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The Last American Diplomat
John D. Negroponte and the Changing Face of US Diplomacy
By George W. Liebmann I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd
Copyright © 2012 George W. Liebmann
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85773-040-4
CHAPTER 1
EARLY YEARS
A true natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the state, or separable from it. It is an essential integrant part of any large body rightly constituted. It is formed out of a class of legitimate presumptions, which, taken as generalities, must be admitted for actual truths. To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from one's infancy; to be taught to respect one's self; to be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; to look early to public opinion; to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the widespread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw and court the attention of the wise and learned, wherever they are to be found; ... and to possess the virtues of diligence, order, constancy, and regularity, and to have cultivated an habitual regard to commutative justice: these are the circumstances of men that form what I should call a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation.
— Edmund Burke, Appeal from the Old to the New Whigs (1771)
In an interview in 2006, John Negroponte stated:
I always wanted to be involved in diplomacy. I was fascinated by history; political science. I liked foreign languages ... I'd taken my junior year abroad when I went to college and I was pretty set on joining the Foreign Service right from the time I went to college ... I took the exam while I was still in college and entered ... several months after graduation.
He had been influenced in this aspiration by Jacques de Thier who had been Belgian ambassador to Mexico, Canada and Britain and who married Negroponte's aunt. In 2008, Negroponte told a group of District of Columbia school children that he had traveled abroad in the summers while a teenager; he urged them to develop the habit of daily reading of a good newspaper. "Once you've got past understanding and speaking and learning another language, then the concept of learning additional languages becomes really rather easy; you've sort of broken the code." In the meantime, he had enrolled in the Harvard Law School. After a week, Negroponte went to notify Dean Erwin Griswold of his acceptance by the Foreign Service and was told: "Well, you have arrived in time to get your tuition refunded." His later approach recognized that
there's no substitute for hard work and studying your situation very carefully ... none of these things can be accomplished by one single individual through a virtuoso performance ... I've always put a great deal of weight on people, recruiting good people to collaborate with.
Negroponte came from a family of Greek expatriates. His great-great grandfather had left the island of Chios following a massacre there in connection with the Greek War of Independence in 1822, which consumed or exiled 90 percent of the population, a decimation in reverse that left the same impress as the Holocaust on the few survivors, Negroponte's grandfather was born in Tagenrog and moved to Switzerland before World War I. In Russia before World War I, Negroponte's grandfather had a fleet of about seven steamships. Negroponte's father was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1915; his grandmother at one point was treated for tuberculosis in Davos. Negroponte shared Chios ancestry with another notable student of diplomacy, the British historian Peter Calvocoressi. Dimitri Negroponte, John's father, was brought up in Francophone Switzerland and went to boarding school in Klosters and then to the École des Sciences Politiques in Paris, where his son was later to spend his junior year abroad. He was one of the two members of the Greek Olympic ski team at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Germany. He wanted to enter the Greek Foreign Service but was told that he could not do so without a Greek university degree, although he was fluent in French, English, Greek, and German. Dimitri had inherited about $600,000 from his mother in 1933 and in 1936 started a small shipping business in London. After marrying in 1938, he came to the United States in September 1939. During the war, he worked for Stavros Niarchos, a cousin of his wife; at the end of the war, he resumed trading for himself with four or five ships under the name of D. J. Negroponte and Company. The ships were Liberty ships, acquired from the US government with the aid of Greek government guarantees. By 1958, he had 7 ships, rising to 11 in 1965. In the 1970s, the fleet diminished to three vessels. In 1973, he returned to London from New York. John Negroponte observed that he would have done better financially if he had put his money in the stock market in 1933. Negroponte's mother, the former Catharine Coumantaros, was born in New York of Greek parents but was raised in Greece from the age of three onward and was married in Paris in 1938. She was active in relief programs for the Greek underground during the war and ran a Friends of Greece shop at 52 East 57th Street in New York. Two cousins endowed the Dimitri and Maria Negroponte-Delivanis Award in International Affairs. From this background, Negroponte gained the view that there were political causes worth fighting for. After the war, the family remained in New York where the children were in school.
