The Foreign Service Journal, April 2022

42 APRIL 2022 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Shawn Dorman with a representative of the Independent Publisher Book Awards, the IPPYs, at the 2012 award ceremony in New York City, where Inside a U.S. Embassy won a gold award. Inset: Copies of the third edition coming off the press in Baltimore, 2011. COURTESYOFAFSA wanted to help the institution. That’s what this is all about: love for the institution itself, a desire to explain it. I’m not surprised that people wanted to be a part of telling this story.” The first edition, a skinny yellow handbook that marked its 25th birthday in 2021, features stories from such relative unknowns as Linda Thomas-Greenfield, then regional refugee coordinator at Embassy Nairobi. Today, of course, we know her as Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Also profiled in that edition: Ambassador Tom Pickering and future ambassadors Barbara Bodine, Tom Shan- non and Michele Sison. The second edition continued to feature people who would go on to become big names in the Foreign Service. In addition to interviewing Ambassadors Anne Patterson and John Tefft, the team profiled future ambassadors such as Randy Berry, Tulinabo Mushingi, Andrew Young, Carmen Martinez, Ken Merten, Brian McFeeters and Ted Osius. The third edition, while we’re name-dropping, included such notables as Ambassador Marie Yova- novitch, Dereck Hogan, Andrew Young, David Becker and two future medical directors, Mark Cohen and Larry Padget. Special Coordinator for the Arctic Region James P. DeHart earned the distinction of being featured twice, in 2003 for a day in the life of a political officer at NATO and in 2011, as director of the Panjshir PRT. Marie Yovanovitch believes the State Department has changed since she was interviewed in 2010 as the ambassador profilee for the third edition. Then ambassador to Armenia, she agreed to participate, she said when we spoke with her late last year, because “I’d seen the earlier version of the book and thought it was a great vehicle to help people within the Foreign Service and, more broadly, journalists, students and others, learn—to inform and educate them as to what the Foreign Ser- vice is all about.” In the 2011 profile, Yovanovitch noted that she had a par- ticular interest in the advancement of women. But has the State Department made progress since then? “That’s a complicated question,” she says. “Now we have people like Wendy Sherman, Toria Nuland, LindaThomas-Greenfield and Uzra Zeya in top State’s diplomats in residence and political advisers to military institutions used the book as an introduction to the Foreign Service career and an embassy primer. The book also started to get adopted for university diplomacy courses. AFSA went back to the printer multiple times to reprint as inventory sold out. Diplomacy at Work In 2010, Dorman called on Adams-Smith and the FSJ team again to help produce the third all-new edition, this time with the subtitle: Diplomacy at Work . Based on the response to the second edition, and its popularity as a career guide, Dorman planned to add a new chapter on joining the Foreign Service, as well as additional chapters on the broader community and the country team. “Every once in a while, I pick up the book and see the people we interviewed,” says Adams-Smith. “We talked to some excel- lent people.” As a team, says Adams-Smith, “we asked ourselves, ‘Who do we know who’s fantastic?’ We started reaching out to people to ask if they were interested. And they were. They COURTESYOFAFSA