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

Q: Did you go on to get your PhD?
MILLER: I didn’t finish. I finished the oral exams, which I passed, and I was three
quarters through the thesis on Sidney’s Arcadia which is a big, huge text, and a detailed
analysis of the text, of The Arcadia. Then I was about to take an ongoing step, to teach at
Columbia while doing course work and working on the Arcadia thesis I’d been teaching
at Harvard as a teaching assistant in order to pay for the costs of tuition to be able to
support my wife. Suzanne had to work as well, and I had to teach in order for us both to
get through. The struggle was a great pleasure and a great privilege. We worked very hard
and had a great time together. It was a very good way, I think to begin a marriage.
So I was going on to Columbia. I had been offered a job at Columbia. They asked me to
come as an instructor in Renaissance literature. A career in teaching was laid out, it would
seem. Then the Foreign Service called to say, come now or forget it. So the thesis on
Sydney’s Arcadia was set aside.
Q: That would be 1959.
MILLER: So I thought about it, and after discussion with friends and so on, I said, “Well,
I’ll get the Foreign Service out of my system. I probably won’t like it, as George Kennan
said, but I’ll never know and I’ll regret not having tested it if I don’t do it.” So I decided
to enter the Foreign Service in the spring, late spring of ’59. My incoming class, my A-
100 group was a group of great guys. Who is still around? Allen Holmes, Nick Platt,
Brandon Grove, Dick Moose. It was a terrific group. We lived in Alexandria, many of us.
We were very close.
You know very well, you are asked to put down where you want to serve, and I said,
“GTI.”
Q: Which was that?
MILLER: Greece, Turkey, and Iran. It was the Greek part that I was interested in from
The Arcadia and all that past conditioning. It also reflected a desire to travel in Greece as
well. So by luck of the draw I went to Isfahan.
Q: In your class were there any women, minorities, or anything like that?
MILLER: Yes, there were two women. They both went into consular work. There were
no minorities.
Q: It was still pretty much the cast of the Foreign Service of the old time, many white
males.
MILLER: Yes, and a lot of legacies so to speak, like Allen Holmes and Homer Byington
III.
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