A Rare Resignation in Protest: Nat Davis and Angola

Morris, Roger

A Rare Resignation in Protest: Nat Davis and Angola by Roger Morris It surfaced quietly and, aptly, with a little diplomatic lying, swallowed whole. You could imagine how it went by reading...

...We knew from Chile,” said another source, “that Davis was somebody who could follow orders...
...For the moment, Davis seemed to be enjoying the best of both worlds: his dissent blotting out his Chilean past and ushering him out of Washington as a hero among Democratic critics (who may, after all, be calling back exiled ambassadors to greater glory in 1977) and his propriety-the “no comment” in the resignation letter and to the Times-a certification of his loyalty to his employers...
...You could imagine how it went by reading that first story in The Washington Post...
...ambassador to Guatemala was assassinated by terrorists...
...Another source who read the documents said, “The memos were so careful and indirect when they should have been screaming...
...Henry was told he was one of the best FSOs, if not the best,” said one source...
...and which, as he surely knew after a ‘Corridor Image’ In the three years since his Caracas tour as a middle-grade officer, Davis had acquired no special diplomatic skill or seniority to propel him so abruptly ahead of hundreds of his fellow foreign service officers with similar careers...
...Following Moscow were four obscure years on a desk at the State Department, a Ph.D...
...The lessons of that process could hardly have been lost on its beneficiary...
...By some corollary of the Peter Principle, he then becomes ineligible for lesser assignments and presumptively qualified for further high positions, provided age or political enemies don’t force retirement for equally arbitrary reasons...
...The press account had Davis emphasizing three arguments: that the U. S.-backed factions were ineffective...
...Then, on December 14, The New Yorlc Times told the world that Nat Davis had been an unsung rebel, even hero, all the while...
...When he resigned in late August, the covert intervention was in full gear and still largely secret from the American public...
...Angola was a disastrous policy, which, despite his internal disagreement, would be added to his reputation in the wake of the Chilean scandal...
...from Brown University at 19 and World War I1 service as a Navy ensign, Davis joined the Foreign Service and had conventional early assignments as a junior officer in Prague, Florence, and Rome...
...a nice quiet embassy, someplace like Switzerland...
...No Secretary of State in history ever took office with more privately and publicly expressed contempt for the bureaucracy, or with more enemies in the Department...
...It was, of course, a logical concern for a foreign service officer who had watched several less-conspicuous millions of covert dollars in Chile come screaming into the headlines to the deep embarrassment of his mission...
...Kissinger figured from the start,” said one witness, “that Angola would be one Chile too many for Nat...
...But at least an outline of events and positions seeps through in this case, enough to impart a disturbing ambiguity to what so many have celebrated...
...He’s the only Assistant Secretary who can declare war before anybody notices,” Dean Rusk said of one of Davis’ predecessors, recognizing the job’s paradoxical insignificance and power...
...Addressed to that mentality, Davis’ strictures on publicity tended to have, as one official put it, “all the force of a wet noodle...
...For some, this has meant routine reassignment...
...The fatal problem was that this approach-for which bureaucratic convention and the Chile experience had prepared Davis so well-was the least effective argument he could have made to Kissinger under the circumstances...
...No, there seem to have been other influences in Davis’ action...
...It also had elements of a traditional bureaucratic ploy, such as happens when the State Department wants to oppose the proposed exploits of a bare-chested CIA or Pentagon without seeming less manly...
...He stayed for three years of quiet, reportedly courageous, service, until the Nixon Administration asked the State Department for an ambassador who knew both Latin America and the Communists to deal with the obstreperous regime of Chile’s Salvador Allende...
...His 28-year career in many respects had been a model of the conformity, patronage, and luck by which a chosen few foreign service officers levitate to the top of thejr profession...
...It had all been done^ by the rules...
...Moving in Angola was necessary to keep the Soviets honest,” said one high official, “but we also had to find out if we could still run a foreign policy with this Congress...
...What “happened” was that he had been there when he was needed-by his Peace Corps patrons appreciative of the “professional” when they found one in Caracas, by the Democrats who needed to get Rostow’s boys their jobs and an ambassador to Guatemala, and not least by Henry Kissinger, who needed a few safe careerists to keep the lid on while he conducted the important policies...
...legation in Sofia, Bulgaria...
...Davis is going away with the respect of a lot of people up here on the Hill...
...The decision was “routine,” as one source described it, made with the “clearance” of the African bureau...
...His career was studded with accidents of timing...
