In the U.S. Foreign Service, there are few days free from excitement or danger. Through the medium of his personal diaries, the author describes a parlous life with his family in distant lands, including trouble spots such as Venezuela, El Salvador, Colombia, Kenya, Grenada, Saudi Arabia, and India. The book shows how the career U.S. Foreign Service contributes to the nation's well-being every day despite the miscalculations and interference of politicians. The author argues that an independent career Service must be preserved at all costs from partisan anxieties and political influence. He highlights the humanity, humor, and sacrifice of the Foreign Service and scoffs at the Hollywood version of the lazy bureaucrat sitting comfortably behind a desk all day denying visas. This book should go far toward persuading U.S. citizens that a career Foreign Service is their first line of defense abroad and that it continues to advance their interests resolutely every day without fear or favor.
Funny in Parts
THE DIARY OF A FOREIGN SERVICE OFFICERBy John J. EddyAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2011 John J. Eddy
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4634-5242-1Contents
AUTHOR'S PREFACE.........................................................IXA NOTE ABOUT DIARISTS....................................................XIIICHAPTER ONE THE AMBASSADOR...............................................1CHAPTER TWO "WHERE DID YOU SAY YOU ARE FROM?"............................7CHAPTER THREE LATIN AMERICA..............................................45CHAPTER FOUR AFRICA......................................................83CHAPTER FIVE THE ENGLISHSPEAKING CARIBBEAN...............................111CHAPTER SIX WASHINGTON...................................................139CHAPTER SEVEN THE UNITED NATIONS.........................................165CHAPTER EIGHT THE PRIVATE SECTOR.........................................177CHAPTER NINE SAUDI ARABIA................................................189CHAPTER TEN INDIA........................................................239CHAPTER ELEVEN ONCE MORE, THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE.....................307CHAPTER TWELVE THE INSPECTOR.............................................331CHAPTER THIRTEEN A SUMMING UP............................................375CHAPTER FOURTEEN "YOU KNOW THE WAY YOU ARE"..............................379
Chapter One
THE AMBASSADOR
"A capacity for absorbing without derangement vast quantities of intoxicating liquor was considered essential in any envoy to Holland or to the German Courts. These qualifications are no longer regarded as absolutely essential." —Harold Nicolson, 20th century British diplomat
The U.S. Congress created the career Foreign Service as the professional diplomatic arm of the United States. It functions as the objective eyes and ears of the American people abroad and as their first line of defense against foreign threat. Foreign Service officers are picketed far out where U.S. troops, businesspersons, or academics rarely tread: places like Conakry in Guinea, Ekaterina in Russia, and Ulan Bator in Mongolia. They submit their analyses and recommendations to the U.S. Department of State without fear or favor. That is at least the idea.
It was not always so. On May 24, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the "Rogers Act" into law to remove the old Foreign Service from the partisan anxieties and patronage system that Theodore Roosevelt called "a wholly unmixed evil." This act "confirmed a system of written and oral examinations, created a uniform salary scale, provided for representation allowances, and instituted a retirement program that would allow ordinary Americans, not just the rich, to aspire to a diplomatic career." This act has preserved the Foreign Service from the worst excesses of political interference, but there is still something to be desired.
The President appoints ambassadors with the advice and consent of the Senate. It was clear from the beginning that Mr. Rogers wanted the great majority of ambassadors chosen from the ranks of the career Service. There have been enough departures from this norm to wonder whether we have drifted toward a diplomatic corps of party loyalists.
To be sure, there have been superb "political" ambassadors. Three of them were David K.E. Bruce, Ambassador to France, West Germany, and the United Kingdom; Averill Harriman, Ambassador to the USSR and the United Kingdom; and Chester Bowles, Ambassador to India. But many political appointments have been unimpressive. The number of political ambassadors in recent years has swung between 20 and 40 percent, which is too many and poses a danger of feudal subservience to the party in power.
