Faith in Diplomacy

[Draggingtree]

Faith in Diplomacy

 

Conservative realism has a champion in Reagan’s Swiss ambassador.

 

By GRACY OLMSTEAD • July 22, 2015

 

She was an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania during the Vietnam era. It was the early 1970s: she believed in the war at the time. But one day she rode a train from Haverford, Pennsylvania along with wounded soldiers from Valley Forge hospital. Many of them had lost arms, legs, eyes. Seeing those young men on the train shocked and changed her: she became familiar with the cost of war—and was convinced it cost too much.

 

The young woman on that train was Faith Ryan Whittlesey. She could never guess the role she would soon play in fighting the Cold War and advocating a prudent foreign policy—rising from her law career and work in Pennsylvania politics to serve the Reagan administration, both in the White House and overseas as an ambassador to Switzerland. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/faith-in-diplomacy/