the esteem of his five Commanders-in-Chief. Silent Missions records Walters’ career as translator, military attaché, and backdoor diplomat.

Walters’ particular stretch of history has been long and varied (and tips of strata even longer and more various keep cropping out in it—Tito, Walters reminds us, fought for the Habsburgs in World War I; Churchill, at a Fifties summit meeting in Bermuda, recalled charging on horseback at Omdurman). When Walters received his first postwar attaché assignment, there was a coalition government in Prague, and a dozen countries on earth had rulers with nonwhite skins. When Walters finally retired, there were Soviet advisors in Africa, and the Union Jack had receded from all but a few spits like Tristan da Cunha and Belize.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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Silent Missions By Vernon A. Walters Doubleday, 654 pp., $12.95 When Vernon A. Walters entered the army in 1941, his loftiest ambition was to become a major. Thirty-five years later, he retired a major-general, with three Distinguished Service Medals and the esteem of his five Commanders-in-Chief. Silent Missions records Walters’ career as translator, military attaché, and backdoor diplomat.

Walters’ particular stretch of history has been long and varied (and tips of strata even longer and more various keep cropping out in it—Tito, Walters reminds us, fought for the Habsburgs in World War I; Churchill, at a Fifties summit meeting in Bermuda, recalled charging on horseback at Omdurman). When Walters received his first postwar attaché assignment, there was a coalition government in Prague, and a dozen countries on earth had rulers with nonwhite skins. When Walters finally retired, there were Soviet advisors in Africa, and the Union Jack had receded from all but a few spits like Tristan da Cunha and Belize.