. . .
John was greatly tickled at the thought of my being allowed—even encouraged—to cultivate the most interesting people in the country and to be the chief link between the legal opposition and the US government. It was a far cry from the banal world of protocol duties to which I had been originally assigned. John found being present at those dinners—at which Robby was usually also present until he and his family left later that year—made up for his having to spend time dealing with Mobutu’s very corrupt and often boring commercial cronies. My dissident contacts liked John a lot. They trusted him to give them a good sense of what support they could expect from Uncle Sam.
Robby, who still had too much to do, also offered me the human rights dossier. Being the human rights officer at our embassy to Zaire meant following what was happening for good or ill as regards human rights in the host country and then writing a report. The report would be published, after editing back in Washington, as a chapter in the State Department’s annual assessment of human rights in all the countries we recognize.
It was in that connection that I got involved in the effort to get a pardon for prisoners. I was working with a Congolese man Robby admired and had nominated for an International Visitor’s grant to the United States. After coming back, the man—who was now my friend, too—had been appointed to a position high up in the Ministry of Justice. One of his first acts in the new job was to visit as many as he could of the country’s prisons; he was appalled by what he found there.
Together, he and I drafted a pardon for some of these prisoners, over a series of breakfast meetings at my apartment. (We had noticed that Mobutu’s secret police were not early risers.) My new friend’s idea was that the pardon should apply to those who had been in jail for two or more years without being charged, or who had less than two years to serve to complete their sentence. After consulting with me, and my checking with my bosses, my friend told his minister that these prisoners were by and large not troublemakers but that, unless released soon, most of them were likely to die of starvation, leading to headlines abroad that could keep Mobutu from getting in to see President Carter at the White House.
Mobutu signed the pardon in May or June of 1980, and somewhere close to 40,000 people were set free. I felt absurdly proud when our new career ambassador, Robert Oakley, asked my friend whether the pardon was due to the just concluded visit of Pope John Paul II. My friend smiled and pointed at me, saying, “Voici le Pape.” It wasn’t me, of course. It had only happened because the US government was then believed by Mobutu and his advisers to care about human rights. I think of this pardon when politically fashionable people of various nations pooh-pooh the effectiveness of human rights policies like Carter’s. But looking back now, I realize that the benefits of this human rights coup cut two ways. Yes, it saved tens of thousands of lives, but it also made it easier for the United States to defend its continued support of a dictator who had allowed prisoners to starve to death in jail.
Chapter 2
Paying Calls
IN NOVEMBER 1958, LONG BEFORE the State Department allowed spouses to take the Foreign Service exam, long before John and I became one of the first so-called tandem couples, I left my country for the first time.
I was accompanying John to his first post: the American Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia. There he was assigned to be an officer in the political section. We both had graduated from college the year before but, unlike John, I was not officially a diplomat and had received no State Department training. I arrived in Jakarta almost totally ignorant of the place where I was going to live for the next three years or why Uncle Sam was sending us there.
In those days before we were all tethered to the Internet, diplomatic pouches sent once in six weeks by sea were our only route for getting personal mail, and international phone calls were out of the question. So I knew I would have to come to terms with what was—like it or not—our new home. The first impression of this new home was not altogether encouraging.
“SEATO Hands off Indonesia” read some of the signs on the trees lining the road from Kemayoran Airport into town. Other signs showed President-for-life Sukarno giving a big kick to a supine Uncle Sam. There seemed to be similar signs and slogans on every spare space on fences and walls along our route.
Looking beyond the lurid posters, I could see in the putrid water of Jakarta’s roadside canals golden-skinned naked women and children bathing downstream from where men were squatting to defecate. I told myself I could not have asked for a greater contrast to the genteel streets of Northwest Washington, D.C.—which I, as a New Yorker, had found a little too tame. Well, I thought, at least Jakarta won’t be too tame.
. . .
Up until a few months earlier, we had assumed we would be sent to Malaya. John and I had met as freshmen and married just after our junior year at college—he at Harvard and I at Radcliffe (which had all its classes except freshman gym with and at Harvard). John had dreamed of being an American diplomat, ideally in Asia, since he was a child; he had dedicated his senior honors thesis, “The Independence Movement in Malaya,” “To my wife Judy who will share the world with me.”
John started his diplomatic orientation course at the State Department the day after we graduated from college. After that, he had volunteered for nine months of Indonesian language training because he knew that the same language was spoken in Malaya. Malaya in those days was a relatively safe, comfortable place where English was widely used. It was a good place, he must have thought, to introduce his wife to living abroad.
Then word came that we were going instead to Jakarta, capital of Indonesia, a disease-ridden, uncomfortable country where little English was spoken and several bloody rebellions were going on. I tried to soften John’s possible disappointment by saying cheerily: “That will be great. I can learn to speak decent French there,” having somehow got Indonesia and French Indochina mixed up in my head. I saw John’s face grow pale. Although he used to joke about the limited horizons of English majors like me, I think it was only at that moment that he realized how truly ignorant of the outside world I was.
Now we were in Indonesia, and John was sitting beside me in the backseat as we were driven in from Kemayoran Airport; he seemed to be taking in everything he saw. I guessed that Jakarta, with its many Chinese shop signs, reminded him of the Shanghai he had known as an eight-year-old in 1940–41, a time when that part of China was not yet in Japanese hands. By now I knew that John’s Shanghai year included the happiest memories of his life with his mother.
His mother, Doris Olsen, was the daughter of a Danish immigrant civil engineer and a no-nonsense Yankee housewife who stayed at home, cooked, sewed, and raised her three girls—of whom Doris was the parents’ favorite. But Doris had scandalized her family by marrying a New York Jew. This was almost as bad as a cousin who married a Boston Irish Catholic. So nobody was terribly shocked when in 1940, nearly a decade later, Doris again threw convention aside. This time it was to accept the invitation from a Chinese actor named Yao, who was her lover at the time, to go back to Shanghai with him and teach English there for a year. She left John’s physician father, Harry Heimann, at home in New York City and took their only child, seven-year-old John, with her.
John had loved his time in China, especially the food. To the end of his life, he preferred a meal based on a bowl of rice to anything else. He also loved having the sense of being inside a brand new world, which Shanghai was in those days—thanks in part to his mother’s dashing friend Yao. Yao was one of the pioneers in bringing Western theater there.
Most of all, I guess, John had loved that, during that time, his mother had seemed happy and fulfilled as he had never seen her before or since. Yao and his modernist friends treated her like a grown-up person and a smart one. But when the Japanese moved to take over Shanghai in 1941, his mother took John home again, on the last American President Line passenger ship not to be torpedoed by the Japanese Imperial Navy.
They returned to John’s patiently waiting father. He loved this brilliant, adventurous woman but did not know how to make her happy. Doris had been one of the first women to pass the Massachusetts bar exam in the early 1930s. But she could