whalebone corsets and bustles. Among them was a small Asian gentleman.
“Who was this?” I asked Aunt Lina, as we sat on her sofa going through the album one Sunday evening.
“That was your Japanese relative, Joseph Hardy Neesima,” she replied, and told me the story that Japanese, as I discovered years later, remember and repeat to this day. His name was Nijima Jo, a twenty-year-old Samurai who stole out of Japan in 1864, four years before the Meiji Restoration. Under the Tokugawa Shoguns, his country had been closed for 250 years, and emigration was a capital crime. But Admiral Perry’s black ships had appeared in Japanese waters ten years before, bringing evidence of a different world, new technology, and strong Christian beliefs that Nijima and other young Japanese were not permitted to study. So frustrated that he became physically ill, Nijima had to escape. With the help of a Russian Orthodox priest and an American packet-schooner skipper, he made his way to Shanghai. There, in the roads of the Whampoa River, he found an American clipper ship, the Wild Rover, owned by Alpheus Hardy, Aunt Lina’s grandfather. Nijima, an extraordinarily focused young man, made straight for the vessel and found a job as cabin boy.
By the time Wild Rover reached Boston a year later, stopping in Hong Kong and Manila among other Asian ports, Nijima had learned English, translated portions of his Chinese Bible into English, and made strong friendships with key members of the crew, most notably the captain, who arranged for him to meet the boss. In 1865, Alpheus Hardy, a handsome, imposing, and deeply religious man, received Nijima in his Boston office, standing next to a large rolltop desk.
“Why did you come here?” he asked, simply.
“This is why I came,” Nijima replied, and placed on the desk several pages of the New Testament he had translated. Hardy, impressed, asked him to write an essay that described his feelings and motivations. In Nijima’s quaint but passionate prose, he told Hardy and his wife that he had felt like a “rat in a bag” in Japan. Originally thinking to hire him for the household, they were so moved that they adopted him as their son.
Nijima became a close member of the Hardy family for the next ten years, calling himself Joseph Hardy Neesima. Under Alpheus’s patronage and guidance, he studied with characteristic intensity and graduated from Phillips Academy Andover, Amherst College, and Andover Theological Seminary. In 1875, he returned to Japan to found the country’s first, and still largest and most successful, Christian university, in Kyoto. He called it the Doshisha (Society of Friends). Every year Mary Caroline Hardy received an engraved invitation to attend graduation. Nijima’s story fascinated me. Like Aunt Mabel’s Chinese temple tales, the early Japanese connection would echo in later years. With great fanfare, my father and I attended the Doshisha centennial anniversary in 1975, while I was serving in our embassy in Tokyo.
Choices at Harvard
Asian inklings aside, my focus at Harvard remained on preparing for a Foreign Service career in Europe. Diplomatic history and German language training were main subjects. My honors thesis traced the passage of the Marshall Plan through Congress. During my undergraduate years, Eisenhower was president, the role of the United States as leader of the West solidified, and the lines of battle for the Cold War hardened. U.S. interest in world affairs was strong and growing. University teaching began to reflect these realities. Courses I took from McGeorge Bundy and Arthur Schlesinger and lectures I audited by Henry Kissinger lent intellectual life and shape to my choice of calling.
Having decided early what I wanted to do, I began unconsciously searching for someone to do it with. Deep down, the idea of launching into a complicated international life without a mate terrified me. Sheila Maynard was a year behind me at Radcliffe. We had both been born in 1936, midway between the Great Depression and World War II, in the same Upper East Side New York hospital. We did not know each other then, but our parents did. They were members of a socially cohesive group of professionals––lawyers, architects, and investment bankers––thus assuring that, one day, we would meet. We found each other in February of my junior year at a ghastly, smoke-filled, post-exam party in a crowded dormitory room, drinking gin out of Styrofoam cups. We sat down and started talking. Three hours later we were astonished to find that we had not run out of things to say. The conversation has lasted more than fifty years. I gave up rowing my senior year in order to court her. In the winter of 1957, my senior year, I startled Sheila and myself by proposing, out of the blue, that she come with me on my chosen adventure and be the mother of my children. Equally startling, she agreed. We married just after graduation.
Convincing the Family
Diplomacy was an unorthodox choice, particularly in a family whose professional traditions were architecture and law. My grandfather, Charles A. Platt, had been a leading architect. He designed the Freer Gallery, Deerfield Academy, and Phillips Andover as well as a host of grand residences for the tycoons of his time. My father, Geoffrey, had a distinguished career of his own, which culminated as New York City’s first Landmarks Commissioner. Happily, my father had no preconceived notions of what I should become. On the contrary, when I asked him early in my teens whether I should become an architect, he responded in the kindest manner, “If you have to ask, you should not be one.” He advised me to go with my own passion.
My mother had doubts about a son “in the Diplomatic,” but history helped her get used to the idea. Her grandfather ’s successful stint as U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s from 1899 to1905 had provided rich nuggets of family lore. Joseph H. Choate’s skirmish with the Argentine foreign minister during a reception at Claridge’s Hotel is still famous. The minister, decked out like a Roxy Theater doorman in an elaborate court uniform with epaulets and frogs, mistook Choate for a waiter. This was a common occurrence in those days, as American diplomats, representing an egalitarian republic, wore only black tie or white tie and tails on formal occasions.
“My man, call me a cab,” the minister exclaimed. A crowd gathered, knowing Choate was fast on his feet.
“You are a cab, sir,” he replied.
In his early twenties, my mother ’s father, Joseph Jr., served two years as Ambassador Choate’s private secretary. He was the duty officer on August 14, 1900, the day the Boxer Rebellion ended and the Siege of Peking was lifted. The U.S. Embassy in London was the telecommunications center for information about the international expeditionary force sent to rescue the foreign legations. Official London and royal London were all at the annual garden party at Buckingham Palace. My grandfather put on his striped pants and frock coat, took a hansom cab to the palace with the fateful telegram, and found himself the instant man of the hour. A reticent and self-effacing person, Pa Choate told me later this was the highpoint of his life. His story also made it easier for my mother to accept the idea of a son in the Foreign Service.
My father-in-law, Walter Maynard, a leading Wall Street investment analyst and banker, had little time for government officials and told me so in the most genial way. Assistant secretaries were a dime a dozen, he said. Wall Street had a comfortably clear and quantitative way of measuring performance. The more money you made, the better you were. Even though I was only twenty-one and painfully green (he tactfully diverted me from asking for Sheila’s hand as we stood side by side in a downtown club men’s room), Walter respected my judgment in choosing his daughter. We liked each other from the beginning. He knew that my mind was made up and simply advised me to consider his profession as a fallback, should my plans fail to work out.
Convincing the U.S. Government
His advice was well taken. I may have decided to join the Foreign Service, but the service had hardly decided to join me. The entrance exams were notoriously competitive. In 1957, the first year I applied, 240 officers were chosen from a field of 14,000. Failure was common, and many subsequently successful diplomats
