An American Tune: a Memoir

 

An American Tune is a memoir based on my 400-page oral history recorded by The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project. The title is inspired by Paul Simon’s song, “American Tune.” The verse portrays in my imagination the career of an American Foreign Service Officer. Off we rose above the Statue of Liberty to tell America’s past and promise for the future. It was our American tune. We served our country with successes and sometimes failures. And how many nights did we drop dog-tired in bed, with another exhausting new day just ahead? But it turned out all right. There was always tomorrow, another working day.

An American Tune tells my story as an American diplomat for nearly thirty years in Europe and Africa during some of the most critical conjunctures of the post-World War II decades. It tracks the depths of the East-West confrontation we call the Cold War, its end and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Few places experienced the Cold War more intensely than Finland where I served twice. During assignments In Greece and Italy, urban terrorists operated freely, nearly unchecked. I was in London when Reagan triumphally returned from Moscow after signing a missile agreement with the Soviets. I was the American embassy’s Counselor for Economic Affairs in South Africa during the tumultuous days of that country’s transition to democracy. I was there when Nelson Mandela assumed the reins of power, ending apartheid with all its atrocities. I stood outside the room where President Bill Clinton, one-on-one with Russian President Yeltsin, reached an agreement that opened the door for NATO expansion into the Baltics. I organized embassy support for the final negotiation that stopped NATO’s bombing in Serbia and brought Milosevic’s role in the Balkans to a close.

Of course, much has changed since those decades – but then maybe not so much as one might think. Certainly, Russia’s aggression and Ukraine’s turmoil undermine the security and confidence in central Europe and remind us that history runs deep and still intertwines with the present. The same might be true of today’s State Department. Years pass quickly by, but many of the same issues the Foreign Service wrestled with then – both internally and diplomatically – have not disappeared.

An American Tune is available on Amazon.com

 

 

 

Excerpt from Paul Simon’s song “American Tune”

“And I dreamed I was flying
And high up above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty
Sailing away to sea
And I dreamed I was flying

We come on the ship they call The Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age’s most uncertain hours
And sing an American tune

Oh, and it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright
You can’t be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow’s going to be another working day
And I’m trying to get some rest
That’s all I’m trying to get some rest.”

 

 

 

 

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Diplomacy Comes in Many Forms

I discovered from my first assignment in Milan, Italy, that diplomacy is done in many ways, on many levels, and can take many guises. To my great satsification I had the opportunity to experience many of them. There were days supporting the President and Secretary of State as they negotiated the expansion of NATO into new parts of Europe. Arctic science diplomacy wasn’t on the same grand level, but brought its own satisfaction. I also learned early that religion required its own forms of diplomacy.

 

 

 

With Ambassador Keith Nyborg at the Kevo Research Station in northern Lapland where we brought American and Finnish scientists together in a greater level of cooperation during dark Cold War days.

 

 

 

 

 

A luncheon for the leader of the Orthodox church in Greece, Archbishop of Athens Christodoulos: Re-building relations with the Greek Orthodox church were crucial for good US-Greece ties, especially in the immediate days after 9/11 when Christodoulos initially took an anti-American stand.

The Unforgettable

Memoirs, a record of events personally observed — memories. But what were my best memories? That has always been hard for me to answer. We had many “best memories.” But unforgettable memories, that’s another thing. Unforgettable memories don’t just migrate through your mind every now and then. They stay there as powerful experiences that left a deep impact. There is no question about what were my most unforgettable memories during the 30 years in the Foreign Service. They flow from the days I traveled to Africa to observe how American food aid and support were reaching people. In the world of 800 million chronically hungry people, I saw many struggling to survive and how programs like WFP-sponsored school lunches — with mainly food from the United States — gave them a chance.

One of the most potent of these remembrances took place on a day when Seija and I visited a school lunch program in Swaziland. The school was far into the bush, a vacant building with most its windows broken. Our World Food Program (WFP)  hosts had stretched the definition of “school” in order to get a badly needed school lunch program set up for the children. While they explained to me the program, Seija, suffering from food poisoning the night before, sat to the side. Suddenly we saw her surrounded by children, probably attracted by her blonde hair and warm smiles. She began to teach them some Finnish games, and they responded by showing her one of theirs. While they danced in a circle, they sang, “We all have AIDS, we are all dying of AIDS.” They understood what that meant. Many came from households headed by children whose parents had died from AIDS, malnutrition, and other diseases.

In a squalid village in Zimbabwe, we found thousands of people who had worked for White family farms. One morning without any notice, the Zimbabwean government had loaded them on trucks and transported them far into the countryside where the were dropped alongside the road. The purpose of this atrocity was to close down the White farms by removing their laborers. These former farm workers did best they could, building shelters and shacks from waste wood and cardboard, but were soon starving and infected with disease. In a relief operation, WFP quickly started delivering food aid and organizing school lunches for a hastily erected school. During our visit, we met an emaciated young woman, maybe in her twenties, who was weak and probably dying. On the wall of her hut was a poster she had made. She smiled, and pointed it out to us. “I love those who hate me for nothing,” she had written. That script is one of my unforgettable memories.

A Rich Life

For me, and I think for my family too, what made a rich life was not where we lived. It was what we did there. We learned from the beginning that understanding our hosts and what their country offered immeasurably enriched our experience. In Finland I learned to cross-country ski — at least well enough to ski with Seija a 75-km mararthon that began with 13,000 of us skiers standing on a frozen lake. In London, we frequented the West End theaters nearly weekly. We also got a dog and tried to grow roses in our window boxes so our English neighbors would like us. In South Africa, we back-packed the rough bush-country otter trail. And Seija helped set up a sewing project for needy women living in a poor township. We discovered a life outside the office and American enclave.

The 75-km Finlandia cross country ski marathon started with 13,000 of us snaking our way off the ice of a frozen lake that fortunately held all of us.

 

There were times in my career when my days regularly ran 15 hours or more, and when I came home from the embassy sleep was instantaneous when I fell in bed. We worked hard and played hard. I didn’t work Saturdays if I could help it, and we took advantage of every minute when on leave to extract everything we could learn and do in our host country, always with our family when they were home — on the beaches of Greece, or game reserves of South Africa, or cobble stoned streets of Milan and Rome. On my second assignment in Finland, I became obsessed with the legends of a Finnish American soldier and started arising at 5:00 in the morning to do research and write. The obsession eventually became a best selling non-fiction in Finland and Sweden and was published in a number of other languages.

I signed copies of my book at Finland’s largest book store, and within a few weeks it topped the charts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And one of those “best” memories was celebrating Christmas with a steak fry around our pool in Pretoria, with just us.