Читать книгу CHINA BOYS: How U.S. Relations With the PRC Began and Grew. A Personal Memoir - Nicholas MD Platt - Страница 8

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.