The Foreign Service Journal, June 2003

emergence of politically open, demo- cratic governments, in many parts of the world that took place while I was in office. But then you come back to some- thing that involves a human being. I remember working so hard on the problems of Soviet Jewry and the repression that they experienced, and working on individual cases. I worked on many of them. One of them was a woman called Ida Nudel. I can recall to this day sitting in my office at the State Department and the phone rings and on the other end a voice says, “This is Ida Nudel. I’m in Jerusalem. I’m home.” Some- thing like that makes you feel that whatever part you may have had in that, you did something that helped an individual human being that you can identify. FSJ: What do you see as the value of professional diplomats? Shultz: My time as Secretary of State was my fourth job of Cabinet rank. I started as Secretary of Labor in a Republican administration. I was told that I had an impossible job because the career people were all the appointees of organized labor and they wouldn’t do anything for a Republican. I didn’t believe that, and I managed to recruit a very top- notch bunch of people to come and work with me at the Department [of Labor]. They provided what I would call professional support; the career people responded and knocked themselves out to work with us. We listened to them; we worked with them; and it was a great experience. And it was the same when I was Director of the [Office of Manage- ment and] Budget and Secretary of the Treasury. I came to the State Department having had some experience with the Foreign Service when I was Secretary of the Treasury, because when I’d go on trips, generally some FSO was assigned to go along and I noticed, “Hey, these guys write good cables. And they’re interesting — apparently they see what’s going on. I can learn from them.” So I came to my job at the State Department in a somewhat different frame of mind than many people do. I was very favorably disposed to these people who devote their lives to public ser- vice. So I found the Foreign Service very responsive and I think I worked them pretty hard, lots of them. And they liked that; in a sense, that’s what they came for: to be involved, to be consulted, to be given assignments. And they carried them out well. FSJ: Who are some diplomats you worked with during your time in Foggy Bottom that particularly stand out in your memory now? Shultz: I had a whole lot of spe- cial ones: Larry Eagleburger was under secretary for political affairs when I came, and Jerry Bremer was in the Secretariat or the Operations Center, I forget which; and later Mike Armacost came and succeeded Larry Eagleburger. And then I got to work with the incomparable Phil Habib. And I had Roz Ridgeway, who did a marvelous job with all the negotiations with the Soviets, and Charlie Hill and Ray Seitz, who worked directly with me; and Tom Pickering — I could go on and on and on. The Foreign Service offi- cers were really special, and I think they responded to the fact that the political appointees were also a first- class bunch of people. Kenneth Dam first, and then John Whitehead, for most of the time, who served as my deputy [secretary of State]; Paul Nitze, Allen Wallis, and Max Kampelman. You had a really special bunch of people to work with. I’m just sitting here recalling names off the top of my head — Dick Solomon, Chet Crocker, Paul Wolfowitz, Gaston Sigur, Dick Murphy. I could go on and on. FSJ: Speaking at the renaming of the National Foreign Affairs Training Center to the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center last year, you com- mented that when you became Secretary of State, you knew you “would be dealing with many crises on a day-to-day basis, and that for American foreign policy to succeed over time I would have to pay atten- tion to long-term issues.” What do you see as the impact of the war against terrorism on diplomacy as a profession, in terms of taking a long- range view of things? Shultz: The war on terrorism brings out — if it needed to be brought out — the central impor- tance of vital, skillful diplomacy, because you’re dealing all the time with people throughout the world and you are relying on them to pro- vide intelligence; you are working with them if the use of force becomes necessary; you are con- stantly working the message of the Great Seal [of the United States]. The Great Seal has the eagle with the olive branch in one talon and the arrows in the other. So the essence of diplomacy is you work these two things together. So much of the time 50 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 3 “It’s important for a diplomat to provide not simply intelligence but interpretation of intelligence to Washington, and then to stand firmly for whatever the U.S. position is.”