Lessons from the Edge

February 21, 2022
The former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, who got unwillingly caught up in Donald Trump’s first impeachment, examines corruption abroad and at home in this stinging memoir. Yovanovitch was removed from her ambassadorship in Kiev in 2019 amid fabricated accusations of collusion with Ukrainian figures to subvert the 2016 U.S. presidential election and claims that she “had spoken with ‘disdain’ about the Trump administration.” As she writes, the allegations arose from efforts by Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani and a Ukrainian prosecutor to tar candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter with insinuations of corrupt dealings in Ukraine. Yovanovitch gives a gripping account of this Kafkaesque scandal, complete with Trump’s drive-by tweets—“Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad”—and her moving testimony at congressional impeachment hearings. She sets it within an engrossing recap of her diplomatic career in postings to Somalia and ex-Soviet nations, during which she was subjected to sexist indignities (while ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, she was asked by a press attaché to serve cookies to a reporter) and enmeshed in wrangles to promote reforms aimed at bolstering human rights and reducing rampant corruption in foreign governments (and, eventually, America’s). Full of shrewd insights and bitter ironies, Yovanovitch’s saga offers a revealing insider’s take on the labyrinth of foreign policy and on one of the most sordid episodes of Trump’s presidency. Photos.

March 1, 2022
A veteran Foreign Service officer tells all. In this fine memoir, Yovanovitch (b. 1958) chronicles her career in the Foreign Service, where she has served in a variety of posts, with an emphasis on the Soviet and post-Soviet world. Her father left the Soviet Union as a child, and her mother survived World War II in Nazi Germany. As immigrants in Canada, they met and married in 1958, moved to the U.S. in 1962, and raised a family on the small salary of a boarding school teacher. As hardworking as her parents, Marie excelled in high school and, later, at Princeton. After graduation, a Russian-language program in Moscow cemented her fascination with world affairs, and she joined the Foreign Service in 1986. The author writes about the sexism she experienced in the service, noting how "pale, male, and Yale" was a popular profile of its employees. One of her first assignments was Somalia, an impoverished, corrupt, and often dangerous failed state, but she did well. Tours in Uzbekistan and Moscow in the 1990s and Ukraine in 2001 solidified her expertise on Russia and its former provinces after the Soviet Union's collapse, and she rose to the top of her profession as ambassador to Kyrgyzstan in 2005, Armenia in 2008, and Ukraine in 2016. The author delivers captivating accounts of her ambassadorial duties, which included furthering American interests, discouraging and fighting corruption, and promoting capitalism, good government, human rights, and the rule of law. Although successful on many issues, Yovanovitch does not deny that the three ex-Soviet provinces where she served remain corrupt and ill-governed. She was ambassador to Ukraine in 2019 when then-President Donald Trump and his allies began pressuring its government to gather dirt on his rival, Joe Biden. Apparently, Yovanovitch showed insufficient enthusiasm for the job; after a nasty smear campaign, she was fired. A compelling memoir of diplomatic service behind the old Iron Curtain.

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Starred review from March 1, 2022
After her magnetic congressional testimony during Donald Trump's first impeachment trial, Yovanovitch was hailed as a "rock star," a "badass." She felt anything but. As a career public servant posted to danger zones in lands ruled by corrupt regimes from Somalia to Kyrgyzstan, Yovanovitch's pragmatic mantra was "keep your head down." Wherever her diplomatic missions took her, Yovanovitch epitomized foreign service office philosophy, hewing to the principle of representing American ideals and policies with dignity and integrity. This worked well for her until Trump and his henchmen came along. In a far-reaching memoir that traces her family's migration from Russia to North America and her own trajectory from shy private school student to ambitious State Department careerist, Yovanovitch divulges in granular detail the situation on the ground in every country she served while illuminating the deft juggling act required when one is charged with bringing democracy to nations mired in totalitarianism or authoritarianism. Nowhere was that task more challenging than in her posting as ambassador to Ukraine during the Trump administration, which set her in the crosshairs of nefarious politicians both abroad and at home. A superbly crafted and intimately revealing self-portrait of a true hero of American diplomacy. Pair this with Fiona Hill's There Is Nothing for You Here (2021).

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