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Overview
Journeying Far and Wide describes Philip M. Kaiser's remarkable career under four presidents: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter. As Truman's assistant secretary of labor for international affairs, cooperating with the American labor movement, Kaiser played a key role in the development of free, democratic trade unions in postwar Germany, Austria, and Japan. One of Kennedy's brilliant ambassadors in Africa - accredited to two countries at the same time, Senegal and Mauritania - he was largely responsible for Senegal's denial of Soviet use of Dakar's modern airport during the Cuban missile crisis. At the height of the cold war, Carter appointed Kaiser ambassador to Hungary, a sensitive post that he handled with great skill and aplomb. As ambassador to Austria in the 1980s, Kaiser worked successfully with Chancellor Bruno Kreisky and encouraged Austrians to come to terms with their past relationship with Nazi Germany. In his conclusion, Kaiser reflects brilliantly on how Woodrow Wilson set the pattern for the Democratic party's activist domestic and foreign policies during the last eighty years. Journeying Far and Wide is the moving, lively, and elegantly written memoir of an outstanding and devoted public official.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Kaiser served in various government posts including assistant secretary of Labor under Truman, ambassador to Senegal under Kennedy, and ambassador to Hungary and Austria under Carter. Elegantly written and anecdotal, his memoir is enjoyable. Especially noteworthy: his account of his role in returning to the Hungarian people the Crown of St. Stephen, the treasured thousand-year symbol of their national identity, which had been stored at Fort Knox since the end of the war; and his close relationship with Chancellor Bruno Kreisky at a time when Austria was just beginning to confront the realities of its wartime relationship with the Nazis. Kaiser is eloquent in his denunciation of the American government's failure to provide the State Department with the resources to perform its role as the first line of national defense (he points out that State has the smallest budget of any Cabinet department, less than 1% of the Defense Department's). A profound admirer of Woodrow Wilson, he argues that what the country needs most right now is a fresh application of the progressive legacy initiated by the president, and a willingness to manage government imaginatively and creatively. (Jan.)Library Journal
Wilsonian idealism and internationalism have taken quite a beating as this century has lurched from Sarajevo 1914 to Sarajevo 1992. But its ideology remains alive and well in Kaiser's lively account of his remarkable diplomatic career. Born in Brooklyn, educated at the University of Wisconsin and as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, Kaiser served in the U.S. diplomatic corps during the postwar presidencies of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter. He has forceful opinions on the political and diplomatic events in which he took part. A staunch Wilsonian Democrat, Kaiser has little patience for those who would press for a reduction in American involvement in world affairs. Despite difficult economic times, he insists that the United States must remain generous with foreign aid, especially to the emerging countries in central and eastern Europe. Recommended for academic libraries.-- Ed Goedeken, Purdue Univ. Libs., West Lafayette, Ind.Book Details
Published
January 28, 1993
Publisher
New York : Charles Scribner's Sons ; c1992.
Pages
352
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780684193502