Foreign Service Daze
Gibney, James
Foreign Service Daze A veteran diplomat recalls life in an obscure outpost By James Gibney WITH ITS GRAHAM GREEnesque title, pastel-colored book jacket, and breezy prose,...
...Moreover, while just about every FSO I know can ‘tell tales similar to Conroy’s, mismanaged budget cutbacks - especially at the smaller posts - have largely ended the days when vice consuls sat around swirling their gin and tonics under the ceiling fans...
...Agency for International Development, or AID...
...Writes Conroy about his time in Switzerland: “If these years were in any way memorable, they were so because the consul general was a lovable alcoholic with a 70-year-old Polish mistress, my immediate superior insisted that all correspondence be prepared in the passive voice, and I had to use elaborate subterfuge to wrest control over the visa section from a local Swiss clerk who had delusions of grandeur...
...But this period is not a total loss: A teahouse patron later helps Conroy by derailing his assignment to Naha, Okinawa, in favor of the more desirable Zurich...
...Have assumed charge...
...Bored out of their gourds, Conroy and colleagues set up an informal tea house where they spend their days composing lim(One of the department’s longest-run ning internal laments is that few FSOs are good “managers” - a legitimate concern that involves a complex mismatch between the people it attracts and the people it needs...
...Foreign Service Daze A veteran diplomat recalls life in an obscure outpost By James Gibney WITH ITS GRAHAM GREEnesque title, pastel-colored book jacket, and breezy prose, Richard Conroy’s memoirs of Foreign Service life in 1960s British Honduras offer an enjoyable nostalgia trip back to the days when diplomacy still featured prop-driven DC-4s and typewritten dispatches...
...After a shaky recovery from his welcoming cocktail party, Conroy settles in at the tiny, two-person consulate...
...The Peace Corps arrives with 15 baby blue Jeeps “full of laughing, nubile couples on their way to who knows what youthful excess...
...Disruption to this more or less happy state of affairs comes in the form of Hurricane Hattie on Oct...
...failure to provide adequate post-hurricane aid...
...But as the State Department has come under fiscal siege, it must confront the contradiction between the demands of modern diplomacy and the dictates of its still almost-feudal bureaucratic culture...
...The State Department’s assignmerit system continues to defy easy explanation, operating more on the basis of personal connections and personnel regulations than any internal logic or guiding intelligence...
...The ICA mission withdraws in the face of bitter complaints from local officials about the U.S...
...Conroy sends the department the kind of cable that most vice consuls can only dream about : "Consul missing...
...All bureaucracies are by definition doomed to a certain level of absurdity and inefficiency...
...Conroy returns to his daily rounds, speculating that an enraged Pruitt has spiked his career after hearing about his takecharge telegram...
...With the exception (per haps) of the lovable alcoholic consul general, his description deftly distills many a first tour...
...Conroy...
...Three of the top stories that dirtpoor Indian farmers used to give “Visa Wallahs” in Bombay were that they wanted to see: 1) Disneyland...
...and 3) the Water Goddess, aka the Statue of Liberty...
...31,1961...
...Conroy’s story begins with his induction into the Foreign Service by way of jobs in the Social Security Administration and a federal nuclear bomb factory in his native Tennessee...
...A turf battle that State ultimately lost with the creation of the Foreign Commercial Service...
...When Hattie hits with winds close to 200 miles an hour, it kills 400 people, shreds buildings, and leaves much of Belize covered with mud and without electricity or drinking water...
...The first telegram the department sends back is “Department presumes that in view of the destruction caused by the recent hurricane, there will be no representation functions [i.e., parties] in British Honduras during the recovery period...
...Readers will be pleased to know that the conduct of FSO spouses is no longer rated - at least not officially...
...Belize’s trade in illegal drugs and stolen cars, for example, has gone from the quaint to the murderous, and at most Third World posts there is more likely to be a shortage of resources than of work...
...Recruited as part of a larger effort by the State Department to go beyond the then-usual pool of Northeastern elites, Conroy quickly demonstrates that he has the right stuff When his State Department examiners ask whether he would commit an illegal act to advance the nationa1 interest, Conroy replies that he would first find out that he had been “misinformed” about the act’s illegality, commit the act, and then slap the highest possible classification on any records of what he had done...
...Conroy is left to secure the consulate and find shelter for his staff and that of the International Cooperation Administration (now the U.S...
...Thus, although it would be foolish to read too much modernday meaning into Conroy’s skillful burlesque of Foreign Service life, it would be just as foolish to ignore the persistence of the mindset behind the snafus and shenanigans that he so ably recounts...
...Then Conroy himself moves on to his next post in Vienna...
...I don’t know what Belize is like today, but Conroy’s vivid portrait of its sights, sounds, and smells in 1961 evoked some of my first impressions of Bombay, India, 30 years later, whether the funky hygiene, madcap drivers, or the local tendency to steal gas caps and windshield wipers...
...Life lurches back to normal...
...Consul Pruitt leaves...
...Although this anecdote rings a little too cute to my ears, few FSOs would deny that the ability to cover your ass is an essential survival skill...
...Roughly four decades, one Cold War, and several dozen State Department reorganization plans after Conroy first took up his tropical post, the day-to-day experiences of an American vice consul - especially in the Third World - remain a bizarre blend of Conrad, Kafka, and the Marx Brothers...
...Have assumed charge...
...His first assignment is to reconcile personnel files and pay records in the personnel office...
...Conroy does not tell why he went from Zurich to then-British Honduras (now Belize), which is probably just as well...
...Conroy sends the department the kind of cable that most vice consuls can only dream about: “Consul missing...
...Eventually, tired of lugging his piano around the world and dealing with the department’s restrictions on his journalist wife’s writing, he arranges to go on permanent loan to the Smithsonian, from which he ultimately retires...
...As the resident “Visa Mon,” he sorts through a daily parade of dubious would-be travelers to the United States, including one 26-year old man who “wished to see his daughter graduate from Harvard, which he seemed to think was located in New Orleans...
...things...
...As the storm approaches, Conroy’s boss Pruitt heads for the high ground (after first ensuring the safety of his sailboat...
...Moreover, Conroy’s depiction of his early days in the department is a classic illustration of what happens when smart people are forced to do dumb JAMES GIBNET, a foreign service officer from 1989 to 1997, is the managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine...
...But based on my latter-day experiences with the State Department, what’s most striking about Conroy’s recollections is how little the Foreign Service seems to have changed...
...In his place comes the by-the-book Consul Hausley, who lectures Conroy on what he calls his wife’s “forward” behavior, noting that “if it was not corrected, it would have to be reflected in my performance report...
...And, last but not least, as Conroy hilariously recounts, our man in Belize spends a lot of time at parties and receptions, -g etting- bombed with b the zany locals, fishing giant cockroaches out of his soup, and doing some compulsory dancing with the wife of the British Governor General...
...Conroy also tends to the usual mix of good, bad, and ugly American travelers, keeps loose tabs on Belize’s bubbling trade in illegal narcotics and stolen cars, and writes commercial reports that “the State Department had to provide if it was to keep [the Department ofl Commerce from sending out its own field representatives...
...2) the “White Christmas” festival, usually in Texas...
...All unobligated representation funds for this fiscal year therefore withdrawn from post’s allotment...
...But as Conroy’s new boss makes clear when he welcomes him and his family to “in back of beyond,” his assignment probably isn’t a reward for good behavior...
Vol. 30 • April 1998 • No. 4
