Customer Reviews

Pinstripes and Reds: An American Ambassador Caught Between the State Department and the Romanian Communists, 1981-1985

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

...this book does...provide a disturbing look inside the State Department and other areas of the US government vis a vis Romania.
Romania was given a political "free ride" for many years by the US. This was because of cheap and shallow political gestures against the Soviet Union made by Romania, such as sending athletes to the Olympics during the Soviet boycott. Meanwhile, the regime did Moscow's bidding where it really counted and also repressed the Romanian people to devistating extremes.
This book provides useful insight into many of the outrageous actions by the Romanian government and US refusal to do anything meaningful about it.

The author recounts the process by which he was nominated & confirmed to be US ambassador to Communist Romania. Interesting insight into the inside workings of the State Department, as well as life in Ceausescu's Romania. An important historical text.

David Funderburk--the former history professor at the hardline Baptist Campbell University, one-term US Representative from rural North Carolina, protege of Sen. Jesse Helms and former Ambassador to Romania in the early '80s--is in the mold of those Red-baiters of the early '50s. He denouces the State Department as communist sympathizers and throughout the book belies his extreme right-wing Christian fundamentalist ideology. He is certainly correct that the Ceausescu regime was horrid, but that was not due to the State Department. His solution, end detente with all communists, has been tried time and again with failure. Funderburk obviously harbors a deep insecurity about his less than stellar academic career and that he was ostracized by everyone in the foreign policy making apparatus from George Schultz on down. If any book deserves less than a star, this is it.