The Foreign Service Journal, November 2008

surprising, as he left a scant paper trail. When he retired in the 1960s, the expected book of memoirs was not forthcoming, even though such friends and colleagues as Chip Bohlen, Jacob Beam and George Kennan were writing or had written theirs. When asked why, Thompson said he felt it would compromise the work of future diplomats if it became practice to divulge behind-the-scene talks. He consistently maintained that it was the results of negotiations and diplomatic work, not the process or personalities, that counted. “He didn’t give a damn about pub- licity,” his one-time assistant Leonard Unger recalls, but “he had a very spe- cial relationship with the newspaper people; he knew how to work with them” — a useful skill when secrecy was essential. When his wife once complained that credit for his work went to someone else, he said, “Jane, where it matters, they know.” He was right, of course, and after he success- fully concluded the Austrian State Treaty in 1955, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles offered him the ambassadorship to the Soviet Union. In November 1971, already ill with cancer, he gave an uncharacteristical- ly long interview to historian John Campbell on the Trieste crisis. He said resolving that matter had given him the most satisfaction in his career, and he thought important lessons had been learned that could prove useful in the future. For that reason, we wish to highlight that episode here. A Thorny Problem At the end of World War II, the status of the city of Trieste and the surrounding “Free Territory” was a thorn in everyone’s side. Claimed by both the Yugoslavs and the Italians, it was given to neither. Instead the Americans and British occupied one part that included the city and port of Trieste (Zone A), and the Yugoslavs occupied the other (Zone B) until negotiations could assign the area to one or the other claimant — or both, as happened in the end. For nearly a decade, the Italians used Trieste to wield political pres- sure on the U.S. because, as allies, they felt it should go to them. Yugoslav President Josip Tito argued that because Yugoslav partisans had liberated the area from the Germans, it should be theirs. Repeated at- tempts to bring the two contenders to the negotiating table proved fruitless, even though geopolitical interests made this a Gordian knot in the heart of Europe that everyone wanted untied as soon as possible. So seemingly intractable was the situation that in October 1953 Clare Boothe Luce, U.S. ambassador to Italy (and wife of media magnate Henry Luce), convinced President Dwight Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to pull out their troops and give their section to Italy. This became known as the October 8th Declaration. Luce argued that, otherwise, the commu- nists would win the next Italian elec- tion, even implying it might jeopar- dize Eisenhower’s own re-election. While the ambassador understood the Italians, she did not assess the 60 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 8 In a twist on Woodrow Wilson’s dictum, Thompson maintained that “Open covenants are all right, but arriving at them openly is a poor way to achieve them.” Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson, wife Jane, and daughters Jenny and Andy arriving in Vienna, 1952.