The fun that people see ambassadors having motivates unqualified people to seek an appointment. They seldom aspire to a dangerous geographic area. When a wealthy pipe joint manufacturer looks at the job, for example, he or she sees only the flags on the car, the crested dinner plates, the household servants, and the diplomatic parties. Above all, the aspirant covets the title, Mr. or Madam Ambassador. Here is a fictional story helping to explain this phenomenon.
An ambassador who led an exemplary personal life arrived at last at the gates of Heaven. Saint Peter met him and reminded him that all titles were to be left at the door, that in heaven the last would be first and the first would be last. Regrettably, the newcomer could no longer be addressed as "Mr. Ambassador."
"Does this mean," the ambassador asked, "that my secretary or my communicator could precede me at table?"
Saint Peter chuckled. "There is no rank here. We do not respect persons merely for their worldly achievements."
The ambassador looked crestfallen. "But I've already established my humility by dismissing my driver down the road."
St. Peter said good-naturedly, "I regret that was necessary."
The ambassador persisted. "I had looked forward to having you as guest of honor at my first reception in Heaven."
Saint Peter raised an admonishing finger. "This will not do, sir."
"We'll use the Peruvian silver just as in the old days. Are there any film people here?"
"Well ..."
"Think of it, the first Pope as my first guest of honor! Summon the caterers! Put Michelangelo on the flowers! You, my Saint, will stand first in the reception line right after me."
St. Peter did see a refreshing resilience in the man and considerable flair that he thought might enliven Heaven. He was not unmoved, either, by the ambassador's humility in wanting to host a simple fisherman. St. Peter said, "Well, Mr. Ambassador, it's getting chilly standing out here. Let's go inside and discuss details."
Chapter Two
"WHERE DID YOU SAY YOU ARE FROM?"
"Woodstock was judged one of the ten prettiest towns in the United States. If the judges were honest, they would have named the other nine in Vermont as well." —Charles Kuralt
"You know, I've been watching that seagull over there for half an hour. I think it's dead." —President Calvin Coolidge on the Sequoia
Calendar art gives a false picture of Vermont. Outsiders think that Vermonters revel in snow like wild turkeys or chickadees, or that for some reason they just like the marrow-sucking cold. Vermonters like snow up to a point that is passed almost every year. For most of them, the winters are just too long. Many reasons conspire to keep them in place: the pull of ancestors, the love of relatives and friends, the lakes and rivers, the cost of moving.
But the summer, well ... the summer has a sweet, rising scent like the center of a warm roll. You smell mown hay, weeds, and old pine stairs. Smells drift up lazily from the bottoms of the ponds where the lizards lie. Bees float above the ponds, not busy as their reputations would have it, but droning on and on like Uncle Ned in his fedora at Lake Elmore, legs stretched out in front of him, toasting his marshmallows.
In the summer, men park their rusty pickups next to the brooks and slide down the tangled banks to fish. "Save some for me" is a common witticism called from the road. In summer, families gather to enjoy picnics near the swimming holes. Aunt Polly Spittle used to sit in her sun suit on the wall at Patch's Dam, swinging her feet in the water. She herself couldn't swim and so never immersed herself in the water. She objected to the way a girl's dress clung to her as she emerged from the water. "You can see everything she's got," she said.
My friend Howard Burke and I hiked a lot, tramping off into the fields, stepping carefully around the "meadow muffins" left by the cows, and clambering over the stone walls laced with blue chicory while the crows cawed away.
One day my younger brother Dick and I pedaled up Town Line Road looking for raspberries. We worked all morning and heaped big luscious ones in Dick's basket. Coming back down, a farm dog tore out after us and we had to pedal for our lives. Farm dogs then were vicious animals that would be cheerfully euthanized today by the most ardent animal rights advocates. At the bottom of the hill there was nothing left to the raspberries but purple mush. I pulled out my knife and threatened to kill Dick right there on the spot. I wasn't serious, of course. I knew it was illegal.
