Books in Brief: The Diplomats

The Diplomats, by Martin Mayer (Doubleday, 417 pp., $17.95)

Martin Mayer, the thinking man’s Vance Packard, spent five grisly years touring the Foggy Bottoms of twenty countries in preparation for his latest institutional profile, a snappily written exercise in high dudgeon called The Diplomats. Mr. Mayer is a well-known specialist in the profitable combination of hard data and spicy gossip, and The Diplomats is full of both; but he is also an intelligent man, and The Diplomats consequently crackles with the kind of testiness that diplomatic stupidities inevitably arouse in sound minds. (Jimmy Carter’s post-Afghanistan grain embargo, Mr. Mayer snarls, was carried out “in what must be described as the typical half-assed manner of that Administration.”) Martin Mayer is perhaps not quite hard-nosed enough to savor either the current Administration’s anti-Soviet determination or Israel’s realpolitik, but he is everywhere else superbly cynical wit its rousing dismissal of the US as a repository of bad papers dishonest rhetoric druken deleganes,over secretariats, boredom beyond the capacity of any but veterans of these engagements to sustain.” Or, better yet, his explanation of the notorious New World Information Order: “What has driven the UNESCO effort to bring the world’s news agencies under government control . . . has been less a resentment of reportorial unkindness to the Third World than a fury at the inability of the press to take the international organizations and their diplomatic attendants as seriously as they take themselves.” Nice. To be sure, all that protocol has made Mr. Mayer just a little woozy when it comes to the odd detail—somebody named “Edward Meese,” for example, turns up both on page 254 and in the index—but how can you knock a guy who describes Andrew Young as “intelligent, ill-informed, reluctant to become confused by facts”?

About the Author

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout is the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. Satchmo at the Waldorf, his 2011 play about Louis Armstrong, has been produced off Broadway and throughout America.

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The Diplomats, by Martin Mayer (Doubleday, 417 pp., $17.95)

Martin Mayer, the thinking man’s Vance Packard, spent five grisly years touring the Foggy Bottoms of twenty countries in preparation for his latest institutional profile, a snappily written exercise in high dudgeon called The Diplomats. Mr. Mayer is a well-known specialist in the profitable combination of hard data and spicy gossip, and The Diplomats is full of both; but he is also an intelligent man, and The Diplomats consequently crackles with the kind of testiness that diplomatic stupidities inevitably arouse in sound minds. (Jimmy Carter’s post-Afghanistan grain embargo, Mr. Mayer snarls, was carried out “in what must be described as the typical half-assed manner of that Administration.”) Martin Mayer is perhaps not quite hard-nosed enough to savor either the current Administration’s anti-Soviet determination or Israel’s realpolitik, but he is everywhere else superbly cynical wit its rousing dismissal of the US as a repository of bad papers dishonest rhetoric druken deleganes,over secretariats, boredom beyond the capacity of any but veterans of these engagements to sustain.” Or, better yet, his explanation of the notorious New World Information Order: “What has driven the UNESCO effort to bring the world’s news agencies under government control . . . has been less a resentment of reportorial unkindness to the Third World than a fury at the inability of the press to take the international organizations and their diplomatic attendants as seriously as they take themselves.” Nice. To be sure, all that protocol has made Mr. Mayer just a little woozy when it comes to the odd detail—somebody named “Edward Meese,” for example, turns up both on page 254 and in the index—but how can you knock a guy who describes Andrew Young as “intelligent, ill-informed, reluctant to become confused by facts”?

About the Author

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout is the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. Satchmo at the Waldorf, his 2011 play about Louis Armstrong, has been produced off Broadway and throughout America.