The Broadview Book of Diplomatic Anecdotes

Graeme S. Mount is a history professor at Laurentian University.

“My main objective in producing this book has been to entertain,”
says Martel, and entertainment he has provided, through scores of
unrelated anecdotes, principally from the memoirs of European, North
American, and Australian diplomats. Amusing stories concern passenger
Richard Nixon when Leonid Brezhnev drove a car at high speeds around
Camp David; Andrei Gromyko’s trip to the washroom, pursued by
Communist delegates of both sexes who thought they were staging a
walk-out from the U.N. General Assembly; the bewilderment when Prime
Minister Winston Churchill confused musician Irving Berlin with
historian Isaiah Berlin and solicited his opinions on political matters.

Martel’s “entertainment” also takes non-humorous forms. A
gruesome Japanese hara-kiri, demanded and observed by British diplomat
Ernest Satow, is gripping, as are the blow-by-blow accounts of the
Munich crisis. The Belgian cabinet’s escape from Petain’s France is
as exciting as the State Department’s indifference toward American
diplomats trapped in late–1941 Berlin is shocking.

Unfortunately, numerous errors give the impression of a rushed job. The
book begins with a meeting of British, French, German, and American
foreign ministers in 1942. After the preface comes a story purported to
have begun “one day before World War I,” but Martel identifies the
Secretary of State as Philander Knox. Elsewhere, Martel has Franklin
Roosevelt expressing his fears, in July 1940, “that France would not
be able to stand up for long against Germany.” Later he mentions a
London conference that took place “during the Second World War”; the
conference began in September 1945. In another spot, he refers to the
“American declaration of war on Germany” in 1941.

Language is occasionally sloppy, as well. Martel discusses an event
from the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm I, who died in 1888, as occurring
“before the First World War began.” On the first page, he uses the
infinitive “to lay” when he means “to lie.” Elsewhere he uses
plural pronouns with singular antecedents.

The good outweighs the bad, but carelessness detracts from the book’s
overall utility and attractiveness.