Nijima became a close member of the Hardy family for the next ten years, calling himself Joseph Hardy Neesima. Under Alpheus’s patronage and guidance, he studied with characteristic intensity and graduated from Phillips Academy Andover, Amherst College, and Andover Theological Seminary. In 1875, he returned to Japan to found the country’s first, and still largest and most successful, Christian university, in Kyoto. He called it the Doshisha (Society of Friends). Every year Mary Caroline Hardy received an engraved invitation to attend graduation. Nijima’s story fascinated me. Like Aunt Mabel’s Chinese temple tales, the early Japanese connection would echo in later years. With great fanfare, my father and I attended the Doshisha centennial anniversary in 1975, while I was serving in our embassy in Tokyo.
Choices at Harvard
Asian inklings aside, my focus at Harvard remained on preparing for a Foreign Service career in Europe. Diplomatic history and German language training were main subjects. My honors thesis traced the passage of the Marshall Plan through Congress. During my undergraduate years, Eisenhower was president, the role of the United States as leader of the West solidified, and the lines of battle for the Cold War hardened. U.S. interest in world affairs was strong and growing. University teaching began to reflect these realities. Courses I took from McGeorge Bundy and Arthur Schlesinger and lectures I audited by Henry Kissinger lent intellectual life and shape to my choice of calling.
Having decided early what I wanted to do, I began unconsciously searching for someone to do it with. Deep down, the idea of launching into a complicated international life without a mate terrified me. Sheila Maynard was a year behind me at Radcliffe. We had both been born in 1936, midway between the Great Depression and World War II, in the same Upper East Side New York hospital. We did not know each other then, but our parents did. They were members of a socially cohesive group of professionals––lawyers, architects, and investment bankers––thus assuring that, one day, we would meet. We found each other in February of my junior year at a ghastly, smoke-filled, post-exam party in a crowded dormitory room, drinking gin out of Styrofoam cups. We sat down and started talking. Three hours later we were astonished to find that we had not run out of things to say. The conversation has lasted more than fifty years. I gave up rowing my senior year in order to court her. In the winter of 1957, my senior year, I startled Sheila and myself by proposing, out of the blue, that she come with me on my chosen adventure and be the mother of my children. Equally startling, she agreed. We married just after graduation.
Convincing the Family
Diplomacy was an unorthodox choice, particularly in a family whose professional traditions were architecture and law. My grandfather, Charles A. Platt, had been a leading architect. He designed the Freer Gallery, Deerfield Academy, and Phillips Andover as well as a host of grand residences for the tycoons of his time. My father, Geoffrey, had a distinguished career of his own, which culminated as New York City’s first Landmarks Commissioner. Happily, my father had no preconceived notions of what I should become. On the contrary, when I asked him early in my teens whether I should become an architect, he responded in the kindest manner, “If you have to ask, you should not be one.” He advised me to go with my own passion.
My mother had doubts about a son “in the Diplomatic,” but history helped her get used to the idea. Her grandfather ’s successful stint as U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s from 1899 to1905 had provided rich nuggets of family lore. Joseph H. Choate’s skirmish with the Argentine foreign minister during a reception at Claridge’s Hotel is still famous. The minister, decked out like a Roxy Theater doorman in an elaborate court uniform with epaulets and frogs, mistook Choate for a waiter. This was a common occurrence in those days, as American diplomats, representing an egalitarian republic, wore only black tie or white tie and tails on formal occasions.
“My man, call me a cab,” the minister exclaimed. A crowd gathered, knowing Choate was fast on his feet.
“You are a cab, sir,” he replied.
In his early twenties, my mother ’s father, Joseph Jr., served two years as Ambassador Choate’s private secretary. He was the duty officer on August 14, 1900, the day the Boxer Rebellion ended and the Siege of Peking was lifted. The U.S. Embassy in London was the telecommunications center for information about the international expeditionary force sent to rescue the foreign legations. Official London and royal London were all at the annual garden party at Buckingham Palace. My grandfather put on his striped pants and frock coat, took a hansom cab to the palace with the fateful telegram, and found himself the instant man of the hour. A reticent and self-effacing person, Pa Choate told me later this was the highpoint of his life. His story also made it easier for my mother to accept the idea of a son in the Foreign Service.
My father-in-law, Walter Maynard, a leading Wall Street investment analyst and banker, had little time for government officials and told me so in the most genial way. Assistant secretaries were a dime a dozen, he said. Wall Street had a comfortably clear and quantitative way of measuring performance. The more money you made, the better you were. Even though I was only twenty-one and painfully green (he tactfully diverted me from asking for Sheila’s hand as we stood side by side in a downtown club men’s room), Walter respected my judgment in choosing his daughter. We liked each other from the beginning. He knew that my mind was made up and simply advised me to consider his profession as a fallback, should my plans fail to work out.
Convincing the U.S. Government
His advice was well taken. I may have decided to join the Foreign Service, but the service had hardly decided to join me. The entrance exams were notoriously competitive. In 1957, the first year I applied, 240 officers were chosen from a field of 14,000. Failure was common, and many subsequently successful diplomats had flunked several times. I took my first set of exams before graduating from Harvard in 1957 and fell short. The examiners said I knew nothing about economics and had to fix that. They encouraged me to try again once I had. A solid commitment to the career was rare in someone so young, they said, implying that I needed to go away and grow up some.
That afternoon, I went to call on Paul Nitze at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). The father of a classmate at college (as well as Walter Maynard’s Harvard roommate), he was a founder of SAIS, former head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under Dean Acheson, and a respected member of the Washington foreign policy establishment. I had consulted him earlier on the benefits of graduate school for a Foreign Service career. A blunt and friendly mentor, he had advised that I take the exams first. If I got in, the Foreign Service would train me on the job. If I did not pass, come and see him. Graduate school could help.
The two years at SAIS were stimulating and eventful. We lived in a tiny house in Georgetown and fell in love with the city that was to become our headquarters for the next thirty-five years. The school, now renamed after Nitze, was the perfect place to start learning the Washington ropes. Small then, with a student body limited to seventy-five by the size of the two converted townhouses in which it was housed, the teaching was done by international figures with years of Washington knowledge, like Hans Morgenthau, and experienced practitioners, like Roger Hilsman and Nitze himself. Papers were graded on the quality of the interviews students conducted with working officials, rather than books cited.
SAIS taught us the mechanics of Washington. My formal academic focus remained on Europe. I studied advanced German, economics, history, psychological warfare, and the balance of power. But we were lucky to get a look at loftier levels of life in the capital. The columnist Joseph Alsop, an admirer of Sheila’s mother, befriended us when we arrived in Washington. He liked to sprinkle his guest lists with younger people and included us in some of his famous Georgetown dinner parties, where he gathered the top personalities and policy makers of the day. At one of these, his cousin, Alice