Krebs went to the Foreign Service from the Southwest. He learned a lot, and he had thrown himself into the cauldron, handling Cold War issues in some of the best bureaus in the State Department. He took initial assignments in Europe.

He had sacrificed his health in the process, and lost a marriage, too, and found himself a long distance from his three-year-old son. Along the way, he had learned his limitations. He was not good at handling stress. For some time, even as early as his first tour, he had begun to feel that he was in the wrong field. His talents were not those of a successful diplomat. He had good intuition, coming from a good knowledge of history, and was a good contact person, but lacked communications and foreign language skills.

His mind, he began to understand, was fuzzy, and his temperament artistic, centered on nuances and aesthetics. He would attend meetings with senior officers, focusing on their manner and how they dressed, rather than the substance of what they were explaining. He was not a good staffer, and hated crisis situations.

Gradually, Krebs began to change. First, he lost some of his ambition, seeing the cost success took on one’s private life. The setback to his health, his more realistic self-appraisal, and the cost to his marriage, had contributed to a new attitude. He began to choose easier, less glamorous, assignments. The loss of excessive ambition was a good thing.

The second change was that he learned to restrain the emotional side of his nature. His mother’s stroke, coming on top of his divorce, seemed to throw everything into overload. Working on Ethiopian famine that claimed two million lives, also had a great effect on him. Merely retelling the stories of children walking to feeding camps led him to tears. The only way he could cope with his mother’s illness, divorce, and the job was to push his feelings into the background. It was a case of denial. Except for his son, he pushed things out of his mind.

The problem was that he over-reacted, and turned off his emotions almost altogether. He lost empathy and avoided relationships. He let friendships lapse. It bothered him, not being able to feel. But, it was better than the anxiety before.

On the positive side, he had regained self-confidence working on Ethiopia, where he had distinguished himself. This was followed by a study tour at Berkeley, a reward. He became more self-contained and less ambitious, with a better sense of himself and what he believed.

In the early days of his subsequent tour in central Africa, he had gotten along well at first with the Ambassador, who had mentored him. But, Krebs’ new self-awareness began to change him. In the past, he had gone along with policies that bothered him, but here he rebelled, opposing U.S. support for a dictator who was our ally. During a discussion of the annual human rights report, Krebs argued we should not in good faith certify, as Congress required, that improved freedom exists in the country. As the Embassy’s Political-Military Officer, Krebs objected to U.S. military cooperation with the local government.

The Ambassador called Krebs in for a private meeting, asking “for his full support,” saying we can not always choose which governments to back, that we gain more by engaging this particular dictator, and, moreover, that we have strategic interests in the country which the local government protects, and these are not a trifle. Krebs countered, by saying “our long term interests in staying in country are actually undermined by supporting the local government.”  By starting to kill rather than imprison his opponents, the dictator has “crossed the Rubicon,” and would bring himself down. We will have been seen as collaborators.  What we need to do, Krebs argued, was show the people that there was hope for the democratic opposition, and that someone was on the people’s side.

The Ambassador agreed with Krebs on the dictator, whom we had to move to a better direction. We would continue to fight him on democracy and human rights matters. But Krebs was underestimating the need for stability.  Closing the argument, the Ambassador referred to “high-level support at all levels” for our policy, which the Embassy was only implementing. “The issue had already been decided in Washington.”

Out of personal loyalty, the Ambassador did not send Krebs home for inability to support his policy, which he could have. But, Krebs was cut out of the loop for the rest of his tour. He no longer saw intelligence reports or held the political-military portfolio. Krebs, for his part, continued to respect the Ambassador. It was simply a matter of balancing idealism and realism in American foreign policy. He and the Ambassador had different ways of attaining that balance.

Krebs received a lukewarm annual evaluation, ensuring no promotion, perhaps for five years. Those were the costs of dissent at a time when you could be thrown out for lack of promotions. But, for Krebs, this was an important step in his life. He had stood up for something.  He had grown in the process and discovered himself. He would live his life, not making big issues, but would calmly go about his life in a rational way, but would not be afraid of taking consequential decisions. He would not be afraid in general.

He found it suddenly easier to make decisions. Things became clearer; he had a more rational outlook.  He would no longer agonize over his son, but would spend vacations with him, and give him financial security and expand their time together over time. He would not worry about his own health problems. He would develop his side interests and moderate his career. Life was not about vertical development up the success ladder, but about horizontal development as a person with hobbies and family. The British understood that.  He would no longer just drift and allow decisions to be made for him. He would live for acquiring knowledge and writing and perhaps teaching someday.

Suddenly, his emotions came back as well, perhaps as a result of his fighting for the human rights. He had been rejuvenated. He had put aside ambition and fought the system, and had still survived with his honor intact. There would be good tours and advancement before him.

During his home leave, Krebs stopped over in Brussels, where he spent time at the Royal Museum. Looking at the Sumerian cuneiform scrolls, he launched into a new hobby, the study of ancient civilizations and humanities.  He would use future vacations to tour the museums of Europe. He was consumed by a desire for knowledge.

From this point on, Krebs’ career was divided between his work and his private interests, as the latter began to occupy more of his thinking.  He enjoyed the Foreign Service for the travel and the contact with foreign cultures.  But, international relations, which had occupied him since his worked in Germany as a college sophomore, and even before, as a boy in Mexico, was now taking second place to his original loves in college, the humanities, history, and American literature.

He found himself going through the motions in his assignments, making the most of them, learning about Africa and Russia, and advancing U.S. interests, but he was increasingly interested in time off and reading.  He would live for retirement, where he would reorient himself to the humanities. He would write or teach, starting a new chapter, and stay close to his son. That would come soon. He saw himself like Dick Diver, in Tender is the Night. How did Fitzgerald put it?  He was “like Grant at Galena, biding his time.”