The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2015

64 JULY-AUGUST 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL by hand (the better to learn the vocabulary). Since the guidance was never long enough, I would glean whatever I could find from presidential remarks, from the Secretary of State and from senior officials, to supplement my talking points. The challenge came from the fact that the material was neither specific nor convincing enough for a fast-paced, dynamic media environment. You had to make your point quickly, or you would soon find yourself in uncharted territory. After the Storm The “Fernandez Stupidstorm” had a happy ending. Within 24 hours of the news breaking, I wrote up the usual, insincere “I mis- spoke” statement for release by PA and moved on. I took off a few days from press work and then returned to the fray. One Arab media wag joked upon my return that “Fernandez has now been liberated from Guantanamo after his recent misdeed.” I was fortunate in the strong and constant support I received from Karen Hughes and from the NEA front office. The fact that we had been fully transparent with them all along about the scope of the challenge we faced, the risk involved and the volume and quality of our work, helped. It also helped that when senior officials looked at the full transcript prepared after the fact by the Open Source Center, they could see that I had defended rather than attacked the Bush administration. If I had truly wanted to denounce them, I would have used more of my allot- ted time to do so. While others may draw different conclusions, the lessons I learned in those days, both before and during my brush with fame, have served me well in two tours as a chief of mission (in Sudan and Equatorial Guinea) and in my just-concluded stint as director of the Center for Strategic CounterterrorismCommuni- cations, a unique and worthy effort to conduct media outreach differently. Those lessons are: • Be bold and unafraid in your dealings with the press. • Document everything you do. • Make sure to let your superiors know what you are doing and that it is difficult and inherently risky—before something bad happens. • And, most important of all, don’t worry too much; enjoy your work and the people you interact with along the way. n