The Foreign Service Journal, October 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOB ER 2018 61 ernment officer to investigate an outbreak of Lassa fever, a close relative of Ebola, at its source in Jos, Nigeria. Returning toWashington, D.C., in 1970, he ran the Southern African Students Program in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. In 1972 he moved to the Office of Personnel, where he made the first assign- ment of a female officer to the Office of the Secretary of State and the first assignment of a female officer to Arabic training. Forty years later, DACOR honoredMr. Gallagher with their annual Tragen Award for his support of the women’s movement at State in its earliest days. In 1975 he became acting U.S. consul general in Guayaquil. At age 34 he was the youngest chief of a major American diplo- matic mission inmodern U.S. history. That same year Mr. Gallagher publicly came out as a gay man at a conference organized by the Gay Activist Alliance of Washington, D.C., making him the first officer of the U.S. federal government to come out publicly and voluntarily. In 2013 Secretary of State Hillary RodhamClinton praisedMr. Gallagher for challenging the discrimination against gay people that was prevalent in 1975 and which, at the time, forced him to resign from the State Department. Mr. Gallagher relocated to California, where he worked as an emergency room social worker at the UCLA Hospital in Los Angeles, taught interviewing skills at the UCLA School of Medicine and volunteered as director of the counseling program at the Gay Community Service Center in Los Angeles. Moving to San Francisco to work at the Travelers Aid Society, he developed the first counseling program for children in the Tenderloin, the city’s most notorious slum, and became director of Napa County’s psy- chiatric emergency program in 1980. In 1994, when President Bill Clinton lifted the policy of formal discrimina- tion against gay Foreign Service officers, Mr. Gallagher returned to his diplomatic career. His first assignment on returning to the State Department was as consul in Madrid. After serving as country officer for Eritrea and Sudan in the Office of East African Affairs, he was posted to Brussels as head of the visa section before returning toWashington as country officer for the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mr. Gallagher’s final assignment was with the Office of International Health, where he served as regional adviser for Europe in what was, at the time, the most effective worldwide anti-AIDS program. He retired from the Foreign Service in 2005. In 2012 Mr. Gallagher joined the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus. He sang with the chorus on Broadway, at Carnegie Hall with Chita Rivera, at the Plaza Hotel with Bernadette Peters and at the Grand Canal Theater in Dublin. In 2015 Monmouth University named Mr. Gallagher Distinguished Alumnus of the Year. In 2016 NJ Pride, the New Jersey gay organization, presented himwith its Trailblazer award in recognition of his many years of gay activism. In 2016 the State Department issued an official apol- ogy toMr. Gallagher for the fact that he had been forced to give up his career 40 years earlier. Mr. Gallagher is survived by his hus- band, Amin Dulgumoni, and his former wife, CarolynWorrell. n John P. (Jack) Harrod, 72, a retired Senior Foreign Service officer with the U.S. Information Agency, died of an apparent heart attack onMarch 25 at his home in New London, N.H. Mr. Harrod was born on July 13, 1945, in Chicago, the son of John E. andMarguerite (Phillips) Harrod. He was educated in the Chicago public schools and attended Grin- nell College in Iowa before transferring to Colgate University, fromwhich he received a bachelor’s degree in Russian area studies in 1966. He then completed two years of gradu- ate study in the same field at Georgetown University inWashington, D.C., and spent a summer session in Russian language study at Moscow State University. He was fluent in Russian, Polish and French, and had a working knowledge of Dutch. Mr. Harrod joined USIA in 1968. His overseas assignments included Afghani- stan, Poland and two tours in the former Soviet Union, where he played a key role with several American cultural exchange exhibitions and served as press attaché in Moscow. During the first of those exhibitions he met Dolores (Dolly) Foley, of Manchester, N.H. The two were wed in Kabul in 1971. From 1979 to 1981, Jack was a member of the State Department’s Iran Hostage Task Force, serving as a media spokes- man and a liaison with the four families of USIA hostages. In 1982 he received a Congressional Fellowship from the Ameri- can Political Science Association, which enabled him to work with Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and Representative JimLeach (R-Iowa). From 1984 to 1992 Mr. Harrod oversaw USIA operations in Poland, and then Bel- gium. His final assignment was as director of USIA’s Office of West European and Canadian Affairs, where he oversawU.S. public affairs operations in 24 countries or multilateral organizations. In that capacity, he received USIA’s highest recognition, the Distinguished Honor Award. After retiring in 1996, Mr. Harrod was the senior consultant to the Public Diplomacy Foundation and served on the