The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2016

90 JULY-AUGUST 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL IN MEMORY n Charles Sidney Blankstein, 80, a retired Foreign Service officer with the U.S. Agency for International Develop- ment, died on April 30 at the Washington Home in Washington, D.C., of congestive heart failure. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Mr. Blankstein was born in the Bronx, N.Y., the youngest of three children. He was raised in Greensboro, N.C., where his family moved during the 1940s. Mr. Blankstein was an avid bibliophile from a young age, absorbing the adven- tures of Herman Melville, Alexandre Dumas and others. He became a regular newspaper reader at age 8 when his par- ents kept him indoors for two consecutive summers due to the polio epidemic that swept through the South. As a young boy during World War II, he would spread out large maps of Asia and the Pacific, as well as Europe, in his bedroom to track the progress of the Allies. His uncle, Guy Dembo, was a U.S. infantryman who fought to liberate Italy. After attending Riverdale Country School in the New York City area, Mr. Blankstein attended college at the Uni- versity of North Carolina, graduating with a degree in economics in 1957. It was the same year that UNC’s basketball team won its first national championship, and Mr. Blankstein remained a lifelong Tar Heels fan and an avid college basketball enthusiast. He went on to attend Harvard Law School in a class that included the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Massachusetts governor and 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis and Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. He graduated with a J.D. degree in 1960, and later spent a year as a Sloan Fellow at the Massachu- setts Institute of Technology, where he earned a master’s degree in management. Mr. Blankstein began working for the federal government in 1962 as a lawyer for the Securities and Exchange Commission. He subsequently spent four years as an attorney in the General Counsel’s Office of the National Aero- nautics and Space Administration. In 1967, Mr. Blankstein joined the USAID Foreign Service. He was posted in Bolivia and Ecuador in the late 1960s, and traveled extensively for this work in Africa, Asia and the Middle East during the 1970s. Mr. Blankstein’s diplomatic career was shaped by the expanding fortunes— and global role—of the postwar United States, as well as by President John F. Kennedy’s 1960 Inaugural call for Ameri- cans to serve their country. He was grateful for the opportunity to expand his knowledge and participate with extraordinary colleagues at a time when the United States lent its resources and expertise to help emerging nations realize their potential. He worked to stabilize foreign govern- ments by helping impoverished farmers improve their businesses, which would allow them to feed growing populations and better their own lives and that of their families. He also contributed to rural development programs, including the massive Caribbean Basin Initiative during President Jimmy Carter’s administration. Mr. Blankstein retired from USAID in the mid-1980s, after spending four years in the Dominican Republic. He contin- ued working as a consultant. He is survived by his wife, Lucy; his daughter, Amy; and his son, Andrew, daughter-in-law, Beth, and granddaugh- ter, Emma. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to the Rock Creek Conser- vancy, 4300 Montgomery Ave., Suite 304, Bethesda MD 20814. n John Harmon Clary, 81, a retired Foreign Service officer with the U.S. Agency for International Development, died on April 24 at Frederick Memorial Hospital in Frederick, Md. Born on Sept. 26, 1934, in Osceola, Iowa, Mr. Clary was the son of the late Orvelle M. and Mary King Clary. He served in the U.S. Army from 1955 to 1957, and then entered college, graduat- ing from the University of Iowa in 1960 with a bachelor’s degree. In 1966, Mr. Clary joined the USAID Foreign Service, beginning what would be a more than 40-year diplomatic career. His first posting was to Saigon during the VietnamWar, where he sustained shrapnel injuries. In this four-and-a-half-year assignment he progressed from assistant provincial representative to area development administrator, and also received a supe- rior honor award. Mr. Clary also served in Paraguay, where the couple’s two daughters, Heather and Hillary, were born. Assign- ments to the Dominican Republic, Nepal and Panama followed. The Clarys retired to Braddock Heights, Md. In retirement, Mr. Clary worked for several years at Bon Ton department store in Frederick, Md. Friends and family will especially remember him for his dry sense of humor. An avid student of the Civil War and son of a World War I veteran, Mr. Clary had recently joined American Legion Post 297. In addition to his wife, Barbara O’Neil Clary, he is survived by his daughters, Heather Clary and her husband, Sebas- tian Silvestro, of Annapolis, Md.; and Hillary Hawkins, and her husband, Kevin Hawkins, of Smithsburg, Va.; two grand- children, O’Neil Silvestro and Penelope Hawkins; and a brother, James Clary, of