Journeying Far and Wide

Journeying Far and Wide describes Philip M. Kaiser’s remarkable career under four presidents: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter. As Truman’s assistant secretary of labor for international affairs, cooperating with the American labor movement, Kaiser played a key role in the development of free, democratic trade unions in postwar Germany, Austria, and Japan. One of Kennedy’s brilliant ambassadors in Africa – accredited to two countries at the same time, Senegal and Mauritania – he was largely responsible for Senegal’s denial of Soviet use of Dakar’s modern airport during the Cuban missile crisis. At the height of the cold war, Carter appointed Kaiser ambassador to Hungary, a sensitive post that he handled with great skill and aplomb. As ambassador to Austria in the 1980s, Kaiser worked successfully with Chancellor Bruno Kreisky and encouraged Austrians to come to terms with their past relationship with Nazi Germany. In his conclusion, Kaiser reflects brilliantly on how Woodrow Wilson set the pattern for the Democratic party’s activist domestic and foreign policies during the last eighty years. Journeying Far and Wide is the moving, lively, and elegantly written memoir of an outstanding and devoted public official.