Plunging into Haiti: Clinton, Aristide, and the Defeat of Diplomacy (Adst-Dacor Diplomats and Diplomacy Book) [Hardcover]

Ralph Pezzullo (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1578068606 | ISBN-13: 978-1578068609 | Publication Date: May 22, 2006

For much of the early 1990s, Haiti held the world's attention. A fiery populist priest, Jean Bertrand Aristide, was elected president and deposed a year later in a military coup. Soon thousands of desperately poor Haitians started to arrive in makeshift boats on the shores of Florida. In early 1993, the newly elected Clinton administration pledged to make the restoration of President Aristide one of the cornerstones of its foreign policy. But that fall the U.S. let supporters of Haiti's ruling military junta intimidate America into ordering the USS Harlan County and its cargo of UN peacekeeping troops to scotch plans and return to port. Less than a year later, for the first time in U.S. history, a deposed president of another country prevailed on the United States to use its military might to return him to office.

These extraordinary events provide the backdrop for Plunging into Haiti: Clinton, Aristide, and the Defeat of Diplomacy—Ralph Pezzullo's detailed account of the international diplomatic effort to resolve the political crisis. Through his father, Lawrence Pezzullo, who served as the U.S. special envoy to Haiti, Ralph Pezzullo gained access to important players on all sides. He tells the story of talented, committed men and women from the United States, France, Argentina, and Haiti who dedicated themselves to creating an outcome that would benefit Haiti and the rest of the world. With the energy of a political thriller, Plunging into Haiti fleshes out the central political struggle with threads of Haitian history and will engage readers with a general interest in Haiti as well as students of foreign policy. Using his unique perspective and access, Ralph Pezzullo covers the aftermath of the Clinton administration's diplomatic maneuvers to show an island still in turmoil.

Ralph Pezzullo is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter, novelist, poet, and journalist. He is the author of several books including Jawbreaker and At the Fall of Somoza and has written articles for the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, the Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, Connoisseur, GQ, USA Weekend, the Miami Herald, and other publications.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

This inside account of the backroom negotiations that entangled the United States in the sufferings of its island neighbor

--- Provides an insider’s perspective on how U.S. foreign policy failed—the author, son of one of the key U.S. diplomats involved in the crisis, had direct access to the primary sources involved

--- Demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of U.S. diplomatic and military efforts via close study of a specific crisis

--- Tells the story of modern Haiti and reveals the ongoing and difficult relationship between the U.S. and Haiti

--- Places U.S. diplomatic efforts in a larger context of actions taken by the U.N. and other international organizations

--- Expands our cooperation with ADST-DACOR

From the Inside Flap

An inside account of the backroom negotiations that entangled the United States in the sufferings of its island neighbor

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi (May 22, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1578068606
• ISBN-13: 978-1578068609
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,829,874 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I've lived in some interesting places, starting with New York City....

When I was five my father joined the Foreign Service of the State Department. His job took us to Washington, DC, Mexico, South Vietnam, Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Uruguay and Nicaragua. We lived in Saigon during the Tonkin Gulf Incident, the overthrow of Diem, a number of other coup d'etats and almost daily Vietcong terrorist attacks against Americans. We survived three years gasping for air at 13,000 feet in La Paz, Bolivia during the time that Che Guevarra was trying to build a guerrilla base in that country. In 1980 I was in Nicaragua debating politics with guys like Tomas Borge and the Ortega brothers and witnessing the first days of the Sandinista Revolution (the subject of the non-fiction book At the Fall of Somoza, which I wrote with my father).

So, yes, I have some stories to tell. After college I worked as a freelance journalist and for the National Endowment for the Arts. And when I moved back to New York City, I started writing plays. By the middle of the wild '80s I had became part of the downtown avant-garde theater scene working at such places as La Mama, Theater for the New City, Here and the Public Theater. Since then, fourteen of my plays have had their premieres in Manhattan.

In 1986 two movie producers attended an Off Broadway play of mine called The Education of One Miss February (a farce about the rise to fame of a Playboy bunny), optioned it for the movies and commissioned me to write a screenplay. That got me started writing for TV and film. I've also worked as a copywriter, speechwriter, published poems in literary anthologies and written an eight-part radio series called The Swamp Fox for National Public Radio and the BBC. (And I've been a bartender, actor, rock guitarist/singer, cruise planner, construction worker, labor foreman, baseball player, soccer coach, short order cook, writing teacher and ghost writer.)

I had written just about everything, except for a mystery novel. But that changed with Eve Missing published in October 2003. At the close of that year, I moved to Los Angeles to jump into the film world. It's been interesting so far working with directors like Oliver Stone, Antoine Fuqua, James Foley, Roger Donaldson, etc. Equally fascinating has been my work (book and film) with former CIA undercover operative Gary Berntsen (Jawbreaker, The Walk-In) and former LAPD detective Steve Hodel. I keep learning. Isn't that what it's all about?

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Plunging into the Pezzullos, July 29, 2007

By 

A Miami Reader (Miami) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Plunging into Haiti: Clinton, Aristide, and the Defeat of Diplomacy (Adst-Dacor Diplomats and Diplomacy Book) (Hardcover)

The name Pezzullo, for those concerned with Haiti, is infinitely divisive. Ralph Pezzullo is the son of Lawrence Pezzullo, one of the State Department's special diplomats whom the Clinton Administration contracted to force both the Cedras regime and the exiled Aristide administration to settle their dispute and come to some compromise where Aristide would return to power after his ouster in the early 1990s. Lawrence Pezzullo was likened to a devil by advocates of Aristide and far-left-leaning protesters in the United States for forcing Aristide to compromise with the Haitian military which they accused of being mass-killers.

"Plunging into Haiti" is essentially about the operations of the Clinton Administration that eventually led to the 1994 US Intervation and restoration of Aristide. I thoroughly enjoyed Ralph Pezzullo's book because it tells the same old story from the fresh, different point of view of Lawrence Pezzullo. Before reading this book the maddening indecisiveness and awkward behavior of the Clinton Administration made little sense to me. I was surprised how frustrated Pezzullo was with his fellow State Department officials, and by the discord and chaos within the US Administration itself. Perhaps this book should have been named "Plunging into the US State Department."

Needless to say, this book is blatantly one-sided and biased in favor of Lawrence Pezzullo. So: this book is only valuable if you read it with others that tell the story from different points of view. I suggest reading Paul Farmer's "Uses of Haiti" together with this book for a mind-expanding debate. Farmer slams the Clinton Administration for forcing Aristide to compromise with Cedras; while, Pezzullo feels that Aristide as a president in exile had no right to complain about US tactics to restore him to power.

Also, I really disliked how each chapter is interrupted by condensed introductory summaries of the history of Haiti. Ralph Pezzullo intended this book to serve training diplomats--BAD IDEA; because this topic is too complex, too divisive--this book is only one side of the story. This book should NOT be your introduction to Haiti. But it should definately be on your list if you are familiar with Haiti's history and have already considered different points of view.

0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating story of the making of foreign policy, July 8, 2006

By 

JTB (Miami, FL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Plunging into Haiti: Clinton, Aristide, and the Defeat of Diplomacy (Adst-Dacor Diplomats and Diplomacy Book) (Hardcover)

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Haiti, U.S. foreign policy making, diplomacy and multinational negotiations.