The Foreign Service Journal, April 2004

range missiles in Germany. In Moscow, he and Ambassador Arthur Hartman established a pro- gram giving a day’s in-country leave every month so that embassy person- nel could get to know the “ordinary” Russia, outside the isolation impos- ed on foreign embassies by the Soviet authorities. Throughout his tour he led the embassy not only to the dissidents but also to the suffering intellectuals who were reaching out for our support. Thus, instead of feeling hemmed in by the restrictions that the Soviet situation imposed and believing that the Soviet internal situation was hopeless, em- bassy personnel came to feel the sorrows of real people who wanted a better life for themselves and their country. Moments That Require Courage Zimmermann’s courage was rooted in his values. Like Ernest Hemingway, whom he admired, he recognized that there are moments in a lifetime that require acts of courage, regardless of the consequences. He was a loyal and disciplined civil servant and never to my knowledge failed to carry out his instructions, nor did he leak to the press. However, when the stakes re- quired it, he was prepared to put his career on the line. In 1970 he joined in a private letter to the Secretary of State from a handful of Foreign Service offi- cers criticizing our continued involve- ment in Vietnam. His courage also accounted for his ability to be tough when necessary. As charge d’affaires in Moscow when the Soviets shot down a commercial airliner, he gave a tongue- lashing to the Soviet authorities for their brazen refusal to admit the truth, even before Washington instructed him to do so. Soon after arriving as the new U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, he publicly criticized the virulent Serbian national- ism of President Slobodan Milosevic that would soon cause Yugoslavia to unravel. His criticism put him on Milosevic’s black list; the Yugoslav A P R I L 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 63 A P P R E C I A T I O N Warren Zimmermann , 69, former FSO and the last U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, died Feb. 3 at his home in Great Falls, Va., of pancreatic cancer. “Warren Zimmermann ranks among our finest career ambassadors,” stated Secretary of State Colin L. Powell Feb. 4 in a tribute that hailed Zimmermann as “an elo- quent defender of human rights and refugees” and extend- ed condolences to his wife and family on behalf of “col- leagues at the Department of State, and especially the many young men and women he so generously mentored over the years.” Warren Zimmermann was born in Philadelphia in 1935 and graduated magna cum laude from Yale University in 1956. He received a master’s degree in history in 1958 from Cambridge University in England, which he attended as a Fulbright scholar. In 1961, following work in teaching and journalism, Amb. Zimmermann joined the Foreign Service. He began a 33-year career that would take him from Washington, D.C., to Caracas, Madrid, Geneva, Belgrade (twice), Paris, Moscow and Vienna. Appointed U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia in 1990, he was recalled in 1992 to protest Serbian aggression in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Amb. Zimmermann returned to the department as director of the Bureau for Refugee Programs, but resigned from the Foreign Service in 1994 in frustration over the Clinton administration’s reluctance to intervene forcefully in the Bosnian war. From 1994 to 1996, Amb. Zimmermann taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. During this time he wrote Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and Its Destroyers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), a book about his experiences in Yugoslavia that received the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Douglas Dillon Award for a Book of Distinction on the Practice of American Diplomacy in 1997. From 1996 to 2000 he was a professor of international diplomacy at Columbia University. Amb. Zimmermann’s most recent work, First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), won the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Dillon Award in 2003. A lover and student of 19th-century English poetry, Amb. Zimmermann occasionally wrote humorous verse of his own for friends and family. He maintained a life- time interest in playing squash and tennis, and was a fly fisherman. He spent summers at his cottage at Glandore Harbor on the southwest coast of Ireland, where he enjoyed long walks. Amb. Zimmermann was a board member of Human Rights Watch, Partners for Democratic Change, the American Academy of Diplomacy and the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs. He was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Metropolitan Club in Washington, D.C. Survivors include his wife, Corinne (“Teeny”) Chubb Zimmermann of Great Falls, Va.; three children, Corinne Alsop Zimmermann of Watertown, Mass., Lily Zimmer- mann Metcalfe of London and Tim Zimmermann of Washington, D.C.; and five grandchildren.