ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...

Bukavu. The consequence was that in our first two years in the Foreign Service, the
furthest we got from Washington was on home leave to California. But we were in fact
very fortunate. Ottawa turned out to be a very interesting and pleasant place to live. And
very significant in our lives because both of our daughters, Kaja or Katherine and
Alexandra, were born there about 17 months apart. I even finished my dissertation.
Q: Let's go back to the class again. What was the composition in terms of ethnicity,
gender and so on?
PERINA: It was a mixed group but an impressive group. There were, as I recall, a fair
number of women in the class. It surely wasn’t 50-50 but I would say it was about a third
women. Racially, there were one or two African-Americans, one Hispanic, but as I recall
no Asians. It was certainly an impressive group and very collegial. In fact, the spouses of
the group gave my wife a shower in Arlington Towers, a baby shower, which was an
introduction to the sense of community in the Foreign Service which we came very much
to value.
Q: Were you able to parlay your doctorate into anything?
PERINA: No, I quickly found out that Ph.D.’s were neither rare nor particularly valued.
Academic degrees were not really taken into account very much. I finished my
dissertation mainly out of principle and as an insurance policy if I left the Foreign
Service, but it never helped me much in the bureaucracy. Later I found out that education
levels were actually hidden from promotion boards. What I did get credit for were the
languages I knew. I tested and received step increases for Czech, German and French.
That put me at the top of my pay grade so I started out at about $13,000 a year, which we
were very happy with. I had the highest salary in my class.
Q: Ten years before I started out at about $3,500. That wasn't bad. $10,000 was the top
government salary. So you were in Ottawa from 1975 to 1977?
PERINA: 1975 to late 1976. We arrived in Ottawa in February 1975 after I had taken the
A-100 and the consular course. This was a rotational assignment so I did both consular
work and political/economic work, but primarily it was consular. Canadians, of course,
do not need visas but there were a lot of third-country applicants in Ottawa and also a lot
of complex citizenship cases, plus imprisoned Americans. I worked on all of these. It was
the only consular work I have done in my career but it left memories of some very
interesting experiences.
Q: Do you recall any of them?
PERINA: Well, I recall one in particular that was when I gave the first visa to the United
States to Alexander Solzhenitsyn who had just been expelled from the Soviet Union a
few months earlier. He was invited to Canada before he was invited to the United States.
He came to Canada and while there he got an invitation from the AFL/CIO to speak in
Washington at some convention they were holding. He decided to accept and we received
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