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 had always claimed to me that my writing would be an asset in diplomacy. Well, now I would see if it was.
I said I would try, but wished I hadn’t when I looked at the draft. There was no way I could edit this in a quick and discreet way so as not to embarrass the drafter—who was a nice young man of considerable cultivation, despite his awkwardness with a pen. It was clear that he had spent many hours on this long, convoluted message, with lots of repeated bits. It was as if (which seemed likely) he had tried putting sentences and the odd paragraph first in one place and then in another, and forgot to remove them from their earlier position. In the privacy of the file room, taking scissors, I cut the cable into several segments and removed the redundant text. After putting the stray sentences into what looked to be the right paragraphs, and the paragraphs into an order that seemed to make sense, I retyped them in that order. I edited, as I went, conserving as much of his wording as I could. Seeing the horrified look on his face when he picked up the new draft, I hastened to say: “You remember those hilarious advertisements for cheap records of the classics? The ones that promised you all nine Beethoven symphonies on two LPs with ‘all the unnecessary repetitions left out’? Well, that is all I did here. This is still your text, your cable.”
At this point fate intervened in the form of a wonderfully helpful colleague, Harlan “Robby” Robinson. Robby was the number two of the section, a civil servant who was on loan from the Africa Office of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Unlike most of the rest of us, including me, Robby spoke flawless French. He also knew a lot about Africa, including the Congo, from previous study. Also, he had already been in this job for two years and had extended for a third year. He came over and said, “Judy, if you have nothing better to do, I suggest you accompany a friend of mine, David Gould, who has just turned up. He’s a famous academic on the Congo; he’s the man who first used the term kleptocracy to describe the Mobutu regime. He is going out to the University of Kinshasa where he has lots of interesting Congolese friends on the faculty you could meet.”
I wondered if our boss would let me be away from the office on my second day at work in his section, but Remole said, “Oh yes, that’s a good idea of Robby’s! I should have thought of it myself. Go ahead!” (Given the much stronger centripetal forces in embassies nowadays, I doubt that any boss now would have let me out of the embassy in the company of somebody not on his staff on my second day in the office.)
As it happened, nothing could have been a better introduction for me to some of the smartest and kindest Congolese in Kinshasa than being passed on to them by Professor Gould.