Nothing scared Dick. One day at the age of five, he drank a glass of varnish to the last drop and had to be pumped out at the Rutland hospital. No one could understand why he had kept on drinking. But during his whole life, he took everything in stride. He came to the head of the stairs one evening at the age of eight and inquired, "Dad, did you know there's a fire up here?" My father jumped up, threw the potatoes out of the pot, and did a lot of water damage.
I'm amused now when a few Vermonters think themselves superior to outsiders because they happened to be born here. In my day, everyone thought of the boys, especially, as pretty dumb. There was some evidence for this. Boys jumped over hot tar pits, jumped from high bridges, and split their heads open like cantaloupes diving into three feet of water. It was hard to see the point. I stood more than once at the casket of a boy who stepped barefoot on a rusty nail.
If you were a boy, you never knew when you were going to get socked. John Quinn came up to me once and socked me for no reason other than the beauty of the morning.
I need to mention a few uncles briefly because they are always covered in a book of this kind.
Uncle Pat Stapleton worked for twenty years at a foundry making weight scales. He shoveled coal into a furnace all day. He also got up at two thirty every morning to deliver the Rutland Herald. Every afternoon he came home covered with soot and coal dust. He filled a large washtub and stepped into it in the middle of the kitchen floor. He had to be very careful where he put the tub down because eventually he had nine children and his peripheral vision was taxed.
A scar zigzagged down one muscular arm where a farmer hit him with birdshot when he was filching pears as a boy, just like Saint Augustine. Strong as he was, he developed black lung disease from the foundry and had to retire early. He spent the next twenty years standing at the front door jingling the coins in his pocket and sometimes drove Aunt Dorothy crazy.
At last, he was confined to bed. He pestered his family all night long for petty services because he didn't want to die alone. My mother said she never saw anyone so afraid to die. His youngest son David got fed up one night and told him to quit pestering everyone. David also told him to stop taking so many pills. Uncle Pat improved for a time on the medical advice of his son but died soon anyway, very brave at the end and rightly a great hero to his children.
There were only two black women living in Rutland, and Uncle Ernie lived with both of them. Even at their racially tolerant peak, Rutlanders did not look kindly on double adultery. The relationship was not as lurid as Rutlanders had hoped, however, because the women were actually sisters and took in laundry just to support themselves and Uncle Ernie, who would otherwise probably have been destitute. When I would pick up our laundry at the back door, Uncle Ernie would come out looking woozy to chat amiably about the appalling state of the city. The alcohol seemed to let him see such things clearly, except that he had no idea of the social earthquake he had caused.
When he died, despite his spectacular transgression, his estranged wife made arrangements at the most expensive funeral home in town, his army officer son came home, and all of us children were required to attend the obsequies. I can't remember if the black women were there.
Uncle Tom Eddy was my father's younger and only sibling. He was happier than most men because he was an Elk. He spent many a convivial Saturday afternoon under the antlers in Rutland. When he ran for alderman, his bald head shone on posters all over town. Now some politicians smile in public but are mean at home. Uncle Tom was just the opposite. On his posters he looked as stern as could be, but at home he did the hula in the kitchen and made Aunt Charlotte laugh.
Uncle Tom seemed never to fear his own extinction. This may have been because he studied with the Jesuits at Holy Cross College. I think he anticipated a fine reward in Heaven. He played golf regularly with a prominent funeral home director and would occasionally lie down in one of the director's caskets for size, comfort, and price. His daughter Charlene called him to breakfast one morning while they were vacationing together in Florida. When he didn't respond, she entered his bedroom and found him dead of diabetes at 73 with the sheets unruffled and his head cupped nonchalantly in his palm. Thus died one of the two Greatest Playboys of the Western World, the other being my father, who had died a few years earlier at 76.
* * *
I should mention that the first Eddy's landed in America in 1630. They were John and Samuel Eddy from Cranbrook in Kent, England. They arrived on the "Handmaid" ten years after the "Mayflower," but they were still technically pilgrims. There is a rock commemorating their arrival right across the road from the Plymouth Rock itself, which is of course better known. The prestige of the Eddy rock is diminished only by the fact that they put it there themselves.
