movie theater ticket-taker. He also worked as an armored guard and at a wax factory, where he filled "little paper cups with wax" from midnight until 8 a.m. He was admitted to the University of California, Berkeley where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1951 with a B.S. degree in international economics. It was also where he met and married Margaret Eileen Polley in 1951. In 1952 Blumenthal became a naturalized U.S. citizen. He was offered a scholarship to attend the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, in New Jersey. From there, he earned a Master of Arts and Master of Public Affairs in 1953, followed by a Ph.D. in economics in 1956. Blumenthal's doctoral dissertation was titled "Labor-management relations in the German steel industry, 1947-54." For income, his wife worked as a secretary and he taught economics at Princeton from 1954 to 1957. He also worked as a labor arbitrator for the state of New Jersey from 1955 to 1957. Career He left Princeton University and joined Crown Cork International Corporation in 1957, a manufacturer of bottle caps, where he remained until 1961, and rose to become its vice president and director. In 1961, having by then been a registered Democrat, he went to Washington, D.C. following President Kennedy's inauguration, where he was offered a position by diplomat, George Ball, to serve as Kennedy's deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs. He accepted the position and served in the State Department from 1961 until 1967 as an adviser on trade to Kennedy and, after Kennedy's assassination, as adviser to Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson made him U.S. Ambassador to act as the chief U. S. negotiator at the Kennedy Round General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade talks (GATT) in Geneva, considered to be the world's most significant multilateral trade negotiation. Canada's Minister of Trade and Commerce described Blumenthal as a tough negotiator, which Blumenthal feels is ironic: "If they'd let me into the country in 1945, I might have been working on their side." In 1967 Blumenthal left government to join Bendix International, a manufacturing and engineering company specializing in auto parts, electronics and aerospace. After five years he was appointed as its chairman and CEO, and remained with the company for ten more years. When he first took over to head Bendix, the company was regarded by Wall Street as a