Activities and affiliations

Diplomacy and international organization United States state institutions 1871–1955 ○ Natural causes

An American diplomat who pressed for free trade and international institutions

On November 26, 1941, he delivered the Outline of Proposed Basis for Agreement Between the United States and Japan to the Japanese ambassador.

Cordell Hull was a Democratic politician and diplomat who helped shape U.S. free-trade policy and a multilateral international order. He promoted lower trade barriers and the Good Neighbor policy in the 1930s, while often working in tension with Franklin D. Roosevelt, who retained final control over foreign policy. In the 1941 negotiations with Japan, Hull delivered the November 26 Outline of Proposed Basis for Agreement, the last major diplomatic document before the Pacific War. Afterward, his work for the United Nations earned him the 1945 Nobel Peace Prize.

Diplomacy and international organization United States state institutions 1882–1972 ○ Natural causes

Roosevelt's "assistant president" who, as Secretary of State, designed the Potsdam reparations compromise

After Byrnes took the oath as Secretary of State, Truman said, "Jimmy, kiss the Bible." Byrnes did so, then handed it back to the President and told him to kiss it too. Truman did, as the room laughed.

James F. Byrnes was a Democratic politician from South Carolina who, as senator, steered New Deal legislation through Congress; as director of war mobilization, earned the nickname "assistant president"; and as Truman's Secretary of State, designed the reparations framework at Potsdam. At Potsdam, Byrnes negotiated the compromise with Molotov whereby each occupying power would extract reparations from its own zone, while the USSR would receive 15% of western-zone industrial equipment in exchange for food and raw materials and an additional 10% without payment. Passed over as Roosevelt's running mate in 1944 and later sidelined by Truman as their relationship soured, Byrnes returned to elective politics as governor of South Carolina, where he championed "separate but equal" schooling against desegregation.

Diplomacy and international organization United States state institutions 1888–1959 ○ Natural causes

An American diplomat who drove the Cold War through alliance-building

At the 1954 Berlin Conference, he rejected an all-German government without free elections and upheld the Western electoral procedure.

John Foster Dulles was an American diplomat and lawyer who sought to organize the postwar order through alliances and military deterrence. As Dwight D. Eisenhower’s secretary of state, he pressed beyond containment toward rolling back communist influence and consolidated the Western bloc around NATO. At the 1954 Berlin Conference, he opposed Molotov’s collective-security proposal and call for an all-German government, insisting on reunification through free elections; later that year he secured West German entry into NATO, choosing institutionalized division in Europe over an unguaranteed settlement. The policy strengthened Western cohesion and American influence, but also carried responsibility for interventionism, including support for coups in Iran and Guatemala and reliance on nuclear threats.

Diplomacy and international organization United States state institutions 1894–1978 ○ Natural causes

The diplomat who read the danger in Berlin first

Shortly after Sokolovsky walked out, Murphy reported that the Soviets had begun a three-step plan to force the Western powers out of Berlin.

Robert Daniel Murphy was an American diplomat who combined negotiation with intelligence judgment in the arenas of war and occupation. As the U.S. political adviser for Germany in 1948, he reported to Washington that the Soviet Union had begun a staged campaign to drive the Western powers from Berlin, helping shape American perceptions during the blockade and airlift crisis. His career ranged from preparing the North African landings and administering occupied Germany to ambassadorships in Belgium and Japan and senior State Department posts, illustrating how field reporting could move military and political decisions.

Diplomacy and international organization United States state institutions 1900–1949 ○ Natural causes

A corporate executive turned architect of the postwar international order

The Yalta Protocol preserves the signature of the American representative, “E. R. Stettinius Jr.”

Edward Stettinius was a statesman who moved from corporate management and national mobilization into the center of American diplomacy at the end of the Second World War. As administrator of Lend-Lease, he helped sustain the Allied war effort, and at Yalta he accompanied Franklin Roosevelt in negotiating the framework of postwar Europe and international organization. He signed the Yalta Protocol as the American representative and then led the United States delegation at the conference that founded the United Nations, but his effort to address growing tensions with the Soviet Union through the UN brought him into conflict with the Truman administration. His career shows how wartime coordination between corporations and the state fed into postwar multilateralism while being constrained on the threshold of the Cold War.

Diplomacy and international organization United States state institutions 1904–1972 ○ Cancer

The US Ambassador to Moscow who knew Khrushchev personally and, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, told Kennedy to ignore the second letter

"The important thing for Khrushchev, it seems to me, is to be able to say 'I saved Cuba; I stopped an invasion,'" Thompson told the ExComm during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

An American diplomat who served as Ambassador to Moscow from 1957 to 1962, building a personal rapport with Nikita Khrushchev that gave Washington rare insight into Soviet decision-making. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, on Kennedy's ExComm, he was the one who argued that the second, more aggressive Khrushchev letter of October 27 should be ignored and the first, conciliatory letter of October 26 answered instead: the strategy that became the resolution. He returned to Moscow as ambassador under Johnson and helped shape nuclear non-proliferation policy and the SALT process.

