John Newton Gatch, Jr. 1921-1992

By Andrew I. Killgore

In his play, "It Is the Truth If You Think It Is," now being performed at Washington's Arena Stage, the late Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello has his narrator, Laudisi, reprove a group of villagers for arguing endlessly over which of two main characters, a man or his mother-in-law, is crazy. The man insists that his wife is his second wife whom he married after his first wife died. The mother-in-law insists that the first wife is still alive and that the man is still married to her.

One or the other obviously is badly confused, if not crazy. Pirandello comments on the arguments via Laudisi, as follows: "I find all you people at your wits' end trying to find out who and what other people are; just as though other people had to be this, or that, and nothing else."

Our beloved John Gatch was such a complex man that many of those who knew him may have pondered just how to explain him, at least to their own satisfaction. Whether he was "this, or that, and nothing else,'' to borrow Pirandello's enigmatic observation.

In basic outline, John Gatch's life was not unlike that of many others of his generation and establishment background who chose careers in the U.S. Foreign Service, in which he served from 1947 to 1975. Born in Cincinnati, he graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and Princeton University, also the alma mater of his lawyer father. His mother, Orpha Gerrans, who died in 1991 just short of her 100th birthday, was for many years the oldest living graduate of Smith College. John served a three-year stint in the U.S. Army in World War II, with overseas service in Europe.

Like all American diplomats, John had his ups and downs. On his first post in Baghdad he had a near-fatal attack of appendicitis. Assigned next to Warsaw, where the Department of State thought his recuperation might be hastened, he met his future wife, Anne Schmidt Gatch. Their five children, Cathy, June, Loren, Dorothy and Alice, were born in Tripoli (Libya), Rome and Washington, DC, as their parents pursued the gypsy lifestyle mandated for diplomats serving Uncle Sam abroad.

Like every young foreign service officer assigned to issue visas for entering the United States, John frequently was offered bribes. Perhaps the most unusual attempt was made while he was serving in Hong Kong. A powerful official in the Truman White House, a household name whose influence may have been exceeded only by the president himself, offered John $10,000, a sum about double John's then salary, to issue an immigration visa to a particular applicant. John and the White House official sat looking at each other for a long moment in the Hong Kong consular section. John made no reply, and the official finally got up and walked out. John didn't issue the visa.

In a distinguished career, John Gatch helped found the International School in Kuwait, where he was serving as deputy chief of mission and for which President Johnson awarded him a medal. He established the American Embassy in Bahrain and negotiated and signed an agreement with Bahrain providing for the presence of the U.S. Navy in that small Persian Gulf country. On a second assignment to Baghdad, he headed the U.S. Interests Section in a period when diplomatic relations between the United States and Iraq were broken. In an uncertain and sometimes hazardous life in the Middle East, the Gatch family experienced three evacuations, one coup d'etat and the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

When he retired in 1975, John established a successful consulting business, the Sitra Corporation, named for one of the islands in the Bahrain Archipelago, to provide liaison between American and Arab businesses. His fluent command of Arabic, which had served him so well in the Foreign Service, continued to be useful as a consultant. One hardly anticipated aspect of his consulting activities took John on regular trips on behalf of a Kuwaiti horse fancier to auctions of racehorses in Kentucky, where John came to know many of the famous names in the horseracing world.

John's first wife, Anne, died in 1988. In 1990 he married Hilda Jannesson, a professional organizer of conferences, who lovingly cared for him through the painful months of his final illness. She and her daughter by a previous marriage, Kathryn Blackwell, along with John's and Anne's five children, and John's three sisters and a brother, survive him. The Gatch family suggests that gifts in his memory be made to the Scholarship Fund of the American Foreign Service Association, 2101 E St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20037.

In personality and essence John Gatch struck me as a paradox. He talked little in a profession of talkers. But what he did say always made good sense. He was a strong supporter of his church, serving finally as an usher and a Sunday School teacher at Concord-St. Andrews Methodist Church in Bethesda, MD, after a peripatetic profession that made deep commitment to a specific church difficult.

A Well Loved Storyteller

He was perhaps best known for his humorous stories. These were doled out prudently—one, two, but never more than three, at a time. Friends came to imagine that he drew them from an inexhaustible mental file, meticulously categorized so that the most appropriate anecdote popped out for each situation.

John Gatch was more than well-to-do, but he scrupulously avoided any external show of affluence. His laid-back style concealed drive and he was a great help to the American Educational Trust, never imposing himself but always there when needed. He enjoyed writing book reviews for the Washington Report and was working on a personality piece at the time he became too ill to continue.

I never felt I completely understood John, though I expect others did. Why he was so quiet, I don't know. Why he told so many gently humorous, and once in a while not-so-gently-humorous stories, I don't know. Just what qualities of personality combined to make him the best loved foreign service officer I've ever known, I also don't know.

But I loved what I understood, and I know I shall miss him.