A LONG WAY FROM RUNNEMEDE: One Woman’s Foreign Service Journey

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This memoir of Theresa Tull’s career as a twentieth-century diplomat begins with childhood recollections of life during the Second World War in the small town of Runnemede, New Jersey. It tracks the death of the author’s father, her initial education, post–high school employment, and early college education. In 1963, after successfully passing the rigorous entrance examinations, Terry Tull entered the U.S. Foreign Service. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland, and in 1973 earned a master’s degree in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of Michigan.

Service at Embassy Brussels was followed by a year of Vietnamese language training. Her career as an FSO took her to Saigon just in time for the Tet Offensive of 1968. In September 1970 she returned to Washington to work on internal Vietnamese politics on the Vietnam Working Group. In August 1973 she returned to Vietnam as deputy principal officer at the U.S. Consulate General in Da Nang, where she remained until the fall of South Vietnam in the spring of 1975, when she organized and oversaw the consulate’s evacuation. Other assignments included the Intelligence and Research Bureau, Consul in Cebu, the Philippines, the National War College, Office Director for Human Rights in the Human Rights Bureau, the Senior Seminar, Diplomat in Residence at Lincoln University, and director, Office of Regional Affairs, East Asia and Pacific Bureau.

As chargé d’affaires in Laos in 1983, she negotiated and oversaw the first joint crash-site excavation to seek the remains of missing U.S. servicemen. In 1987 President Reagan appointed her Ambassador to Guyana, and in 1993 President Clinton named her his ambassador to Brunei.

This is a book in the ADST Memoirs and Occasional Papers Series.

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