Life & Contributions
Walter Clarence Thurston is the only career foreign service officer to have a room in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms named in his honor. He was an exceptional statesman but at the same time representative of all the exceptional men and women who have been in the nation’s diplomatic service since 1776, when Congress first sent Benjamin Franklin to France.
Thurston spent most of his life in postings in Central and South America: Bolivia, Brazil Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Mexico, where he had his first and last assignment. In 1914 he was a clerk in Mexico City, and two years later had full representative responsibility during the tumultuous regime of General Venustiano Carranza. In 1930 he was named chief of the Latin American Division of the Department of State. But during that decade of economic depression and the rise of dictators, he also took on some difficult overseas assignments. He was counselor of the Madrid Embassy at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and chargé d’affaires with the Republican government as it retreated, finally to France, before that war ended in 1939. He was next appointed counselor at the Moscow Embassy, and then minister in November 1941, five months after Germany attacked the Soviet Union in World War II. As the Soviet government retreated before the German advance, he served as chargé d’affaires, heading the embassy staff in Kuibyshev on the Volga.
As ambassador to Mexico from 1946 to 1950, Thurston is remembered for having arranged a visit by President Harry S. Truman to Chapultepec Castle, to the memorial for the young Mexican cadets who chose death over surrender during the Mexican-American War. The Mexican people appreciated the respect shown to their heroes and were saddened at Thurston’s departure. “Thurston is one of us,” one Mexican general explained. A Mexican columnist called him a “just friend.”1Both quotations in Benjamin Muse, “Mexico Losing a Friend in Thurston,” Foreign Service Journal 27, no. 9 (September 1950): 23, reporting an article in the Washington Post, August 27, 1950.
Tributes like these testify to the high ideals and achievements of all U.S. diplomats, who promote American ideals and values abroad, build friendships, and work for peace. Their service is remembered in the room named for Walter Thurston.