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| Cover of Bill Clinton |
I’m off schedule again, which is supposed to be a
bad thing for a blogger. But, I have a good reason to be way early with the
penultimate article on my life as a diplomat; this weekend I will, like Jack
Kerouac, be ‘on the road.’ I’m heading north to Chautauqua to participate in
the 2013 graduation ceremonies of Chautauqua’s Literary and Scientific Circle
(CLSC), where the Zimbabwean graduates will be honored. I’m looking forward to
the week’s activities, and will blog about them when I return.
But, for now, let’s look at my first diplomatic
assignment – my first tour. Like a lot of my subsequent tours, I had to fight
for it. One of the assignments opened to my A-100 class was Guangzhou, China,
and I’d always wanted to see China, so I put that first on my list. Actually, I
let it be known that it was the ONLY assignment I was interested in. The
personnel office pushed back because my two youngest kids at the time were in
grade school, and they didn’t think it was a good assignment for a first tour
officer. I had to point out that I’d just completed 20 years in the army, and
my family was accustomed to packing and moving, and the kids had already
attended several schools at various places in the U.S. as well as in Korea. It
took a little arm twisting, but they finally caved, and after six months of
Chinese language and consular training, we were off to China.
Except for ten to twelve hour days interviewing
immigrant visa applicants, it wasn’t all that much of a challenge. We had two
to three officers doing immigrant visas, and some days we’d interview hundreds
of applicants. Along with that, we had to answer Congressional inquiries – an average
of five to ten a week. I had a little argument with my supervisor who felt my
congressional drafts were to blunt and straight forward – I believed what was
needed was a direct answer to the questions, but she liked to wax eloquent in
her replies. Neither of us ever changed our minds or ways on that one.
Thankfully, the head of the consular section liked the way I wrote, so the
conflict abated.
After nearly a year doing immigrant visas, I moved
to the citizen services section (ACS) for a while, and finally became the
anti-fraud investigator. In ACS, it was mostly death cases and helping
Americans who’d lost passports or were having disputes with local merchants. My
biggest case was an elderly woman who’d fallen from the top of an aircraft
landing ladder and was in hospital in a coma after a portion of her brain had
to be removed. I visited her in the hospital every day, just sitting at her
bedside talking to her in the hope that she was able to hear. She eventually
improved enough to be moved back to the U.S.
I never heard what happened after that. That’s often the way it is – you
help the best you can, and they move on, while you’re already busy with the
next case. The freakiest case I handled was an American who’d committed suicide
by jumping from his hotel window and going head first through a bike rack. The
Chinese had let the body lie on the sidewalk for several hours before calling
us, but they refused to let it be moved until I identified the body (from his
passport, and thankfully there was enough of his face left to allow that) and
said it could be moved. Not exactly something you want to do just before lunch,
but it happened more often than I care to remember.
When President Ronald Reagan came to China, I was
sent to Shanghai to provide TDY administrative support for the visit. Shanghai was
and is an interesting city, and my first presidential visit in the Foreign
Service was a good learning experience. Not for the reasons, though, that you
might think. When the president was to visit with the consulate staff and
families near the end of his visit, we support staff were excluded. In fact,
the consul general ordered that we stay in the control room out of sight. Talk
about a slap in the face, given that we’d been instrumental in the success of
the visit. Then Secretary of State George Schulz demonstrated the kind of
leadership I admire, though. When he entered the room where the consul general
and his crew were assembled, he noticed the door to the control room which was
ajar. Coming over, he opened it to find over a dozen support staff hanging
around and taking occasional peeks through the crack in the door. He spent time
with us, thanking each of us individually. An act I never forgot. When
President Clinton visited me in Ho Chi Minh City in 2000, I made sure the TDY
support staff was included when he paid a call on the consulate.
My tour was only 18 months, so I don’t think it
deserves any longer treatment than this. In the final offering I will describe
how I decided to join the Foreign Service, and how I almost didn’t make it.
Your humble servant.
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