The Foreign Service Journal, September 2005

And at the end of the Clinton administration, Secretary {Madeleine] Albright asked me to come back when Jamie Rubin left and I served for nine months. Under Secretary [Colin] Powell, I didn’t think I would stay long but stayed all the way through. And I then stayed on for the first five months or so of Secretary [Condoleezza] Rice. FSJ: What’s the best part of the job? RB: The best part of the job is the whole world. There are very few jobs in Washington where you deal with the whole world at the same time. From minute to minute, you can be trying to explain Russia policy, what we are doing against AIDS, how we are promoting democracy in the Arab world. And you deal with the whole world in all of its aspects — economics, politics, diploma- cy, arms control, proliferation. And that makes it interesting and exciting. There is nothing quite like it in government. There are few jobs where you try to under- stand intellectually why we’re doing one thing in Zimbabwe and then something slightly dif- ferent in Cambodia. So it has been an extraordi- nary education. And even after all this time I’m learning new stuff every day. [And] I’m for- getting the stuff every day, too (laughs). But I’m learning new stuff every day. At one point in my life, I probably knew as much about Chinese economic reform as anybody. And there is indeed a pleasure that comes from that. But trying to understand and figure out the big picture is a challenge that speaks not only to what are American interests but what is our role fun- damentally in the world. Or, in understanding democracy policy as it applies to different places. I think that’s the most interesting thing going on right now. FSJ: What is the most difficult part of the job? RB: Answering all those questions. There are more questions than there are answers. And there are usually more questions you can’t answer than questions you can answer. So how do you give people an honest indication of what policy is, what the Secretary wants, the direction she is going in a way that supports the diplomatic process without getting into things that might make it more difficult to achieve our policy goals? Every day you’ve got to do that balance. Questions usually go right to the heart. Journalists are as smart as we are. FSJ: Have you ever made a sensitive negotiation more difficult by saying the wrong thing? RB: I don’t think I’ve ever messed up any negotiation. But I’ve certainly seen it happen. Once, when I was a senior watch officer, I remember walking a very highly classified cable with instructions down to a communicator so they could send them to our negotiators in Geneva who were negotiating with the Soviets on a missile deal. I walked it down- stairs and I came back up. I was on the midnight shift. I came back up and the newspapers had arrived. There was the U.S. position and the U.S. fallback position on the front page of the Washington Post. It was 1986 or 1987. The other thing is that people get a distorted impression of U.S. policy. For a long time there was the belief that we had provided arms to the Khmer Rouge. Because we had a pol- icy of not commenting on intelligence, this belief was ram- pant. It took a major effort inside the bureaucracy to say [publicly], “No, we don’t supply arms to the Khmer Rouge.” FSJ: But didn’t [National Security Adviser Zbigniew] Brzezinski encourage the Chinese to supply the Khmer Rouge because they were the only anti-Soviet force in Southeast Asia in the late 1970s and early 1980s? RB: That’s a different question. The idea that the United States supplied them was wrong. FSJ: Has being a spokesman been more difficult since 9/11? RB: Everything we’ve been doing is more difficult since 9/11 because what we say is more important. What our diplomats are doing in the field is more dangerous and dif- ficult because we know how important security and the job are. On the other hand, it’ gives a certain sense to our role in the world, to what we are trying to accomplish. And that applies to the briefing, as well. There is an organizing prin- ciple: to prevent another attack on America. And that has enormous ramifications for everything we do around the world, even the support for democracy. You have to be able S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 75 “The best part of the job is dealing with the whole world at the same time.” — Richard Boucher A frequent contributor to the Journal , George Gedda cov- ers the State Department for The Associated Press. He was present for most of the press briefings Richard Boucher gave since 1993.