The Foreign Service Journal, October 2012

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2012 71 of 63 years, Helen Gordon of Redding, Conn.; his daughters, Anne McLaughlin (and her husband, Ed) of Ithaca, N.Y., and Laura Kutnick (and her husband, Dale) of Redding Center, Conn.; a sister, Gloria Delson of Los Angeles, Calif.; and five grandchildren, Ben and Gordon McLaughlin and Toren, Varyk and Kyja Kutnick. n Earl Allyn Kessler II , 90, a retired Foreign Service officer, died on May 24 in Fairfax, Va., with his family at his side. Mr. Kessler was born in Portland, Ore., in 1921 and became interested in inter- national affairs after a conversation with an officer at the consulate in Vancouver. He pursued that interest at the University of Southern California, which had one of the few international affairs programs in the country at the time, graduating in 1944. He then entered the Navy’s V-7 program, received cryptographic train- ing and served in Honolulu working on Japanese codes. When his Navy enlistment ended, he embarked on a diplomatic career that spanned the tenures of 12 Secretaries of State and five continents. On Oct. 24, 1946, he joined the State Department as a courier and was issued a green diplo- matic passport signed by Dean Acheson. Covering all of Asia from his Shanghai office, Mr. Kessler had vivid stories of China’s civil war, the Marshall mission and final U.S. evacuation from Shanghai to Honolulu. From Hawaii, he helped design and fly courier services that connected the State Department with missions in Australia, New Zealand and South and Southeast Asia. Mr. Kessler then moved into adminis- trative duties with assignments in Athens (1949-1952) and Madras (1952-1954). In 1955 he returned to Washington and worked in the Refugee Relief Program of the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs. In 1957 he was assigned to Mexico City, where he met and married Martha F. Varela in 1959. Mr. Kessler’s 1960 tour in Baghdad as personnel officer was marked, on the one hand, by the ambas- sador’s being declared persona non grata and, on the other, by enjoyment of the embassy’s motor boat and picnics. Mr. Kessler next served at the consul-