Memoirs and Occasional Papers – An ADST Series – Page 4 – Association for Diplomatic Studies & Training

ADST created the Memoirs and Occasional Papers Series to preserve firsthand accounts, histories, and other informed observations on foreign affairs for scholars, journalists, and the general public.

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Peck’s Postulates

Peck, Edward L. Memoirs and Occasional Papers, Political science

Ambassador (ret.) Edward L. Peck presents a concise, organized framework for navigating international relations in Peck’s Postulates, a new volume in the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Memoirs and Occasional Papers Series. With touches of gentle humor, the author offers four concepts, each explicated with supporting statements and examples....

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U.S. intelligence specialist James Potts tells the story of how covert French military aid changed the course of history by enabling the rebellious Americans to hold off the forces of Britain’s King George III, most notably in the pivotal battle of Saratoga in October 1777. Potts probes the actions of France’s King Louis XVI’s government in secretly providing vital arms and ammunition to George Washington’s forces––and much-needed subsidies to the Continental Congress––in the critical early years of the American Revolution, beginning in 1775. Drawing heavily on contemporaneous French government archives and other historical sources, Potts brings to life the colorful leading characters in the drama: France’s Foreign Minister (and secret spymaster) le Comte de Vergennes; Vergennes’s principal agent, the playwright Beaumarchais; Lord Stormont, King George’s ambassador in Paris; Benjamin Franklin, the wily American Commissioner in Paris; and numerous perpetrators of high intrigue on land and sea. The author also shows the highly-effective British counterespionage operations, whose American agents had penetrated Franklin’s mission in Paris, even intercepting his letters to the Continental Congress. In 1778 France joined the Americans openly in their war against the British and, at great cost to French fiscal well-being, further helped them win their independence.

French Covert Action in the American Revolution

Potts, James M. Memoirs and Occasional Papers

U.S. intelligence specialist James Potts tells the story of how covert French military aid changed the course of history by enabling the rebellious Americans to hold off the forces of Britain’s King George III, most notably in the pivotal battle of Saratoga in October 1777. Potts probes the actions of...

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Lu Rudel describes his unique experiences with U.S. economic aid programs during some of the most dramatic international events since World War II. These include Iran after the fall of Mosaddegh (1956–1960); Turkey after the military coup of 1960 and continuing to the start of the Cuban Missile crisis; India after the death of Nehru (1965–1970); and Pakistan following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988. Rudel’s firsthand observations on Iran differ markedly from the description of events commonly espoused by some historians and journalists. His memoir also provides a firsthand account of the political metamorphosis over the past half-century of the “Group of 77” nations, as they attempted to employ the UN’s economic development agencies to press for a “New International Economic Order.” These experiences lead him to draw important lessons about the conduct and effectiveness of foreign aid. After retirement in 1980 Rudel launched a second career, applying lessons learned from his work in international development to creating and running a thousand-acre land development and resort in rural Appalachia. His experiences over the ensuing thirty years as an entrepreneur track the relentless growth of government regulations and the disappearance of community support institutions such as local banks, now being replaced by megabanks. A final chapter examines global trends of the past eighty years in four critical areas of change affecting our lives––population growth, science and technology, economic systems, and political structures––to draw some surprising conclusions and projections. LUDWIG “LU” RUDEL, a Holocaust survivor from Vienna, came to the United States in 1938. A 1952 graduate of City College of New York, his graduate studies at NYU were interrupted by two years of service in the U.S. Army. In 1956 he joined the International Cooperation Administration and served succeeding U.S. foreign aid programs in various roles until 1980. He also developed and ran the Glendale Yearound community in Appalachian Pennsylvania until 2002.

Memoirs of an Agent for Change in International Development

Rudel, Ludwig Biography, Memoirs and Occasional Papers

Lu Rudel describes his unique experiences with U.S. economic aid programs during some of the most dramatic international events since World War II. These include Iran after the fall of Mosaddegh (1956–1960); Turkey after the military coup of 1960 and continuing to the start of the Cuban Missile crisis; India...