...The major force in his life was the random caprice of organizational politics, in its preference for the available man...
...Though not a policy job in a direct sense, it was at the time a key position, bearing on senior assignments and other administrative issues that can often shape diplomacy behind the scenes as much as options papers and intelligence reports...
...By most accounts, the CIA money began going to Angola in January 1975, some three months before Davis took over the African bureau...
...The nomination moved swiftly to confirmation, without inquiry by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...
...As Davis prepared to leave for Switzerland, the public furor mounted over the Angola policy, now known at least in outline...
...Davis became U. S. ambassador to Chile...
...Time for the Democrats was running out in 1968 when the U.S...
...The place then was full of these wild-eyed Kennedy amateurs, and here was this cool fellow who knew his way around the bureaucracy and was enthusiastic at the same time...
...As the Johnson Administration drew to a close, Rostow reportedly tried to obtain for Davis, as for other senior career officers on his staff, a suitable ambassadorial appointment-another well-established if lesser-known tradition of foreign policy politics...
...For a career diplomat like Davis, however, the conventions of the Service in such cases are likely to be more comforting-and more perilous to the public interest...
...During September, as the Angolan intervention first became visible in the European press, Davis “scurried around,” as one associate described it, trying to secure an ambassadorial assignment...
...Nevertheless, it bears on the quality of his act, on its real impact in public affairs, that he may have done it not in spite of his career, but in order to salvage it...
...It would be too much, as his loudest critics had charged when he took the job: Davis equals destabilization...
...But it is not quite that simple to connect this with the words “dissent” or “protest...
...One Chile Too Many But this misreading of Kissinger’s taste for far-flung demonstrations in the southern African bush was probably the least of Davis’ problems in mounting an effective dissent inside the State Department...
...The larger tragedy and absurdity of this, of course, was that the Secretary of State somehow could not “figure” that it was also “one Chile too many” for most of us...
...Perhaps the most telling verdict is that when Kissinger looked last spring for a new Assistant Secretary for African Affairs-a job in which, as one official put it, “Henry needed his own man”-he reached for Nat Davis...
...There is obviously no way to second-guess now whether a man with a credible background in Africa-and without Davis’ peculiar mix of success and liabilities-could have turned around Kissinger’s strong penchant for squandering millions of dollars and precious public trust in the Angolan fiasco...
...On the contrary, his Chile service, coupled to his past reputation, further advanced his career...
...An argument on the perils of exposure missed the main political and intellectual point, such as it was, of the Angola policy: Kissinger’s use of the African civil war as a demonstration to both the Russians and the U. S. Congress that Washington’s post-Vietnam diplomacy had not lost its fangs...
...However he got there, once he has presided over a mission, the foreign service officer is at a kind of sacred pinnacle...
...Others, more cynical, view it as the calculated gamble of a man a little desperate to retrieve his career...
...Inside the State Department, at least, the bureaucratic signal was unmistakable...
...Nat’s a good soldier, though...
...But that charge, as Kissinger well knows, is so banal in foreign policy that firing the guilty on those grounds would soon decimate the Service, not to mention having to find a new Secretaiy of State...
...Davis had urged a “diplomatic solution,” said the Times, and had resigned when the policy decision went against him...
...There was a brief blow to his career soon after his arrival in Bulgaria, when his involvement in an automobile accident, in which a pedestrian was killed, forced his recall...
...Had Davis’ first concern been to oppose the policy, a public resignation, or at least a late August leak, would have been a logical course, particularly since he seems to have believed exposure of the policy was inevitable anyway...
...to Kissinger, emphasizing that the Secretary wished to be rid of this internal embarrassment as soon as possible...
...Davis was discreetly stepping aside because the controversy had “deeply compromised his ability to be effective...
...The signals within the bureaucracy were no more subtle...
...To him, as to most of the Foreign Service, “something happened,” just as it had to Joseph Heller’s character...
...He stressed that you just couldn’t hide an investment of that size, especially in a poor African country,” explained one high official...
...Despite the legendary incompetence of the African bureau and Kissinger’s studied lack of interest in Africa, the continent did have potentially awkward problems, and a small but noisy liberal constituency at home, including some influential black Democrats watching from Capitol Hill...
...we’ll take care o? him...
...for others, a premature shift that may stain their records permanently...
...To the extent that this was Kissinger’s initial image of Davis-and several witnesses agree it was-the recommendation must have been especially persuasive...
...Roger Morris writes about foreign affairs and formerly worked for the Mtional Security Council...
