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Douglas
Dillon Award In 1995, the Academy began to award an annual prize for a book of distinction on the practice of American diplomacy. The Academy hopes that this prize will stimulate further academic research on the way American diplomacy is exercised and will also deepen public understanding of the critical need for excellence in our diplomacy.
In
2003, this prize was presented to Warren Zimmermann for his
book America's First Great Triumph: How Five Americans
Made Their Country a World Power, published by Farrar,
Straus and Giroux. The award recipient
is selected by a committee of Academy members, headed by Leonard
Marks, former Director of USIA. His remarks
are reprinted below.
Joseph
Sisco: Ladies and gentlemen, if I could have your attention
for just a moment. We are going to start the awards ceremony a bit earlier,
but go ahead on your dessert and so on. We are going to make a few changes
in the program itself. The first award that we will be granting is the
Book Award, and I am asking Leonard Marks, former head of the USIA, to
make the presentation. Leonard? Leonard Marks: This year's Book Award, the Douglas Dillon Award, is now in its ninth year. It recognizes distinguished writers for the practice of American diplomacy. This year, the Selection Committee had the very demanding and rewarding task of reading and reviewing 30 nominated books, all of them of high quality and most of them heavily researched. The committee rather quickly and unanimously came to the conclusion that the book by Ambassador Warren Zimmermann deserves this year's award, "America's First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power, as a major contribution to the annals of American diplomatic history recording, as it does, the role of these five celebrated practitioners of both military power and diplomacy at a critical point of transition in American history." Warren is an exceptionally
honored member of the Academy. This is his second time he had merited
and won the award. The first award was in 1996 when he wrote "Origins
of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and Its Destroyers," a contribution
to the record of history made even more important by the passage of time. Warren, congratulations, and I would suggest to each of you to pick up a copy of his book as you go out. I think it is very much worthwhile reading. Let me read the citation, if I may. "The American Academy of Diplomacy is pleased to honor the Honorable Warren Zimmermann with its year 2003 Douglas Dillon Award for a book of distinguished writing on the practice of American diplomacy. The title, 'America's First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power." Warren, it is a book
that I think many of us will realize that it is, in part, a little memoir
on your part, but you have done an awful lot of research historically,
which I think is great, and there is a lot to be said about the description
of the diplomacy. Again, congratulations. Mr. Zimmermann: Thank you very much, Ambassador Sisco, Ambassador Marks. One of the joys of writing popular history is to trace the events of the past up to the present day. The theme I chose some 6 years ago was the period of the Spanish-American War in 1898 when America first became a great power. The conquest of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines began what many have called the first age of American imperialism, to be followed by an age of America's global domination in the second half of the 20th century. Six years ago, I could see the relationship between these two historical periods, but I was not prepared for the remarkable similarities between the United States' conquest of the Philippines between 1898 and 1902 and the defeat of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003. Let me cite some of these similarities. Both Iraq and the Philippines are examples of military conquest and occupation in a distant country where U.S. interests were not vital. In neither case was there a tradition of democratic rule on which to build. In both situations, we saw ourselves as liberating and were shocked to find ourselves treated as occupying. We entered both endeavors with a missionary zeal, a sense of superiority, and a conviction that we could easily implant our values on an alien culture. In both cases, military pacification took much longer than we expected. In the Philippines, we fought a dirty three-year guerilla war against Filipino insurgents who had helped us defeat Spain. In both the Philippines and Iraq, we discovered that getting in was much easier than getting out. In the Philippines, for example, getting out took us 48 years. In both situations, American actions produced a bitter domestic debate which threatened to divide our country. It is too much to say that a greater understanding of America's experience in the Philippines, a century ago, could have pointed the way to a more effective approach to Iraq, but I do believe that a deeper understanding of this historical episode in the Philippines would have sharpened our perception of such important issues as America's true national interest, the difficulties of extracting ourselves from a country, and the dangers of unintended consequences. William James, the famous Harvard professor who was as strong an anti-imperialist as his even more famous student, Theodore Roosevelt, who was an imperialist, James preached that the disruption of other countries could only lead to trouble. He wrote in 1898, "We gave the fighting instinct and the passion for mastery their outing because we thought that we could resume our permanent ideals and character when the fighting fit was done." James believed that our actions in the Philippines did change America's ideals and characters. Today, as we ponder what to do next in Iraq, his warning still hangs in the air. Thank you very much for this wonderful honor. |
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AMERICAN ACADEMY
OF DIPLOMACY |
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