The Foreign Service Journal, April 2013

the Foreign Service journal | april 2013 63 lia Haley of Elkridge, Md.; a brother; and five grandchildren. n Lucian Heichler, 87, a retired Foreign Service officer, died on Feb. 13 in Stamford, Conn., where he had been visiting family. Born in Vienna, Austria, Mr. Heichler and his parents immigrated to the United States in 1940. Being Jewish, the family had spent two increasingly difficult years living under the Nazi regime, but man- aged to obtain visas when a diligent U.S. consular official retrieved a years-old application that allowed the Heichlers a spot near the head of the line for the small immigration quota. They travelled via the Netherlands weeks before that country fell to Hitler, and settled in New York City. Mr. Heichler became a U.S. citizen in 1944 and served two years in the Army. He attended New York University, receiv- ing a bachelor’s degree in 1947 and a master’s degree in history in 1951. His first job in government service was in the Army Office of the Chief of Military History, where he reviewed captured German documents and wrote parts of the official history of World War II. In 1954 Heichler joined the State Department as an intelligence analyst, and also received a Foreign Service reserve officer commission; he gained regular FSO status in 1963, about three years into his first posting as a political officer in the U.S. Mission in Berlin. In his role as liaison with the Berlin city government during the early 1960s, Mr. Heichler was closely involved with visits to Berlin by John F. Kennedy, Rob- ert F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Adlai Stevenson. During the Berlin Wall crisis, he was tasked with showing Willy Brandt, then mayor of Berlin, the Ameri- cans’ note of protest. The future chancel-