The Foreign Service Journal, September 2008

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 63 had the great privilege to work closely with David Newsom over many years, most of them turbu- lent. I interpreted for him with King Idris and others in Libya from 1967 to 1969, then served under him when he was assistant secretary for African affairs and, a decade later, when he was under secretary for political affairs in the midst of the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, among other major events. I consider David among the greatest of the “greatest generation.” He was certainly a hero to me. With his family newspaper heritage, his B.A. in English from Berkeley and his master’s degree in journalism from Col- umbia, David Newsom began his career in publishing. Along with his young bride, Jean, he produced a weekly newspaper in northern California, the Walnut Creek Courier Journal . In the normal course of things, he would have become a successful editor/publisher in flourishing postwar California. Perhaps something from David’s naval intelligence expe- rience in the Pacific during World War II (plus the memo- ries of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship that had taken him to troubled Asia in 1940-1941) pushed him to take the Foreign Service exam in 1947, which he passed — to the immense benefit of our country. The always modest Newsom claimed he passed because he could tell the exam- iners how to score a fielder’s choice in baseball, thus demon- strating that he had the grounding in American culture that is an essential component of being a Foreign Service officer. I did not know David in his early career. Yet his memoirs, due to be posthumously published this fall, show an ability to learn from his experiences. He recalls, for instance, a meeting he attended with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said in the early 1950s, when Said warned the American ambassador that if the balance was ever destroyed among the Kurds, Shia and Sunnis, “Iraq would become ungovernable.” This observation may have been a factor in Newsom’s opposi- tion to the recent invasion of Iraq. Once he commented to me, as we entered the presidential palace in Bucharest in 1980 on his mission to express appreciation to President Nicolae Ceausescu for his op- position to the Soviet invasion of Afghan- istan: “Have you noticed how dictator- ships have no one milling about the dicta- tor’s palace, whereas in democracies there is a hubbub of activity in places like the White House?” A Gentle Teacher, Astute Observer As a supervisor, David was a tremendous supporter and a gentle teacher — as long as you were serious about your work. I remember one occasion when he was negotiating with a rough-and-ready Bedouin Libyan defense minister over the purchase of some F-5 aircraft. When I quoted the literal translation of the minister’s Arabic expression in my draft cable to Washington, “we have rings and wish to buy,” Newsom kindly suggested Washington would be better served if we dropped the folklore and merely reported that he said, “We have the funds and wish to purchase the F-5s.” I A PPRECIATION C ONSUMMATE D IPLOMAT , E XTRAORDINARY H UMAN B EING D AVID D. N EWSOM , 1918 – 2008 B Y R OSCOE S. S UDDARTH He possessed an uncanny sensitivity to the requirements — foreign and domestic — of a successful foreign policy. Roscoe (Rocky) Suddarth is a retired Foreign Service offi- cer who served under David Newsom in three assign- ments: as political officer in Tripoli from 1967 to 1969; as Libyan desk officer in the Bureau of African Affairs from 1969 to 1971; and as executive assistant to the under sec- retary for political affairs from 1979 to 1981.