Robert Korengold profile

Robert (Bud) Korengold describes himself as a "former just about anything." A native of Minnesota and a graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, he came first to Europe as a hitch-hiker in 1955 after serving as a Navy officer in the Korean war. After landing his first European job as a dishwasher in Stockholm's Grand Hotel he quickly returned to journalism as a roving correspondent in France for the Army Times publishing company, a UPI correspondent in Paris and then UPI bureau chief in Moscow. After a one-year break on a Nieman journalistic fellowship at Harvard he returned to Moscow in 1963 as Newsweek's correspondent in what was then still the Soviet Union and moved on to head Newsweek's London bureau from 1968 to 1972. He joined the U.S. Information Agency in 1973 as the editor of two world-wide government magazines , Economic Impact and Horizons U.S.A., whose mission was to explain U.S society to decision-makers abroad, and then went on to head the Agency's overseas information and education operations , including management of Fulbright exchange programs, in, successively, Belgium, ex-Yugoslavia, The United Kingdom and France. In 1985 he worked three-months on special assignment in the White House preparing the public information campaigns for President Ronald Reagan's trips to Germany, Spain, Portugal and the European Parliament in Strasbourg. He then returned the same year to the White House as Coordinator of Public Diplomacy for President Reagan's first meeting, in Geneva, with then Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1988 he received a Presidential Award for Sustained Superior Accomplishment in the conduct of foreign policy, and he has been honored as well by the Belgian government for his work in educational exchange and by New York University's Center for French Civilization and Culture which, in 1994, awarded him its annual medal for an individual contributing significantly to Franco-American understanding. After retiring from the U.S. government's diplomatic service in 1994, he ran the Musée d'Art Américain in Giverny, France, before retiring for good in 1998. In France he has been named a Chevalier in the order of Tastevin in Burgundy, in the order of Palmes Academiques by the Ministry of Education and in the order of Arts et Lettres by the Ministry of Culture. He now lives in Normandy doing a bit of gardening and a bit of writing and a lot of amused reflection about life in France and with the French. Bud is accredited by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a member of the foreign press corps. His French wife, Christine, thinks it should be a bit less writing and a bit more gardening. But that's what French wives are for.