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

Interim Assignments: GATT Tariff Negotiations, 1960–61; Senior Seminar, 1962–63; Diplomat in Residence in California, 1976– 77

Seven Interim Assignments: GATT Tariff Negotiations, 1960–61; Senior Seminar, 1962–63; Diplomat in Residence in California, 1976–77 Geneva: GATT Tariff Negotiations Personnel assignments are never easy in the Foreign Service, either for the administrators making the decisions and issuing the orders or for the assigned officers, with their questions and doubts as to where and how they will be spending the next three to four years of their lives. The process does have some virtues: personnel panels making the recommendations involve some Foreign Service officers (FSOs), though only on decisions related to officers below their own grade. Such decisions are professional and far from capricious. They can even be compassionate and are usually soundly based on assignees’ proven capabilities, professional experience, and career potential. Nevertheless, jokes persist within the Service that assignments are made by using roulette wheels or randomly throwing darts at target boards, or that administrators look to see what preferences officers may have expressed and then make assignments directly contrary to the stated preference, like Djibouti for Paris. Further speculation arises because FSOs’ preference statements are—or used to be—requested on April l of every year. 151 All joking aside, Foreign Service assignments are more often than not made for sound, administrative reasons, most especially because it is a job for which the assignee is especially well qualified and has the necessary language capability. Timing can be critical. Sometimes the goodmatch job is not always open when the candidate is ready for assignment and vice versa. Occasionally an available officer may have to be put into a holding pattern, like an aircraft circling for hours before it can be cleared to land. Temporary or special duty assignments (TDY) can and sometimes do provide a solution as well as a wider experience for the officer. I found myself in such a position in 1960 following my assignment in Chile, when I could not have been more anxious for a change to easier, less stressful living accommodations. My language capabilities at the time were in Spanish, French, and Italian, and as some in-house jokers used to say, “ay leetle eengleesh.” When the “perfect” bilateral country assignment was not found, Personnel thought that a multilateral TDY might be appropriate—one that could build on my past economic and commercial experience. The European Common Market, officially the European Economic Community (EEC), had been formed in 1958 with its first six member states—France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg and The Netherlands . By 1960 it was a going concern and sought adherence to the rules and regulations governing international trade. It applied for accession to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in Geneva with the intention of engaging in the next round of tariff negotiations. This session was scheduled for 1961 in Geneva and was called the Dillon Round, in honor of the U.S. under secretary of state, Douglas Dillon, who had proposed it. The State Department was thus looking for economic and commercial officers to staff the U.S. Delegation to the Dillon Round. One might suppose that when the personnel people in the department punched in “GATT tariff negotiations” and “European language capabilities ,” the name “Wilkowski” among others might have popped out of the assignment machine. This data would have reflected my TDY assignment in 1956 from Embassy Paris to the GATT in Geneva for negotiations with the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the institutional foundation on which the EEC was built. In what seems to have been a good fit, I received another TDY assignment to GATT, this time for the Dillon Interim Assignments 152 Round. I quickly learned that before any of us could take off for Geneva, considerable preparatory work—months of it, in fact—had to be done in Washington. Along with three others I was selected to be on the team that would negotiate with the newly formed EEC. I knew something about GATT, but the EEC as a composite of six countries was another and very new kettle of fish. For the United States to be negotiating with the EEC was considered a historic event. The terrain was virginal, unploughed, and not easy, either for the EEC or its negotiating partners. The scenario would unfold as we moved forward. The four of us on the so-called EEC team faced a unique task, but we...