THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2023 69 IN MEMORY n Harry C. Blaney III, 85, a retired Foreign Service officer, died of kidney cancer in his Bethesda, Md., home on May 11, 2023. Mr. Blaney graduated from Allegheny College (B.A.) in 1959 and Yale University (M.A.) in 1961. He also did graduate work and research at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and at the London School of Economics and Political Science. After joining the Foreign Service in December 1965, Mr. Blaney served twice in Brussels—at the U.S. mission to the European Communities and at the U.S. mission to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, where he was economic and science counselor. Mr. Blaney was a White House staff member and special assistant to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then counselor to the U.S. president. While at the White House, he followed a wide range of environment and energy issues and served as coordinator for the United States in NATO’s Committee on the Challenges of Modern Society. He also worked as special assistant to Russell E. Train, then the chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality. From his 20-year career, Mr. Blaney is most noted for his work as a member of the policy planning staff of Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance, covering energy, nonproliferation, technology, and environmental issues, as well as the Law of the Sea. After retiring in 1988, Mr. Blaney held two volunteer jobs. First, he was president and chief executive officer for more than a decade of the Coalition for American Leadership Abroad. This was an AFSA initiative that brought together some 50 nongovernmental organizations to support U.S. engagement in world affairs and the “150 Account.” Second, Mr. Blaney was a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, a Washington, D.C., think tank. He is survived by his former wife, Julia A. Moore. n James Francis “Jim” Dobbins Jr., 81, a retired Senior Foreign Service officer and ambassador, died on July 3, 2023, from complications of Parkinson’s disease. Mr. Dobbins was born on May 31, 1942, in Brooklyn, N.Y. His father was a lawyer for the Veterans Administration, and his mother was a homemaker. When he was 10, he moved with his family to Manila, where his father had been transferred. That experience, which involved weeks of first-class travel by train and ship, imbued him with a lifetime love for living abroad. Mr. Dobbins returned to Washington, D.C., for his senior year of high school, then enrolled at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. During his senior year there, in 1963, he passed the Foreign Service exam, but he had already enlisted in the Navy. After graduation, he served for three years aboard the USS Bon Homme Richard, an aircraft carrier supporting America’s deepening involvement in Vietnam. He was on duty during critical moments in the clash with North Vietnamese forces near his ship in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964, which effectively opened the Vietnam War. Mr. Dobbins joined the Foreign Service after his discharge and was assigned to Paris. At a party given by the U.S. embassy’s Marine detachment, he met a Norwegian model, Toril Kleivdal. They married in 1968. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Mr. Dobbins took on a number of assignments, including ambassador to the European Community, the forerunner of the European Union. In 1993 he was asked to oversee the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia. He was later assigned to oversee all peacekeeping-related issues at the State Department, including the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. A stint as a special envoy to Haiti followed, during the U.S. intervention in 1994 and 1995. In the late 1990s, he held assignments involving postwar diplomacy in Bosnia and Kosovo. His career almost derailed in 1999 when two members of Congress accused him of lying under oath while testifying about Haitian death squads. An internal investigation cleared him of that charge but concluded that he had been “reckless” in his choice of words. Amb. Dobbins claimed that the investigation’s final report had been tweaked to please the politicians. He appealed and, in March 2001, received what he called “a sizable financial settlement,” according to The New York Times. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he became the Bush administration’s envoy to the Afghan opposition, played a key role at the 2001 Bonn conference from which Hamid Karzai emerged as the consensus candidate for Afghanistan’s first president, and reopened the American embassy in Kabul on Dec. 16, 2001. After retiring from the Foreign Service in 2002, Amb. Dobbins directed RAND’s International Security and Defense Policy Center until 2013, when he returned to government service as President Barack Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He spent a challenging year in the post, negotiating over such issues as whether to keep American troops in Afghanistan after 2014 and the controversial swap of
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