Thanks to the good fortune of being selected by the Exchange Program, I experienced the most momentous year of my life at Bryanston School, Dorset, from 1967-1968. I had graduated from a very conservative, small private school in western Maryland and from my first days, Bryanston launched me into entirely new ways of thinking and, more significantly, created opportunities to relate to people from different cultures and backgrounds. The masters became my mentors, and the intellectual level of my schoolmates was extraordinary. Years later, I embarked on a long diplomatic career, and scarcely a day goes by that I do not credit what success I may have enjoyed to my ESU/Bryanston experience. I am still pleased to remain in touch with some of the wonderful friends I met at the School.

There was a crossroads encounter of my Bryanston days and my diplomatic life in a rather unlikely venue in 2000: I was in Dili, East Timor, helping to open a new U.S. Embassy in the early days of Timorese independence. While having lunch with a British counterpart working with the United Nations, I told him I had gone to school in the U.K. When he heard where, he said that his father-in-law had also attended Bryanston--and indeed it turned out that I had known him.