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The Legendary Uli Women of Nigeria: Their Life Stories in Signs, Symbols, and Motifs

Sanders, Robin Ambassadors, Biography, Foreign relations

Dr. Robin Renee Sanders, having lived in Africa for several years, was always struck by the ancestral, socio-historical and educational aspects of certain African cultural practices, especially languages, artifacts, and sign and symbol systems from the Ovahimba in Namibia and Pygmies in Congo, to the Horom, Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, and...

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The Rise of Africa’s Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

Sanders, Robin Africa, history, Diplomats, Foreign relations

Ambassador (Dr.) Robin Renee Sanders’ new book on The Rise of Africa’s Small & Medium Size Enterprises (SMEs) is an insightful examination of the dramatic shift in the development paradigm for Sub Saharan Africa — driven in large part by the imaginative, innovative, and insta-impact leadership of the region’s small...

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Bushels and Bales

Steele, Howard Agricultural economists, Memoirs and Occasional Papers

Bushels and Bales: A Food Soldier in the Cold War covers Howard Steele’s encounters with the people, problems, and opportunities in forty-three countries and a variety of U.S. government programs. Along the way, he survived gun-toting Bolivian revolutionaries, Viet Cong artillery fire, deadly anarchy in Sri Lanka, a shakedown by...

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In 1956 John Tinny began his brief years on the “Golden Road to Samarkand,” his vision of the pinnacle for a State Department Foreign Service officer. The murder of Her Britannic Majesty’s vice consul, a grim portent, climaxed Day One at his first post, San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Around this obscure consulate the Cold War flamed hot. For 130 weeks he and his family lived amidst savagery and the shades of Hitler and Rommel. Thereafter he was posted to Cairo, where Nile floods bring life and death, and he gloried in the romance of the great sand seas. Assigned to Beirut, he immersed himself in the language of the Koran and the certainty of True Believers. He glimpsed hope in a refugee camp attended by angry young and bitter old Palestinians and clashed with the angry intensity of young Israelis. Understanding the Arab-Israeli problem is not an answer, he discovered. A misstep in the British Crown Colony of Aden, where vain sultans and the jingle of medals on British chests exuded an air of the fading Imperial Raj, taught him that John Q. Public was his master. The State Department pardoned him and named him consul and principal officer of Consulate Benghazi, Libya. There, his second inept misstep was unpardonable. A murder on his last day brought him full circle. His life as a Foreign Service officer ended on the gangplank of a tired Italian tramp steamer, not on the Golden Road to Samarkand. John David Tinny served in Honduras, Egypt, Lebanon, and Aden, accompanied by his wife Josephine and three sons. He was serving as U.S. consul in Benghazi, Libya, when it was bombed in 1964. After leaving the Foreign Service in 1966, he worked for Occidental Petroleum and Conoco in the Persian Gulf and Africa. He earned a Master’s degree in library science in 1986 and worked as a reference librarian until 2011. Tinny married Harriette Josephine Hicks in 1950 after both had served in the U.S. Navy, 1943–46, Josephine in the WAVES, John at sea. He also swept mines in Korea, 1950–53. Both he and his wife descend from Florida pioneers and Revolutionary War patriots.

From the Inside Out

Tinny, John D. Memoirs and Occasional Papers, World history

In 1956 John Tinny began his brief years on the “Golden Road to Samarkand,” his vision of the pinnacle for a State Department Foreign Service officer. The murder of Her Britannic Majesty’s vice consul, a grim portent, climaxed Day One at his first post, San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Around this...

