Contributions by Minnesotans in the Foreign Service

The son of parents from Two Harbors, Richard A. Ericson spent much of his childhood in Minnesota. After serving with the U.S. Army in Korea immediately after World War II, Ericson joined the Foreign Service in 1947. In 1968, he was political counselor in Seoul when the North Koreas seized the USS Pueblo, a naval intelligence vessel, killing one crew member and holding the others hostage. For nearly a year, Ericson advised Washington on North Korean negotiation tactics and kept the South Korean government from overreacting to the situation. The Pueblo crew was freed after 11 months of talks, and Ericson went on to become Ambassador to Iceland. Read his Pueblo story in ADST’s collection of “Moments in U.S. Diplomatic History.”

After his childhood on a southern Minnesota farm and studies at St. Olaf College, L. Bruce Laingen served in the Pacific in World War II with the U.S. Navy. He joined the Foreign Service in 1950 and was leading the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 when radical students took him and 51 other U.S. diplomatic personnel hostage for 444 days. His wife Penne started what became a nationwide Yellow Ribbon campaign to show solidarity with the hostages. Read both Bruce’s and Penne’s hostage crisis stories on ADST’s website.

Philip W. Pillsbury Jr. grew up in Minnesota as the son of the president of the Pillsbury company and joined the Foreign Service as part of the U.S. Information Agency in 1959. He built people-to-people ties between America and countries across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. As the cultural affairs officer in Buenos Aires, he helped maintain U.S. ties with Argentina during tensions surrounding the Falklands war with the United Kingdom. Read his oral history in ADST’s collection.

Raised in Minnesota, David J. Fischer joined the Foreign Service in 1961. After assignments in Germany and Poland, Fischer worked as the secretary of the U.S. delegation to the first round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), coordinating and documenting months of meetings with the Soviets. According to Fischer, these meetings convinced the Soviets that they could not win a nuclear war, leading them to accept a doctrine of mutual deterrence and keeping the Cold War from going hot. Fischer later became Ambassador to the Seychelles. Read his oral history on ADST’s website.

After growing up in St. Paul, Arma Jane Karaer joined the Foreign Service in 1967. Thirty years later, she was named Ambassador to Papua New Guinea, arriving in the middle of a coup d’etat. During her tour, she and her team assisted the military in recovering the remains of U.S. servicemen killed in airplane crashes in World War II. Read her oral history in ADST’s collection.

Constance J. Freeman grew up in Minnesota politics as the daughter of Governor Orville Freeman. After spending four years with the Peace Corps in the Congo and Cameroon, she joined the Foreign Service in 1983. In the early 1990s, as economic officer in Nairobi, she reported on corruption and helped inform Washington’s decision to suspend aid to Kenya, compelling the Kenyan government to implement essential reforms that saved the country from economic collapse. Read her story in ADST’s oral history collection.

Born in Ortonville, Philip Robert Hanson was a Peace Corps volunteer in Cote d’Ivoire and Morocco before joining the Foreign Service and continuing his work in Africa. On June 25, 1981, he was on a flight to begin a new assignment in Lome, Togo, when his plane crashed and killed all on board. Hanson was 35 years old.