The Foreign Service Journal, September 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2015 27 FSJ: And that did the trick. WCH: Right. He said, “Okay, no more Soviet planes,” and they stopped coming. But he also had signs put up which read, in French: “Down with food blackmail!” I don’t think anybody else had the slightest idea what that was about, but he knew I knew what it meant. FSJ: Yeah, you got the message. Since you retired from the Foreign Service in 1993, Africa has become the scene for a differ- ent kind of power struggle. How do you view the huge Chinese investment in Africa, and what does it mean? WCH: Well, Beijing is keenly aware that Africa will keep growing in importance, because it’s both a huge source of raw materials and a huge market. I’m optimistic about the conti- nent’s prospects. The proportion of Africans with cell phones has gone up astronomically, and there’s growing industrial activity. Despite the dreadful corruption and infrastructure mess in Nigeria, it’s still a major economy, as is South Africa. I also think governance will gradually improve throughout the region. So, yes, I’m optimistic about Africa. FSJ: You were the last FSO to serve as State Department inspector general. How has that job changed since then? WCH: The reason I was the final career FSO in the position is simple: Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) hated me and hated the Foreign Service. As he once said on the floor of the Senate, “The Foreign Service is an institution which is downright un-Amer- ican. It appoints itself, it assigns itself, it promotes itself, and, lo and behold, it even inspects itself.” Then he added, “We had best change it.” And he proceeded to do just that. The fellow who replaced me, Sherman Funk, had been inspector general of the Commerce Department; he was also a college classmate of mine, though I didn’t know him at the time. But he was very competent, putting more stress on auditing, in combination with inspecting embassies to improve operations. We’ve had one or two very weak inspector generals since he left—people appointed as though it were a political patronage job. But overall, they’ve been pretty good. FSJ: Your next two ambassadorships were in Kenya and Zaire. Did you draw any lessons about democratization from your time in those places? WCH: Maybe one lesson to learn is that our concept of democracy simply may not be applicable everywhere. Yet we keep trying to impose it all over the world. A friend of mine, Mark Palmer, who died in 2013, was obsessed with that long