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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 in Europe for young officers and lots in Asia, provided you learnt a core language. Senator McCarthy had purged the Foreign Service of many competent China specialists. Chinese was culturally relevant to more Asian countries than any other language. Personnel officers, I had learned the hard way, did not care what you knew before you entered the Foreign Service. But if they made their own investment in training you, they had to justify your onward assignments to congressional watchdogs. In cold blood, I decided that Chinese language training represented the perfect combination of interest, expense, and opportunity. I applied for a training slot two years hence. The officer in Personnel told me to forget about it. An untried junior FSO with no Asia background had little chance. I urged him to remember my face, because I would keep coming back until he approved my request.

Three months later, after passing a grueling FSI course on immigration law and visa procedures, we left Washington for Windsor, Sheila, infant son Adam and I, stuffed into a small German car. The plan was to issue visas by day, read about China at night, and see where that would lead.

The First Call

The Consulate in Windsor was a four-man post where Foreign Service officers traditionally began or ended their careers. I was by far the most junior, the only vice consul in a section that issued eight thousand visas a year to immigrants, Canadian commuters, and visitors from all over the world. The offices were on one floor of an old office building on the Detroit River, with the skyline of the Promised Land shining through the window. A 23-year-old novice, I was to decide who got to go there and who did not. replacing a consul of long tenure, locally known for his skill at the poker table, and more so for entertaining guests in his office barefoot. He suffered from a psoriasis condition made worse by wearing shoes. Colleagues reported that he would put his scaly feet on the desk when meeting others with whom he felt at ease.

The new boss had spent years as a clerk in debilitating posts along the Mosquito Coast in Central America. He had become a Foreign Service officer in the late 1950s under the Wriston program, which sought to integrate into one officer corps all the different components that made up the service, including the Foreign Service Staff and the Civil Service. Fresh from an assignment heading the visa section in a large embassy in Latin America, Windsor was his first command.

Sheila and I prepared meticulously for our formal first call on the consul and his wife. Carefully following the guidance from ”Social Usage in the Foreign Service,” a State Department manual which we had been told to consult for all such occasions, we dressed in our best, she wearing hat and gloves, and I a dark blue suit. My calling card was turned down at the corner, with the appropriate initials penciled in as instructed.

Walking down the flagstone path to the modest brick suburban house that served as the residence of the ranking American official in Windsor, we were apprehensive about our first official occasion as a Foreign Service family abroad. The consul met us at the door, dressed in a pair of khaki shorts and nothing more. Bald, with knobby knees, bunions, and undisciplined sprouts of chest hair, he greeted us affably and invited us out onto the back porch to meet his wife and enjoy a glass of iced tea.

Also dressed in khaki shorts, but with a halter-top, she welcomed us warmly. We sat stiffly on the porch glider, which had not been oiled for some time and squeaked with every movement back and forth.

The women carried the burden of the small talk that followed, with Sheila asking the consul’s wife about her life and work. In soft tones from her native Virginia (the boss was also from there), she told us that she had been trained as a nurse, a profession that had served her well in the unhealthy climate of coastal Central America.

“I set great store by enemas, Sheila,” she said. “Whenever I’m feeling a mite puny, I just bend over and take a quart.”

The glider squeaked loudly as it moved back and forth in the dead silence that followed.

“How was your trip up to Windsor?” Sheila asked, alertly filling the void.

“Oh, we had a horrible time with our medical exam in Washington,” came the reply. “You see, neither me nor my daughter [a sallow 21-year-old who accompanied the new top couple] could produce the stool specimen required. It was Friday, and we thought we’d be stuck the whole weekend.”

The glider squeaked back and forth.

“So, what did you do next?” Sheila asked, helpfully.

“Well, my husband never suffered from this complaint. He produced a big one. We just cut it in three pieces and went on our way. That’s how we got to Windsor, Sheila!”

After a few more squeaks of the glider, we took our leave,walked to the car, drove around the corner, stopped, and broke down laughing. What have we gotten into, we wondered? Was this the same Foreign Service that produced Chip Bohlen?

Composing ourselves, we drove back to our hotel in silence.“Bend over and take a quart” became a secret family motto. But hilarity aside, our first call troubled and even shamed us. It took years before we told others of the conversation.

Management and Diplomatic Training

My colleagues were weak. The leadership example set by the new principal officer included driving the official car home each afternoon to watch Queen for a Day. The head of the visa section, a cultured and fastidious Europeanist, turned out to be an alcoholic who binged when his domineering wife was away, drinking vodka out of a paper bag in his desk drawer between visa applicants. I had not expected as the most junior of officers to have to send my supervisor home. The Consul kept the situation at arm’s length. “You handle it,” he said.

I did, and, in effect, ran the visa section. The staff, eleven .0214smart polyglot Canadian women from Ontario, Quebec, Serbia,with long experience in the Consular Service, kept me from making mistakes. I had much broader responsibility than most of my contemporaries working on one specialized kind of immigration problem in the huge visa assembly lines in Toronto, Montreal, and Rome. With immigration lawyers crossing from Detroit to push their cases, and congressional staffs a mere phone call away, I had to know the law and the procedures cold.

The flow of applicants provided endless variety. The Australian female bullwhip champion, a Polish spy, Cuban baseball players, Japanese chicken sexers, suspected Lebanese marriage frauds, and midget wrestlers were among my “clients.” I learned early one of the basic skills of diplomacy––imparting difficult news in a positive way. The cherry-cheeked grandmother had to be told that she had failed the Wasserman test for syphilis, but could get a visa after a big shot of penicillin. The middle-aged couple who had never formally wed despite twenty years together had to be told to go get quietly married during the lunch hour, lest their teen-age daughter find out she was illegitimate. The Iranian student who married an American prostitute from the pits of Detroit had to be told that this relationship would not get him into the United States or her out of jail.

Sheila and I, insular New Yorkers by birth, learned a lot about the American Middle West (two of our daughters-in-law are Michiganders). I found out how the United States and Canada manage their peaceful 4000-mile-long border, knowledge still relevant in the current age of borderless terrorism. We made lifelong friends. Our family grew, with the birth of second son Oliver in 1960. Inspired by a great folksinger named Odetta, I took up the guitar and sang to my boys, a practice that turned into a semiprofessional passion in later years.

My supervisors, such as they were, appreciated what I did for them and wrote glowing efficiency reports, which in turn convinced personnel in Washington to take a gamble and assign me to Chinese language training. We were thrilled when the word came through at the end of 1961. Reading the five-foot shelf on China during long Windsor evenings had implanted a fascination that was to last a lifetime. Two years of intensive Mandarin––one in Washington and one in Taiwan––would start us down a new path after a grim, if instructive start in the Foreign Service.