Negroponte characterized his father as
the liberal in the family ... he saw our political process here through the lens of his anti-fascist perspective on Europe, so I think he misread some things—like Nixon, for instance. He exaggerated. [He] was a little horrified that I went to Vietnam, and a bit more horrified that I went to Central America—to Honduras.
Finally, when Negroponte became Ambassador to Mexico, Dimitri voiced approval. He died in 1996, followed in death by Negroponte's mother in 2000. "Neither lived to see me come back into government."
Our milieu was one that has vanished, that of the Manhattan upper middle-class in the 1940s and 1950s, when persons with moderate but not grand earned or inherited incomes could still afford to live on the Upper East Side and pay private school tuitions for their children, which had not reached their present astronomical heights, when the massive flight to the suburbs was just getting under way, and when one live-in domestic servant was customary and two or more not infrequent. The region has now become the preserve of UN diplomats, the very wealthy, and an expense-account aristocracy. We lived within walking distance of our early schools. The ground floor of our apartment building included an old-fashioned drug store, the Wilcox Pharmacy, with a soda fountain; a small stationery store; a branch of Gristede's Grocery in which bills were written out and added by hand and merchandise was brought down from the shelves by the manager using an enormous hook; across the street was the Montauk Market, an old-fashioned butcher shop, familiar with the idiosyncrasies of its customers. A block away, the Third Avenue El was still standing, with its stations heated in winter by pot-bellied stoves; beneath it was an array of antique stores and ethnic restaurants.
Most people who were young in the Manhattan of the 1950s do not doubt the reality of global warming: sleigh riding in Central Park, all but vanished today, was a part of their youth. Most also are sympathetic to environmental controls; clear skies over any large city were rare in that era. Many apartment buildings were heated by soft coal, delivered down chutes across sidewalks, while many others had incinerators to burn their garbage, emitted over Manhattan from a myriad of smokestacks.
Negroponte attended the Town School in New York (where the writer was his classmate); and then the Allen-Stevenson School, where a classmate remembered "at that age you can see the intelligence of someone. It hasn't got the varnish of pretension yet." He then went to Exeter for his high school years, where he participated in the debating society, varsity soccer, golf, and swimming and where he won the French prize. At Yale (where one of his friends was William H.J. Bush, the brother of the elder President Bush), he belonged to Psi Upsilon, otherwise known as The Fence Club, along with William Bush and Porter Goss (who was the last Director of Central Intelligence following the passage of the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act), and pursued his language studies, spending his junior year, 1958–9 at the Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris. It was said that he and William F. Buckley, Jr, were the only students to achieve an A in the political science course given by the conservative scholar Wilmoore Kendall. He was also influenced by Professor Cecil Driver's emphasis on the nonpartisan nature of the British civil service (a course on the English political system was required of all Government majors), as well as by Charles Lindblom's course on comparative political systems and a course on quantitative political analysis taught by Karl Deutsch. His closest faculty friend was Roulon Wells in the philosophy department, who wrote his principal letter of recommendation to the Foreign Service; he took almost as many philosophy as government courses.
John Negroponte had three brothers, all with notable careers. Nicholas, the best man at his wedding in 1976, was about five years younger, and is known for his writings on computers and intellectual property and as the leader of a program to place inexpensive computers in the hands of all school children in underdeveloped countries. The other two brothers are identical twins, fourteen years junior to him. Michel is a filmmaker and the author of Jupiter's Wife; the fourth brother, George Negroponte, is an artist who lives in Sweden with his Swedish wife. Two of the brothers went to Yale, and two went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A cousin, Anthony Lyiardopoulous, recalled that "His dad taught him how to eat, how to ski, how to be a good athlete. His dad would have made a sensational diplomat." As one of his brothers observed, "Our father spoke at least five languages fluently. John has his genes." In his youth, he displayed "a feeling that one must handle problems privately"; he was mortified in college when he "had to call his father to bail him out [of a poker debt]. I don't think John was too happy about that." He had "a propensity for reaching out to other students, especially those from foreign cultures, engaging them in conversation, asking them questions ... it was an outstanding trait." While he was at McGraw-Hill, John Negroponte was active in the French-American Foundation.
