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Ambassador William Bodde Jr., entered the Foreign Service in 1962. His foreign postings until 1977 were in Europe. They included Vienna, Stockholm, Berlin and Bonn. In 1978 he became the first director of Pacific Islands Affairs in the Department of State. Besides his responsibility for formulating policy towards the south Pacific island nations he served as the senior department representative to the Micronesian Political Status Negotiations.
In 1980 he was named Ambassador to Fiji, Tonga, Tuvalu and Minister Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Kiribati by President Carter. He left Fiji in 1982 to take up his duties as the first diplomat in residence at the East West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. During that period he traveled to Japan, Thailand, India and Nepal.
He returned to Europe in 1983 when he was assigned as Consul General in Frankfurt, the Federal Republic of Germany. As Consul General at American’s largest consulate general he was particularly active in promoting trade and investment in the German financial center. In 1986 he returned to Washington when he was named Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs. He left his position in 1989 to become Dean of the Senior Seminar, the highest level executive training program in the United States Government. A year later in 1990, President Bush named him Ambassador to the Republic of the Marshall Islands. He returned to Washington in the summer of 1992 where he served as Senior Advisor for policy planning in the State Department Bureau of Oceans, International Environment and Science Affairs. Ambassador Bode, was named the executive director of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Secretariat in 1993.
Ambassador Bodde was born on 27 November 1931 in Brooklyn, New York. He received a BA in 1961 from Hofstra College and his master in public policy administration degree in 1967 from John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He served in the US Army from 1951 to 1954.