Apprenticeship in Africa
5. Diplomacy at the Dining Table
6. Learning to Drive a Bargain
11. A Moment of Cold War Intrigue
16. Back in the Heart of Europe
Appendix: Our Foreign Service Career
Illustrations
Judy (age twelve) with her mother, Esther Moscow, April 15, 1948
John’s mother, Doris Olsen Heimann, and her Chinese lover, Yao, en route to Shanghai, 1940
John (age eleven) and his mother, back in the United States, 1944
John (age twenty), a freshman in Harvard Yard, Autumn 1953
Judy (age seventeen), a freshman in the Radcliffe Quad, Autumn 1953
John and Judy and most of their Jakarta domestic staff, 1958
John walking behind Ambassador Howard P. Jones in Bandung, Java, during the Indonesian constitutional convention, 1959
Women’s International Club buffet lunch, Surabaya, 1960
Anita Hubert Cunningham holding newborn Nathalie, Surabaya, 1960
Judy in a becak in Java, Indonesia, 1960
View of Kuching, Sarawak, East Malaysia, 1957
Iban women bathing in a stream, Sarawak, 1957
John and Judy heading off to their first tandem assignments in Brussels, 1972
Judy and a Congolese student friend on her Kinshasa terrace, 1979
Back in Brussels, John, Judy, and John’s visiting father, Harry Heimann, 1984
The Hague, senior embassy officials, 1987
Staff members in front of the US Consulate General, Bordeaux, France, 1989
Judy with Mayor Louis Longequeue of Limoges, France, and Ambassador Joe M. Rodgers, 1987
Judy with Mayor Jacques Chaban-Delmas of Bordeaux and the prefect of Aquitaine, 1988
Sud Ouest, November 11, 1990, page 2, carried in its frame to the scene of the French hostage-taking in March 1991
Judy, as refugee coordinator at the US Embassy in Manila, visiting children of Vietnamese boat people on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines, 1992
Judy and John in their retirement home on the Chesapeake Bay, 1998
Prologue
Memory is a funny thing. I cannot remember where I left my keys an hour ago. But, if I concentrate, I can clearly remember me at seventeen, standing next to the Christmas tree in our comfortably shabby sixth-floor walk-up apartment on York Avenue in Manhattan. I was standing perfectly still, better to observe my wonderful mother look at twenty-year-old John Heimann. John was a Harvard classmate I had met that fall, and I already suspected he would be my life’s companion.
My mother, a tall, good-looking, clever, and worldly woman, had sought divorce (when I was eight years old) despite what she knew would be our consequent straitened circumstances. She had found she preferred having lovers she could send home, rather than continue being the wife of my father, Warren Moscow. He was a man she liked and respected as a talented journalist, but after years of trying, she found she could not love him enough to give away her independence.
By now (1953), I had long been the person she cared most about in the world. And I could see she was looking at John as someone who very likely would marry me in the next few years. He had made no secret of his plan to take me away to the ends of the earth, as he pursued his dream career as an American diplomat, beginning right after college.
I could read her expressions so well that it was almost as if she said out loud: “This young man is going to take Judy away into worlds where I cannot follow. But he is going to make her happy. It would be wrong for me to try to hold her back.” She looked over at me, and our eyes locked. My gratitude for her generous spirit brought me almost to tears. I promised myself then that I would—at least in letters—let her know, as truthfully as I could,
