With verve and a sure command of concepts, ranging from literary theory to Cold War historiography, Hannah Gurman has produced a first-rate study of a subset of establishment dissenters. Her focus is on Foreign Service officers and State Department denizens who have exercised varieties of responsibility, from the early days of the Cold War to the Barack Obama era. Gurman's study amounts to a version of prosopography that begins with George Kennan, unhappy with the way in which containment policy during the Acheson–Nitze years drifted away from his preferred approach, centered on economic–diplomatic initiatives. Gurman pays comparably close attention to John Paton Davies and John Service, two of the most discerning China hands, who were misunderstood and persecuted during the Joseph McCarthy season of hysteria. Gurman also examines the dissenting career of George Ball, when, as LBJ's plucky undersecretary of state, he worried about, and then challenged, the shibboleths that underpinned US policy in Southeast Asia. In the book's last two chapters, Gurman provides an arresting meditation on the course of dissent since the late 1960s. Her examination of the State Department's Dissent Channel repays close reading. In respects worthy of Orwellian imagination, the Dissent Channel has frequently functioned – especially in the Nixon and Kissinger government – to quell, contain, or dilute ideas and people that have run counter to the prevailing line.

As Gurman makes plain, Foreign Service skeptics of the 2003 Iraq war, such as Joseph Wilson and John Brady Kiesling, came to know at first hand what had previously been experienced by Kennan (marginalized), Davies and Service (crushed), and Ball (ignored). Yet through their travails, these and other diplomatic dissenters have held firm in what Gurman admiringly – and rightly – terms the dissenter's devotion to, and faith in, the “genre of diplomatic writing” (16). It has possessed equal parts intellectual integrity, patriotic grit, and literary flair (Kennan) or sturdiness (Service, Davies) versus the bromides, careerist caution, and prolix prose of too many foreign-policymakers and self-styled experts.

One of the frustrations that writers of history encounter is that, no matter how conscientious and meticulous they are, pesky intruders (from typos and grammatical infelicities to factual mistakes and questionable assertions) sneak through the screen emplaced by proofreaders, peer reviewers, and editors. Too many of my own publications are so marred, recollection of which makes me wince. Alas, Gurman's otherwise excellent book is similarly afflicted. Despite the book's impressive virtues, it contains some errors and a few flat statements that need qualification or amendment. Each of these problems is minor, no more than an annoyance. None diminishes the author's many shrewd insights or weakens her overall interpretation. Still, the cumulative effect of these flaws is jarring and should be addressed in subsequent editions of the book, including any contemplated paperback release.

Gurman refers (31) to V. M. Molotov as the Soviet prime minister at a time (1945) when in fact he was foreign minister. James Forrestal is repeatedly referred to (37 ff.) as the undersecretary of the Navy and a subcabinet member of Truman's administration, when in fact Forrestal was secretary of the Navy (1944–47), the last holder of that office to serve at cabinet level. Contrary to what is stated in the book (108), Everett Drumright was not ambassador to Hong Kong in 1954–58. Indeed, the United States never maintained an embassy in what was then a British crown colony. Drumright was the American Consul General in Hong Kong during the years in question. Kennan's brief ambassadorial tour in Stalin's Moscow took place in 1952, not 1953 (200). Kennan died in 2005, not 2004 (203).

Gurman might, before the next issuing of her book, also consider two additional points. First, students at the National War College cannot properly be classified as “senior military officers” (38). Rather, these students are of army field rank (lieutenant colonels, full colonels) and naval equivalents (plus a smattering of people recruited from civilian agencies, like the State Department). As such, these students are groomed for senior responsibility (i.e. generals, admirals, ambassadors) but have not yet attained it – and there are no guarantees. Second, the 1968 Tet offensive deserves to be termed not simply a “defeat” (161, 164) for the United States and its South Vietnam client. For them the campaign must be judged a military success and tactical victory, even as it constituted a massive psychological setback – from which latter perspective Gurman, needless to elaborate, is entirely correct. Finally, a couple of quibbles. That Kennan was influenced by Anton Chekhov is a matter of record, but to call (26) this Russian writer of short stories and plays a “tragedian” misreads this subtle, and at times quite amusing, observer of manners and mores. So, too, Edward Willett, author of a clunky essay that stirred Kennan's famous riposte – “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in Foreign Affairs, July 1947 – was not a business professor (40), but occupied a more intellectually elevated place in the scholarly firmament, namely that of economist (at Smith College).

As earlier mentioned, the above complaints, mostly trivial, do little harm to Gurman's book. They detract not at all from her hopeful conclusion: sound diplomatic writing, irrepressible and against heavy odds, has occasionally in the past fostered decency and desirable outcomes – and still might “continue to play a role in the larger battle to make America a more intelligent, realistic, and humane force in the world” (198).