Consular
Thomas R. Pickering was a fresh college graduate in 1953 when he braved the notoriously lengthy entrance process at the State Department, prolonged even further by an ongoing investigation of suspected communists in the agency’s ranks.
Although he was offered a job earlier than he expected, Mr. Pickering by then had enrolled in the graduate program of Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Mass. He later left for Australia on a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Melbourne, which was followed by three years in the Navy.
So it was 1959 when the 28-year-old finally became a Foreign Service officer — or, to use the better-known term, a diplomat…
At first glance, David T. Donahue’s experience on September 11, 2001, was not much different from that of most other Americans. “I heard the first plane had already hit the World Trade Center, and then watched the second live on television, like everybody else,” he recalled recently.
But while most Americans were at home or at work when the terrorists struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Mr. Donahue was in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, where the plot that killed about 3,000 Americans most likely was hatched.
He had been dealing for days with the country’s Taliban regime, which had provided safe haven to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network since 1996…
