Edwin O. Reischauer, Harvard Professor and U.S. Ambassador to Japan, was a seminal figure in both American education about and policy toward East Asia. In his detailed new biography, Dr. George Packard brings together his scholarship and his personal experience working for Reischauer in the early 1960s.

Re-centering the U.S.-Japan Alliance after the turmoil of the 1960 Security Treaty Riots, Ambassador Reischauer relied on his deep understanding of and sympathy for Japan, stabilizing the bilateral relationship for decades. Packard's insights on this history have bearing today as the United States and Japan seek to build a new partnership to cope with emerging challenges.

George R. Packard, president of the United States-Japan Foundation, is the former dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he founded Johns Hopkins's Foreign Policy Institute, The SAIS Review, the Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies, and the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in China. He has been a military intelligence officer, Foreign Service Officer, journalist, scholar, educator, and author.

Risa Brooks holds her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at San Diego and is currently Assistant Professor of Political Science at Marquette University. Brooks has also served as a post-doctoral fellow at CISAC, a Research Associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and an affiliate at Harvard University’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. Brooks’s research focuses on civil-military relations, military effectiveness, Middle East politics, and terrorist organizations. In her most recent work, she has begun to apply her broad expertise in these areas to examining the determinants of terrorist groups’ strategic choices. In addition to the many articles and book chapters she has published, Brooks authored Shaping Strategy: The Civil-Military Politics of Strategic Assessment (Princeton University Press, 2008) and Political-Military Relations and the Stability of Arab Regimes (Adelphi paper 324, Oxford University Press, 1998), and served as editor (with Elizabeth Stanley) of Creating Military Power: the Sources of Military Effectiveness (Stanford University Press, 2007).