The Foreign Service Journal, December 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2018 23 many foreign contacts who sometimes visited the house, as well as some Foreign Service officers. Somehow, these contacts lit my desire to become an FSO. Later my father became an ambassador. He was a Republican who supported Lyndon Johnson against Barry Goldwater, whom he found too extreme. The result was that he ended up being nominated as ambassador to Afghanistan by Johnson, staying there under President Richard Nixon, going as ambassador to Morocco under President Gerald Ford and then, after being out during the Jimmy Carter years, being appointed ambassador to Saudi Arabia by President Ronald Reagan. He was thus fairly unique; a political appointee who served four presidents, three embassies and two parties. FSJ: What was it like having a father who was a three-time ambassador? REN: I entered the Foreign Service while he was still in Afghanistan. Our joke was that we entered the FS at much the same time; he at the top and I at the bottom. I first saw an embassy, as it were, through the ambassador’s eyes, when my wife and I spent three months in Afghanistan after graduate school. That experience was a huge aid when I finally got into the Foreign Service. I had some understanding of what an ambassador wanted, how to work with a deputy chief of mission (DCM), and so on. The downside was that I didn’t fully experi- ence the emotions or strangeness of being an entry-level officer. Later, when I supervised entry-level officers, I had to get the experience vicariously, intellectually, to properly understand what they were going through. FSJ: How did your time in the Army during the Vietnam War prepare you for a Foreign Service career? REN: I served as an infantry rifle platoon commander with some 30 to 40 men under my charge (our strength varied depend- ing on casualties, health and replacement rates), and later I was the company executive officer. I learned a lot about managing people and administration in general. Also, the Army has some very effective ideas about leadership that have served me well. In Afghanistan I think we did some good work, and our predictions still stand up well; but we lost a lot of time for lack of resources. Ron Neumann making notes in his journal in Nepal, 1987. American Diplomacy Award