KOHLER, Foy David

(b. 15 February 1908 in Oakwood, Ohio; d. 23 December 1990 in Jupiter, Florida), diplomat and U.S. ambassador to Moscow during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

The son of Leander David Kohler and Myrtle McClure, Kohler grew up in Ohio and attended the University of Toledo from 1924 to 1927. During this time, he worked as a bank teller and then transferred to Ohio State University, where he earned his B.S. degree in 1931. Kohler married Phyllis Penn on 7 August 1935; they had no children. Kohler spent the bulk of his career, from 1931 to 1967, as a foreign service officer under the U.S. Department of State, with initial postings in Windsor, Ontario (1932 to 1933); Bucharest (1933–1935); Belgrade (1935); Athens (1936–1941); and Cairo (1941). Kohler served in Washington, D.C., as country specialist (1941–1944) and assistant chief of the Division for Near Eastern Affairs (1944 to 1945), and then underwent graduate study at the National War College (1946) and at Cornell University, where he learned to speak Russian.

Kohler's first posting to the Soviet Union, and his first direct experience of cold war politics, came when the state department sent him to Moscow. There he served as first secretary and counselor, from 1947 to 1948, and as minister plenipotentiary, from 1948 to 1949, at the U.S. embassy. Kohler also worked as director of Voice of America broadcasts (1949–1952); member of a state department policy planning staff (1952 to 1953); counselor with the U.S. embassy in Ankara, Turkey (1953–1956); an observer with the International Cooperation Administration (1956–1958); and deputy assistant secretary of state for European affairs (1958 to 1959).

The high point of Kohler's career began with his appointment as assistant secretary of state for European affairs in 1959. While serving in this capacity, he was present in Moscow with Vice President Richard M. Nixon when the latter engaged in the famous "kitchen debate" with the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev. The occasion was the U.S. Trade and Cultural Fair in Moscow's Sokolniki Park, and Nixon and Khrushchev were viewing a model American kitchen when an angry exchange began. Khrushchev claimed that the Soviets would surpass the United States technologically, to which Nixon replied, "You don't know everything." The comment was not particularly inspired, but much of what followed, as Nixon and Khrushchev argued over the relative merits of capitalism and Communism, showed the future president's debating skills to advantage. One of the items on display happened to be the first video recorder, manufactured by a company called Ampex, which captured the debate on film. Aired on U.S. television, the debate added greatly to Nixon's prestige among Americans.

Kohler himself later remembered Khrushchev with admiration. "You couldn't help but like him just as an individual," he once said. "He was a shrewd peasant, and he loved to trade repartee. He had a quick wit." Though personally impressed with the Soviet leader, Kohler was no less an anticommunist than Nixon and remained under no illusions as to Khrushchev's ideological beliefs. "It's true," he noted, "that Khrushchev—especially with his de-Stalinization speech—shook up the society and greatly eased the terror that prevailed under Stalin. On the other hand, Khrushchev was a true believer in Bolshevism."

His knowledge of Khrushchev's character would stand Kohler in good stead when, in 1962, President John F. Kennedy appointed him U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. The challenges of the job did not take long to make themselves known. In October 1962 Khrushchev's regime began building missile sites in Cuba, precipitating the greatest crisis of the cold war. Throughout the tense days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kohler served as an intermediary in negotiations, and the Kennedy administration relied on his insights regarding his hosts.

For example, on 16 October, at the height of the crisis, Kohler met with Khrushchev, who conveyed his anger at the strident U.S. response to "defensive" Soviet activity in Cuba. In this way, Kohler served as a listener for his own government and as both a sounding board and whipping boy for Khrushchev, who no doubt diffused his fury somewhat by having the opportunity to harangue a U.S. official. The Soviet leader's anger was perhaps in part a reaction to fear, since he rightly recognized that the two superpowers were on the brink of World War III. Later, on 7 November, after the crisis had passed, Kohler sent a cable to Washington reporting that "there seems to me no doubt that events of [the] past ten days have really shaken [the] Soviet leadership." One Soviet military official, he reported, "told my wife he was now willing to believe in God."

The remainder of Kohler's four years in Moscow was, in comparison to the two weeks of the Cuban Missile Crisis, uneventful. In large part because of the crisis, the Soviet leadership replaced Khrushchev with Leonid I. Brezhnev, who had little interest in engaging in repartee with the U.S. ambassador. At the same time, Brezhnev was less of a hot-head than Khrushchev and by the late 1960s began sending indications that he was prepared to engage in relatively peaceful, if unfriendly, coexistence with the United States.

Kohler returned to the United States in 1966 and briefly served as deputy undersecretary of state for political affairs before retiring in 1967 with the rank of career ambassador. In 1968 he became a professor of international studies at the University of Miami's Center for Advanced International Studies. During the eleven years that followed, he published almost a dozen books, beginning with Understanding the Russians: A Citizen's Primer (1970). He retired from the University of Miami in 1979 and died of heart ailments following a long illness.

With his posting to Moscow, Kohler found himself in the thick of the cold war, both as a battle of words and potentially as a battle of weapons. True to his gift as a diplomat, he remained unobtrusive, and his greatest accomplishments undoubtedly went unpublished, perhaps even in government records. It is testament enough to Kohler's success, however, that he served in one of the most difficult positions the U.S. Department of State had to offer and at one of the greatest times of international crisis that the United States has ever faced.

Kohler's dispatches from Moscow are part of the Avalon Project at Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut. Some biographical details can be obtained from the record of hearings in Congress, conducted between 27 September and 4 October 1966, on the nomination of Kohler and others to various posts in the U.S. State Department. Kohler was also the subject of a documentary, Our Man in Moscow, made by WTOL-TV in Toledo in 1964. Obituaries are in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and USA Today (all 26 Dec. 1990).

Judson Knight