The Foreign Service Journal, November 2007

Israeli War; as DCM in Cairo, he facilitates Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy negotiations; and as a staff aide, he assists Director of Central Intelligence George H.W. Bush. John Godlove Kormann graduated from the High School of Music and Art in New York City and received his B.A. in government and M.A. in public law from Columbia University. He is a graduate of the Army War College and a former president of the 17th Airborne Division Association. A military historian, he has writ- ten on airborne warfare, denazification and U.S. mili- tary assistance to Africa. The U.S. Foreign Service: From New Frontier to War on Drugs John W. Stahlman, Xlibris Corporation, 2007, $15.00, hardcover, 152 pages. John Stahlman rose from a modest background as a lad in Ohio in the 1930s to interaction with high government officials — including a reigning monarch — as a member of the Foreign Service for 28 years. And, as he says in the introduction to this lean and captivating memoir, this was not the typical FS career. A former Airborne Ranger, Stahlman admits to a tendency to seek demanding assignments. Yet, as he notes, “strangely, wherever he was assigned, violence or disaster lurked or soon occurred.” In Colombia, his first and last post, it was ‘violencia’ by guerrilla groups, the drug mafia and natural disaster. While assigned to Panama, mobs attacked the embassy twice. In Central America, it was revolution and bor- der strife. While he was in Jordan, the Six-Day War erupted, and three days before his posting to Bangladesh, India bombed Dhaka. In Dhahran, the effects of the Iran-Iraq War spilled over near his post and in Mecca. But in each assignment, Stahlman and his family were rewarded with firsthand experiences getting to know the people, culture and natural beauty of their host country. And, he reports, his children recall their FS upbringing as “a blast.” John Stahlman served from 1959 to 1986, with N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 27