Douglas Dillon Award
for Books of Distinction on the Practice of American Diplomacy

2013 Call for Entries

Since 1995, the American Academy of Diplomacy has celebrated distinguished writing about US diplomatic efforts and achievements with an annual award. Last year the prize went to John Paton Davies' posthumously published memoir, China Hand: An Autobiography, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

The deadline for submission of nominations for this year’s award is Monday, September 2, 2013. A committee of Academy members will review nominated books and determine the winner, with concurrence by the Academy’s Board of Directors. The award for the winning entry this year includes a cash prize of $5,000. The awards are customarily presented at the Academy’s Annual Awards Luncheon ceremony in the Benjamin Franklin Room at the US Department of State in the late fall.

Eligibility Requirements

Eligibility is limited to books written by American citizens and published in the United States within the period of September 1, 2012 to August 31, 2013. The Academy seeks to honor books, and their authors, dealing with the practice of American diplomacy with emphasis on the way US foreign policy is developed and carried out, rather than international theory, studies of broad foreign policy issues, or analyses of intelligence and security operations. Biographies, autobiographies, and personal memoirs that relate to diplomatic practice and process are welcome. Both official diplomatic relations between governments and non-official “Track Two” and other activities that supplement government-to-government diplomacy fall within the scope of this competition. We are particularly interested in books that focus on the opportunities diplomacy offers as well as its limitations.

Publishers should submit five (5) review copies to the following address:

American Academy of Diplomacy
Attn: Aimee Stoltz
1200 18th Street, NW Suite 902
Washington, D.C. 20036
Telephone: 202-331-3721
Email: astoltz@academyofdiplomacy.org

About the Academy

The American Academy of Diplomacy is a nonprofit organization whose members, while in government service, held senior policy positions related to the conduct of US foreign relations. They are men and women, both career and non-career, who held major diplomatic posts abroad and high-level foreign policy responsibilities in Washington. Among them, as honorary members, are the seven living former Secretaries of State. The Academy works to encourage the highest standards of qualification for, and performance in, the conduct of American diplomacy, and to enhance public understanding of and appreciation for the contributions of diplomacy to our national interest.

Previous winners of the Dillon Book Awards as well as Recipients of Academy Special Citations include:

2012:
John Paton Davies Jr., China Hand: An Autobiography

2011:
Edmund Hull, High Value Target: Countering Al Qaeda in Yemen

A special citation was given to David A. Nichols: Eisenhower 1956: The President’s Year of Crisis – Suez and the Brink of War

2010:
Lynne Joiner, Honorable Survivor: Mao's China, McCarthy's America and the Persecution of John S. Service

A special citation was given to Fraser Harbutt: Yalta, 1945: Europe and America at the Crossroads

2009:
Ambassador Howard B. Schaffer, The Limits of Influence: America's Role in Kashmir, published by Brookings Institute Press.

2008:
Ambassador James F. Dobbins, After the Taliban: Nation-Building in Afghanistan, published by Potomac Books Inc.

A special citation was given to Greg Behrman: The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe

2007:
Robert L. Beisner, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War, published by the Oxford University Press.

2006:
Ralph Pezzullo , Plunging Into Haiti: Clinton, Aristide, and the Defeat of Diplomacy published by the University Press of Mississippi.

Special recognition was given to Amb. Edward J. Perkins and Connie Cronley for Mr. Ambassador: Warrior for Peace published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

2005:
Joel Wit, Daniel Poneman, and Robert Gallucci, Going Critical: The First North Korean Nuclear Crisis, Brookings Institution Press

2004:
Richard B. Parker, Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History, University Press of Florida.

2003:
Warren Zimmerman, America's First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Citation to Robert Miller, Vietnam and Beyond: A Diplomat’s Cold War Education.

2002:
John Boykin, Cursed is the Peacemaker: The American Diplomat vs. the Israeli General, Beirut, 1982, Applegate Press.

Special Citation to Princeton Lyman, Partner to History: The US Role in South Africa’s Transition to Democracy.

2001:
David McCullough, John Adams, Simon & Schuster.

Special Citation to Dennis Kux,
The United States and Pakistan 1947-2000; Disenchanted Allies.

2000:
Herman J. Cohen, Intervening in Africa: Superpower Peacemaking in a Troubled Continent, MacMillan/St. Martin’s Press.

William J. Gleysteen, Jr., Massive Entanglement, Marginal Influence: Carter and Korea in Crisis, Brookings Institution Press.

1999:
James Chace, Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World, Simon & Schuster.

1998:
Dr. Leon Sigal, Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea, Princeton University Press.

1997:
Warren Zimmermann, Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and its Destroyers, Times Books/Random House.

1996:
Jack F. Matlock, Autopsy of an Empire, Random House

Condoleeza Rice and Philip Zelikow, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, Harvard University Press.

1995:
David Mayers, The Ambassadors and America’s Soviet Policy, Oxford University Press.

AMERICAN ACADEMY OF DIPLOMACY
1200 18th Street, NW Suite 902
Washington, DC 20036