Video Transcript
Rozanne "Roz" Ridgway—Example of Excellence:
Highlight
I suppose the most interesting was the preparations for the 1985 Geneva Summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Why the interest? We decided, we – myself, obviously Secretary of State George Shultz had more to do with this than I ever did, but I was part of the team and part of the group that threw ideas into the hamper – we decided that the process before of summitry had in fact not accomplished a great deal and had led in many instances to misunderstandings. You had phrases like “detente” and “rapprochement,” peaceful coexistence, and all it had led to at the end of the day was the invasion of Afghanistan. And everybody asking, “How could this happen? We thought we had peaceful coexistence.” We decided that a lot of that had to do with the way the process was conducted – that there was one group of people who did arms control, and there was another group of people who talked about human rights and there was another group of people who worried about things like Afghanistan – that preparing for the 1985 Summit between Reagan and Gorbachev was a new moment in history. New players, a new opportunity to move away from tired old communiqués with fusty language that in fact only masked disagreements, and to put into place what became in fact a joint statement – a statement where there were no disagreements in it. It was in fact a work statement that guided the next four years. And it was I think a masterpiece of moving away from diplomatic formalities and into the world of really getting things done.
Certainly with respect to the Reagan Gorbachev summits, all five of them in fact, it was important to understand how summits had unfolded previously, how teams of people had worked or not worked together, what mistakes had been made in terms of papering over differences instead of wrestling them to the ground. That piece of historical memory was very important.
Low point
I found that in 1980 when I was ambassador to Finland I was being asked to return to Washington as the Counselor of the Department. A lot of distinguished people have been Counselor of the Department, including, for example, Robert Murphy, whose book Diplomat Among Warriors is practically required reading in international affairs. I was very excited about the assignment, and overnight, as I was traveling from Helsinki to Washington, all of the responsibilities were removed from the position. And I discovered what they really wanted was a woman’s picture on the organization chart. My reaction to it after enormous disappointment, and after sort of saying to the people in charge that this was not right, that in fact I wanted all of the things Counselors of the Department had ever been, and finding that that was not going to be the case, I worked with others in the department to put some content into the job, but for a year it was a pretty miserable assignment. Following which, of course, when the Republicans came into office in January of 1981, they had no idea what had happened at the job of Counselor of the Department. The new Counselor was going to be Robert McFarland, who later became National Security Advisor. And so the Republicans decided that I looked too much like a Democrat, even though I was a career officer. And I spent two years in limbo. I found that the Department and the Foreign Service had divorced me, when I didn’t know we had been married. And so I looked around. What else can one do? And I found on the horizon two things. A lot of unfinished negotiations of some importance to some people around the United States, if not to the world in general. For example, the return of gold to Czechoslovakia in payment for the claims that American citizens had against Czechoslovakia. Things of that sort. And on the horizon I also found the man who became my husband two years later.
Vignette
I had no background in Ecuador. I had had some studies in Latin America, but had never had a Latin American assignment. My language was Spanish, but I had never had an opportunity to use it, and suddenly there I was the Ecuador desk officer. And the fisheries wars which had characterized U.S.-Latin American relations since 1948, and offered every December the scene of two or three tuna boats from San Diego being seized, became in 1970, just as I took over the desk, an outright tuna war. And 52 tuna vessels were seized in December of 1970.
The conflict within the U.S. government among equally good interests is an example of one of the best functions of the State Department. To take equally good but conflicting interests and to try to draw from them a balance, some would say a balance of sacrifice and others would say a balance of opportunity, so that they are all served. In short, what kind of an outcome would give the United States Navy the kind of access it believed it needed around the world, would give the American distant water fishing fleets an opportunity to continue fishing, would allow science and marine research to continue to take place, and yet would respect the interests as well as of the coastal states whose available resources tended to be quite limited and where coastal towns were among the poorest of the poor? The American Congress became impatient waiting for an international legal result of all of those kinds of interests, and in 1976 said, “We don’t want anybody fishing off our coasts. We are just like the folks in Latin America. We don’t want anybody fishing off our coasts. And at the same time, however, we want access to the coasts of other countries. In short, our fish are ours and your fish are ours as well.”
We assembled a team of people, from the Department of Commerce, NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], National Marine Fishery Service, the Legal Department, the Navy, the Coast Guard, the American industry, which was made up of people who fish off the coast of other shores, people who fish off the coast of the United States, retailers, wholesalers, sports fishermen, scientists, everyone who has an interest in fishing. The delegations tended to be 80 people strong. That’s how many different interests had a legitimate call on the intellect of the State Department in trying to solve this. A group of people between the passage of the Magnuson Act and March 1, 1977, did exactly what the act said. We negotiated new agreements concerning access off the coast of the United States. We had some troubles continuing our access off the coast of other countries. We took all of those agreements to the Congress. We obtained their passage and approval by Congress, and we put in place, after 25 years of post-war struggle, an entire new legal regime for fishing off the coast of the United States.
Reflection
When I came into the Foreign Service, which seems like eons ago – it’s now almost 50 years ago – I was one of six women in a class of 47.
And by the end of my career, I was the last of the women still in the service, and most of my 41 male colleagues had also left. I think I had a very traditional career for a woman at the outset. Immediately, I was sent to public information and educational exchange. A nice, soft topic where all of my bosses and all of my colleagues were women. They were, however, women who had served in World War II in the Office of War Information. They were skilled, they were tough, they were terrific supervisors and they were wonderful teachers. But it follows that I went from that to a job as a personnel officer. Of course, what else would you do with a young woman except send her out as a personnel officer?
I received a notice that I was being assigned to Washington as a political officer in the Office of NATO Affairs, in the Bureau of European Affairs. I will tell you that over time I worked with 25 of the most talented men – there were no other women in the office – the most talented men the service has ever seen, and over time all 25 of us reached the rank of Ambassador, and some higher than that,
That sort of broke the ice with respect to how I was seen, not as a woman political officer but as a political officer who happened to be a woman. But my next assignment was a strange one. I was going to be assigned to Norway as the staff aide, a very nice kind of a job, to the ambassador. But the ambassador was a woman, a woman named Margaret Joy Tibbets, one of the great women of the American Foreign Service, who called me and said, “Look Roz. It’s tough enough to know that you’re probably being sent out to a token job, but to know that as a woman, you’re being assigned as a staff aide to a woman ambassador. I don’t want it and you shouldn’t want it either, so I am rejecting the assignment, and I just wanted you to know why I was refusing to take you as staff aide.” That was fine with me. I was having a good time in Washington. Ms. Tibbets went out to Norway, and two years later when there was an opening in the embassy in Norway for a real political officer, Ms. Tibbets saw to it that I became a real political officer and not a staff aide to a woman ambassador.
At the time of the Reagan years obviously I was the only woman in the room when we were discussing anything to do with the unfolding of the U.S.-Soviet relations. So much so, I should tell you by the way, that when these messages were released at the end of negotiations that the two leaders had met and that the delegations had met, the delegations list always showed me as R. Ridgway. And there was no effort, since it was an English name and for an American, no effort on the part of the Soviet press to add all of the endings that would have indicated that I was a woman. And it wasn’t until Mrs. Gorbachev came to Reykjavik with Mr. Gorbachev that she realized that the American delegate R. Ridgway was in fact a woman. The Soviets ran around looking for a senior woman in their Ministry of Foreign Affairs that they could add to the delegation to show that they too could field a woman of some prominence. They couldn’t find anyone, so for those four years I was the only woman in the room. And by that time I was well past the struggles that many women had had.