the consummate insider, was widely rumored to be the CIA’s chief agent in Indonesia (though I doubt this was the case). But he had clearly learned from his days in World War II special operations how to build up trust and fruitful relations with all sorts of people.
John was invited after the movie to play poker with the big boys—the deputy chief of mission and John Henderson, among others—in Billy Palmer’s bungalow. I waited for him before going to bed, and overheard bits of the conversations around me—some of it apparently in Dutch—among the elegant Indonesian women guests whose high bosoms were visible through their tight-fitting sheer blouses above waistlines that Scarlett O’Hara would have envied. Most of the Western women had already retired for the night.
Sitting there in a bamboo lounge chair and looking up at a blanket of stars, I could hardly believe I was in such an exotic place among such exotic people. I thought if I dozed off and woke up, I might find myself back in Kansas, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. When John turned up and we went off to our neat, sparsely furnished little bedroom, I told him I was glad we had started off our Foreign Service life in Indonesia. No place else could be so foreign and such a mixture of the wonderful and the terrible.
In the morning, Hester Henderson took me to pay my first protocol call, on Mary Lou Jones, the ambassador’s wife. A tall, rangy woman who looked to be in her late fifties, Mrs. Jones wore a faded cotton dress and no makeup. She was down to earth in her manner, despite her husband’s rank as head of our diplomatic community. The Joneses were now on their second tour in Indonesia and must have had many stories to tell, but I could sense that Mrs. Jones, although courteous to me, was a very private person who would have preferred her weekends to be a respite from protocol.
My call on Mrs. Jones approached its conclusion, and Hester, who had kept the conversation going, rifled through my calling cards and pointed out that I should give Mrs. Jones two of John’s cards and one of mine or, alternatively, I could give her one Mr. and Mrs. card and an extra one of John’s. That was because I was supposed to leave John’s cards on both the husband and wife, since men could call on both men and women, but women were only supposed to call on women. In fact, as was usual during formal calls, neither of the men was present. Odder still, according to Hester, if Mrs. Jones had not been home, I should have turned down a corner of one of the cards and maybe written a note on it—in pencil, not ink. That was because, back in the days when the rules were made, there were no portable pens and thus a pencil showed you had come yourself.
It is easy to laugh at the absurdity of this kind of paying formal calls, but it helped us women feel that we were part of our country’s representation abroad. Since the other diplomats’ wives, regardless of nationality, were operating from the same set of archaic rules, it gave us all a quick and fairly efficient way to meet the other diplomatic families in our own and other embassies. In a secretive dictatorship like Indonesia, our diplomats could sometimes learn what was happening within Sukarno’s inner circle from foreign diplomatic colleagues.
When we got back to Jakarta at the end of the weekend, I was no longer in Shangri-La, but back in Jane Austen country. I spent most mornings of my first month in Jakarta—wearing a dress or skirt and blouse, plus a hat, nylons, and short white cotton gloves and armed with the right calling cards—calling upon the other twenty-eight (yes, twenty-eight) wives of John’s more senior embassy colleagues. Some of these women seemed worth knowing better, and many of their houses were handsome and well arranged, perhaps because these women had more experience of furnishing houses in the tropics than I did. Indeed, they had more experience, period.
Some of these women, however, had become visibly fed up with a life that—in the Jakarta diplomatic setting—made it nearly impossible to exercise their skills, whether professional work of some kind or even cooking and childcare, which were done chiefly by servants.
In those days, wives of American diplomats were often commandeered for various unpaid jobs by the embassy. There was even space in our husbands’ annual performance evaluations for their supervisor to comment on how well the wife entertained and in other ways contributed positively to the mission’s goals. (Nowadays, many more Foreign Service officers are women, and many more wives are either officers themselves or able to work in the local economy, thanks to the tireless efforts of the State Department to obtain reciprocity on work permits for diplomatic spouses abroad.)
. . .
John would chat with these world-weary women on the cocktail circuit. Remembering how at seventeen he had welcomed the National Guard call-up that let him escape from a home then dominated by his mother’s drinking, he seemed to understand where these women’s low spirits were coming from. He would later occasionally say to me of some woman he met who seemed to have once had a spark that “she had died in the war.” I sometimes wondered if that would be my fate, too, after the novelty of being a diplomat’s wife wore off.
American diplomats’ wives are no longer obliged to pay calls or to participate in any way in their husband’s social duties. But in quite a few countries they still have no right to a work permit and can only hope to occupy themselves in volunteer work, social clubs, a job at the American embassy, or perhaps in an American-funded school or business. Given the current climate of opinion regarding women’s roles, no boss’s wife would dare to try to teach subordinate spouses what is expected of them, the way Hester taught me. Yet the wives are still expected to know.
I found calls on foreigners more interesting than calls on other Americans, but they were more complicated, as often the person I called on and I had no more than a few words in a common language. But one Pakistani wife who spoke fluent English was especially cordial to me, expressing gratitude for the American diplomats at her husband’s last post, in Saudi Arabia, where the only chance she had to leave the house and be out of doors unveiled had been when invited to picnics by her husband’s American colleagues. Muslim she might be, but Pakistan in her day was a place (like Indonesia) where an educated Muslim woman enjoyed much more freedom than in the Arab world.
Most of my diplomatic calls were pretty tame affairs. Coffee or tea or orange squash was served, along with something to nibble on, a brief polite conversation took place, and I was expected to leave within the half hour. But not all calls were like that. It is not really stretching a point to say that Barbara Benson’s call on the wife of one of her husband’s Indonesian contacts changed the course of history between our two countries.
Barbara was the wife of Assistant Military Attaché Major George Benson, and was a registered nurse. And when she paid a call on the wife of a highly placed army colonel named Yani, who lived a short walk from the Bensons’ house, she found Mrs. Yani writhing with labor pains; Barbara stayed and helped the midwife deliver the baby.
From then on, the Bensons and the Yanis were closer than family, and the Bensons’ adventurous four-year-old son, Dukie, would sometimes escape his out-of-breath baby amah to wander over to the Yanis’ front porch. Dukie’s father, George, perhaps the most charming Irish American Jakarta had ever known, would routinely walk over to reclaim his son after he came home from work. One evening he found not only Dukie but much of the top brass of the Indonesian army sitting around Yani’s table in front of maps of a part of Sumatra that contained a rebel stronghold. George Benson, having been well trained at West Point, and recognizing the people sitting around the table, immediately understood what was going on. And he could not keep from pointing out to Yani and his colleagues a better way to invade Sumatra and defeat the rebels. They took his advice and it worked, thereby further cementing his good relations with the anticommunist Indonesian Army leadership. (Benson would be called back again and again in future years to work at our Jakarta embassy when someone was needed who knew everyone that mattered.)
The irony was that Benson was not privy to the then closely held secret that the CIA under its director Allen Dulles, abetted by Dulles’s brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and with the approval of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, was supporting the Sumatran
