first set of exams before graduating from Harvard in 1957 and fell short. The examiners said I knew nothing about economics and had to fix that. They encouraged me to try again once I had. A solid commitment to the career was rare in someone so young, they said, implying that I needed to go away and grow up some.
That afternoon, I went to call on Paul Nitze at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). The father of a classmate at college (as well as Walter Maynard’s Harvard roommate), he was a founder of SAIS, former head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under Dean Acheson, and a respected member of the Washington foreign policy establishment. I had consulted him earlier on the benefits of graduate school for a Foreign Service career. A blunt and friendly mentor, he had advised that I take the exams first. If I got in, the Foreign Service would train me on the job. If I did not pass, come and see him. Graduate school could help.
The two years at SAIS were stimulating and eventful. We lived in a tiny house in Georgetown and fell in love with the city that was to become our headquarters for the next thirty-five years. The school, now renamed after Nitze, was the perfect place to start learning the Washington ropes. Small then, with a student body limited to seventy-five by the size of the two converted townhouses in which it was housed, the teaching was done by international figures with years of Washington knowledge, like Hans Morgenthau, and experienced practitioners, like Roger Hilsman and Nitze himself. Papers were graded on the quality of the interviews students conducted with working officials, rather than books cited.
SAIS taught us the mechanics of Washington. My formal academic focus remained on Europe. I studied advanced German, economics, history, psychological warfare, and the balance of power. But we were lucky to get a look at loftier levels of life in the capital. The columnist Joseph Alsop, an admirer of Sheila’s mother, befriended us when we arrived in Washington. He liked to sprinkle his guest lists with younger people and included us in some of his famous Georgetown dinner parties, where he gathered the top personalities and policy makers of the day. At one of these, his cousin, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, snapped my head back with the catty observation that the vain General Douglas MacArthur hid his baldness with an “armpit comb-over.”
Paul and Phyllis Nitze took us under their generous wings and included us in weekend activities at their spectacular farm on the Potomac in Maryland. Sheila and I were close to the Nitze children and later our boys to their grandchildren. The weekends at the farm were a cozy mix of family, policy talk, and sport, featuring ferocious tennis games between people like the CIA’s Desmond Fitzgerald, Stewart Alsop, and a variety of admirals and generals. I remember asking Paul at one of these events what he thought of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. “Foster Dulles was a bore and a fart!” Nitze replied, never one to mince words.
We started our family. Adam was born in July 1958. His first month of life was marked by a severe case of pneumonia, which almost killed him and taught his parents more about the fragility and value of life than anything that had happened before. Taking the advice of my father-in-law, I spent the summer of 1958 as a trainee at the Baltimore investment banking firm of Alex Brown and Sons, working in all their departments for a dollar an hour. We bought our first house, in the old town of Alexandria, and moved there.
I took the Foreign Service exams again. The Board of Examiners, noting that I had showed up once more, this time a year older, married, and a father, and with some real-world economic experience under my belt, decided to let me in. It took another year to complete the security and medical clearances (obtaining urine specimens from an infant was a challenge) and for the Congress to appropriate the money to bring in another class of new Foreign Service officers.
The call came in April 1959 to report to the A-100 course at the Foreign Service Institute, the State Department’s equivalent of boot camp. The choice was made.
2
Choosing China
A Rude Shock
In 1959, the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute, now located on a handsome Virginia campus named after Secretary of State George P. Shultz, occupied the garage of an ugly brick apartment building across the Potomac River named Arlington Towers. There, in hastily assembled, mostly windowless, wallboard compartments, our training as junior diplomats began. I reported to the “A-100” indoctrination program for new recruits, a gentle, dull survey course on the infrastructure of American diplomacy, the organization of the State Department and its constituent embassies and consulates abroad, and the roles and relationships of other government agencies involved in foreign policy. The eagerly awaited climax of our training came toward the end of the twelve-week course, when we learned where our first posts would be.
Eligible for assignment anywhere in the world, we were invited to state our preferences. A European history major from Harvard with a Johns Hopkins masters degree in international relations and tested German language skills might be considered for work in Europe. Right? Wrong! My orders were for the U.S. Consulate in Windsor, Ontario, where I was to serve as vice consul in the visa section. A quirk of geography had placed this Canadian border city due south of Detroit on a peninsula, the Foreign Service Post Report told us, of “poorly drained soil, whose principal crop is rutabagas.” Windsor produced cars and Canadian Club whiskey in flat, prosaic surroundings totally at variance with the dreams of a brand new diplomat bent on seeing the world and witnessing history.
My A-100 classmates, including future ambassadors Brandon Grove and Allen Holmes, thought my assignment was hilarious and razzed me incessantly. They had received orders for glamorous sounding places like Isfahan, Iran, Yaoundé, Cameroon, and Paris. I felt crushed and humiliated. State Department Personnel insisted I go, arguing that Canada was in the European Bureau and a good place to start. Three other applicants had wriggled out of the assignment, one because, he argued, his mother-in-law lived in Detroit.
A New Idea
Roaming the halls of FSI in shock and despair, I ran into Herbert Levin, an older friend from Harvard who had joined the service a few years before. What was he doing at the Institute? I asked. Studying intensive Mandarin Chinese, came the answer. Why? There are no posts there, I continued. Well, there will be, came the reply. History is on our side. The Far Eastern Bureau of the State Department, he added, is free of prejudice toward Jews, an important factor in his own decision.
Having never given a single thought to China, I was intrigued. The year was 1959. Mao’s Great Leap Forward was failing, and news of the resulting turmoil and starvation was filtering into the Western press.
I was influenced by the example of Charles E. “Chip” Bohlen, ambassador to the Soviet Union, France, and the Philippines and later under secretary of state. Bohlen had fashioned a famous career in the Foreign Service by choosing to study Russian at a time when the United States had no relationship with Moscow. He calculated that the time would come when U.S.-Soviet relations would be paramount and he would be in the thick of things. Chinese was clearly the current analog. My father had roomed with Bohlen at Harvard and introduced me to him the summer I went to college. He endeared himself to me instantly by telling how he had survived in life despite being expelled from St. Paul’s School five days before graduation (the legend was that he had inflated a condom in the library).
Levin, who already knew the ways of the bureaucracy, recommended that I put in a strong application for Chinese language training before I left for Canada, and then do the research during the two years in Windsor to determine if I really wanted to proceed. The State Department would not force a hard language on unwilling officers. The process was simply too expensive.
I pondered Herb’s advice and consulted Sheila. The hard language option provided a rudder for Foreign Service careers. There were few jobs
