Ronald D. Godard

Ronald Dwight “Ron” Godard (born July 8, 1942 Anadarko, Oklahoma[1]) was a career Foreign Service Officer with the grade of Minister Counselor given the temporary rank of Ambassador in July 1998.[2]

Early life

Godard moved around often as a child due to his father’s work in the oil business and they moved to Odessa, Texas when he was in the ninth grade. After graduating from high school in Odessa, he went on to study at Odessa College. Godard was inspired by his history teacher Mary Jane Gentry and his plan was to study history and become a professor.[1] He graduated from the University of Texas in Austin[1] with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and a Master of Arts degree in Latin American Studies.[2]

Career

On January 8, 2001, Godard was sworn-in as Ambassador to Guyana. Previous assignments included Deputy Permanent Representative to the Organization of American States (OAS) at the same time he served as Deputy Chief of Mission of the U.S. Mission to the OAS; Deputy Chief of Mission and then Acting Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina and the same positions in Managua, Nicaragua. [2]. He was close to retiring from the Foreign Service in 2003 when he was assigned to be Diplomat-in-Residence to the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). For a year he was recruiting for the Department of State and taught an honors seminar on international affairs.[1]

In October 2015, when the United Nations General Assembly took a vote on ending the Cuban Embargo, the US was one of only two countries to vote against lifting the embargo. At the time, Godard was the U.S. senior adviser for Western Hemisphere affairs and he said “Cuban leaders would be "mistaken" if they thought the vote would further efforts to improve relations between the two countries. He added that normalization of relations will take "years of persistence and dedication on both sides."”[3]

gollark: No, I do not.
gollark: GPUs use SIMD, where several thousand small cores operate on a little bit of the input data, which is very good for their high performance computing needs.
gollark: There are multiple appropriate ones for various scenarios.
gollark: They're bad at it and it would not be easier if you could just spin off new threads at random. There would also probably be issues with synchronization overhead.
gollark: No, that would cause horrible race conditions constantly.

References
  1. "AMBASSADOR RONALD D. GODARD" (PDF). The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project. Retrieved 28 November 2019.
  2. "Biography: Ronald D. Godard". Archive. US Department of State. Retrieved 28 November 2019.
  3. Westcott, Lucy (October 28, 2015). "U.N. OVERWHELMINGLY VOTES AGAINST U.S. EMBARGO OF CUBA FOR 24TH YEAR". Newsweek. Retrieved 28 November 2019.
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