Volume 11, Number 6 · October 10, 1968
Watching the World Go By
By A.J.P. Taylor
A Diplomat Looks Back
by Lewis Einstein
Yale, 269 pp., $7.50
From Prague After Munich
by George F. Kennan
Princeton, 294 pp., $6.50
Diplomacy is a strange profession. Its practitioners spend their lives either actually in foreign countries or else thinking about them. Often they seem to become half foreign themselves. They develop exceptional sensitivity in two opposite ways. On the one hand, they are more acutely obsessed than their fellow citizens with the interests of their own country. On the other, they are more anxious to know what other countries are doing. Diplomats find it hard to believe that an event anywhere in the world is literally alien to them. Bismarck, we know, gave himself nightmares, conjuring up hostile coalitions—most of them imaginary. Metternich, when told that Talleyrand was dead, reflected: 'I wonder what he did that for.'
Review, 2176 words
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