Tally's Triumph

The Department of State pleaded guilty last week. One of its Foreign Service officers, blonde, blue-eyed Alison ("Tally") Palmer, 39, charged that she had been discriminated against because of her sex--and there was no defense.

The Department's embarrassed Deputy Under Secretary for Administration, William B. Macomber Jr., admitted that Miss Palmer's career had been adversely affected by the fact that she was denied assignments to three embassies in Africa in 1965 simply because she was a woman. Accordingly, said Macomber, she would be promoted to the rank of Foreign Service Officer 3, would receive a salary increase from $19,537 to $22,135, and would be awarded a one-year assignment to a prestigious course at the National War College.

Pint-sized (5 ft. 1/4 in.) Tally Palmer has long been known as a fighter. As consular officer in Leopoldville during the turbulent months that followed Congolese independence in 1960, she showed up time and again to save U.S. officials and newsmen from Congolese mobs. One of the men she rescued was Frank Carlucci, then a Foreign Service officer, now the newly appointed associate director of the Office of Management and Budget. Carlucci's car had killed a Congolese and skidded into a ditch, and both Carlucci and a U.S. military aide might well have been lynched if Tally had not arrived in time in her little blue sports car. Another time, she was on the spot in Leopoldville when Congolese troops seized three American newsmen (including TIME'S Lee Griggs) during a dustup with U.N. troops.

Social Secretary. Despite her Congo exploits, Tally was turned down for assignments as political or economic officer by three U.S. ambassadors. Eventually one of them, Edward Korry, Ambassador to Ethiopia, let her become his executive assistant. But the job involved little more than that of a social secretary who also went on shopping trips for Kerry's wife.

Tally complained to the director general of the Foreign Service in Washington but got little satisfaction. Then, after an 18-month assignment in Viet Nam, she took her case to the American Federation of Government Employees and to the Civil Service Commission, which eventually ruled in her favor.

In her seventh-floor office, where she received a stream of well-wishes last week. Tally Palmer was less than overcome with gratitude. "What Macomber did," she said, "is no more than what the Department was required to do by President Kennedy's executive order of 1962 [banning race and sex discrimination]. This is no great leap forward."

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