from hers.
I wrote those letters, and she kept them all; they were returned to me after her death. They form the chief backing for what I describe in this book. They are supplemented by my peculiarly powerful oral memory, which includes conversations from many decades ago, and also poems and hundreds of songs (down through the fifth verse) that I learned, starting before I could read. Undoubtedly, there are misrememberings mixed among my recollections, but I have tried my best to tell the truth as I know it.
My desire, in writing this book—which covers more than a half-century as a diplomat’s wife, career diplomat myself, and rehired retired diplomat—is to let you, the reader, share my discoveries as I made them. I want to let you experience what it was like—and to some extent still is—to go out into the world as a career diplomat or as part of a diplomatic family. I often arrived in the new place with little preparation for living and working there. If, at the start of a chapter, you wonder what was really going on in the place I was living, that is because so was I at the time.
When, after fifteen years as a diplomat’s spouse, I became a diplomat myself, I soon learned that what a career diplomat is supposed to do was something I already loved doing. For me it was a joy to live in a foreign country and get to know many people there. As a career diplomat, I would especially seek out opinion-makers and people who could help me in my efforts to devote serious and sustained attention to what this host country cared about. That way, I could maybe help find a fit with what my country wanted from the host country. Such work is best done out of the glare of the public spotlight, and, if done right, it does not make headlines. But when it is well done, it provides a long-term sense of complicity, even affection, between diplomats like me and our counterparts in the host country. It also can produce a warm feeling that our successors on both sides can draw upon.
Although women have come late to the field, I think many women are well suited to this work. I confess that I have adventurous women especially in mind as I present these memoirs to the reading public. For the reader who wants to know where John and I were and when in our Foreign Service career, I recommend consulting the Appendix on our Foreign Service posts.
I start this memoir with a chapter out of chronological sequence because it shows me making a crucial friendship with an important opinion-maker in his country and on his terms. This man taught me perhaps my single most important lessons about how to be a woman diplomat.
Chapter 1
Political Apprenticeship in Africa
DIPLOMATS ASSIGNED TO A NEW post often have strong preconceptions about it and clear expectations of what it will be like. I had very strong views and expectations about Kinshasa, and virtually all of them proved to be wrong.
After six years in Belgium, the first place where I was not only my diplomat husband’s wife but a diplomat in my own right, in 1978 we received orders for home leave and transfer. Our new post was Kinshasa, capital of Zaire (the name President-for-life Mobutu had given to the ex-Belgian Congo, now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
Just then, news was breaking of the taking as hostages of some three thousand foreigners, mostly Europeans, in Kolwezi. This was a place in the Congo’s southeast, and further news told of the murder there of more than two hundred of those hostages by an armed rebel Congolese group with the aid of some Cuban and East German military officers. We spent a lot of our home leave in the summer of 1978 explaining to family and friends that Kolwezi was a thousand miles away from Kinshasa.
Yet even before the Kolwezi incident, the ex-Belgian Congo was known to be unsafe, uncomfortable, and expensive, and home to terrifying diseases like Ebola and a fatal wasting disease that was later identified as AIDS. (We were grateful that our kids were safely home in college and boarding school, respectively.)
My Kinshasa job would not be available for months after we got there. I had pleaded for a house with a swimming pool, which I had been told was typical housing in Kinshasa for someone of John’s rank. I argued that I was being forced to be on leave without pay; at least I could work on my tan. But word came back that we would have an apartment—without swimming pool—right in the middle of town.
Having arrived in Kinshasa—which looked to be as dispiriting a place to live in as I had been warned—I asked the embassy personnel officer, “Couldn’t I go somewhere else in Africa on temporary duty for some of the time until my job here comes free in late November?” Well, yes, I could.
The Department promptly offered me a job in Nairobi, Kenya, as acting chief of the consular section. It was enormous fun while it lasted, but within a few months I was back in Kinshasa, ready to report for work as “protocol officer” in the political section. I was not really looking forward to it.
I had by then become comfortable doing consular work, first in Brussels and then in Nairobi, and felt competent at it. But now, I realized, as a new, untrained political officer, I was back in kindergarten again. This is not an unusual experience for junior and mid-level career diplomats, I would learn. In the late 1950s, when John started his diplomatic career, Foreign Service officers usually received language and area training for their new assignments, sometimes including a year of graduate school at a top university. The officer was then expected to hone that expertise during the bulk of what remained of his or her career. But by the time I joined, fifteen years later, in the Kissinger era, that policy had changed somewhat.
The new rules were that officers should expect at least once every eight or so years to be uprooted from a place where they had expertise and made to serve somewhere else. The theory was that this would keep us from becoming too emotionally committed to a favorite area or country and would also give diplomats serving in hardship posts a fairer share of life in the fleshpots of Europe.
I felt ready to kick and scream like a spoiled child at what I saw as a squandering of our hard-won knowledge and contacts. If they had wanted us to leave Europe after six straight years, fair enough. But why (I wondered aloud) couldn’t the State Department have sent us back to Southeast Asia? John had been a diplomat there while I had been his wife and diplomatic hostess during six fascinating years. We both spoke Indonesian and Malay and were more than willing to learn Thai or even Burmese.
Still, I had to concede in fairness to the State Department, we had always said our highest priority as a “tandem” couple was to be assigned together. And State had managed—just—to find jobs for both of us in Kinshasa. Although Kinshasa was then often referred to as the second worst “hell hole” in Africa (after Lagos, Nigeria), John would have a good job there. He would be counselor for economic affairs, at a time when Zaire’s economy was a basket case being kept on life support by the IMF and the Paris Club. John’s new job, one of the top three or four in a big embassy, was sure to get him noticed by the powers-that-be in Washington. My job, however, was an entry-level job, two grades below my then low rank; it was not even in my career specialty, consular work.
My new job’s title was Protocol Officer and, recalling that protocol had been only a small part of John’s political officer duties years ago in Jakarta, I asked my new boss, Political Counselor Bob Remole, what my job would entail. “Not much,” he said frankly. “Basically, the protocol job here amounts to carrying the ambassador’s briefcase at meetings, if he lets you go along, and meeting his flights—usually in the middle of the night, given the international plane schedules. You then get to carry his suitcase to and from the airplane.”
I felt my worst fears for this assignment had been confirmed. Trying not to sound too negative, I asked if there was anything else I could do. He paused and then said, “John tells me you can write. The person you are replacing, a very nice young man, cannot. Maybe you could already help by turning his newest effort at drafting a cable into something we can send to Washington.” John
