EDITOR’S CORNER
Biographic Information (cont.)
As the reader of these scrolled pages may have noticed, only a small band of colleagues make up the staff and Editorial Advisory Board of this journal. But as Seneca so wisely noted long ago, “It is quality rather than quantity that matters.”
Well, all right, I’ll agree that quantity has its place in life, but certainly that old adage pertains to the production personnel of American Diplomacy, if not necessarily to all things.
Continuing our presentation of biographic information on our colleagues in the last “issue,” the brief sketches which follow will shed some small amount of light on the origins, preparation, and accomplishments of several other American Diplomacy individuals, including yours truly. We can not do justice to them as people in such short items, except for myself; we can only hope to limn their impressive backgrounds and to accord thereby a small measure of recognition for their services to our joint internet publishing effort.
~ Ed.
Carl R. Fritz
For twenty-five years, 1951 to 1976, Carl Fritz held senior U. S. foreign aid agency positions abroad and in Washington. The list of areas or countries in which he served overseas includes East Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Thailand. For the next twelve after 1976 years he served as a private consultant in Indonesia and Bangladesh. Retired in North Carolina since 1989, among other interests he is now a member of this journal’s Editorial Advisory Board and long held the presidency of the NC Triangle chapter of the Society for International Development.
Carl, originally from Ohio, earned an undergraduate degree at Heidelberg College in that state, plus a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University. During 1966 – 1967, he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Princeton University. Carl has one book to his credit, Combating Nutritional Blindness in Children (1980), and has published a number of articles on economic development questions. American Diplomacy included his recollections of service in Vietnam in its inaugural issue of September 1996.
He and his wife, Tarinee, live in Chapel Hill, N. C.
Richard H. Kohn
Dick Kohn, Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (U.N.C.), also fills the post of American Diplomacy Editorial Advisory Board member and is Executive Secretary of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies, based at U.N.C. A native of Wisconsin, Dick did his undergraduate studies at Harvard and earned masters and doctoral degrees in history from the University of Wisconsin. He has taught full time or held visiting appointments at City College of New York, Rutgers University, the Army War College, the National War College, and Johns Hopkins University.
From 1981 to 1991, Dick served as Chief Historian, U. S. Air Force, at the Pentagon in Washington. Since the latter year, he has been at U.N.C., heading up the Triangle Universities Security Seminar and the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense, in addition to his duties as history professor.
He has written or edited eight books and authored some two dozen scholarly articles in the field of U. S. military history. This journal presented his essay, “Civilian Control of the Military,” in its Volume II, number 1. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, Professor Kohn also serves as consultant, advisor or board member to numerous national historical and military organizations.
Dick and his wife, Lynne, have lived for the past six years in Durham, N. C.
Henry E. Mattox
The journal’s editor was a Foreign Service officer from 1957 to 1980, serving abroad in France, Portugal, Brazil, Nepal, Haiti, England, and Egypt, in addition to a couple of Washington assignments. After retiring from the Service to North Carolina, he entered academe, studying, writing, and teaching part time, a course of action that led to a Ph.D. in U. S. diplomatic history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1986. His publications include Twilight of Amateur Diplomacy: America’s Foreign Service and its Senior Officers in the 1890s (1989) and a volume in sports history, Army Football in 1945 (1990), plus numerous scholarly articles.
A native of Mississippi, Henry served in the army during the Korean War, returned to school upon discharge to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics. He taught briefly at Ole Miss, and soon thereafter entered the Foreign Service.
Henry lives with his wife, Shelley (who has a piece on life in the Foreign Service in this issue of American Diplomacy), in Chapel Hill with their several German Shepherds.
Richard Bartlett Moon
Born in Missouri, Editorial Board Member Bart Moon served as a U. S. diplomatic and consular officer for 34 years, retiring in 1990. He is now the president of a nonprofit agency that provides interpreting, translating, and other assistance to the growing Spanish-speaking population of Chatham Country, N. C., where he lives with his wife, Calista.
After graduating from the University of Missouri and serving for two years in the Air Force during the Korean War, Bart began his U. S. Foreign Service career abroad with appointment to Paris, followed by assignments to Antananarivo, Quito, Caracas, San Jose, and Maracaibo. In 1980, he returned to Embassy Caracas as deputy chief of mission and chargé for four years. Later he held assignments as political advisor to the commander in chief of U. S. Southern Command and as senior Foreign Service inspector. During these years he also had opportunities to pursue graduate studies at Berkeley, Columbia, and the U. S. Naval War College.
Bart has a special interest in the journal’s feature on Foreign Service personnel who pulled tours in Vietnam during the war. He would be pleased to hear from any readers who have prepared reminiscences on that period.
J. Edgar Williams
Ed Williams grew up in Wilmington, N. C. Following service in the Army of Occupation in Japan at the end of World War II, he received BA and MA degrees from U. N. C. – Chapel Hill in the early 1950s. He also studied in New Zealand on a Fulbright Scholarship, 1952 – 1953, and later earned a master’s degree in economics at Yale University.
Entering the Foreign Service in 1954, Ed’s many posts abroad include assignments to London, Madrid, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Auckland (as consul general), and Ottawa. In Washington, he had senior responsibilities in the Department of State’s Commercial Policy Division. He retired and returned to North Carolina in 1981, taking up residence at Fearrington Village near Chapel Hill.
After teaching part time at U. N. C. for five years, Ed began work for the Department of State as an escort-interpreter for Spanish-speaking official visitors to the United States, a continuing activity that keeps him fully occupied — except when he pitches in as a member of this journal’s Editorial Advisory Board.