Edwin O. Reischauer (1910–90) was America's most influential scholar of Japanese history and politics during the 1940s and 1950s, after which he served as U.S. ambassador to Japan between 1961 and 1966. George R. Packard, a special assistant to the ambassador in 1963–65, offers an insider's perspective in this admiring but not uncritical biography. Packard was given access to the original, unabridged manuscript of Reischauer's condensed 1986 autobiography and to his private correspondence from 1961 until his retirement. Packard also draws on interviews with former colleagues, students, and government officials in Japan and the United States. The result is a lively account, written with panache, that excels in describing Reischauer's foreign policy ideas and his conflicted views of the Vietnam War.
Packard portrays Reischauer as genial, down to earth, kind to students, lacking in guile, self-confident, and rarely responsive to scholarly critics. He was also intensely private and so career...
