Foreign Relations

William Dodd served four years as the ambassador to Germany before resigning -- after repeated clashes with both Nazi Party officials and the State Department. Erik Larson chronicles Dodd's time in Berlin in his new book, In the Garden of Beasts.

U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Pete Peterson. He's a former Florida congressman and a former P.O.W. during the Vietnam war. He spent almost seven years as a prisoner of war. Now everyday, living in Vietnam, he passes by the Hanoi Hilton, the building that held him. Peterson is the subject of a new PBS documentary, "Assignment Hanoi." (It airs on many PBS stations September 7th).

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new Clare Boothe Luce biography, "Rage for Fame."

Former Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin. Dobrynin has written his autobiography In Confidence: Moscow's Ambassador to America's Six Cold War Presidents published by Times Books 1995. Dobrynin was Ambassador from 1962 (Kennedy) through 1986 (Reagan). He was a key diplomat in many U.S./Soviet conflicts including The Cuban Missile Crisis. Dobrynin, now 76 years old, is still active in Russian diplomacy as senior advisor to the Foreign Ministry. He lives in Moscow.

Israel's first ambassador to the United Nations and the United States Abba Eban. In 1948 he was elected to Israel's Knesset and worked in the cabinets of many Israeli leaders. Eban served with the British in the Middle East during W.W.II. He has been president of the Weizmann Institute of Science, a professor at Columbia University and worked with the Center for Advanced Studies at Princeton. His latest book, "Personal Witness," is a political memoir about the past five decades of Israel.

Ambassador Max Kampelman. He was head of the U.S. delegation to the Geneva negotiations on nuclear and arms reduction. He also headed the U.S. delegation at the Madrid East-West Conference on Human Rights. Though a moderate Democrat, he worked for the Reagan and Bush administrations. And he was a pacifist until the end of World War Two when he realized that nuclear weapons changed the way wars would be waged. He's written a memoir, "Entering New Worlds: The Memoirs of a Private Man in Public Life." (HarperCollins Publishing).