The noblest characters in the impeachment melodrama were the State Department foreign service officers who attempted to represent the United States honorably in Ukraine. Chief among them was Marie Yovanovitch, our ambassador in Kyiv, who was summarily fired by Trump in April 2019. The reason, we later learned, was that her direct diplomacy had thwarted Trump’s machinations and of his personal lawyer. , Rodolphe Giuliani.

Yovanovitch became a momentary celebrity during impeachment hearings. She displayed the laid-back professionalism of a career diplomat trained in the grotesque vortex of the Trump White House. This decency was underscored by Trump’s cheap attack on Twitter as she began her testimony: “Wherever Marie Yovanovitch went, she went wrong. It started in Somalia, how did it go?

When Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, read that smirking tweet to Yovanovitch, she somehow managed a self-effacing diplomatic response: “I don’t think I have such powers. Not in Mogadishu, Somalia. Not in other places.

Yovanovitch has now penned a subtle and engaging memoir, “Lessons From the Edge.” While this converges on her unwanted moment of national prominence, the freshest part is the story of her rise through the Foreign Service to become US Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, and finally Ukraine.

Being an American career diplomat is a thankless job, even at the best of times. Luxury positions, at home and abroad, are given to political appointees who are sometimes incredibly unqualified, and not just in the Trump administration. The State Department bureaucracy can be obtuse, Congress is a relentless intervenor and special litigator, and host governments make demands that America often cannot or should not meet.

Yovanovitch describes herself as “an introvert by nature,” and living under the State Department canopy seemed to suit her. A bachelor raised by Russian immigrant parents, she spent the last years of her career accompanied by her mother, “Mama,” who was as unflappable as her ambassador daughter.

Yovanovitch loved tough assignments in tough, corruption-ridden countries where the American ideal was truly a beacon. In Somalia, she “felt like a character in a Graham Greene novel”. She was pursued by a loving nephew of the country’s president while pushing back “brazenly.” . . acts of petty corruption” while managing the embassy fleet and other first-assignment administrative duties. In post-Communist Russia, she observed the rise of oligarchs, as “insiders and crooks were able to outsmart the system and scoop up sovereign assets.”

During a first tour of Kyiv as deputy head of mission, she encountered another group of “newly created oligarchs” and the government’s “telephone justice” system, under which politicians would “pick up the phone and say prosecutors and judges what to do”. This initial mission prepared her for what she will encounter later when she returns as an ambassador in 2016.

Her first ambassadorship was in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, truly “the hinterland”, to use Rudyard Kipling’s expression. This, too, was a lawless place, run by local crime bosses trying to shake off the American ambassador and everyone else. Yovanovitch has learned to hold on. During his meeting with the president, “I told him bluntly that international donors and investors would not put their money in a country run by criminals.”

A stint as ambassador to Armenia led her to wonder why President Barack Obama gave in to Turkish pressure and rescinded a campaign promise to acknowledge the Ottoman Genocide of Armenians in 1915. “The cognitive dissonance of our politics have imposed an emotional price on me,” she wrote. “We are, after all, a nation not just of interests but of values.”

All of these assignments helped prepare Yovanovitch for her posting to Kyiv as an ambassador. Corruption remained endemic there. The country had a voracious array of oligarchs who, unlike those in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, had not been cowed into political submission. Yovanovitch tried to identify honest government officials and business leaders and help them.

She also tried to help Ukraine deal with Russian aggression. Putin’s forces had seized Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014, and Yovanovitch worked with Kurt Volker, Trump’s special envoy, to try to implement the peace accords. Minsk from 2014-15 and stabilize the Russian-dominated enclaves of Donetsk and Luhansk. Trump had little use for Ukraine. Yovanovitch writes that he told visiting President Petro Poroshenko in June 2017 that “Crimea was Russian, because the locals spoke Russian.” To his credit, Trump agreed to send the Ukrainians Javelin anti-tank missiles.

Yovanovitch, “a self-described rule follower,” had no idea what was in store for her. She wandered through a political jungle with the candid goodwill of a career civil servant. His efforts at good government upset the oligarchs and their political friends in America. Her nemesis, though oblivious, was Giuliani, who knew Ukraine because he had done business there.

Giuliani was using his Ukrainian contacts to do some dirt on Joe Biden, the likely Democratic nominee against Trump in 2020. Yovanovitch’s fatal mistake may have been denying a visa to a “corrupt” former attorney general named Viktor Shokin. Unbeknownst to him, Shokin wanted the visa to travel to New York to throw dirt at Giuliani.

Yovanovitch describes her disappearance as ambassador as beginning with the Trump circle fleeing their displeasure with her and culminating in articles in The Hill falsely accusing her of sabotaging a supposed “anti-corruption crusader” named Yuri Lutsenko. Lutsenko had provided information to Giuliani for his file on Biden and his son Hunter, who had worked for a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma that had been accused of corrupt practices. Yovanovitch’s career, built so carefully over so many years of difficult postings, suddenly came crashing down. She was called home and fired as an ambassador, at Trump’s insistence.

The misdeeds of Trump and Giuliani are so well known that reading them one more time is like reliving a bad dream. What is more troubling about this account is the behavior of some senior State Department officials – the people who should have protected a brave and hardworking ambassador.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo bowed to pressure from the White House even as he issued a grandiose ‘ethics statement’ calling on his underlings to demonstrate ‘uncompromising personal and professional integrity’. Later, Pompeo attempted to suppress the testimony of Yovanovitch and other State Department officers before Schiff’s committee. David Hale, undersecretary for political affairs and a distinguished career officer, suggested that Yovanovitch save himself by writing a letter “expressing his loyalty to Trump.” She tried, but she couldn’t do it.

Ukraine grew as a country in the years following Yovanovitch’s removal as ambassador. Zelensky, a comedian who made a name for himself playing a television president who dares to criticize the oligarchs, actually became president, crushing billionaire Poroshenko with 73% of vote in April 2019. Trump tried to extort favors from Zelensky in exchange for American weapons in July 2019, during his famous “perfect” phone call. But Zelensky kept rolling toward his date with the story of the Russian invasion.

Yovanovitch emerges from this account as a model of what America should expect from its diplomats: courageous, unwavering, naively politically aloof. The saddest moment in her book comes near the end, when she talks about what her country had become under Trump. “The parallels with Ukraine, where clientelism and politics often trumped principle and patriotism, were uncomfortably close for comfort.”

Ukraine has found its identity and national unity under fire. The reader can only hope that the same is true for America.

David Ignatius writes twice a week an article on foreign affairs column for the Washington Post. His latest novel is “the paladin.”