The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2014

46 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Gerald Loftus, a State Department Foreign Service officer from 1979 to 2002, is director of the Tangier American Legation Institution for Moroccan Studies. The Tangier Legation, America’s only overseas National Historic Landmark, is located in the medina of the city. He writes about the long history of Moroccan-American relations on per- manent display at the institution’s museum at www.TALIMblog.org. Despite the wealth of material generated by and about U.S. diplomat J. Rives Childs, he remains an enigma a quarter-century after his death. BY GERALD LOF TUS J. RIVES CHILDS INWARTIME TANGIER FS HERITAGE O n July 16, 1987, the New York Times noted the passing of J. Rives Childs (1893-1987), a “former American diplomat and authority on Casanova.” Childs had led many lives: volunteer ambulance driver à la Hemingway and U.S. Army cryptographer in France during World War I (he later received the Medal of Freedom for cracking German codes); postwar White House correspondent; American Relief Administration official (one of “Hoover’s Boys”) in the famine-stricken USSR of the 1920s; and a Foreign Service officer whose 30-year career culminated with ambassadorships to Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia after World War II. He also wrote 14 books, ranging from definitive studies of Casanova and French writers of the 18th century (some writ- ten in French) to several works touching on his Foreign Service career. His final memoir, Let the Credit Go (1983), recounts his tenure as chargé d’affaires at the American Legation in Tangier, Morocco, between 1941 and 1945. Despite the wealth of material generated by and about Childs,