The first Eddy to move to Vermont was Peter Eddy in late 1774 or early 1775, from Rhode Island. After a very short time, he and his family had trouble with the Indians. They entered Peter's house in Rutland led by a chief called "David," and threatened to burn it. The tense confrontation is told in the family's genealogy, The Eddy Family in America, which records the following dramatic exchange:
Peter's wife Mary said to the Indian chief, "David, after being friends so long with us, you surely are not going to kill us, are you?" David said, "No, but you go away." The Indians began to ruin everything. They ripped up the feather beds and let the feathers fly away and then they proceeded to set fire to the house so that our grandparents were glad to escape with their lives.
After this incident with the heathen, Peter moved his family ten miles south to Clarendon, where the Eddy's farmed the banks of Otter Creek for the next two hundred years.
My father was Jack Eddy. He liked horseracing and the whole idea of Heaven. He tended to equate them. He was a two-dollar better. During most of his life, his only vacation was a few afternoons a year at Saratoga in August, which he eagerly awaited. He would sit under an elm propped against the fence reading his racing forms while famous jockeys like Eddie Arcaro weighed in nearby. He kept a sharp eye on the weights. He tried chastely to touch the elbow of a black woman on his way to the betting window, because he thought it brought him good luck.
He was born in 1902 in Rutland in a white gingerbread house on the grounds of the Eddy Ice Company on Cold River Road. His thrifty Protestant father Zeke founded the ice company, one of the largest in New England. Zeke later built a fine home at 11 Court Square in Rutland and acquired a Revolution-era hotel in Rutland called the Brock House on South Main Street.
Zeke was smitten one day by an Irish Catholic girl visiting from Elmira. Her name was Helen Collins. Her brother Flaxie worked for the circus, and I think that's why she was visiting. Zeke promised the priest that he would bring his children up Catholic, and he was as good as his word. My father always said that Protestants were good, charitable people who never cheated, lied, or stole. He thought that Protestants treated Catholics much better than we Catholics would have treated them if we were on top. Protestants love to hear this.
Since his father was so well off, Dad thought he would never have to work a day in his life. He spent two convivial years at St. Michael's College in Vermont followed by the same two, equally pleasant years at Fordham University in New York, but he never got past the sophomore year. He loved the Jesuits at Fordham and spoke often of them, remembering them by their nicknames like "Min" Oates or "Sniffer" Taft.
When Fordham finally dismissed him, Sniffer advised Dad somewhat tardily, "Be good, Jack, and you'll always be happy." He tried hard to remember that advice with few lapses.
He worked for a time at the Bronx Home News until one night, after covering a speakeasy, he wrecked the company car and returned to Vermont. He met my mother Pauline one evening when he gave her a ride home from a babysitting job. They were married in 1932. He was laid off by the Rutland Herald during the Great Depression. He brought my mother to Cleveland, where I was born in 1933 in a working class section of Lakewood. My mother was nineteen and alone except for Dad when she gave birth in a hotel.
Many years later, I made a pilgrimage to Lakewood to find my birthplace, listed as 132 Webb Street. I parked my car excitedly at the back of an old apartment hotel. A man in a pickup with a very red neck and a bill cap drove up and demanded that I get out of his spot. In words that I was sure he would find moving, I explained that I had been born in that very building 65 years ago.
"Move your car now," he said.
When Zeke died in Rutland at 72 of diabetes, Dad learned that he was left nothing. This was a quite a shock to him despite his former miscreant ways. Zeke settled something on his grandchildren, but that didn't last long. For the rest of his life, Dad worked at minor jobs such as selling nylon stockings door-to-door after the war, or selling coffee and tea for the Jewel Tea Company. In his later years, he learned to take photographs of babies.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Funny in Partsby John J. Eddy Copyright © 2011 by John J. Eddy. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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