The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2010

member walking home from school as a boy and hearing on the radio that the Japanese had just invaded Manchuria. I remember wondering why they would do that, and feeling it was wrong. So I guess my interest in foreign affairs dates as far back as 1931. FSJ: You were 9 years old then, right? LBL: Right. Later, as a Norwegian- American, I got very interested in the fact that the Nazis had invadedNorway. As you can imagine, that was a very hot topic in my heavily Norwegian-Ameri- can community. After I earned a B.A. in history and economics from St. Olaf College in 1947, and was discharged from the Navy, I began my graduate studies in international relations at the University of Minnesota. There I was a charter member of an organization known as SPAN: “A Student Project for Amity among Nations.” Like many young Americans who had fought in World War II, I’d devel- oped an intense idealism. We saw that experience as wrong, painful, costly and corrosive to international peace. So we were eager to construct a foundation, a basis, for cooperation among nations. Our motto was taken from the pre- amble to the UNESCOCharter: “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peacemust be constructed.” I still think that is a very good creed for any inter- nationally oriented organization. SPAN is Minnesota’s oldest study abroad program, and still exists today. More than 2,500 SPANners, as partici- pants are known, have visited 93 coun- tries on six continents since the pro- gram began. Inmy case, I went to Sweden as part of a group of nine students, carefully chaperoned. While there, I crossed over the Baltic Sea to Helsinki, where I took the Foreign Service entrance exam at the American legation in the summer of 1947. It was a two-and-a- half-day affair in those days. FSJ: Did you pass? LBL: Unfortunately, no. There was then a requirement to demonstrate proficiency in a foreign language in order to become a member of the For- eign Service, and I failed the Spanish exam. If you failed any part of the process, you had to start all over. So that’s what I did when I got back to Minneapolis. I eventually passed — after being held over for yet another year by the Board of Examiners —and joined the Foreign Service in 1949. By the way, over the next 38 years, I was never assigned anywhere that re- quired me to use my Spanish. So much, you might say, for the personnel policies of the Department of State! I did learn German during my train- ing as a KRO officer, but that was my only other language, apart from the Norwegian I’d learned growing up and a smattering of Farsi, Urdu and Pindi at posts along the way. FSJ: After leaving Hamburg in 1953, what was your next assignment? LBL: I was assigned to be a consular officer in Kobe, Japan, but I never got there. After the 1953 coup in Iran, which we and the Brits staged to over- throw Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and put the shah back on the throne, our presence in Iran ex- panded dramatically. Loy Henderson, the U.S. ambassador at the time, ur- gently requested more staff to manage the changed situation. So half a dozen other young FSOs and I saw fate inter- vene: we were suddenly jerked out of our assignments and sent instead to Iran. I served in Tehran from 1953 to 1955, and also spent some time as act- ing principal officer in Mashhad, a small but sensitive listening post vis-à- vis the Soviet Union. At that time I was a youngster, still wet behind the ears, but I enjoyed that rare opportunity for young officers to demonstrate leader- ship at a very early stage of their ca- reers. That’s the ultimate in our line of 42 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 1 0 “My wife urged me not to go [to Tehran], but as I told her, I always wanted to be where the action is.” Amb. Laingen at the White House with Vice President George H.W. Bush, First Lady Nancy Reagan and President Ronald Reagan, Jan. 27, 1981.