The Foreign Service Journal, May 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2019 43 he imparted, I’ve always considered him a generous man—and a wise and prescient one, too. Although much has changed since his era, almost everything he told me proved useful and on the mark. Part of what struck me as I read the brief summation of his life and career was the fact that he had been in his mid-50s—roughly the same age as I am now—at the time we crossed paths, which today seems like a strange combination of long ago and just yes- terday. Maybe it was also the realization of time passing, the baton changing hands, another generation moving to the front of the line. Welcome, you all. Meeting Ambassador Fischer I first met David Fischer in San Francisco in 1992, while volun- teering at the World Affairs Council. He had retired after 30 years in the Foreign Service and come to head the Council the year before. For my part, after finishing a master’s degree in East Asian studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, I had decided to return to my hometown. I was struggling to find my place in the world and had decided to give my deferred dream of becoming a writer one final shot. To hedge my bets (a wise move, it turns out), I had taken the Foreign Service exam. When I received the news that I had passed the crucial oral examphase, I decided to request a meeting with the ambassador to solicit his thoughts about the career that might now await me. He was happy to oblige. We sat down to talk over coffee in his office one morning in early 1993 and had several shorter exchanges over the months that followed—until I left San Francisco for Washing- ton, D.C., on Jan. 1, 1994, to join the 70th A-100 Class. Ambassador Fischer began his Foreign Service career in 1961—the year before I was born—and spent much of it working in European affairs and on arms control issues. He had two tours behind the Iron Curtain—first in Poland, then in Bulgaria. And he worked two separate Washington assignments on Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty issues, helping to negotiate START I and then to conclude START II. His final Foreign Service assignment was as consul general in Munich, which was, as his obituary notes, “then one of our largest and most important consular posts, where he managed U.S. interests during a critical time as the Cold War faded and German reunification took shape.” In this sense, Fischer was a quintessential ColdWar diplomat: he entered the Foreign Service in the year the BerlinWall was being built and retired soon after it came down. In the intervening years, he participated as an insider in what were surely among the most critical foreign policy issues of his time. I remember admitting to him somewhat frivolously that I felt fortunate, for personal reasons, that the ColdWar had ended, because I would have been inca- pable of mastering the highly technical details of missile counts, warheads, blast ratios and the like that monopolized the pages of Foreign Affairs and other suchmagazines during that era. President George H.W. Bush’s disorderly “newworld order” seemedmuch better suited tomy somewhat unsystematic temperament and character. Fischer told me he had switched over to the Africa Bureau later in his career, because the opportunities for advancement into the senior levels were greater there than they were in European affairs (nothing new under the sun). He explained that that was how he had become deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires in Tan- zania—where, as his obit points out, then-President Julius Nyerere was a close professional contact—and later ambassador to the Seychelles, fromwhere he had derived the title that (I must note in passing) he used to deft professional effect in his second career. About the Foreign Service Fischer toldme several things that morning that I’ve had the opportunity to confirmfirsthand over the years, assignment by assignment. The first was that the Foreign Service is, in fact, a career, not a job. He said this not—or not just—in the highfalutin sense of an avocation or calling, however true that might also be for some, but more as a practical matter. That is, the Foreign Service is a succession of distinct and often very different jobs that follow one another in the context of one fantastically flexible but focused and defined professional path. If you really don’t like the situation you happen to be in at any given time, he said, never fear. No need to look for another occupation like most people in the civilian world would have to do. Simply do your best, ride it out and find a better fit in the next assignment cycle. He was right on the money. Fischer also described the Foreign Service as roughly equal parts academia and military life, combining the opportunity for intellectual exploration of the former with the strict hierarchical structure of the latter. Starting with the academia part, he noted that you get to study and learn about a new country or set of issues every two or three years, often from the ground floor up. In that way, he said, each diplomatic tour is a kind of doctoral course of its own, offering a chance to think day and night about and, at least to some degree, master a new subject. Fischer described the Foreign Service as roughly equal parts academia and military life.