Diplomacy and international organization United States state institutions 1904–1974 ○ Pancreatic cancer

The State Department Soviet expert who turned Kennan's and Clayton's policy memos into Marshall's Harvard speech

"After Potsdam, there was little that could be done to induce the Soviet Union to become a reasonable and cooperative member of the world community," from his memoir, Witness to History.

An American diplomat and Soviet specialist who was present at nearly every pivotal moment in U.S.-Soviet relations from the opening of the Moscow embassy in 1934 through the Cold War. As Roosevelt's and Truman's interpreter, he sat beside them at Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam; in 1947, at Secretary of State George C. Marshall's request, he drafted the Harvard commencement address that launched the Marshall Plan, synthesizing policy memoranda from George F. Kennan and William Clayton. He survived a brutal McCarthy-era confirmation battle to become ambassador to Moscow in 1953, later serving as ambassador to France and as one of the nonpartisan 'Wise Men' advising presidents from FDR to LBJ.

Diplomacy and international organization United States state institutions 1906–1999 ○ Natural causes

An international lawyer who worked the UN’s procedures

On June 25, 1950, he reported on Korea and steered the Security Council’s procedure toward a vote on the resolution.

Ernest A. Gross was an international lawyer and U.S. diplomat whose work joined legal counsel, postwar administration, and representation of American policy at the United Nations. When the Korean War began in June 1950, he led the U.S. delegation and managed the Council’s procedures and voting so that Resolution 82 could be adopted. The result was a diplomatic success made possible by the Soviet delegate’s absence, but it also exposed the tension between collective security and great-power rivalry. He later practiced international law, assisting the Tibetan government in exile and challenging South Africa’s apartheid policy.

Diplomacy and international organization United States state institutions 1909–1994 ○ Natural causes

A Cold War diplomat who built containment through international coalitions

“Our United Nations action should be aimed at removing the missile threat; our objective in the OAS would be to persuade other Latin American countries to act with us under the Rio Treaty.”

Dean Rusk was an internationalist who reached the center of American foreign policy through World War II service and the postwar State Department. As secretary of state under Kennedy and Johnson, he helped manage the Cuban Missile Crisis, backing a quarantine rather than immediate attack while using the Organization of American States and the United Nations to defend it internationally. In Vietnam he became an increasingly forceful advocate of intervention, leaving a defining tension between his commitment to international legitimacy and his role in explaining an expanding war. After leaving office, he taught international law and foreign relations at the University of Georgia.

Diplomacy and international organization United States state institutions 1909–1994 ○ Cancer

The Under Secretary who stopped an airstrike on Cuba with the Pearl Harbor analogy, then alone opposed escalation in Vietnam

This coming in there, a Pearl Harbor, just frightens the hell out of me as to what goes beyond... You go in there with a surprise attack. You put out all the missiles. This isn't the end. This is the beginning, I think.

Under Secretary of State (1961–1966) serving Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, he was the exceptional figure who opposed escalation at two defining Cold War junctures: the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam. In October 1962 at EXCOMM, he called a surprise airstrike on Cuba 'a Pearl Harbor' and played the decisive role in swinging Robert Kennedy and the majority toward the naval blockade. Alone among Johnson's senior advisers, he warned in 1965 that sending combat troops would lead to hundreds of thousands more and an unwinnable war, and was proven right. After leaving government, he criticized America's pro-Israel tilt in the Middle East and, as Jean Monnet's collaborator in the 1950s, helped draft the Schuman Plan and the treaty creating the European Coal and Steel Community.

Diplomacy and international organization United States state institutions 1914–1994 ○ Natural causes

A negotiator of the nuclear age

When he headed the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, Smith proposed a direct Moscow–Washington link that met resistance from State and the military, yet once it became the 'hot line,' President Kennedy credited Smith with the original idea.

Gerard C. Smith was an American lawyer and nuclear-policy specialist who treated arms control and nonproliferation as problems of statecraft. As the U.S. lead negotiator at SALT I, he organized the practical work of limitation talks amid competing nuclear strategies, later recording their tensions and judgments in Doubletalk. He continued to oppose measures he believed would undermine the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, making his career a study in both managing and questioning the arms race.

Diplomacy and international organization United States state institutions 1920–1986 ○ Natural causes

A career diplomat who worked the front lines of détente

On March 4, 1974, he presented his credentials as the U.S. ambassador to Moscow.

Walter Stoessel was a career American diplomat whose work centered on the Soviet Union and Europe during the Cold War. As ambassador in Moscow from 1974 to 1976, he represented Washington on the ground during détente and the negotiations surrounding the Helsinki process. He later served as ambassador to West Germany and Deputy Secretary of State.

