Jack Wilson Lydman was the American ambassador to Malaysia from 1969 to 1973, but he got into a dispute with the Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, and resigned. He and I met the next year, when he came to speak at my undergraduate school and he invited me to join him and his wife for a dinner party at their Georgetown home. I was eager to get into the Foreign Service and he became a source of advice and encouragement. (But for a nagging inability to pass the State Department test, why, I’d be chargé de affairs in some glamorous posting this very day.) Lydman had been instrumental in influencing American-Indoensia relations when he was DCM there, gritty business involving extensive and sophisticated intelligence work. He was part of nastier matters still in elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the subject of confidential Congressional testimony. But let me tell you about the Georgetown dinner party.
© 2024 John Oliver
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