The Foreign Service Journal, September 2014

32 SEPTEMBER 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL on then. There were some rockets and some fighting on the out- skirts of Saigon. It was quite a different war. SD: Were you married then? SK: Yes, but my wife wasn’t with me in Vietnam. I’d met Ellen while studying at Boston University, and we got married before I joined the Foreign Service. We just celebrated our 59th anniversary, by the way. SD: Congratulations, that is an accomplishment! SK: Next, I served in Greece, an interesting place. I was there from 1970 to 1974, while the military junta was in charge. So, I got to see how inefficient a dictatorship was. That’s one of the nice things about the Foreign Service: you get to observe differ- ent types of government. I served in every geographic bureau except Africa and Latin America, and always did consular work while overseas. I served in Frankfurt, Dhahran, Belgrade, Saigon, Seoul, Naples and Washington. SD: Did you spend much time back in Washington? SK: Yes, usually in personnel. But many of us stayed overseas as much as possible, because we got better pay there. You didn’t get any particular credit for serving in Washington. I didn’t understand until I got to this oral history program that you could pick work that would be more likely to lead to becoming an ambassador and other plum assignments by working in desk or staff jobs in the State Department. When I entered the Foreign Service, we were the first post- McCarthy class and got a certain amount of attention for that. I remember one time someone came to the department and asked us, “How many of you want to be ambassadors?” We all raised our hands, of course; but I only raised mine about halfway up because I thought, “Consul general in Bermuda sounds like a hell of a lot more fun!” SD: It seems there are different types in the Foreign Service, including some who focus on networking and climbing to be ambassadors and others who are more focused on having the experience of a good career and doing what they’re interested in . SK: Absolutely. SD: You were consul general four times. What were the most satisfying and the most challenging things about being in that position? SK: Consular work is one side of the operation of the embassy. When you’re running a consular section, you’re pretty much on your own. You don’t have to write long papers with explanations. You get involved with things dealing with relations with the host country and you’re on the country team, but the basic work was done without somebody on top of you. The ambassador and deputy chief of mission didn’t give us any trouble. That’s the way it should be. I remember that if you had a difficult case, and you really didn’t want to do anything— figuring that if you hold off a while, something will happen to resolve it— you just sent it off to Washington, because you’d hardly ever get an answer. SD: Was there a lot less bureaucracy back then? SK: Yes. Things have not improved in that regard. I think com- munications are probably much better now, but there are many more restrictions. SD: Naples was your last post. You retired in 1985, and then almost right away got to work on the oral history project? SK: Yes. I had started thinking, “What am I going to do with my life after I leave the Foreign Service?” A lot of retired FSOs were going into declassification work, but that didn’t seem like much fun. I had attended the funeral of Charles Burke Elbrick, who had been consul in Poland during World War II and was later kid- napped in Brazil. There were so many stories. And I remember at the funeral I saw Larry Eagleburger and many other friends, all of whom had stories of their own to tell. And then it came to me: Someone needs to collect those stories, because no one else knows them. Back then, you could get a good portable tape recorder for about $35. At first, I had the rather naïve idea that I would just go around and invite people to “tell me about the good old I’ve been interviewing people for more than 30 years. I have a fairly low threshold for boredom, and I’m not bored yet.