The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2004

Council on Foreign Relations, the Middle East Institute, the Cosmos Club and Delta Tau Delta. His many honors and awards include the Department of State Superior Service Award (1967, for a rescue mission to Yemen), the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Cedars, Lebanon (1979); the Air Force Medal of Merit (1980); and the Foreign Service Cup (1989). Little wonder, then, that many of Parker’s peers in the Foreign Service over the years (even those who did not already know of his penchant for chemistry and math) have described him as a “Renaissance man.” Ambassador Parker is married to the former Jeanne Jaccard. They have four children and nine grand- children. Foreign Service Journal Editor Steven Alan Honley interviewed Parker at his Georgetown home on March 31. FSJ : Congratulations on your award for lifetime contributions to American diplomacy, which places you in the same company as George Shultz, Tom Pickering, Cyrus Vance, George Bush Sr., and Larry Eagleburger, among others. What would you say have been your strengths as a diplomat? RP : I think the fact that I’ve been able to maintain my sense of humor through some difficult times, first of all. Eisenhower once said, “Always take your job, but never yourself, seriously.” But of course, if you don’t take yourself seriously, no one else will, either. So you have to find some compromise there. But the important thing is if you don’t take yourself too seriously, you can understand the humor in the situa- tion in which you find yourself and you can relate much more easily to other people. I would also say that I’ve always concentrated on doing whatever my job was to the best of my ability. FSJ : You were born in the Philippines. How long did you live there? RP : We left when I was three months old. My father was stationed there as an Army officer; and they were just waiting for me to be born. FSJ : I understand you originally planned to be a chemical engineer. What drew you to the Foreign Service instead? RP : Well, engineering studies are very difficult, with a very heavy class load. The war was on, and I had sort of lost interest. I had one more semester to go at Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science (now Kansas State University), before I was going to be taken into the Army in 1943, and I said the hell with it, I’m going to have one fun semester before I leave. So I dropped engineering, much to the dismay of my faculty adviser, and took a semester of things like public speak- ing and Spanish, as well as German, which I’d already been studying — that was required for chemical engi- neers — and navigation math, which was very easy. That made 12 hours of very easy courses. So I had a wonder- ful semester and a great time. FSJ : This was the fall of 1943? RP : The spring. FSJ : And you were already in offi- cer training by this point? RP : Yes, I was in ROTC. We were told we would be sent to an OCS (Officer Candidate School) after we did our basic training. I was in coast artillery, or anti-aircraft, ROTC as befitting an engineer, but along with all my classmates, ended up being sent to infantry OCS — which, of course, was a good deal more danger- ous. FSJ : And then you shipped over- seas in 1944? RP : Yes, our division went first to England and then to France. FSJ : Tell me about your experi- ence as a POW in World War II. RP : Well, our division was annihi- lated in the Battle of the Bulge, and I was among the thousands of men cap- tured. I spent only 34 days under German control, ending up at a camp for American ground-force officers in Poland, near Poznan. When the Soviets finally began moving west from Warsaw, where they’d been stopped the previous September, the Germans started marching us back to Germany. About 200 of us, out of the thousand or so men in the camp, said after one day that we were too weak to walk any further. So they left us, and the Soviets arrived that night. FSJ : And then you were repatriat- ed? RP : Yes, over a long period: it took over six weeks before we got back into American control down in Odessa. FSJ : I understand from one of the biographical sketches I read that you saw a lot of the world on the trip and 50 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 4 “The term ‘Arabist’ was no compliment even in the 1950s, but it was a fascinating world and language. And no one ever tried to warn me off from going into it.” — Richard Parker