The Foreign Service Journal, November 2008

N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 59 lewellyn E. Thompson Jr. (1904-1972), our father, was a long, lean, graceful and absurdly quiet man. Brought up part-time in a small southern Colorado town on the Old Santa Fe Trail and part-time on a sheep and cattle ranch in the remote plains of central New Mexico, he learned to play cards with the Basque cowboys in the ranch bunkhouse. There he perfected the poker face that would serve him so well in his diplomatic career. His background and his quiet demeanor added to his air of mystery. No one could boast of being very close to him, and people from opposite ends of the political spectrum claimed him as their own. In today’s world of celebrity, his life is a reminder of howmuch can be accomplished through quiet service to one’s country. He is known to Foreign Service officers and Cold War scholars for his ambassadorship to the Soviet Union and his role in the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, his career placed him at other important events that are not commonly known. His unique relationship with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev (previously, U.S. diplomats had had almost no informal access to Soviet officials of any kind) was due in part to the fact that during World War II he had stayed at his post inMoscow even during the siege by the Germans, over- seeing both U.S. and British interests when the rest of the diplomatic corps (and much of the Soviet government) had fled to Kuibyshev. When messages had to be relayed from the American ambassador to Premier Joseph Stalin, the young FSO personally delivered them to “Uncle Joe.” Thompson was a clerk, along with Charles “Chip” Bohlen, at the Potsdam Conference. A decade later, he con- ducted the secret negotiations that led to the settlement of Trieste. On behalf of the United States, he concluded the Austrian State Treaty that restored that nation’s sovereignty, and was still in Vienna when the flood of refugees from the Hungarian uprising came streaming across that border. Later, he helped resolve the Berlin Airlift and was present when Nikita Khrushchev revealed the capture of U-2 pilot Gary Powers. Thompson was the first American official to appear on Soviet television and pioneered the cultural exchanges that included the American Expo Fair in Moscow in 1958. And he was an early architect of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks process. Sadly, he died at the relatively young age of 68, before he could witness the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet era — but he predicted them as inevitable. The obscurity of Thompson’s accomplishments is not L Jenny and Sherry Thompson, daughters of Ambassador Llewellyn E. Thompson, are currently working on a book about their father and would greatly appreciate any in- formation or anecdotes from Thompson’s former col- leagues. Please direct responses or queries to Sherry Thompson at LlewellynThompson@gmail.com . R ESOLVING THE T RIESTE DISPUTE BEFORE IT BECAME A C OLD W AR FLASH POINT WAS A HIGHLIGHT OF A MBASSADOR L LEWELLYN T HOMPSON ’ S CAREER . B Y J ENNY AND S HERRY T HOMPSON FS H ERITAGE L LEWELLYN E. T HOMPSON AND THE T RIESTE N EGOTIATIONS