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 rebels and other rebels in Indonesian islands northeast of Java. The Dulles brothers encouraged the rebels and armed them with cash, weapons, logistics, and mercenaries, in the hopes of toppling what they believed to be the dangerously pro-communist Sukarno regime.
A fairly typical Cold War gambit for that era, this covert effort at subverting a country with which we were in theory enjoying friendly relations was so clumsy and inept that the Indonesian government easily uncovered it. Had it not been for the help provided by Major Benson and the near infinite patience and tact of our ambassador to Indonesia Howard P. Jones (who was also at least partly out of the Dulles loop), it is probable that Sukarno would have publicly exposed the plot and used it as a pretext to sever relations with the West and move his country firmly into the Eastern bloc.1
The lesson I drew from that incident was that there are times—fortunately rare—when diplomats on the ground have both the obligation and capability to save our country from the consequences of mistakes made by our bosses at home.
Though I never paid a call that turned out to be half as momentous as Barbara Benson’s, I found there were occasional glamorous moments in diplomacy, such as the annual Queen’s Birthday Ball held (where else?) at the British Cricket Club, better known as “the Box.” While our furniture was in storage in America, I had had shipped out with our most essential belongings my only ball gown. This was a white lace confection made by Worth of Paris—straight out of an Edith Wharton novel. John had insisted we buy it at Bonwit’s in Boston in a wildly extravagant moment, for me to wear to the Harvard senior prom. I had no idea, then, how much use I would get out of such a ball gown over the years.
At the ball a Viennese waltz was played, of course. David Goodall, John’s counterpart at the British embassy, stood to help me from my chair onto the dance floor, and said, “I feel I must warn you, I don’t reverse!” A happy but very dizzy young woman in white lace was returned to her seat afterward, to drink champagne and to feel that the diplomatic life was, every once in a while, precisely what one imagined it should be. David, almost intimidatingly well educated, remained one of our closest friends ever after. He became a consummate British diplomat, and over the years that brought him ever better jobs and higher honors, we stayed in touch. During those years, David taught John and me a lot about what good diplomats do and, also, how differently our closest allies can sometimes approach the same issues our government faces.
I learned another, more painful lesson about dealing with British diplomats during that first year in Jakarta. Through David Goodall, John and I met an absolutely charming and original poet and British council member named Henry, who came from a very modest family background and whose excellent education had been entirely the product of his good brain and hard work. Also through David, we were later introduced to a new, very upper-class British couple at his embassy, whom I shall call Hermione and Alec. Just for fun, we invited Hermione and Alec to our house for dinner, the only other guest being Henry. While we watched helplessly, the couple put Henry through a thorough examination of his background: where had he gone to school? Oxford, ah yes, but they meant school, and Henry was obliged to name the state-financed grammar school he had attended, not a famous so-called public school like Eton or Harrow. And who were his friends? Alec and Hermione didn’t know them. And where did his parents live? And on and on, while John and I cringed with embarrassment at having exposed poor Henry to this onslaught—to which I must confess Henry seemed more inured than John or I were.
The worst came when Henry got to ask them where their parents lived. At the mention of a village somewhere near Bath, Henry said with a twinkle in his eye, “Ah yes, I rather think my father passed through there during the Jarrow Hunger March of ’36.”
I still shudder when I think of that evening. The lesson I drew was never to invite British people to the same small occasion unless I was sure they were from the same class. It would take me longer to learn (from my Congolese giant friend) that I needed to compose every dinner party carefully to make sure all our guests would be comfortable with one another.
I was almost finished with my protocol calls when Hester Henderson, her heart in the right place, over dinner with her husband and John and me, tried to involve me in a Women’s International Club sewing circle. The ladies’ project, she explained, was to make stuffed animals out of cotton felt, as toys for Indonesian children. My own view (which even I knew enough to keep to myself) was that the children would probably prefer a new white blouse or shirt for school. In any case, the prospect of my spending hours each week, sitting around with the club’s ladies sewing, filled me with dread. John, seeing my face, said bravely: “You know, Hester, some people don’t drink and some don’t smoke—and my wife doesn’t sew.” I would have married him again for that alone.
Undaunted,