The Foreign Service Journal, September 2005

FSJ: I remember when Ed Muskie was Secretary of State 25 years ago. He was amazed at how an off-hand remark would reverberate around the world. Do you see in your mind’s eye a banner headline as you think about what to say and perhaps hold back? RB: I think you have to try to understand what’s it’s going to look like to the people that hear it. Your first responsibility is for what you say, how you explain things. But you have to think about what it’s going to look like. You have to remember that something that’s a minor story in America is a big story in the country you’re talking about. Marlin Fitzwater [press secretary for President Reagan and the first President Bush] once said, “I stand at the podium and I see all these electrons going out and I can’t catch them.” It is indeed instan- taneous. When you travel, you might see a big story in a newspaper for something that took 30 seconds in a briefing. You see a story about some- thing you didn’t really say much about. But it creates a story out there. You’re very conscious of it. People come back from the odd- est places and say, “I heard you on the radio.” But that’s less a reflec- tion of me than it’s a reflection of the media first of all, how international things are. If you say something stu- pid in Southeast Asia, it’s going to go all over the world. … [So] you try to keep it straight and steady so the answer is as clear as possible. Sometimes I will say [in answer to a question], “I don’t know,” or “I don’t know; I’ll check on it.” And I know that in some countries that creates a headline, “State Department unin- formed on X policy.” And then there is a long analysis as to why we don’t know about something. In fact there is probably somebody who does know. I just don’t happen to know myself. And then the next day we’ll come back with an answer and they’ll write another story saying, “The State Department has finally figured it out.” 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 77 “There is always something I think I could have done better or didn’t do as well as I should have. Sometimes if I got it wrong, I go out to try to fix it right away.”