Edith Sampson in Austria: The Promise and Limits of Person-to-Person Diplomacy in the Early Cold War

Edith Sampson in Austria: The Promise and Limits of Person-to-Person Diplomacy in the Early Cold War

By Athan Biss

In the first week of June 1951, Edith Spurlock Sampson, a fifty-year-old African American attorney from Chicago’s South Side, arrived in Vienna as a goodwill ambassador under the auspices of the United States Information Service (USIS).