My Way

About the Book

I was encouraged by several foreign service colleagues and my children, as well as my older grandchildren. They all prodded me to write a memoir. I entered the foreign service by pure luck. It was only because I was at the right place at the right time and was the right age to fill a need discovered by Robert Kennedy shortly after his brother was elected president in 1961. The problem was that no one in the state department was doing anything about reaching out to the youth of the word. Under a new program the Kennedys created, I was invited to enter the foreign service of the US information Agency (USIA) as a student affairs grantee because I could be shipped overseas immediately to help fill this gap. I was selected because I had an advanced degree in sociology, I was athletically inclined, and most importantly, I was bilingual in Spanish.

About the Author

Ernesto Uribe entered the USIA Foreign Service at age of twenty-four in 1962. He had graduated from Texas A&M College, where he earned two undergraduate degrees and a master’s degree. He started his career with USIA as a student affairs grantee in the foreign service for thirty-three years, serving full tours in seven different Latin America countries. He rose in the ranks of the foreign service, coming from a lowly hired-hand grantee to being a minister counselor in the senior foreign service.