Abroad for Her Country: Tales of a Pioneer Woman Ambassador in the U.S. Foreign Service

Paris, France, 1953–56 (Deputy Commercial Attaché)

Five Paris, France, 1953–56 (Deputy Commercial Attaché) I was assigned to Paris in 1953, when the U.S. government still used ocean liners to transfer Foreign Service personnel to their posts. We were encouraged to take American flag carriers but could also use foreign registry ships. Thus, I gained a head start on my French experience with a fantastic ocean voyage on the Ile de France from New York to Le Havre, followed by a pleasant train ride through Normandy to Paris. About midway on my train trip through the French countryside, as we passed through the village of Lisieux, I saluted Sainte Thérèse with a prayer of thanks for her brief twenty-five-year life of memorable service and sacrifice. For her extraordinarily brilliant life of prayer and counsel to others she was made a Doctor of the Church. I had spent several months training for my Paris assignment to the U.S. Mission to COCOM. Its offices were located on the rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré, close to the U.S. Embassy and just off the Place de la Concorde. Upon checking in at the Embassy, I was stunned to learn that notwithstanding all my specialized training in Washington, my assignment had been pulled out from under me and I was shifted to a rather menial job on the commercial side of the embassy’s Economic Section! It was, I learned, a classic case of “musical chairs” that sometimes occurs at large posts. One 99 of the men in the Commercial Section saw an opportunity to slough off his dull job and grab my much more attractive assignment to COCOM. He felt he had done yeoman’s service, and the system owed him something . He was on the ground, spoke fluent French, was a known quantity, and could and did obtain the necessary administrative support to switch jobs. His gambit never endeared him to me, though I tried to be as civil as I could. My half-Irish heritage came into play as a result of this disappointment . From my mother I learned how much importance the Irish attach to signs and omens. Thus I suspected that my bad luck in losing a prized assignment and getting a punk one meant that something was not quite right about the Paris tour. And so it proved to the end. Paris turned out to be the most unhappy assignment of my entire Foreign Service career, bar none. I realized I had best be on my guard and stay alert, for the remainder of my stay in Paris. I pondered whether I should formally protest the job switch to Washington , but I feared I might be branded as a complainer in the Foreign Service. As it turned out, the personnel people in Paris to whom I but murmured my timid concerns advised me to “stand back and realize that you are in Paris, and there are psychic advantages to any assignment here.” And there were. So I dragged myself back to my desk and the dull routine I had inherited from that sneak who stole my job. It suddenly dawned on me how important the nature and quality of my work and career had become to me after nearly ten years in the service and as I moved into my thirties. Not long after that (it was like discovering the first wrinkles on your face), an official notice came in from Washington confirming what had long been understood: that if a single woman officer married, she had to resign from the U.S. Foreign Service—not a single man, only a single woman! That gave me still more pause about this career I had chosen, initially as a war job to do my patriotic duty. By then both the Marine lieutenant in Trinidad and the oil company executive in Bogotá were fast fading from memory. I only hoped they had found other interests. Moreover, I was beginning to doubt that marriage was in my future. To my dismay I was finding that Paris was really a man’s town, maybe even that the Foreign Service was a man’s province, at least as experienced in the 1940s and 1950s. Paris, France, 1953–56 100 The author before being expelled from first grade. Arrow (1) indicates author; arrow (2) indicates Jimzie O’Melia, the basic cause of both students’ expulsion. To left...