1 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign ...

only because I'm an example of it, a beneficiary. I was able to do what I wanted, and
believes I was able to do, to put it that way. I followed my convictions and my intellectual
belief, and I was able to do what I thought was most important and useful. I was able to
do that even as a junior officer in Iran, where I came to the conclusion the shah was rotten
and that he was holding back what most of his countrymen wanted and that we were on
the wrong track at that stage in our support for the Shah and our refusal to push for
democratic reforms.
My ambassador, Julius Holmes, protected me, even when the shah protested my
activities, by saying, "Easy on the young officer, he will learn and get over it. You know
him and like him." The Shah accepted Holmes’ advice. I was able to leave the Foreign
Service as a matter of conscience, on Vietnam, knowing that the reason I was leaving, for
policy differences on Vietnam, I could express myself usefully by working on the Hill. It
was a God-given opportunity, because I learned not only how my government works, but
in a much fuller sense, I was working at the forefront of the major foreign policy issues.
In those years, that's where the heat of the policy battle was, on the Hill, the issues of who
has responsibility for war and peace, what our policy should be on weapons of mass
destruction, in particular arms control measures, on assistance, on the end of the Cold
War. I would say that the work I was doing on the Hill was an absolutely invaluable
interplay with traditional diplomacy. It also underlined for me the reality, that so much of
what we call foreign affairs is done that way. Policy is not solely the province of the State
Department. It's on the Hill, it's in think tanks, it's in universities, in the NGOs, and to
some extent in business.
After leaving the Hill, where I had worked on many major issues, certainly on the issues
of war and peace, intelligence, arms control, I went to Fletcher as a teacher, as an
administrator, as a dean. I was able to express the ideas I had learned with incoming
groups of Foreign Service officers, not just of our country, but of other countries. Then, at
the end of the of the Soviet Union, working with Gorbachev’s perestroika group, I was
able to be in this remarkable period of intellectual engagement, in the formation of a new
world, so to speak, as a head of a foundation in Moscow, in the heart of the Kremlin, with
many of our most distinguished leaders, and many of theirs. That education that came
from that experience perhaps was the most profound. People like Sakharov on the one
hand and our great nuclear physicists on the other, Panofsky, Drell, Garwin, Bethe,
Kistiakowsky, Doty, Ruina, McNamara, Jerry Wiesner – it was an extraordinary group.
That was all part of my education, so when I went back to the Foreign Service as an
ambassador, I was ready, really prepared to work. I knew, certainly, how to run
organizations, because I had led several different kinds of organizations, and had, of
course, experienced embassy life earlier on and all through the career. I had been
involved in policymaking at the highest levels – White House, on the Hill, as well as in
the departments and other governments, and worked on all the major issues. But what
enabled all that to happen was the Foreign Service career itself, beginning with my A-100
group and the notion of the world of foreign affairs that we shared and grew up with.
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