...He’s only parroting the incompetents in the bureau...
...His resignation was by all means an extraordinary act, even done so quietly and conventionally...
...The question is hard to answer, of course, because Davis himself, the only man who really knows, is not talking...
...Complacency frequently clothes a private disillusionment and selfdeprecation, the inner truth discovered by many foreign service officers too late, after the kids are in college and the mortgage payments are too high, that most of theirjobs, even the coveted ambassadorships, really don’t matter very much, that the apprenticeship and the little indignities, from the personnel system to the wives of superiors, may be unending...
...The issue was joined in June when the CIA formally recommended a multi-million dollar clandestine aid package to both Roberto and Jonas Savimbi, leader of the third faction...
...You’d have to say,” observed a young foreign service officer, “that it was an act of principle...
...The sad results were more clearly etched with Davis than either the cause or the exact process...
...What is more depressing is that Davis’ career, the reasons underlying his appointment, and the foreign policy outcomes, are not that unusual...
...After a precocious A.B...
...In 1953 he returned to Columbia and Middlebury for the Service’s quickie Russian language and “area” training...
...Like all but an extraordinary few of his peers, Davis was in some measure a creature of the bloat and oppression of the organization...
...By all accounts, it was in very much the same spirit that, in the early months of 1975, Kissinger selected Davis, whose record, however impressive, lacked any meaningful experience or knowledge regarding African affairs...
...His colleagues, those who knew him abroad as well as in Washington, recall him with the usual variety of opinion, both “pompous” and “self-effacing,” “superficial” and “wise.’’ I saw him in many ways as a physical as well as psychological caricature of the middle-aged foreign service officer...
...In the political climate of 1975, it was not a label one would want to have in pursuing a government career, or leaving it...
...By late May, officials say, the African bureau had conducted its own “routine” review of the events in Angola, where the Portuguese withdrawal was obviously leading to trouble...
...The review concluded with a memo to Kissinger from Davis that the situation was “unstable” and that the U. S. should adopt, as one source worded it (with authentic flavor of the genre), “basically a wait-and-see posture...
...Rusk promptly appointed the most timorous, inert foreign service officer he could locate...
...But whether by the continuing patronage of Moyers, as some of his colleagues believe, or by the convention of status described above, his recovery was fast and impressive...
...According to several sources, Davis went personally to then-Under Secretary Nicholas Katzenbach and volunteered for the job...
...It is hard to imagine, though, a case in which errant bureaucratic and personality factors more polluted what ought to have been a genuine policy debate...
...We’re not going to submit to the breast-beaters,” he reportedly told one staff meeting, which included Davis...
...We didn’t know much about Davis, but he looked as good as anybody else, and it wasn’t exactly the most sought-after post...
...But what is relevant here is that for Davis the Chile tour seems to have been both grandly rewarding in career terms and personally frightening...
...Nor was the substance of those memos quite what would be later leaked to the Times as a description of Davis’ position...
...And on Sunday, December 14, under the front page headline, “Angola Aid Issue Opening Rifts in State Department,” The New Yorlc Times carried the report that Davis had resigned in a “sharp dispute” that “has bitterly divided the State Department...
...Officials talk vaguely about “poor administration” and Davis being “a disaster...
...The State Department still formally denies that there was a letter of resignation, refusing even to use the word by saying that Davis was “reassigned...
...His submissiveness had led him unprotesting to the African job to begin with, despite his glaring lack of qualification, save pliability to Kissinger...
...Several sources say that Kissinger gave a veritable “purge order” to Davis’ successor, William E. Schaufele, Jr., to rid the bureau of any officers associated with Davis’ dissent...
...Davis was briefed on the renewed arrangement with Roberto, and reportedly registered no opinion on the subject when he took office in April...
...An Extraordinary Act Why did he do it, after nearly 30 years of compliant, ladder-climbing service...
...Finally, there was another irony that seems to have damaged Davis’ bureaucratic influence with his superior...
...Davis was an unlikely rebel...
...It was the first major CIA operation in Africa in 15 years...
...The new ambassador was swiftly confirmed, sworn in, and seemed about to pass almost unnoticed back into the smug, highfringebenefit oblivion of the Foreign Service...
...Whatever the precise mix of motives, Davis was brought back to Washington to be Director General of the Foreign Service...
...I think we could have made a much more powerful case against the policy,” said one desk officer...
...Also evident in his Peace Corps experience was a quality which Davis would project in other assignments few years in the Foreign Service, was singularly conducive to bureaucratic advance: a compliant, make-no-waves loyalty to the policy at hand...
