Overview

In this work, a thoughtful career diplomat provides a perceptive and sometimes controversial overview of the intense US connection with East Asia in the 20th century. Part memoir, part diplomatic history, this book traces Ambassador Cross's personal odyssey as a boy born in Beijing to missionary parents, a teenager under the Japanese occupation of North China, a Japanese-speaking Marine Corps officer in W.W.II, and as a diplomat posted to sensitive areas throughout the world. Cross's authoritative and invaluable account of his Vietnam experience as chief of CORDS in I Corps adds significantly to the literature on the Vietnam War. Covering the long sweep of historical events in Asia from revolutionary China in the 1920s and 1930s to the full normalisation of Sino-American diplomatic relations in 1979 and their aftermath in Taiwan, Cross's memoir should be of interest to anyone seeking an insider's view of US relations with Asia.

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9780847694693

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Reviews

(long) As a missionary's son in China, a soldier in the Pacific war, and a career diplomat, Chuck Cross was an eyewitness to America's fateful encounters in Asia across five decades. His memoir is history at close-up range, full of revealing, well-observed details. Diplomats are schooled to take the world as it is, and these are a professional's recollections: cool-headed and factual rather than introspective or emotional. Yet no one who reads them will fail to sense Cross's own solid values or his sympathy and respect for the ordinary Chinese and other Asians whom he lived among during the turbulent and often tragic events recounted in this book...--Arnold R. Isaacs

This is a remarkable and highly personal account of a half century of Chinese-American engagement a mosaic of affection and insight, friendship and hostility, cross-purposes and adjustment, public posturing and private pain. As he moves from parental pacifism and missionary moralism to Marine Corps patriotism and Foreign Service discipline, the author s 'internal turmoil' is repeatedly tested over four decades in a half dozen key assignments on the periphery of China itself. Amid life-threatening situations from Iwo Jima to Vietnam, and career-threatening ones from McCarthy to Agnew, Cross gives us memorable glimpses of politicians, diplomats, generals, and bureaucrats in their often fateful mismatches with one another and with history.--Thomas L. Hughes

Author Information

During the course of his thirty-two year diplomatic career, Charles T. Cross served in posts throughout the world, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt, Cyprus, London, Vietnam (1967-1969) where he was chief of the pacification efforts in I Corps. He was also ambassador to Singapore (1969-1972), consul general in Hong Kong (1974-1977), and the first director of the American Institute in Taiwan (1979-1981). Most recently he was a distinguished lecturer in international studies at the University of Washington.

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