Diplomacy and international organization United States state institutions 1920–2021 ○ Natural causes

The Secretary of State who pushed Reagan toward dialogue with Gorbachev and helped end the Cold War

Over dinner with the Reagans, snowbound at the White House, Shultz listened to the president's relentless questions about Soviet leaders and realized: 'This man has never had a real conversation with a big-time communist leader, and he is dying to have one.'

George Shultz is one of only two Americans to have held four different Cabinet posts, serving as Labor Secretary, OMB Director, Treasury Secretary, and finally as Reagan's Secretary of State for six and a half years, reshaping the direction of U.S. diplomacy with the Soviet Union. Against the opposition of Defense Secretary Weinberger and CIA Director Casey, Shultz insisted that Reagan engage Gorbachev directly, laying the diplomatic groundwork for the Geneva (1985) and Reykjavik (1986) summits. The result was the 1987 INF Treaty, the first abolition of an entire class of nuclear weapons; Shultz then watched the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the unraveling of Moscow's hold on Eastern Europe, witnessing the end of the Cold War from the front row. His memoir Turmoil and Triumph remains an essential primary source for the diplomacy of the 1980s.

Diplomacy and international organization United States state institutions 1923–2023 ○ Natural causes

The architect of détente who used 'linkage' to build the first framework for superpower arms control, the face of American realism

In his notorious 1972 interview with Oriana Fallaci, he declared: 'Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse. This amazing, romantic character suits me precisely.' The comment infuriated Nixon.

A Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany at fifteen, Kissinger rose through Harvard's academic ranks to become the most consequential American foreign-policy maker of the Cold War. As National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford, he pioneered détente with the Soviet Union, devising the 'linkage' strategy that tied arms control and trade to Soviet restraint and conducting the secret backchannel with Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that broke the deadlock over SALT I and the ABM Treaty at the 1972 Moscow Summit. He opened relations with Mao's China through clandestine diplomacy, mediated the Paris Peace Accords to win the Nobel Peace Prize, but also presided over the bombing of Cambodia and covert interventions that earned him lasting accusations of war crimes.

Diplomacy and international organization United States state institutions 1928–2017 ○ Natural causes

Carter's National Security Advisor who drew the Soviet Union into the Afghan trap

That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap… The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.

Polish-born American political scientist and strategist, National Security Advisor under President Jimmy Carter (1977–1981). He drove the human-rights campaign against the Soviet Union, normalization with China, and the Camp David Accords, and articulated the Carter Doctrine committing U.S. force to the Persian Gulf. On July 3, 1979, he signed the finding authorizing covert aid to the Afghan mujahideen while warning Carter it could induce Soviet intervention; in 1998 he called it an 'excellent idea' that drew the USSR into 'its Vietnam war,' fueling the debate over whether the U.S. deliberately trapped the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. After the Cold War, his book The Grand Chessboard (1997) championed Eurasian geostrategy and NATO expansion, exerting a lasting influence on American statecraft.

Diplomacy and international organization United States state institutions 1929–

Reagan's NSC Soviet expert who assembled the 'Soviet 101' briefing papers and the last US ambassador to the USSR

Matlock recalled, "I've never had a better student than Ronald Reagan. He knew that he didn't know a lot of things, and he wasn't ashamed of it."

Jack Matlock was an American Soviet specialist who fell in love with Russia reading Dostoevsky and spent a 35-year Foreign Service career immersed in US-Soviet relations, beginning with translating Kennedy-Khrushchev messages during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis from the Moscow embassy. As Reagan's NSC senior director for European and Soviet affairs, he assembled the 'Soviet 101' curriculum: 24 briefing papers by CIA and State Department analysts, and role-played Gorbachev in mock summits to prepare Reagan for Geneva. Appointed ambassador to the USSR in 1987, he witnessed the country's final four years and later judged Gorbachev's failure to secure a written SDI-sharing commitment from Reagan at Geneva a 'strategic error.'

Diplomacy and international organization United States state institutions 1930–

The pragmatic diplomat who engineered the Cold War's final transition

In his November 29, 1989 Malta briefing memo, Baker wrote that Bush should project a "new pace and purpose" while leading as much as Gorbachev.

James Baker was a lawyer and Republican political operator who became central to American conservative politics through his long alliance with George H. W. Bush. After serving as treasury secretary on currency and international finance, he became secretary of state and helped manage the diplomacy of the Cold War's final years, German reunification, and the Gulf crisis. He did not treat Gorbachev's reforms as a matter of faith, weighing them against American interests and allied stability, yet he persuaded Bush to reach toward perestroika and translated that choice into the agenda and working arrangements of the 1989 Malta summit. His cautious realism slowed the inertia of confrontation while turning rapid change into negotiations that Washington could help manage.