Diplomat and Warrior in Tandem

Diplomat Among Warriors, by Robert Murphy. Doubleday, $6.95 Ambassador Murphy’s book is a moving panorama of American diplomacy over the turbulent period 1940-1963. Its outstanding value lies in its concern with the little understood but vitally important problems of coordinating diplomacy and military policy and directing them in a common effort toward the achievement of national objectives. This became Murphy’s specialty during the quarter-century from the fall of France in 1940 until his recent retirement from the Foreign Service: he was a State Department pioneer in this field, theretofore almost unknown to American diplomacy.

Murphy’s duties as special representative of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and as political adviser to General Eisenhower—in North Africa, Italy, and occupied Germany— began by improvisation of the development of a military-diplomatic teamwork which became a vital necessity in the years that followed. “Those were the years,” observes the publisher’s foreword to the book, “when [American] diplomats and warriors learned that they would have to work together far more closely than they had ever done in the past.” As the Ambassador proceeds with his narrative to the years of the Berlin blockade, the Korean War, the Suez crisis and the troubles in Lebanon, Guatemala, and the Belgian Congo, it becomes obvious to the reader not only that Mr. Murphy is gaining in expertise as he goes along, but that American military and diplomatic personnel are finding double-harness a little more comfortable with the passage of time.

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George Fielding Eliot

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Diplomat Among Warriors, by Robert Murphy. Doubleday, $6.95 Ambassador Murphy’s book is a moving panorama of American diplomacy over the turbulent period 1940-1963. Its outstanding value lies in its concern with the little understood but vitally important problems of coordinating diplomacy and military policy and directing them in a common effort toward the achievement of national objectives. This became Murphy’s specialty during the quarter-century from the fall of France in 1940 until his recent retirement from the Foreign Service: he was a State Department pioneer in this field, theretofore almost unknown to American diplomacy.

Murphy’s duties as special representative of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and as political adviser to General Eisenhower—in North Africa, Italy, and occupied Germany— began by improvisation of the development of a military-diplomatic teamwork which became a vital necessity in the years that followed. “Those were the years,” observes the publisher’s foreword to the book, “when [American] diplomats and warriors learned that they would have to work together far more closely than they had ever done in the past.” As the Ambassador proceeds with his narrative to the years of the Berlin blockade, the Korean War, the Suez crisis and the troubles in Lebanon, Guatemala, and the Belgian Congo, it becomes obvious to the reader not only that Mr. Murphy is gaining in expertise as he goes along, but that American military and diplomatic personnel are finding double-harness a little more comfortable with the passage of time.