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Caveat lector ! The font in the first book under review here, by John W. Young, is so microscopic that it requires a magnifying glass, even for those with good eyesight. Nevertheless, it is an engaging read. David Bruce was ambassador in London from 1961 to 1969. Vietnam is thus at the heart of the book. Before his assignment in London, Bruce worked briefly under Dean Acheson, who once told President Lyndon B. Johnson that he could take Vietnam and ‘stick it up your ass’. Bruce described himself as an American aristocrat. He would never have responded to the President in such a manner, even though he felt uncomfortably provoked by Johnson’s vulgarity. LBJ in turn respected him, in part because Bruce was unyielding in courtesy and careful to distil fundamental points: ‘Every time I am with that David Brice [ sic ]’ the President once remarked, ‘I learn something’. Bruce at one point advised Harold Wilson (whose first term as Prime Minister took place during Bruce’s tenure) to reply to LBJ by teletype rather than be trapped by his favourite weapon, the telephone. Bruce had to respond to anti-Vietnam assaults on the Embassy in Grosvenor Square, where, to his regret, many of the leaders of protest were a small number of ‘radicalised’ American students who denounced Grosvenor Square as ‘Genocide Square’. He found them ‘earnest, sincere, ignorant, and hopelessly disputatious’. Within the Embassy he tried to curtail covert operations on the part of CIA agents, some 120 out of a staff of well over 1,000. The book effectively places his work as ambassador within the institutional, and indeed sociological, setting of the embassy. Bruce worked towards European integration and more effective contingency planning by NATO. What especially aroused him was the British decision in 1967 to withdraw all troops East of Suez, which he had failed to predict. He regarded it as calamitous: ‘The truth is, we have been witnessing the gradual, now accelerated, decline of a formerly great power’. Bruce noted in his diary: ‘The jig is up for any real British military activity after 1970 in the Far East, and probably the Middle East’. The British decision, he wrote, was ‘destructive, selfish, myopic, and threatening to world orderliness … the most deplorable resolve, except for Munich, that any British Government has taken during the last 150 years ’ (emphasis added). Nevertheless, neither the end of empire nor the cultural explosion of the ‘swinging sixties’ deflected him from pursuing his ‘old-fashioned’ interests in the fine arts, furniture, rare books and, especially, wine. ‘I have sacrificed my liver to France’, he once wrote. He held his position in London for a record eight years. Though the book achieves its purpose of concentrating on the 1960s, it is curious that it fails to mention his later assignment to China, or Priscilla Roberts’s magisterial Window on the Forbidden City: The Beijing Diaries of David Bruce, 1973–1974 (2001). It is hard to imagine that his overall record of six major ambassadorial assignments under six presidents will ever be equalled.

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