Glory is not always won under the klieg lights. The novelist Graham Greene wrote that “true glory is a private and discreet virtue, and is only fully realized in solitariness.” Likewise, the golden age of U.S. diplomacy was not only a matter of celebrated victories, such as Henry Kissinger’s secret trip to China in 1971 or James Baker’s negotiations to reunify Germany in 1990. It was also about the many small and lonely achievements that occurred in the far-flung corners of the globe by the middle ranks of a talented and dedicated foreign service.