...Switzerland was arrived at very much by mutual agreement...
...not his fault...
...Kissinger has testified secretly to a House committee (and since told several people privately) that the African bureau under Davis deliberately withheld information from higher officials lest policies supported by the bureau be changed...
...How we have needed that kind of courage over the last 20 years...
...can’t do his job...
...Whatever he calculated, he stood up and refused to carry out orders he thought wrong...
...Not far underneath the controlled surface, one suspects, there is a sizeable and natural rage at the system, and at oneself...
...but as you can tell, I’m not commenting on anything...
...Others in the African bureau were reportedly not so lucky...
...hell, as Henry’s always saying, how can anyone govern in this town any more with all the mistrust and suspicion...
...Why, as a matter of fact, admit Henry’s men, old Nat has decided to bail out for the good of the Service...
...It’s good to know,” said one senator disillusioned by the recent CIA revelations, “that we do have men in government who put conscience first...
...When it works for a non-career official-say a Moyers taken under the wing of a Johnson-it squirts the beneficiary briefly to the rarified levels of government and then, eventually, out into the private world, where the Washington reputation gives an initial boost, but no permanent job insurance...
...Having impressed Peace Corps officials in Caracas, he was called back to Washington and detailed to the new agency, where he quickly acquired both a reputation and powerful political patrons...
...at Tufts’ Fletcher School, then a routine assignment to Caracas...
...This policy clearly rested on a certain belligerent lack of concern about the CIA intervention “getting out...
...It is also entirely consistent with the Secretary’s public defense of the policy in recent weeks...
...Reliable official sources indicate, however, that though Davis’ memos discussed these points and more in general terms, the central thrust of his recommendation was not so much that the policy was mistaken, but that it would “get out...
...Bureaucratically, by last summer he seems to have been in an all but untenable position for reasons that had nothing to do with American interests in Angola...
...And sure enough, within weeks President Ford announced Davis’ appointment to Bern...
...Yet the irony is that this same culture of the State Department bureaucracy also made Davis the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time...
...He was soon promoted to FSO-1...
...In an isolated little bureaucracy ruled by status and appearance rather than substance, he is presumed to have made it largely because he made it...
...That, too, made for sincere opposition to the policy...
...Then in 1962 Davis got the first of what would be a string of lucky breaks: breaks due in part, say those who’ve worked with him, to his ability, but probably more often to sheer circumstance...
...no one could discount the possiblity that involvement of American forces might lie ahead...
...The sum of others’ impressionsand my own recollection of him when we worked together on the National Security Council Staff in 1967-68-is of a generally ordinary bureaucrat, an unremarkable Foreign Service everyman, sometimes cast in remarkable situations...
...But in January, in anticipation of independence and Roberto’s factional strife with a competitive guerrilla group, the stronger, more leftist Popular Movement, the CIA recommended and got some $300,000 for its old client...
...Unlike his predecessors in China a generation earlier, Davis was neither purged nor demoted...
...In fact, the Guatemala appointment was genuinely dangerous, and there is no reason to doubt Davis’ bravery...
...When I called Davis and congratulated him on the dissent, I got the same response others have described: “Thank you...
...But he had brushed against influential Democrats like Shriver and Bill Moyers (who was deputy director of the Peace Corps before moving to the White House), had made the most of it by providing the loyal, dependable service such patrons need in the Washington sharktank, and was now reaping the rewards...
...This, of course, is a common process in government, or in any large organization...
...Davis had more reason than most foreign service officers to observe the canons of the Service-the supreme importance of reputation and image whatever the reality, the prospects for personally surviving any disaster if you positioned yourself carefully and stayed cool, and, above all, that first bureaucratic commandment to do whatever you do indirectly, quietly, untraceably if necessary, ultimately beyond public view, where policy and careers are really decided...
...Davis was appointed to Guatemala in November 1968, taking him out of Washington and possibly out of the reach of political retribution...
...So on September 1, 1975 the Post reported from “authoritative sources” that Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Nathaniel Davis, 50-year-old career officer, would resign his post after only five months, “plagued by African suspicions that linked him to CIA operations in Chile” (where he had been ambassador during the overthrow of the Allende regime...
...We were just keeping our hand in on both sides,” a former official explained...
...When the new Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, asked his Foreign Service assistant in the Vietnam peace negotiations, William Sullivan, for names of reliable people for the highest jobs in Foggy Bottom, Sullivan reportedly recommended Nat Davis in the first rank...
