The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2004

Service, very proper. His secretary said he had a way of pointing out to you that you were inferior. But still, he was a decent fellow, and an honest man. My first ambassador was Lester Mallory, in Amman, in 1955-1956. A former agricultural attaché, he was a rough-hewn fellow, but I liked him very much. He taught me a good deal. Next was Ambassador Armin Meyer, who’s still around. He started out as a radio operator, along with Bill Porter, and was still a ham operator when we arrived in Beirut in 1961. He was our ambassador and I was political officer. He taught me many things. Then there was Lucius Battle, who was ambassador in Cairo in 1965. I learned a lot from him, too. I first worked with Stuart Rockwell in the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau back in Washington from 1957 to 1958, and later was his DCM in Rabat. He is the most com- petent Foreign Service officer I ever knew, but the problem was that he did not leave much for me to do. I could go on and on … FSJ : You spent most of your career overseas, but you were in Washington for eight or nine years. Which Secretary of State do you most admire and why? RP : I would say John Foster Dulles. Not because of his personality —he was very much a cold fish, and he treated the Foreign Service like a pub- lic convenience — but because of his command and control of the depart- ment. He was running American for- eign policy. President Eisenhower was the ultimate authority, of course, but Dulles had no real competition from anybody else in the structure. Everyone deferred to him. He was very competent and a good director; he understood international politics and American interests. I disagreed with many things he did, but I think only Henry Kissinger rivaled his con- trol of foreign policy. FSJ : How would you assess Secretary Powell? RP : I think very highly of him. He is the first Secretary we’ve had in a long time who understands the quali- ties and principles of leadership. FSJ : Going back to your career — you were ambassador to three coun- tries during the 1970s: Algeria, Lebanon and Morocco. What were some of the challenges you faced as chief of mission, and how did you handle them? RP : In the case of Algiers, we had significant American investment in the petroleum sector: prospecting for oil, building natural gas liquefaction plants, and so forth. That presence had stayed intact even during the break in diplomatic relations. American firms had good working relations, in general, with the higher echelons of the Algerian government. But they had a lot of problems with the lower echelons: for example, the Ministry of the Interior requirement that their personnel obtain an exit permit to leave the country. Holding their hand and helping them with such problems was a preoccupation. Trying to get something done in terms of cooperation in the cultural field was another challenge in Algiers. Having had open-heart surgery that left me needing a monthly lab test in a place where the hospital was sort of anarchical, I was very interested in getting some kind of exchange going with American doctors to try to 54 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 Above: The monument to American diplomat Joel Barlow in Zarnowic, Poland, erected after a campaign launched by Richard Parker. Below: Parker (second from left) at the dedication of the monument in 1998, with Francis Scanlan, Consul General, Krakow (center), and Polish dignitaries.