Married to the Foreign Service: An American Life in the Era of Cold War Diplomacy

Born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1931, and orphaned at an early age, Evelyn Lee Dyer joined the US Foreign Service in the mid-1950s and soon found herself in the heart of the Cold War, among bustling diplomatic communities in Istanbul, Bonn, Prague, Leningrad, Moscow, and Geneva, as well as in Washington, DC, and often in crisis conditions. She tells her story in an unpretentious style, filled with vivid anecdotes and character descriptions, with a feeling for the grand sweep of history as lived through by ordinary people.

There are plenty of Cold War memoirs by public figures, most of them men. This memoir by a working-class Southern woman brings to life an entire generation of postwar Americans, whose destinies followed an upward arc from the regional into the global.

Evelyn Lee Dyer Rueckert (1931 2018) had an exciting life in the US Foreign Service, first as a young career woman and later as the wife of a diplomat and the mother of two children. Born and raised in Norfolk, Virginia, she divided her active years between Washington DC and Cold War Europe, where she lived on both sides of the Iron Curtain. She was a witness to the Istanbul Pogrom of 1955 and the Prague Spring of 1968 and was part of a bustling diplomatic community in Leningrad and Moscow in the 1970s. She retired to Madison, Wisconsin, where she wrote her memoirs.