...As with the vast majority of his fellow officers, his career seemed fixed, even at the age of 36, in the long, careful dance from slot to slot, promotion to promotion, destined to end in quiet Washington retirement amid the exotic carpets and brassware, the insiders’ gossip, club lunches, and handsome pension that mark the spent diplomatic life...
...Since Davis had been hired not for his Africa expertise but rather for his other qualities, his advice on policy carried little authority “What does he know about Africa...
...His letter reportedly cited the pressures of suspicion over his past service in Chile, and the cover story was put out to the Post...
...By 1961, after 14 years in the Service, Davis’ greatest asset was specialized training in an area that was fast becoming overcrowded...
...There’s no question that the arguments against it were weak...
...His critics charge he was a mere caretaker at a moment when there was both the opportunity and urgent need for bureaucratic reform...
...There followed another Times story on December 19 reporting that U. S. aid to Angola had begun to flow some two months before the first significant Soviet shipments and repeating that Davis had opposed “an escalation” that would provoke Moscow...
...Defenders say he did as much as he could, given Kissinger’s iron grip and indifference to administration...
...Some thing Happened’ As happens so often to people submerged in organizations, too little of Nat Davis the human being filters through the record of the successful civil servant...
...Kissinger is said to have asked one aide about Davis...
...In any event, several sources claim that Davis was “in trouble with Henry” even before the historic memos on Angola...
...Say, there’s this rumor going around that Nat Davis is leaving as Assistant Secretary for Africa, Marder begins...
...Despite his experience and education he had advanced only three grades, the last promotion, to FSO Class 3, having taken seven years...
...It was at this juncture, according to sources, that Davis wrote two detailed memoranda to Kissinger, not the “steady stream” of protests later described by The New York Times...
...And to journalist Peter Lisagor, reflecting on the great events of the year, Davis’ reported dissent on Angola qualified as “the best advice of 1975...
...If he’d resigned any other way,” said one former official, “they’d have given him the War College,” which foreign service officers generally regard as a burial ground...
...In 1965, as Davis left for Sofia, he had entered this special category, never to return to the ranks, his “corridor image” in the State Department established as a bright, safe comer...
...It is true, says every source, that he opposed the Angola policy and left because of it...
...A year later, bureaucratically certified as an expert on the Soviets, he was in the Moscow embassy...
...Again, there was no reference to the $300,000 already supplied Roberto, or to the mounting bureaucratic sentiment already visible “down the river” (as one foreign service officer alluded to the CIA) to increase the U. s. covert investment in the approaching scramble for power among the Angolan factions...
...There are mixed reviews about Davis’ work as Director General...
...The effect, on those generally wary of post-Vietnam entanglements and long assaulted by an air of cynical irresponsibility in foreign affairs, was gratifying to the point of elation...
...If Kissinger were to pursue serious matters in MOSCOWth, e Sinai, or Gerald Ford’s White House without worrying about the minor annoyances, he needed “his own man” to watch over Africa...
...Resignation by the Rules So the memos were dismissed, the covert money pumped in at midsummer, and, at the end of August, Davis resigned, quietly...
...Davis’ record of discretion and obedience in Santiago had no doubt impressed the suspicious and cynical new Secretary as much as Davis’ reputed abilities...
...but even that is a clue...
...It was, as one senior foreign service officer put it, “the way to resign...
...As it was, nearly three months passed, three months of deepening involvement, escalation with the Russians, a growing macho investment for Ford and Kissinger, and, of course, added carnage in Angola...
...The Post’s State Department ace, Murrey Marder, checks with his seventh floor contacts close to Henry...
...Whatever the merits of that approach to events in Angola (and they are admittedly hard to find), it was, by several accounts, a motive made caustically clear by Kissinger within the government early in the decisionmaking process last winter and spring...
...What had looked like a routine political casualty was now apparently the first high-level resignationin-protest in the State Department in nearly two decades...
...At any rate, out of Davis’ Peace Corps detail came promotion to FSO-2 in scarcely two years, and in 1965, at only 40, appointment by Lyndon Johnson as chief of mission at the U.S...
...I think Nat was appreciated by Shriver and his people above all as a professional,” explained another colleague, who saw Davis at the Peace Corps “as someone who would do what he was told, would go where he was sent...
...Eight years ago, at least, before Chile and Angola, there was about him that mixture of ambition and complacency common to his profession...
