Ambassador Charles Ray

Last Name: Ray
First Name: Charles
Middle Name: Aaron
Suffix: Ambassador
Nickname: Charlie

Medals and Honors: Bronze Star, Humanitarian Service Medal, Vietnam Service Medal, DOD Meritorious Civilian Service Award, State Department Superior Service Award, Thomas Jefferson Award

ACNSL Offices and Committees: Africa Committee Chair

Rank: Ambassador, Senior Foreign Service

Service/Department: U.S. Army, U.S. Dept of Defense, U.S. Dept of State

Last or Significant Assignment: Ambassador to Zimbabwe

Areas of Experience: Africa, China, Foreign Development Aid, Foreign Military Sales and Assistance, INDOPACOM, International Relations and Diplomacy

Articles, Books and Publications:

• Taking Charge: Effective Leadership in the Twenty-first Century, Things I Learned from My Grandmother About Leadership and Life, Ethical Dilemmas and the Practice of Diplomacy, Does Africa Matter to the United States, Is Democracy in Retreat in Africa

Charles Ray was born in Center, a small farming town that is the county seat of Shelby County Texas in the pine-covered, red-clay hills of East Texas, and grew up in Tenaha, an even smaller town that had a population at the time of 715. After graduating from high school in 1962, he joined the army to see the world he had hitherto only experienced in the pages of back issues of National Geographic.

See the world he did. For the next 20 years, until he retired from the army in 1982, he served in or visited Germany, England, Austria, France, Korea, Panama, Thailand, and Vietnam. He also got to see a lot of the U.S.A. including Louisiana, Oklahoma, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, California, Arizona, New Jersey, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, Connecticut, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Massachusetts, Michigan, Utah, Wyoming, Arizona, Washington, and the District of Columbia.

During his time in the military he was also active writing, cartooning and cover art, and photography in his free time, appearing in such publications as Ebony, Eagle and Swan, Essence, Asia Magazine, Stars and Stripes, and Buffalo Soldier.

After retiring from the army, he joined the U.S. Foreign Service to continue seeing the world as an American diplomat, with service in China, Thailand, Sierra Leone, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Zimbabwe, and rose to heights that in 1962 would have been deemed impossible for a boy from rural East Texas. In 1998 he became the first American consul general in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), Vietnam, where he was responsible for demolishing the old American embassy and replacing it with a state-of-the-art consulate general building. In 2002, he was sworn in as the American ambassador to Cambodia by Secretary of State Colin Powell, and in 2006 was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for POW/Missing Personnel Affairs and director of the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO), a job he held until 2009, when he was appointed ambassador to Zimbabwe, his last government assignment before retiring in 2012.

Ray earned a BS in business administration from Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, an MS in systems management from the University of Southern California, and an MS in national security strategy from the National Defense University in Washington, DC

In a career of over 50 years, he established his credentials as an effective leader of organizations, large and small, specializing in dysfunctional organizations or those in troubled situations.

In 2008, he wrote Things I Learned from My Grandmother About Leadership and Life, a book describing the leadership philosophy instilled in him by his grandmother. Since his retirement from government service in 2012 he has been active writing, with over two hundred works of fiction and nonfiction published, teaching, public speaking, consulting, and working with nonprofits involved with foreign affairs and international relations. He has served on the boards of the American Academy of Diplomacy, the Association of Black American Ambassadors, and the Cold War Museum, the Advisory Council of the Una Chapman Cox Foundation, and as a trustee and chair of the Africa Program of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

The Texas native now calls Maryland home, but is still an active traveler, having visited every continent except Antarctica and every state in the United States except South Dakota and Vermont.