The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2014

50 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Is Childs an unsung hero of the Holocaust, whose name belongs among the “righteous gentiles” at Israel’s Yad Vashemmemorial? Presumably this criticismwas based on the fact that Childs had spent two years in the Soviet Union as a relief worker a decade earlier, and had married a Rus- sian woman. Even so, Childs always felt that his interest in the USSR was justified on an intellectual basis, as well as for personal reasons. At one point he commented: “One of the quirks of [the] American charac- ter is the pathological reaction, bordering on mental disorder, toward anything touching the Russian Revolution or commu- nism.” In 1939, Childs learned that he had been recommended for promotion, but the move was later rescinded. He never learned exactly why, but assumed it was because “I was believed to entertain unorthodox opinions about Soviet Rus- sia.” Of course, he went on to become chargé in Tangier and a two-time ambassador, so the episode was clearly not a career- ender. Jamie Cockfield, editor of Childs’ memoir of the Russian famine years, The Black Lebeda , saw him as a “limousine socialist.” Perhaps so. But in his intellectual embrace of Casa- nova and other 18th-century writers, Childs primarily seems a man from a bygone age, one who decried the end of the ancien régime in the wake of World War I. Writing in 1983, he saw many of the modern world’s troubles—World War II, the Arab-Israeli standoff—as rooted in that traumatic war in the trenches. “The end is not yet in sight, nor is it ever likely to be.” J. Rives Childs may well have been a flawed hero. But then again, so was Oskar Schindler. n The hilt of Childs’ sword- cane, a gift from legation staff, was inscribed with his name in Arabic. Courtesy of the Tangier Legation