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Reviewed by:
  • Ellsworth Bunker: Global Troubleshooter, Vietnam Hawk
  • Andrew Wiest
Howard B. Schaffer , Ellsworth Bunker: Global Troubleshooter, Vietnam Hawk. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003. 380 pp. $34.95.

Howard B. Schaffer, the director of studies at the Institute of Diplomacy at Georgetown University and former U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh, combines solid research and a nuanced understanding of diplomatic history in his Ellsworth Bunker: Global Troubleshooter, Vietnam Hawk, which serves as his tribute to one of America's most successful modern diplomats. Bunker began what he thought would be a short foray into diplomacy at the behest of his old Yale University rowing coach, Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Beginning as ambassador to Juan Peron's Argentina, Bunker went on to serve as ambassador in Italy, India, and Vietnam. Additionally, Bunker often served as principal negotiator in world trouble spots, including Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, Yemen, and Panama. Thus Bunker's unique career, working under six presidents in the oft ignored middle ranks of the diplomatic hierarchy, is a valuable lens through which to view the intricate workings of American diplomacy.

Schaffer provides a flattering look at Bunker's life and work and often includes vignettes that give the often impersonal art of diplomacy a more human face. The resulting portrait is a fascinating case study of an old-style American diplomat at work. Apart from being a useful study of the practicalities involved in diplomacy and negotiations, Global Troubleshooter, Vietnam Hawk also provides solid new history concerning many of the central events of the latter half of the twentieth century, ranging from the ticklish negotiations between the Dutch and Indonesia regarding the future of West New Guinea to the shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East. At the risk of slighting some of Bunker's accomplishments, it is appropriate here to focus on three of his most important diplomatic assignments.

It fell to Bunker, in his position as ambassador to the Organization of American [End Page 176] States, to negotiate a solution to the 1965 crisis in the Dominican Republic. He was the perfect choice and proved to be a calming influence amid the stormy and complex Latin American and U.S. efforts to bring peace to the island nation. Bunker served as the leader of a hemispheric negotiating team, often having to quell the fears of his Latin American counterparts, and was at his most forceful in weaving the web of negotiations and veiled threats that brought the crisis to an end. The mission was in some ways the high point of Bunker's career. His diplomatic acumen, honed in years of careful negotiations, was critical to achieving a successful conclusion. Schaffer's account of the affair is a model of careful and well-written diplomatic history and provides an important new source regarding the crisis itself.

For many, Bunker's lengthy stint as ambassador to Vietnam, from 1967 to 1973, will be of greatest interest. During this critical and difficult period Bunker rarely took any initiative, and his importance to policymaking in Vietnam seems only tangential. In Schaffer's words: "Unlike either of his two immediate predecessors as ambassador to Saigon, the Republican politician [Henry Cabot] Lodge and General Maxwell Taylor . . . Bunker did not have an important political or military constituency. He was an archetypal patriot with no policy axe to grind, and [Lyndon] Johnson could confidently expect that he would work loyally with the administration as it faced the uncertainties of the Vietnam War" (p. 166). Bunker did not try to shape events in Vietnam, as Lodge and Taylor had. Instead, he merely attempted to implement the will of first Johnson and then Richard Nixon.

Bunker was, as the subtitle of the book implies, a true supporter of U.S. efforts in Vietnam and saw it as his mission to win the sometimes recalcitrant South Vietnamese over to full support for American goals in the conflict. Specifically, Bunker spent a great deal of time trying to push the South Vietnamese toward truly democratic reform, an effort that met with only superficial success. His main effect on the unfolding history of the conflict came from the steady stream of confident appraisals of the situation...

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