I was back in Warsaw in time for September 1, 1939, when the first German bombers came over at the start of World War II. In February 1939 I was transferred to Warsaw, and a month after that I was assigned temporarily to Bucharest. On September 28 I began at Moscow a foreign service career that kept me wandering until 1967, or thirty years off-and-on. On September 21 Czechoslovakia ceded the Sudetenland to Hitler's Germany. On September 14, 1938, three days before a hurricane hit the New England coast, I sailed from New York on the President Roosevelt for Hamburg, en route to Moscow. Actually I never wanted to be anything great, I just wanted people to think I was great. At other times I wanted to be a great magician, a great singer, a great actor, and just simply great.
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At this stage in my development I wanted to be another Walter Johnson, but that comes hard when you reach your full five-seven at 15. Actually it was 21 to 1 because they scored in the ninth, but negotiations were held and it was agreed that the game should go down in history as 20-0. At fourteen, in the Insect sandlot baseball league, I pitched a nine-inning shutout. If you stop playing in the middle of the piece and say to the pianist, “Let's take that line over,” you are not invited back. At seven I gave my first and last violin recital. At age four I drank a bottle of iodine but was saved by frantic purging. When I was three, I fell off a bench and broke my arm. This book does not expose world-shaking international negotiations or raise the curtain on backstage deliberations but seeks merely to entertain and to inform about the sort of events that can happen to those who climb round-by-round up the foreign service career ladder.Prologue After you serve in half a dozen posts and adjust every three years to changes in political, economic, climatic, geographic, educational, linguistic, cultural and recreational conditions, you look back on the good times and the rough times, the rewards, frustrations, compensations, sacrifices, inconveniences, and physical dangers and say to yourself that you ought to put it all down on paper.
This is the book that every foreign service retiree intends to write but seldom gets around to, an account of experiences on the job. “Donnerwetter! Was Sie alles erlebt haben!” “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be Am an attendant lord, one that will doTo swell a progress, start a scene or two,Advise the prince no doubt, an easy tool,Deferential, glad to be of use,Politic, cautious, and meticulous Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse At times, indeed, almost ridiculous -Almost, at times, the Fool.” “Well-tempered,” in equal temperament, as in Bach's “Well-Tempered Clavier.” TEMPERAMENT: In music, a system of tuning in which tones of very nearly the same pitch, like C sharp and D flat, are made to sound alike by slightly 'tempering' them (that is, slightly raising or lowering them). Reminiscences of the United States Foreign Service Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project