This book is best appreciated from a distance; the sum is truly more weighty than the component parts. Scholars of World War II-era diplomacy will already be familiar with many – but by no means all – of the vignettes upon which David Mayers builds his narrative, but the overall picture gives us something new.

In a series of chapters dealing with America's diplomatic missions to Japan, Germany, Italy, France, Britain, and the Soviet Union, Mayers gives us succinct synopses of the achievements, or lack thereof, of the various ambassadors, moving from Joseph Grew's efforts to keep Washington and Tokyo talking, via William Dodd's prescient warnings of the rise of Nazi Germany, to Averell Harriman's rapidly shifting appreciation of Moscow's wartime and postwar goals. Along with the perceptive and the vindicated, we get the appeasers and the critics (Hugh Wilson, Breckinridge Long, William Leahy, and Joseph Kennedy); the bypassed, the overwhelmed, and the misplaced (Clarence Gauss, Laurence Steinhardt, and William Standley); and the frankly bizarre (Patrick Hurley). This is all good stuff, solidly researched and well told. But Mayers really comes into his own when he stands back to paint the group portrait.

Roosevelt's ambassadors were a disparate group but, despite their differences in personality, politics, and diplomatic professionalism, they had a great deal in common. While some were career Foreign Service officers and others appointees from the worlds of business, academia, or the military, all were white and male. Most were Episcopalian, “politically mainstream,” and well-educated men of independent means and East Coast origins (252–53). They were, as one put it, members of a “pretty good club”; not coincidentally, they were also denizens of the “president's own milieu” (252). Clearly, and notwithstanding the professionalization initiated by the 1924 Rogers Act, the Foreign Service was far from a “mature meritocracy” (252).

Common origins and shared assumptions did not necessarily make for smooth sailing, however. Roosevelt's relationship with the State Department was notoriously rocky, with the President frequently bypassing “hapless” Secretary of State Cordell Hull and paying “scant regard” to professional diplomatic opinion (2). But Mayers demonstrates how several Roosevelt appointees, while often lacking adequate presidential support – one thinks in particular of Winant and Harriman – were able to help shape policy while also playing key roles in its implementation.

In the detailed case studies, Mayers is particularly effective when examining the sorry story of Washington's wartime relations with Vichy France. Appointed by Roosevelt to cultivate relations with Marshal Pétain, Admiral William Leahy ran an embassy notable for its conservatism. Leahy was “fond” of Pétain and implacably hostile to Charles de Gaulle, with senior embassy official H. Freeman Matthews describing the Free French as a “poisonous crowd of Jews, emigrés, and crooks” (146). This much is well known, but Mayers digs deeper to expose the embassy's active – and largely successful – work to block the efforts of American relief organizations to facilitate the emigration to the United States of refugees from Nazi persecution. Only Hiram Bingham, vice consul in Marseille, battled the “wall of legalism and implacability” erected by Leahy and his superiors in Washington; he was “yanked” from France for his trouble (152–53).

These detailed stories, and others like them throughout the book, provide depth and texture to Mayers's depiction of diplomatic functioning while underscoring the importance of ambassadorial leadership. Together, and in the context of the broader group portrait Mayers conjures, they offer an invaluable insight into Washington's wartime diplomacy.

On one substantive issue I find Mayers less than entirely convincing. Mayers suggests that Roosevelt lacked a “dynamic conception of US interests,” thereby allowing his ambassadors unusual “margins of leeway” (254). Roosevelt could certainly be inconsistent in his relations with his diplomats, sometimes letting “matters drift” and sometimes micromanaging; sometimes listening to his ambassadors, sometimes ignoring them; sometimes having diplomats serve as key point-men, and sometimes bypassing them (250). But Mayers's implication that Roosevelt lacked an overall grand-strategic vision seems misplaced. Was, for example, Roosevelt's appointment of Anglophobic isolationist Joseph Kennedy the product of an “excessively casual” approach, or was it connected to the fact that in 1937 he was not ready to commit to the crisis looming in Europe, and the selection of an interventionist ambassador would have pulled strongly in that direction (250). So, too, in China, where Patrick Hurley's heavy-handed efforts to rebuild relations with Chiang Kai-shek could be viewed as part of an urgent effort to reverse the policy of “reconciliation” with the Chinese Communist Party urged by his predecessor, Clarence Gauss (108).

However, while I would argue that Roosevelt ran a somewhat tighter ship than Mayers accounts for here, this criticism in no way detracts from the value of this book: it is a must-read for students of America's wartime diplomacy.