The Foreign Service Journal, February 2004

its inhabitants who were in close association with the diplomatic corps, who formed the sort of society in which the diplomatic corps circulated. FSJ : With the newly amalga- mated Foreign Service, though, it was not quite so necessary that FSOs bring with them an inde- pendent income. GFK : Not quite so necessary. We entered with an annual salary of $2,500 a year. But many of the perks which now exist did not exist at that time. When you went to a foreign post, yes, they paid your way to the post, but after that you were on your own. You had to find your own housing. Nobody cared. All the State Department did was buy us a ticket, a steamship ticket usually, and after that they washed their hands of us. We had to find our way to the post and report to the senior officer. And then we had to find a place to live on our own expense. FSJ : I understand there’s more assistance with hous- ing now. GFK : It’s much more paternalistic now than it was then. We were rather assumed to have enough knowl- edge of the world and maturity to know how to go through all this. The One-Room Foreign Service Schoolhouse FSJ : These days, when you enter the Foreign Service, there’s the A-100 class, which is basic training for new FSOs. What kind of training did you get? GFK : We had at that time a Foreign Service School in the department, which was the first thing we were assigned to. It was in a comfortable room, one of the big rooms in the State, War and Navy Building looking down over the White House gardens. And I can remember Calvin Coolidge coming out and putting on Indian feathers to be photographed for some reason of his own. FSJ : That’s a famous photograph; you saw him in that garb? GFK : Yeah, we did (laughs). We were all taught by one experienced, older consul general of the service, William Dawson, who was a fine linguist and who had had very considerable experience in both the diplomatic and consular ser- vice — that was infrequent at the time. FSJ : So you had one teacher for that course? GFK : We had one teacher, and we had classes in various things, what visa work was about, passport work, commercial work. And we were asked in the end to write a mock Foreign Service report. Great importance was attached at that time to your own writing ability and style. FSJ : What then was your first assignment? GFK : My first assignment was officially as a vice con- sul in Hamburg. But just at that time Pinkney Tuck, who was a member of the old Diplomatic Service, a very distinguished one, had been made the American observer to the League of Nations in Geneva. Tuck was serving as American consul general, and he found himself unable to cope with the consular work, because so many other demands were being made on him from the other duties as an observer and point of contact with the League of Nations. So Tuck asked for a couple of officers to aid him. And a boy by the name of Henry Beck and I (Beck was a brilliant fellow; he’d gone through Harvard in three years) went out there in the way that I’ve described; somebody bought our ticket to Geneva, and said go out. And I remember we reported in at Tuck’s office. He was very nice, very polite to us. And he said, “What brings you here? How long are you going to be in this town?” We said, “We’re assigned here,” where- upon he blew up, threw his papers around, and said, “Goddamn it, I asked for experienced officers and look what they send me!” Well, we dug in, and took the consular correspon- dence very seriously. He was quite mollified. We did better than he expected. But that went on only for four or five months, to carry him through the summer, the difficult period. I moved on then to Hamburg, where we had a big office because it was then the leading port of the F O C U S 16 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 4 If I have any hero, it was George Marshall, a man of qualities very similar to those of George Washington.