Video Transcript
Arthur A. Hartman—Example of Excellence:
Highlight
Well, I think the most memorable, at least in my memory, was working with Henry Kissinger. I was pulled out of Brussels, where I had only been about 18 months and brought back to the Department to be the Assistant Secretary for Europe. And during a time when there was a lot going on – Henry had just moved over to be the Secretary of State, and so we were involved in negotiations with the Russians. It was after the crisis, or during the crisis, the first oil crisis, so there was a lot of putting together of international responses to that oil crisis. The Cyprus crisis occurred. I hadn’t realized that Cyprus was in the European bureau until they came in and told me one day that it had been switched out of the Middle East bureau. So I didn’t know much about the area, and it was a very tough problem to deal with, because there was no way that we were going to just order the Turks to withdraw. I was accused of favoring the Turks, because I had a rather even-handed approach. And when you get into a controversy like, people don’t reward even-handedness. They want you to come down on one side or another. But if you’re going to exercise any kind of diplomatic effort, and to be successful, you’ve got to keep some kind of evenness in your approach – so that you have the confidence of both sides. It was very interesting. It was also a time when President Nixon was gradually receding from the scene, and so the power of the Secretary of State, and the United States itself, came into question in the minds of people I was negotiating with. You know, “What’s going to happen?” If he’s going to be impeached or if he’s leaving office. Which he eventually did. So that was a challenging time, let’s say, for a young man who had been put in this job. I knew European affairs very well, because I had mainly been involved with Europe from the beginning of my career, but that’s different from dealing with day-to-day situations as they arise. And something popped up almost every day.
Low point
Well, I think the Cyprus crisis was the biggest disappointment to me, because we didn’t make much progress. We certainly didn’t get the Greeks and the Turks to recognize each other, and we didn’t get the Turks off of the island of Cyprus, and we didn’t deal with the basic problems. And the problem is still with us today. This was early 1973-74 – in that period – and the crisis is still with us. It’s one of those intractable problems, which come up a lot in foreign affairs. I think we’re seeing it in the Middle East today. Very difficult to come in with a solution that people are going to accept. And therefore the job of the diplomat is somehow or other to bring those sides closer together, but never “agreeing on all the same things.” That’s just impossible. My background is very much in economic affairs, so I put a lot of emphasis on economics – the force of economic events – that really do, I think, affect all of the things that are going on in the world. Even when they seem of a military nature or a political nature.
My thought at the time was that if the European Union expanded and both Greece and Turkey were accepted in the Union – which hasn’t yet happened as far as Turkey is concerned – and Cyprus were to be admitted, then they would be part of something larger and some of these ethnic hatreds that had existed from time immemorial could be erased or at least dimmed to the point where they would be able to get on, and get to cooperate with each other.
Vignette
Well, I went to the Soviet Union in the early 80s and was there for five and a half years. I began in a very tough period with Brezhnev losing control and eventually dying, and being succeeded by two others, who then died, and then finally Gorbachev’s arrival on the scene. But it was a tough time for a diplomat in the embassy in Moscow, because the Soviet government, and particularly Gromyko, who was the Foreign Minister, were very reluctant to deal with the ambassador in Moscow. They had a wonderful ambassador in Washington, Dobrynin – who Kissinger used to allow into the basement of the State Department, it was special access which fortunately was ended before I went to Moscow. But people would go to him rather than thinking of going to the embassy in Moscow. So they did everything they could to keep us from having real contacts with the official bureaucracy as well as Soviet citizens. So, to get around that, I used an old legal trick, which is to have something that is attractive, “an attractive nuisance” in legal terms. I would invite people to come and visit me that I knew Soviet citizens, or special groups of Soviet citizens, would also want to meet. And this ranged all the way from people who were in the entertainment world to people like Vladimir Horowitz – who came and played the piano for the first time in Moscow after having left many years before – to an architect friend of mine who came and lectured about his work in America, to economists who the economists there were anxious to talk to. And I got around, in a sense, these restrictions that the Soviet government had put on us by bringing these people in that they definitely wanted to see. So that I think was a minor success for us.
I remember receiving a rather famous economist, Murray Fishback, who was a great expert on demography in Russia – and he was the one that wrote the book on how their male population was going down because of excessive use of vodka and cigarettes and laxatives. And when he came to Moscow, which the Russians tried to prevent. And I got him in, because I called up the principal American expert on the Russian side, and I said, “You’ll never go to United States again unless Murray gets a visa.” And the next day he got his visa.
Reflection
Well, I think the biggest change is the active participation of our leaders in practically every aspect of diplomacy. And it isn’t just the telephone, it’s all the travel. If you look at the role of an ambassador today, there isn’t much in the way of direct contact that the ambassador can have that affects a particular situation, because the Secretary of State comes or the Deputy Secretary of State comes and negotiates. You go along with them, you advise them. You give them some background on the problems, but they are up to their elbows in the problem from the beginning – if it’s a serious issue in terms of U.S. security or U.S. interests. So that’s a big change. I started out in the time of Dean Acheson, and although he traveled to international meetings, he wasn’t about to, sort of, jet off to some capital somewhere to talk to somebody about a problem that existed. And even Dulles, who did more traveling, didn’t get that much into bilateral relationships, for example. It was more in the international context that he made his weight felt. But today that’s not the case. Just look at the travel schedules of our Secretary of State and you can see that it’s much more of a personal thing. Even for the President. The President himself gets more involved than the Presidents in the days when I was Assistant Secretary of State, for example, for Europe. Although the President in the 70s did go to international meetings, it was a rare time when he would go off and try to deal with a problem. Even though, at a later stage, Jimmy Carter was very active in Middle East negotiations. But that was an oddity of that period. Today it isn’t. And you find both in the public statements of the President and the travels of the President and Secretary of State and other cabinet officers that their involvement is much more direct. And therefore the job of a diplomat today is keeping a step ahead of that game, which means you’ve got to have both official communication with Washington and your own lines.