The Foreign Service Journal, October 2010

n March 1982, 31 Foreign Service officers re- ported for our first day as the 9th A-100 class, an experience that almost 30 years later bonds us still. (The numbering of A-100 classes was reset to zero after the 1980 Foreign Service Act.) We assembled in an airless, windowless confer- ence room in a nondescript Rosslyn, Va., building, a setting that helped let the air out of our pretensions to be “the best and the brightest.” Six weeks of talking heads later, we took our commissioning oath and became Foreign Serv- ice officers. Over the course of the next 28 years, the goals, tools and players in the foreign policy arena would change more dramatically than at any time before. We changed, too, through moments of decision that affected not just us, but the course of history. Signing Up As we looked at each other that first day, we represented one of the more diverse classes in terms of age and experi- ence. Stephen Mull, Jack Zetkulic and I were fresh out of university. Lillian Harris, Constance Freeman and Laurel Shea were mid-level entrants who already had an impressive command of the acronyms the rest of us would come to learn. New Yorkers Stuart Seldowitz and Lucy Tamlyn had both been State Department interns, while Stephen del Rosso was a former Presidential Management Intern and Gordon Gray had been a Peace Corps Volunteer. We came fromAlaska and California, from Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C., and many other locales. Some of us were married; some were single. All of us were ready for adven- ture. We’d signed up for different reasons. “I never wanted to be anything but a diplomat,” Jack Zetkulic recalls. “I wanted to travel to places I’d never heard of and to serve my coun- try.” Janet Bogue sought “the adventure of living in and learning about new places.” Robert Jackson had dreamed of joining ever since the eighth grade. John Heffern took the exam because, as he put it, “My fa- ther joined the Foreign Service briefly after the war. His fa- ther pressured him to quit so he could join the family store. To some degree I am living his dream.” But family could also be a restraining factor. “To be honest,” Stuart Seldowitz notes, “most of my family was against my joining the State Department, feeling that it was an elitist institution that would not be welcoming to a Jewish guy from Brooklyn.” When we were commissioned, the Cold War was still the reigning paradigm by which conflicts and allies were meas- ured. We used Selectric typewriters to produce cables, air- grams, memos and evaluation reports. Diplomacy was con- ducted without benefit of e-mail, texting, social media or even fax machines. There was no “CNN factor,” largely be- cause there were very few cable television networks. Video- tapes (Beta or VHS) were the cutting-edge way to stay in touch with American culture. Then, as now, a number of us went first to visa positions in places like Mexico, China and Jamaica. Jean Aldridge would spell her time on the Hermosillo visa line by singing 38 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 1 0 T HE 9 TH A-100 C LASS : A S NAPSHOT T HEY CAME TO THE F OREIGN S ERVICE FROM MANY DIFFERENT PLACES AND BACKGROUNDS . B UT ALL OF THEM WERE READY FOR ADVENTURE . B Y L ESLIE A. B ASSETT I Leslie Bassett is a proud member of the 9th A-100 class who now serves as deputy chief of mission in Manila. While this article benefits from the contributions of many 9th A-100 class colleagues, ultimately she is solely responsible for its content.