Insight and Analysis from Foreign Affairs Practitioners and Scholars
Established 1996 • Raymond F. Smith, Editor
by Bob Baker Bamako, Mali, was in 1968 a poor, socialist dictatorship, largely in the Sahel region of West Africa. After my tour of duty in Kampala, Uganda, a telegram came from the Personnel Division in the U.S. Information Agency, … Read more
by Felicity O. Yost My father, Charles Woodruff Yost, joined the Foreign Service at the suggestion of former Secretary of State Robert Lansing, a family friend and neighbor in Watertown, New York. Lansing’s Watertown brother-in-law, Pastor Allen Macy Dulles, had … Read more
by Bob Baker My press releases from the U.S. Embassy in Bamako, Mali, on American aid programs were ignored by government order.t I had the idea to combine health propaganda with the fact of U.S. help in the vaccination campaign … Read more
by Bob BakerFrom USIA headquarters in Washington, I made official inspection trips to rate the officers at our African posts. One trip to Nigeria in 1982 was memorable. Nigeria’s Benin and Ife bronzes (12th-17th centuries) are among the world’s greatest … Read more
by Bob Baker”Don’t worry about the upsets in Kampala, Bob,” my new boss in Africa wrote reassuringly in 1967 before I left Washington, D.C, “It’s more like gang warfare in Chicago than a real war and has already calmed down.” … Read more
by Larry Lesser I’m thinking about a man I saw when I was a consular officer in the American Embassy New Delhi back in the ’60s. He was an American citizen; I’ll call him Abner Strong. He came in one … Read more
by Yale Richmond The participating States… Make it their aim to facilitate freer movement and contacts, individually and collectively, whether privately or officially, among persons, institutions and organizations of the participating States, and to contribute to the solution of the … Read more
by Bob BakerMy last years in Africa, 1968-1969, were in Mali, mostly sahel or desert except around the Niger and Senegal rivers. It was called “a hardship post” because of the isolation, heat, diseases, and the local Marxist anti-American dictatorship. … Read more
American Writers Who Were Diplomats
by William Sommers
by Yale Richmond (In the feline spirit of its subject matter, we are running this item as a purebred hybrid Foreign Service Life/Opinion piece. Ed.) In Vientiane, Laos, where I served 1954-56, we had a house cat that can truly be called … Read more
In connection with the death of noted pianist, Van Cliburn, James Wilson in the State Department’s Historical Division came up with the following 1960 Embassy Moscow dispatch drafted by our colleague Hans Tuch that may be of interest to our readers.