charge of the department, in 1956 Battle resigned to work for Humelsine,
who was now an employee of the Rockefellers, as vice president of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
In 1961 Battle came back into the
Foreign Service, once again as special
assistant to the Secretary of State, but
with the additional title of executive
secretary of the State Department.
However, the Dean this time was Rusk,
not Acheson. The relationship did not
work well, and one senses that Battle
left the position with a sigh of relief to
become, in June 1962, assistant secretary of State for educational and cultural affairs. An excellent account of his
productive tenure in that position can
be found in Richard Arndt’s book, The
First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Potomac Books, 2005).
The best source for understanding
what Battle himself, shortly after leav-
To Dean Acheson’s credit,
he expected Battle to
demonstrate independence
of mind and spirit in their
working relationship.
ing the Foreign Service in October
1968, called “a rather odd career,” is the
series of oral histories in which he took
part. Together, they add up to a substantial memoir, which is candid, often
self-deprecating and frequently amusing. The series can be accessed online
at the Truman and Kennedy Presidential Library Web sites ( www.truman
library.org/oralhist/battle.htm; www.jfk
library.org/Historical+Resources/Archi
ves/Summaries/ col_battle_l.htm) and,
in the case of his two interviews for the
Johnson Library, on the Web site of the
Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection
of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training ( http://lcweb2.loc.gov/
ammem/collections/diplomacy/). Battle was also generous in granting interviews to historians, and has been cited
by writers such as Robert Beisner, Walter Issacson, David Halberstam and
Michael Oren as an accurate and reliable source for events and personalities
of the 1950s and 1960s.
In those interviews, Battle is not
afraid to turn his critical faculties upon
himself: “I was ill-equipped for a lot of
the things that came my way in my
diplomatic career, and I don’t hide it.”
He even expresses doubt about the appropriateness of his assignment as ambassador to Egypt (from September
