The Foreign Service Journal, September 2014

30 SEPTEMBER 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL when I was about 3. I moved to California and ended up in the Pasadena area until about 1939. Then we moved to Annapolis, Md., where my older brother was a midshipman who gradu- ated in the class of 1940. SD: Where did you get your undergraduate degree? SK: Williams College. I graduated in 1950. A couple of years later, I joined the intelligence branch of the U.S. Air Force and studied Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Mon- terey, Calif. It was very good for me because I had gone to one of these nice New England prep schools, a nice New England college, and it was time to get out and meet some other peo- ple. Although I was in the intelligence branch of the Air Force, as an enlisted man, I developed an appreciation for non-com- missioned officers of the Air Force and how good they are. Then I was sent to Korea during the Korean War, and I had a very interesting assignment with the U.S. Air Force. One of the lesser known wars that we fought was the U.S. Air Force fight- ing the Soviet Air Force over North Korea. There were regular combat planes on both sides shooting at each other. Of course, I was one of those who sat on the ground and had a tape recorder listening to this. It was a rather nasty little war. SD: You were listening to the Russians? SK: I listened to the Russians directing their fighter pilots to our fighter pilots. And I would pass on to our fighter pilots what the Russians were planning to do. There were a number of us doing this. I’m sure the Soviets were doing the same thing. It’s quite a bit fancier now, but the same thing still goes on. SD: Same concept, different technology. And what was next after the military ? SK: I served in Japan and Germany for a year each and left the Air Force in 1954 with the rank of airman first class. I used my GI Bill benefits to attend Boston University, where I got a master’s degree in history and a bride. While in the Air Force, stationed near Frankfurt, I had taken the Foreign Service writ- ten exam in 1953 and just barely passed. SD: What was your first post? SK: Frankfurt. I’m told that approximately a third of the Foreign Service was assigned to posts in Germany for their first tour at that time. We had lots of consulates. I went to Frank- furt and spent one year there, initially with the refugee relief program. We dealt with refugees who during World War II had headed west to escape the Soviets and settled in Germany. Most of them didn’t want to be there, so we arranged for thou- sands of them to come to the United States. The Canadians and Australians did the same thing. SD: And when you entered the Foreign Service, did you come in as a consular officer? SK: There were no cones then. After a while, your assign- Charles Stuart Kennedy (second from right), U.S. consul in Yugoslavia, at a rest stop with the 7th Army MASH hospital on its way back from treating victims of the 1964 earthquake in Skopje. The hospital was at Kumanovo, now in Macedonia. Kennedy was an adviser to the hospital during this first entry of NATO troops into a communist country on a humanitarian mission. Courtesy Charles Stuart Kennedy