The Foreign Service Journal, May 2016

the Foreign Service journal | may 2016 57 ing to do with what was then the European Economic Community, and then six years in Ecuador, Argentina and Chile as economic counselor, with a second hat as assistant director or director of the local U.S. Agency for International Development mission. My last assignment was in the department as a deputy assis- tant secretary in what was then the Bureau of Economics. During those days the State Department managed the commercial atta- ché network, and that was one of my responsibilities. It was not a happy job because the Department of Commerce chafed about not having an independent foreign commercial service. But it had a happy result for me. During the five years of that tour, which turned out to be my last, I came into contact with a large number of companies engaged in international business. When I retired, I found that I had a very useful contact list. One of the companies on that list was Manpower Inc., a For- tune 500 corporation in the personnel staffing and management business. About 80 percent of its business was in Western Europe and Latin America, and it was headquartered in Milwaukee, where my wife and I had grown up and still had family. It was a perfect match. I spent the next 30 years as an international corporate executive. I drew heavily on my Foreign Service experience. I had to learn the language of corporate financial statements, share- holder relations and a little bit about marketing, but after that it was analysis, negotiation and representation. Most of my time was spent negotiating acquisitions and joint ventures and open- ing new markets. Some of my time was spent doing almost exactly what I had done in my last few years in the Foreign Service. When I was in EB I had participated in U.S. delegations to United Nations spe- cialized agencies like the International Civil Aviation Organiza- tion, World Intellectual Property Organization and International Maritime Organization. With Manpower I found myself a U.S. representative on the employer delegation to annual meetings of the International Labor Organization. For the five years before I finally retired I was president of an international industry trade group headquartered in Brussels. I have never regretted the time that I spent as a Foreign Ser- vice officer. I relish the memory of those years: the friends, the places, the experiences. I love living abroad, and I was fascinated by life in Washington. But I never regretted leaving when I did, still young enough to have a full second career. Joel Biller joined the State Department Foreign Service in 1955. He served overseas in LeHavre, The Hague, Quito, Buenos Aires, Santiago and Washington, D.C.