The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2004

that was one of the factors behind your decision to apply to the Foreign Service. RP : Oh, yes. I’d had no idea many of the things I saw existed. I was also very concerned that we not have another war like World War II, and I thought maybe I could help by joining the Foreign Service. Pretty idealistic of me, but anyway, that’s how I turned up. FSJ : So then you went back to Kansas State? What was your degree in? RP : I got a degree in general sci- ence. My major was math- ematics, which was a mis- take. FSJ : Why was it a mis- take? RP: I had almost failed integral calculus because the war had diverted my attention, but I had more hours of mathematics on my transcript than any other subject. I was not a serious mathematics stu- dent, but I got through it. FSJ : When did you apply to the Foreign Service? RP : I took the written exam in Tokyo in 1946, when I was still in the Army. I took it just to see what it was like, with no expectation of passing it, and much to my surprise, I passed. So they let me out of the Army and I went back to school. I got there in March 1947 and graduated in May; I’d had such a heavy schedule as an engineering student that there was no problem getting enough hours to graduate with. I took the oral Foreign Service exam later that summer in Chicago. The chairman of the board, a Mr. Eberhard, said to me, in effect, “We like your style, Mr. Parker, but you don’t know anything. Go back to college for a year and study about his- tory and economics.” Which I did. FSJ : That’s when you earned your master’s degree? RP : Yes, in something called citizenship education, which was a “Great Books” program modeled on the one at the University of Chicago. FSJ : Tell me about your time with the Kansas State UNESCO Commission. RP : Well, it was brief but interest- ing. Milton Eisenhower, who at that point was the president of Kansas State, and changed its name to Kansas State University, was the chairman of the U.S. National Commission on UNESCO. UNESCO had its first international conference in Beirut in the summer of 1948, and he wanted to establish a UNESCO commission in every state. He started withKansas and got three or four other states to follow suit, but all of the state commissions died on the vine not long afterward. The commission was an early NGO, funded by the university. This J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 51 Parker’s first encounter with the “great wide world,” as he later called it, left him determined to go back and see a lot more. Amb. Parker and his wife Jeanne at DACOR on April 14 at the launch of his new book, Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History.