Long before he was President Reagan’s Secretary of Defense, Frank Carlucci was a young State Department political officer in Kinshasa,…
“We didn’t know if they were all dead…” The attacks on American embassies during the Six-Day War
During the Six-Day War of June 1967 Israel fought and won a decisive victory against Syrian, Egyptian, Iraqi, and Lebanese…
Human Rights and USAID: Remembering the Turbulent 1990s in Indonesia
Political and economic crises abroad have a dramatic impact not only on American personnel at our embassies, but on locally-employed…
An Espionage Caper in Ghana; Helping Americans Escape Rwanda — Scenes From a Diplomatic Life
Arlene Render’s career took her from a segregated neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio, to three ambassadorships and a lifetime of diplomatic…
The Impact of China’s Tiananmen Square Massacre in Taiwan and on the Mainland
Hong Kong-born U.S. Foreign Service Officer Edward Loo migrated to the United States as an infant, and went on to…
Foreign Service Newly-Weds in 1960s Yemen
Since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, Yemen was been a hot spot for unrest in the Middle East. The…
CNN, Tanks, and Glass Walls: The August 1991 Coup
In August of 1991, hard-liners opposed to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev initiated a coup attempt to overthrow him. The rebellion…
When One of “The Murrow Boys” Became a Foreign Service Wife
Mary Marvin Breckinridge Patterson was the only female member of the original generation of CBS Radio war correspondents known as…
Fleeing Rwanda to Survive, then Returning to Rebuild, 1994
On April 6, 1994, the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi were assassinated when their plane was shot down near Kigali…
Crisis Management: Occupation of USIS in South Korea, 1985
On May 25, 1985, seventy-three South Korean students barged into the United States Information Services (USIS) library in Seoul and…