The Foreign Service Journal - January/February 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2018 99 Clark College in Portland. Mr. Smith’s last overseas post was Manila, during the time U.S. military bases were closing. He retired in 1993. In retirement, he worked as a con- sultant for Radio Free Asia, which was just getting started, and took part in their negotiations for new relay facili- ties in Russia, Central and East Asia. He also led negotiations for VOA and RFE/ RL with the governments of Germany, Spain and Portugal to implement the terms of the U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996. Mr. Smith received the Presidential Distinguished Honor Award, as well as USIA’s Distinguished Service Award. His passions, in addition to family, were ten- nis and Oregon. Mr. Smith’s wife, Angelina (Lennie), died in 2005. He is survived by four chil- dren and five grandchildren. n John H. Trattner, 86, a retired For- eign Service officer with the U.S. Informa- tion Agency who was State Department spokesman during the 1979-1981 Iran hostage crisis, died on Oct. 6, 2017, in Rockville, Md. Born in Richmond, Va., Mr. Trattner attended public schools there and earned a B.A. at Yale University in 1952, major- ing in music composition. He served on active duty as a U.S. naval officer from 1953 to 1956, and did graduate music study at Columbia University and Yale where, in 1957, he won the Frances Kel- logg prize for contrapuntal composition. Prior to joining USIA, Mr. Trattner was a newspaper and wire service reporter in the United States and a freelance news magazine and network radio correspon- dent in Europe. He covered conferences on world economic issues, the civil war in Laos, the diplomatic talks that produced an independent Algeria, and the nuclear test ban and arms control negotiations from 1959 to 1961 in Geneva. He joined the Foreign Service at USIA in 1963, serving first as the editor and on-air voice of the Voice of America’s daily half-hour broadcast to Western and Eastern Europe. In 1966, after a year of Polish-language training, he was posted to Warsaw as press attaché. From 1969 to 1974 Mr. Trattner served in France, first as branch public affairs officer in Strasbourg, then as regional affairs officer and press attaché in Paris. He served as deputy public affairs officer at the U.S. Mission to NATO in Brussels from 1974 to 1975. He returned to Washington as deputy director of the Office of Press Relations from 1975 to 1978, when he became special assistant and then executive assis- tant to Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher. From 1971 to 1980, the White House frequently borrowed his services as a spokesman during the summit meetings and global travels of Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. In 1973, he received the Superior Honor Award of the U.S. Information Agency. In 1980 he was named spokesman of the Department of State. As spokesman during that election year, when attention was riveted on the fate of Americans held captive in Iran, Mr. Trattner was essen- tially the only official American source of daily information and comment through the final fraught months of efforts to free the 52 embassy personnel and other citizens seized by student activists in the early days of the Iranian revolution. This made his face a familiar one on television news programs around the world. Mr. Trattner retired from the Foreign Service in 1982. He then served as press secretary to former U.S. Senator George J. Mitchell (D-Maine) from 1983 to 1985. During his post-government career, Trattner wrote the widely read Prune Book series, whose seven volumes described hundreds of senior, presiden- tially-appointed federal government positions. The series, produced during his 17 years with the nonprofit Council for Excellence in Government, drew substantial media coverage in presiden- tial election years from 1988 to 2004. Mr. Trattner also taught for a year at American University’s School of Com- munication, specializing in government- media relationships. A longtime member of the Public Diplomacy Council, he served on its board as well as that of Leadership Forum International, another nonprofit sup- porting quality leadership in transitional post–Cold War economies. Mr. Trattner wrote for a variety of non- profit organizations, including Earth Day Network, the Washington Scholarship Fund and the Inter-American Dialogue. A part-time composer, he wrote the words and music of songs for mixed chorus, with performances in the United States and Canada. He also sang for many years with the Yale Alumni Chorus of Wash- ington. He is survived by his wife of 63 years, Gillian B. Trattner of Chevy Chase, Md.; three daughters: Alison D. Trattner of Amman, Jordan; Sydney Trattner of New York City; and Hilary B. Trattner-Stein- metz of Paris, France; and three grand- children: Anouk Bringer, Laszlo Bringer and Kiera Steinmetz. In lieu of flowers, memorial gifts can be made to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to support GIST research: Dana- Farber, PO Box 849168, Boston MA 02284 or via www.Dana-Farber.org/gift. n