The Foreign Service Journal, April 2016

60 APRIL 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Low-Key Generosity That blend of humility and beneficence was a constant throughout Ed’s 38-year Foreign Service career. In 1958, a year into his first overseas tour, he was transferred from Tokyo to Kobe-Osaka for an assignment as textile reporting officer (which would last until 1961). With characteristic modesty, Ed recounted the notification he received of that decision during the oral history interview Stu Kennedy, of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, conducted with him in 1994: “I remember [Embassy Tokyo Consul General] Laverne Baldwin calling me in and saying, ‘You have been transferred to Kobe-Osaka as economic officer. With all these good young Foreign Service officers, I can’t figure out why they picked you, but I hope you do well.’” During that assignment, a local export company asked him to find them an English-language instructor so its senior execu- tives could work better with their American colleagues. Ed did them one better by offering his own tutoring services: “When the first session was over they said, ‘How would you like to have dinner?’ And I said, ‘That sounds very nice.’ So they took me out to a lovely dinner in real Japanese fashion. We did a little bar hopping, and I took the last train home. And that became the pattern for every Thursday night. So I am afraid they spent more entertaining me than they would have if they had paid me. I got to know them so well that I kept in correspon- dence with them for many years afterwards.” A Highly Varied Career Carl Edward Dillery was born in Seattle, Washington, on Dec. 17, 1930, and graduated from Seattle Pacific College in 1953 with a bachelor’s degree in history. He spent two years working as an insurance examiner before joining the Foreign Service in 1955. (In 1973, he would earn a master’s of science degree in the administration of national security fromThe George Washington University.) From 1955 to 1957, Ed was a foreign affairs officer in the Department of State’s Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs (now the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs). Following the back- to-back assignments in Japan (1957-1961) referenced above, he returned to the department to work in the Bureau of Scientific and Technological Affairs (1961-1965). After spending a year at the University of California at Berkeley, he served as chief of the economic section in Brussels (1966-1967). Next, Ed volunteered—much to the chagrin of his wife, Marita, as he later recounted in his ADST interview—for a tour in the U.S. Agency for International Development mis- sion in Saigon (1968-1969). Arriving not long after the 1968 Tet offensive, he was stationed in Quang Ngai province as a senior adviser to USAID’s Civil Operations for Revolutionary Devel- opment Support program. After a detail to the Department of Defense (1970-1971), he worked in the Bureau of Political-Mil- itary Affairs (1971-1972) and attended the Industrial College of Armed Forces (1972-1973). It was also during this period that he earned his MSA degree from GWU. The next decade of his career focused on Europe, with assignments as deputy political counselor in London (1973- That blend of humility and beneficence was a constant throughout Ed’s 38-year Foreign Service career. Ambassador C. Edward Dillery receives an AFSA Special Commendation from then-President Susan Johnson when he retired from the chairmanship of the Scholarship Committee in 2012. AFSA/LORIDEC