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A lifelong lover of opera and classical music, Hans N. “Tom” Tuch served 35 years in the United States Foreign Service, retiring in 1985 as a Career Minister. This book recalls his devoted engagement with music, especially opera, in the context of that career. His love of opera began in 1938 in Berlin, where he witnessed Herbert von Karajan’s first appearance as conductor at the Berlin Staatsoper. Tuch’s Foreign Service career took him to posts with opera houses–Wiesbaden, Frankfurt, Berlin, Munich, Moscow, Sofia, Cologne, Bonn, and Washington–and earned him a Presidential Distinguished Service Award, the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Public Diplomacy, and the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit in the Federal Republic of Germany. In this book, Tuch shares fascinating stories from his Cold War service in Moscow, Sofia, and Berlin, including Vice President Nixon’s 1959 visit to the Soviet Union (and his famous “kitchen debate” with Khrushchev), the U-2 disaster, and other U.S.-Soviet crises. He writes about his friendship with Georg Solti in the 1950s, his attendance at great music festivals––Salzburg, Florence, Bayreuth––and conductors such as Furtwängler, Walter, Böhm, Szell, and Barbirolli and outstanding vocal artists like Schwarzkopf, Callas, Flagstadt, Ferrier, Seefried, and Fischer-Dieskau. He escorted the Boston Symphony on its 1952 European trip, the New York Philharmonic in 1959, and the New York City Ballet in 1962 on their Soviet tours. In Washington in the early 1960s, Tuch was an assistant to U.S. Information Agency director Edward R. Murrow and, later, deputy director of the Voice of America, ending his Foreign Service career as Minister for Public Affairs in Bonn. His two tours in Germany–in Berlin 1967–70 and Bonn 1981–85–proved especially rich in musical content, with opera, symphony, and solo performances. Since retiring, he and his wife Mimi have frequented the opera and symphonic scene in Washington, especially the Wolf Trap Opera Company in Virginia, with excursions to Santa Fe, Glimmerglass, and New York.

Arias, Cabalettas, and Foreign Affairs

Tuch, Hans N. Memoirs and Occasional Papers, Miscellanea

A lifelong lover of opera and classical music, Hans N. “Tom” Tuch served 35 years in the United States Foreign Service, retiring in 1985 as a Career Minister. This book recalls his devoted engagement with music, especially opera, in the context of that career. His love of opera began in...

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This memoir of Theresa Tull’s thirty-three-year career as a twentieth-century diplomat begins with recollections of her childhood during the Second World War in the small town of Runnemede, New Jersey, and culminates with her two ambassadorial appointments. Her first overseas assignment as a Foreign Service officer, at Embassy Brussels, was followed by a year of Vietnamese language training. Her FSO career took her to Saigon just in time for the Tet Offensive of 1968. In September 1970 she returned to Washington to work on internal Vietnamese politics in the Vietnam Working Group. In August 1973 she returned to Vietnam as deputy principal officer at the U.S. Consulate General in Da Nang, where she remained until the fall of South Vietnam in April 1975, when she organized and oversaw the consulate’s evacuation. Other assignments included the Intelligence and Research Bureau, consul in Cebu, the Philippines, the National War College, office director in the Human Rights Bureau, the Senior Seminar, diplomat-in-residence at Lincoln University, and director, Office of Regional Affairs, East Asia and Pacific Bureau. As chargé d’affaires in Laos in 1983, she negotiated and oversaw the first joint crash-site excavation to seek the remains of missing U.S. servicemen. In 1987 President Reagan appointed her ambassador to Guyana, and in 1993 President Clinton named her his ambassador to Brunei. The book includes stories of Tull’s early life and education. It tracks her father’s death, her initial education, post–high school employment, and early college education. In 1963, without a college degree and after successfully passing the rigorous entrance examinations, Terry Tull entered the U.S. Foreign Service. She later received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland, and in 1973 earned a master’s degree in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of Michigan.

A Long Way from Runnemede

Tull, Theresa Diplomats, Memoirs and Occasional Papers

This memoir of Theresa Tull’s thirty-three-year career as a twentieth-century diplomat begins with recollections of her childhood during the Second World War in the small town of Runnemede, New Jersey, and culminates with her two ambassadorial appointments. Her first overseas assignment as a Foreign Service officer, at Embassy Brussels, was...

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A Haiti Chronicle: The Undoing of a Latent Democracy, 1999-2001

Whitman, Daniel Memoirs and Occasional Papers

Former ADST Executive Director Dan Whitman has written an account of two tumultuous years and three elections in Haiti, where he served as Counselor for Public Affairs in 1999–2001. A Haiti Chronicle: The Undoing of a Latent Democracy, 1999–2001 puts on the record some disputed or forgotten events and efforts...

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