May 20, 2007, Seattle Times - The Washington Post, Retired diplomats tell their stories of intrigue, absurdity overseas, by Peter Carlson,

May 20, 2007, Seattle Times - The Washington Post, Retired diplomats tell their stories of intrigue, absurdity overseas, by Peter Carlson, 


NIKKI KAHN
Stu Kennedy has interviewed hundreds of his fellow retired diplomats, and collected interviews with hundreds more, for an oral history project that covers six decades.

WASHINGTON — Diplomats are trained to be, you know, diplomatic, but Stu Kennedy persuades them to say what they really think.

He waits until they retire and sits them down in front of his tape recorder, and pretty soon they're telling him great stories about wars and revolutions and coups — lots of coups! — and about the Berlin Airlift and the fall of Saigon and drug lords and dictators and how it feels to get stabbed and bombed and shot.

"The crowd started beating me up," Frank Carlucci told Kennedy, recalling the day he was attacked by a mob in the Congo in 1960. "I didn't know I'd been stabbed until I saw the pool of blood. "

"All of a sudden, the window blew in," Robert Dillon told Kennedy, describing the day in 1983 when the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, was bombed. "As I lay on the floor on my back, the brick wall behind my desk blew out. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. The wall fell on my legs."

"Somebody got me with a .22 long," said Richard Dwyer, remembering the worst day of his tour of duty in Guyana in 1978, when members of the Peoples Temple cult shot him, along with a congressman, several reporters and a group of defectors fleeing the cult's Jonestown commune.

"I lay on the ground, and the firing stopped. I was trying to pretend I was dead. I couldn't decide whether I would be more convincing playing dead with my eyes open or closed."

Not every diplomat tells Kennedy tales of mayhem and death. Some tell stories about far more prosaic events, such as furiously attempting to find a toilet seat for the embassy in Niamey, Niger, before the vice president of the United States shows up for a visit. Or rescuing an elderly American woman in Guadalajara, Mexico, when she gets a bit carried away and strips naked in the lobby of a posh hotel.

In the past 20 years, Kennedy, 79, has heard all these stories — and many, many more. He has interviewed nearly 800 U.S. diplomats and collected nearly 700 interviews conducted by others. Kennedy spent 30 years in the Foreign Service, a career that took him to Germany, Saudi Arabia, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Greece, South Korea and Italy.

In February, the transcripts of 1,300 of these "Frontline Diplomacy" interviews were posted on the Library of Congress Web site.

"Although the intention was to develop an oral history of American diplomats, the end result was a history of the world over the last 60-plus years," Kennedy said.

For sheer entertainment, it's hard to beat Kennedy's interview with Anthony Quainton, U.S. ambassador to the Central African Republic during the reign of Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the megalomaniacal dictator who in 1977 crowned himself emperor in an elaborate ceremony modeled on Napoleon Bonaparte's coronation.

"We were sent appropriate instructions in a diplomatic note on how to comport ourselves in the presence of His Imperial Majesty, including instructions as to how far we should stand from him, what kind of bow we should make, how we should answer questions from the imperial personage," Quainton said.

"The answer to any question, we were instructed, was always to be 'Yes.' But if that left something to be desired, you were permitted to say, 'Yes, but ... .' "

The ambassador wondered: What is the appropriate coronation gift for a dictator who is crowning himself emperor?

"The office of protocol came up with two plates from the Franklin Mint," Quainton recalled. "Sometime in the 1970s, the Franklin Mint had produced a series of very elegant silver plates engraved in gold with portraits of the presidents of the United States. Some of these were long since gone — John F. Kennedy, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, etc. — but Chester Arthur and Millard Fillmore were still in stock."

The coronation cost $20 million, one-third of the country's annual budget. It took place in a basketball arena.

"There was a great golden throne in the shape of an imperial eagle," Quainton said. "Bokassa himself wore a Roman toga embroidered with a hundred thousand pearls. He came wearing a golden laurel wreath in his hair, and an imperial toga and staff.

"As in the case of Napoleon, he crowned himself in the presence of his family, visiting delegations and selected guests. He then drove in a coach pulled by six white horses, which had been flown from Paris."