Video Transcript
John E. Reinhardt—Example of Excellence:
Highlight
If you look back over a career of 30 years it’s hard to say what the single highlight is. I suspect that depends on memories over this 30-year period. And I would point to a period when I was in Iran. A group of embassy officers would get together periodically, about once every two weeks, once a month, with a group of new, and it was a group of young Iranians, who had just finished college or who had just begun to work in the Iranian economy. Most of these were young Marxists. They had figured out life and thought that the Marxist way of life was the way economies should be organized, and their future and the future of their country would be much better off with that than with a capitalist system. We would meet informally with six or eight of these people every so often, and we would just kind of chew the fat for an hour or two, over snacks and drinks, generally in an American home. These were not anti-American individuals per se, but we would talk about their point of view, points of view, and our points of view. And we think that they learned more about us. We certainly learned more about them. We were not trying to convert them to anything; we just wanted to know where they stood. This was an unusual opportunity in what was virtually a closed society. This was in the 60s, and there was not an awful lot of freedom of the press and the other freedoms that we take for granted in this country. These are the people now who would be very senior in a country that we look at daily and we read about in our newspapers. Some of them indeed, many of the older ones in the group, would be retired, but they made valuable contributions presumably to their governments. And we are convinced that they knew more about us after each session than they did before they came.
Low point
I can remember, and this would be in the 70s in Nigeria, we received word from the State Department that we should go to the highest level of the Nigerian government that we could and inform them that henceforth the United States would be importing chrome. There wasn’t a lot of chrome in the world. Rhodesia had a good deal of it, Turkey had some, the Soviet Union – our relations with the Soviet Union in those days were not the best. So we were highly dependent on Rhodesia, but we had stopped importing chrome, we were to stop importing chrome, from Rhodesia. And we knew this [decision to renew chrome imports] would not go over well with any Africans, not just Nigerians, but all embassies had practically the same instructions. This was a low point because we knew the answers before we went in. We knew there was nothing that would persuade the Nigerians, or other Africans, that we should import chrome from Rhodesia of all places, close to South Africa. And the Africans wanted to remove the last trace of colonialism, which they thought existed in South Africa. We carried out our instructions. You are supposed to carry out your instructions to the best of your ability, but it was a low point, because we knew that we could not be persuasive.
Vignette
One night in Nigeria, at two or three in the morning, our doorbell rang. In the first place, no one was supposed to have been in the compound. As so it was very strange. I opened the door and it was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Nigeria, at 2:00 in the morning. I knew the man well; he was a neighbor. And he came in at the height of the Watergate problems here. He was not an adversary. Indeed he understood the Watergate problem; he had a lot of knowledge. He wasn’t seeking knowledge, but he thought that the American government was pressing the President too hard, and he wanted me, at 2:00 in the morning, to notify my government that they should let up. Now it’s generally the other way, people who are coming in and objecting to something, not at 2:00 in the morning, but “you should not be doing this” type of message. I notified the government, of course. No change was made, as we all knew thereafter, but there was a certain satisfaction knowing that a high official wanted to understand more. And we talked again a great deal thereafter, and you just tried to make certain points about that, which was gnawing at our own society, at our own government, as best you could.
Reflection
I was in the public diplomacy cone, as distinguished from several other cones, administrative, for example, or political or economic. The most satisfying part of work in that cone is that you are dealing with people. You are dealing with university students and teachers, you are dealing with press people, you are dealing with labor leaders, you are dealing with magazine editors, and just awfully interesting people – wherever they are. And that I always found more challenging than any other aspect of foreign affairs.
I would refer to Africa and specifically to Nigeria, but I think it’s applicable to all of Africa in those days. There were really only two issues on the African diplomatic agenda. In traditional diplomacy there are all kinds of issues. And political officers discuss these issues with their counterparts in foreign ministries. You know more or less where a government stands on a variety of issues. You may even try to persuade the government to change its position on a variety of issues. But in Nigeria there were only two: colonialism – what was left of colonialism, this was in the 70s when I was in Nigeria – and assistance. Most of these societies were very poor. They sought all of the assistance that they could get from private or governmental sources. All of them were equally determined that whatever was in South Africa in the 70s, or whatever was in Rhodesia in the 70s, the last stands of colonialism, must go. And you were either for them or you were against them as they constructed the diplomatic conversation. That’s not easy, to be persuasive, because certainly you aren’t likely to overcome these determinations on the part of your counterparts in these embassies and among the people of these countries. Occasionally you could have some kind of breakthrough, but you had no breakthrough unless you understood completely colonialism, how it had worked in certain countries and how differently it had worked in other countries – and understanding the cultures out of which these views emerged – [otherwise] you’re not likely to get very far in carrying out your assignment.