The Foreign Service Journal, May 2014

48 MAY 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL At the end of the harrowing visit, Amb. Yost visited a curb- side medical facility. There a photographer captured a heart- wrenching image of him sitting at the bedside of a patient, his head bowed, weeping as he gently held the survivor’s fingers— the only unbandaged part of the man’s body. In mid-November 1960, a new challenge arose when the Charles W. Yost (1907–1981) Born in 1907 inWatertown, N.Y., my father joined the Foreign Service in 1929 at the suggestion of Secretary of State Robert Lansing, a family friend. Forty years later, his last assignment was as the first career diplomat to be appointed permanent U.S. representative to the United Nations. His early assignments to the U.S. consulates in Egypt and Poland proved frustrating. When the ambassadors to those countries saw promise in him, and requested his transfer to their staff, the State Department refused on the grounds that his apprenticeship had been too short. As a result, when he rose to supervisory positions, he went out of his way, as Ambassador John Gunther Dean later recalled, to always be “helpful and supportive of his younger col- leagues starting in their career.” In 1944 my father returned toWashington, where he worked on postwar planning before being assigned to the Dumbarton Oaks Conference as a member of the commit- tee that drafted chapters VI and VII of the United Nations Charter—the provisions regularly cited in times of crisis. Following service as an assistant to Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius during the United Nations’ 1945 found- ing conference in San Francisco, and later as secretary-gen- eral of the U.S. delegation to the Potsdam Conference, my father served in Asia, including as the first U.S. ambassador to Laos, and in posts in Europe. In 1958, after the abrupt termination of his assignment to Syria when the country broke off relations with the U.S., he was adrift. It was my Polish mother, Irena, who was responsible for his next assignment; she mentioned to the wife of Deputy Under Secretary of State Loy Henderson my father’s strong desire for a new posting. When Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was informed that Henderson had slated my father for Morocco, Dulles was not put out. Because Dulles considered my father a subtle and reliable implementer of American foreign policy, he did not mind being surprised with a ‘fait accompli.’ Furthermore, the Yost-Dulles connection was one that went back many decades. Dulles, the nephew of Secretary of State Lansing, had also grown up inWatertown; in 1902 Dulles’ father, a Pres- byterian minister, had married my father’s parents. That connection may explain why the ultraconservative Dulles became a loyal supporter of my liberal father. That support proved crucial in the 1950s, during the investigations of my father by the FBI and the Truman Loy- alty Board. Those investigations ruined the lives and careers of many State Department colleagues, and took their toll on both of my parents. In 1961, my father began his first assignment at the United Nations, as the deputy to Ambassador Adlai Ste- venson. After Stevenson’s death in 1965, he stayed on as deputy to Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, and was promoted to the rank of career ambassador, the highest professional Foreign Service level. The turbulent 1960s presented upheavals around the globe—most significantly in the Congo, Kashmir, Cyprus and the Middle East—that challenged the United Nations and American diplomacy. My father’s habit of “suspecting that there is some right on both sides of most questions,” as he wrote, helped him face those challenges. In 1966 he resigned from the Foreign Service to begin his career as a writer at the Council on Foreign Relations and as a teacher at Columbia University, but was called out of retirement by President Richard Nixon in 1969 to become the permanent United States representative to the United Nations, a position he held until 1971. At his 1981 memorial service, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. reflected: “Charles Yost’s life presents the gallant spectacle of a supremely rational man trying to make sense of a supremely irrational age.” –Felicity O. Yost Soviet Union offered to sell two nuclear-capable Ilyushin bomb- ers and 12 MIG fighters to Morocco. For the Americans, Soviet nuclear bombs and jet fighters within easy striking distance of U.S. bases were simply unacceptable. In December, back in the States on home leave, Amb. Yost met with officials at State and at the Pentagon. He emphasized