He spent 45 years in government, mainly as a diplomat, serving successive administrations as U.S. ambassador to Jordan, Nigeria, El Salvador, Israel, the United Nations, India, and Russia. And he capped his government service as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, from 1997 to 2000. But Thomas R. Pickering began his career as a naval officer, serving on active duty and later in the Naval Reserve as an air intelligence officer. He says that much of what he learned during his time in the Navy proved to be of major help later in the Foreign Service.
To many people, few cultures seem further apart than those of diplomats and military officers. Don't count me among them. I found that serving in the Navy provided me with valuable training for my life as a Foreign Service officer.
I got an early start in thinking about both careers. From my days as a young boy during World War II, I'd wanted to go into the military. I was at a traditional Sunday dinner at my grandfather's house when we heard the first news about Pearl Harbor. I followed the war closely from behind my school desk. For me, a youngster then, the idea of being in the military carried a fascination, pride, and mystique that has never disappeared.
With so many veterans returning to finish their education after the war, I was lucky in 1949 to find a place at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Brunswick Naval Air Station had just been closed, and we used its frozen hangars for ice hockey practice. I guess some of the blue and gold must have rubbed off. After I graduated, I began thinking about becoming a naval aviator.
I didn't apply immediately, however. I spent a year at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, earning a master's degree in international relations; accepted a Fulbright scholarship in Australia; and married my grad school sweetheart (in The Hague, on my way back to the States). When I returned, my draft deferment for education expired. Within a few weeks, I was in Newport, Rhode Island, at Naval Officer Candidate School (OCS).
Before I began, I got the bad news. Two years of graduate school had dimmed my sight, and I failed to meet the stringent vision requirements for flight training. Instead, the Navy made me a photo interpreter in air intelligence. Following OCS, after nine more months of training in both visual and radar photo interpretation, I moved to Port Lyautey (now Kenitra, Morocco), where our unit was a tenant on a French naval air station.
I left active duty in 1959 as a lieutenant (junior grade), and immediately joined the State Department, where I traded my service dress blues for the proverbial diplomatic pinstripes. I continued in the Naval Reserve, eventually rising to lieutenant commander. I figured when I joined State that I'd left a big chapter of my life behind me, and that what I was about to do would be completely unlike what I did before.
Almost immediately, however, I found that many of the skills I'd learned as a naval officer were going to prove invaluable in the Foreign Service. In OCS, for example, I'd been taught to master the key elements of a subject quickly, then commit them to memory, and later use them as a foundation for further work. These skills became part of my civilian standard operating procedure as well.
Indeed, I soon realized that there were more similarities than differences between the two cultures. Both the military and the Foreign Service promoted people on the basis of merit, using independent promotion boards and annual fitness reports. They made duty assignments based on the needs of the service. Tours lasted from two to four years. And you never stopped studying and learning.
When my job as a diplomat involved working closely with the military—as it almost invariably does in today's world—my training and three years of active duty gave me insights into that relationship that Foreign Service officers who hadn't served in uniform never had. It proved helpful throughout my career, both as an ambassador and in senior State Department posts.
Even my training as a photo interpreter remained valuable. As a result of my Navy experience, I had a pretty good idea of what I was looking at from an airplane, and I could spot subtle features in industrial buildings and terrain whenever I flew over a country or region. It's a useful skill when you're trying to understand what's happening in a country and its economy—a little like knowing the local language.
Without the fundamentals at OCS, my experience in photo interpretation (where a good bit of the work involved understanding ground warfare and equipment) and my active duty in support of the Sixth Fleet, I would have been even more "at sea" in the Foreign Service—particularly in my duties as ambassador, which involved dealing with foreign military leaders as well.
Examples abound. During my career, I became involved in issues ranging from arms control and disarmament and overseas military bases to nuclear weapons, military assistance, and export controls. As ambassador to Jordan, I helped secure military support for the country after the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, including increased armor and ground equipment and Hawk missiles for air defense.
In ambassadorial assignments as different as India and El Salvador, or Russia and Israel, my close relations with the military were significant. For instance, in India in the early 1990s, we were beginning to discuss the possibilities of a closer relationship with the Indian military, which has recently evolved in ways that we never anticipated. In El Salvador in the mid-1980s, we were in the midst of a tough guerrilla war.
Later, at the United Nations, I played a lead role in putting together the coalition in the Security Council that dealt with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, and authorized the use of force to expel the Iraqi forces. And my final post—as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs—involved hours in the White House situation room, grappling with political-military issues.
My military training also led me to some satisfying personal experiences. When I was ambassador to Jordan, I was often invited to accompany King Hussein on helicopter trips around the country, and I made it an avocation to find little-explored archaeological sites that I had seen from the air. My wife and I had developed an intense interest in Middle Eastern archaeology. Thus, two things from my stint as a photo interpreter stayed with me—looking from the helicopter at previously unknown or unstudied sites and using my map-reading skills in long land trips over unmarked desert terrain to visit them. There weren't many places where you could pull over and ask for driving directions.
Similarly, in the 1970s, I was able to travel overland from Jordan to both Yemen and Oman. In the early 1980s, I drove from Lagos, Nigeria, to Algiers, returning across the Sahara. And in the mid-1990s, I traveled overland from Moscow to four of the Central Asian "stans" and back. These were long trips, on roads that were often no more than desert tracks and without updated maps or GPS.
My early service in the Navy started a long chain of learning and familiarity with the military, which served me well in my diplomatic career. It continues to do so to this day, when, as an international consultant, I work to understand and interpret international events important to major clients in the international business world.
I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to spend time in uniform. At almost every turn in a nearly 42-year career, it made a difference. I've never regretted taking those three years and four months out of my life—and ahead of my chosen career—to serve my country in the Navy.