...The Angola Decision Clouding every bureaucratic battle of leaks such as that surrounding the Angola policy and Davis’ resignation, there is inevitably a Rashomon quality: reality seen dimly, if at all, through the conflicting interests, selected documents, and selective memories of the participants and their advocates...
...and that the whole effort put the U. S. too close to racist South Africa, which was backing the same factions and whose troops were actually in Angola...
...By this account, the dissent thus came to Kissinger from a man he already judged critically on general principles...
...Davis still enjoyed the “confidence” of the State Department, added the Post, duly following the cover story it had been fed...
...Kissinger’s Man Davis’ role in the sordid overthrow of Allende is a tangled and important story all its own, with serious implications for U. S.-Latin relations, the integrity of the Foreign Service, and, of course, the issue of CIA intervention...
...With the Administration under heavy fire for its recently exposed covert arms aid to factions in Angola, the Times quoted new sources, saying that, in fact, “Davis resigned because he believed the policy [in Angola] was utterly wrong...
...For the first time in a quarter century of government work, he found his name publicly linked with responsibility for a very controversial policy...
...Holden Roberto, one of the Angolan factional leaders, had been on a $10,000 yearly dole during the 1960s until the Nixon Administration, for a variety of reasons, stopped in 1970 both that aid and the matching help to the other side, the Portuguese counter-insurgency forces...
...First, Kissinger had reportedly come to a rapid disillusionment with his new Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, much as he had with Davis’ predecessor, Donald B. Easum, now ambassador to Nigeria...
...At least somebody got the lesson of Vietnam,” concluded a congressman...
...Nick was impressed,” said a former Katzenbach aide...
...It seems clear he knew about much, if not all, the covert meddling, silently watched the lying about it to the American public and Congress, and at the least was the dutiful executor of one of the most dubious policies ever contrived...
...Brought back to Washington by Kissinger in part on the basis of his Chile experience, Davis was now, as he dissented on Angola, further pigeonholed as having lost his nerve to judge the policy precisely because of his tour in Santiago...
...There was a letter...
...Davis “refused to comment” on the story, said the report...
...that the probable failure would embarrass Zaire’s Mobutu and Zambia’s Kaunda, old U. S. clients acting as middlemen for Washington in the covert aid...
...though Davis had made his reasons plain in numerous conversations with subordinates and superiors, he discreetly did not discuss the problem for the record...
...He had us between a hard place and a rock,” said one official close...
...Some of his colleagues now see this gesture, unusually bold by F’oreign Service standards, as early evidence of Davis’ personal bravery and devotion to the Service...
...All that bureaucratic background helps explain in part both how and why Davis dissented as the Ford Administration willfully blundered into a highly visible “covert” intervention in Angola in the summer of 1975...
...Worse, added to this was a grotesque Catch-75...
...There was the everpresent paunch, the greying temples, the careful diction, the maddeningly ponderous, elliptical phrasing in which our diplomats really talk as they write...
...Yet since Davis was in any case the principal .State Department officer for African affairs, his memoranda were the main channel for whatever expertise the Foreign Service could offer on Angola, leaving more knowledgeable officers in the bureau hostage to Davis’ less-than-practiced grip on the problem...
...He was reassigned as Walt W. Rostow’s assistant for Soviet affairs on the prestigious National Security Council staff at the White House, where he interpreted hot-line messages for LBJ during the 1967 Middle East war...
...There’s nothing wrong with being tough, whispers the argument, it just isn’t practical with all these losers (a touch of hardheaded racism), and it’ll only burn us (you personally, the decision-maker reads...
...No one anticipated at the time that it would be Kissinger who would seem prone to getting into a war unnoticed, and his hand-picked, custodial Assist ant Secretary who would decide that Africa wasn’t quite worth the trouble...
...Ambition in this world survives largely in the form of caution, and often also in obsequiousness...
...It was now “expected” that he would get a proper reassignment somewhere beyond the political sniping, perhaps Switzerland...
...All that back-stabbing by the Africans and the liberals just because he was in Chile at a bad time...
...It did not, however, mention Angola, say officials who saw it...
...In Angola, a war was widening on the strength of U. S. dollars...
...Bureaucrats, and the country, are seldom so lucky in the coincidence of national and career interests...
...The story was apparently leaked without Davis’ involvement or even subsequent acknowledgement that it was generally true...
...Nat was a valuable find for the Peace Corps,” remembered an official associated with him and Director Sargent Shriver...

Vol. 7 • February 1976 • No. 12


 
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