On entering the Foreign Service, he took the basic officer's course from October 1960 to January 1961. He did not excel in the written Foreign Service exam, passing it because of an added five points given to him for his foreign language proficiency. His oral exam was a happier experience; he had spent the summer after Yale as an intern at Lazard Freres. On a shelf behind his desk was a study on the Federal Reserve System that he leafed through in idle moments. He was delighted when the oral examiners asked him to describe the Federal Reserve System. He was also asked what to do about the new Castro Government in Cuba and recommended a policy of engagement. After he was told that he passed the exam, he was also told that he passed notwithstanding his ignorance about the Foreign Service and his answer about Cuba: "you'll get over it!" He initially wanted to be an Africa specialist and applied on the State Department's annual request sheet, the so-called "April Fool" sheet because of the date of circulation, to be assigned to Francophone sub-Saharan Africa; he expected to study Arabic with a view to ultimate assignment in the Maghreb region in northern Africa. As John Negroponte recalled at his retirement reception in January 2009, he was instead sent to Hong Kong and, after two years, was assigned to the Bureau of African Affairs as a junior administrative aide. Bored with administrative chores after two months, he volunteered to study Vietnamese in August 1963, a career-defining move. At this time, he was an admirer of Roosevelt and Truman: "if they hadn't lost my absentee ballot somewhere in the bowels of the State Department, I would have voted for Kennedy. I considered myself a Democrat until Ronald Reagan came along, and then I switched political affiliation."
CHAPTER 2
HONG KONG
I look forward to an American world empire, whose long-term chances are poor, with more fear and less enthusiasm than I look back on the record of the old British Empire, run by a country whose modest size protected it against megalomania.
— Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 418
The Hong Kong to which John Negroponte was assigned in 1961 was important less as a commercial center than as a listening post. America's relations with China were at their nadir in 1960. The McCarthy period was not long in the past, and although the Sinologists in the Consulate longed to visit China, there was little talk about normalization of relations. Few remember the high hopes invested in China by the Roosevelt administration with its vision of four or five "world policemen" under which China, the Soviet Union, Britain, and perhaps France were to share in the maintenance of world order, a vision of a revived Holy Alliance not, as it is frequently misrepresented, a Wilsonian world parliament or world government. The government of Chiang Kai-Shek was thus given the veto power of a permanent member of the Security Council. Fewer still remember that in 1945 and 1946 there were some 200,000 US troops in China concerned with supply of the Chungking Government and the taking of the Japanese surrender. The recurrence or continuation of civil war and the corrupting effect of US aid on the Westernized nationalists made the Communist victory almost inevitable. Notwithstanding our substantial aid to Chiang, given despite the prescient warnings of General Stilwell and the diplomat John Paton Davies, among others, the Chinese Civil War was not really a proxy war, and both American and Soviet aid were limited, the Russians giving the Communist Chinese little assistance during the era of "socialism in one country," although the Russians gave more after the second world war. The decision of Harry Truman, George Marshall, and Dean Acheson embodied in the China White Paper of 1949 in favor of American withdrawal was a prudent decision, resting on three premises: that a society of enormous population, however ramshackle its armies, could bleed and absorb large numbers of American troops; that the United States despite its victories and its 12 million men under arms, was war weary; and finally, as made most explicit in the writings of George Kennan, that China, unlike Germany, Britain, Russia, or Japan, did not have even a medium-term industrial potential with the capacity to seriously hinder American interests.
China, nonetheless, cast a large shadow over American politics and foreign policy. The Truman administration was charged with having "lost China," although some Republicans, including Senator Robert Taft and General Dwight Eisenhower, certainly knew better. The Nationalist émigrés, aided by Senator William Knowland, who succeeded Taft as Senate Republican leader, made any revision of policy by the Eisenhower–Dulles administration difficult. The Communist victory rendered the United States more sensitive to any communist threat to Japan, hence the prompt American intervention on the North Korean invasion of South Korea. The Chinese intervention in the war in turn was prompted not only by General Douglas MacArthur's semiauthorized march on the Yalu River, but also by the Japanese peace treaty in which Dulles was heavily invested and which firmly rooted Japan within the Western alliance. All this took place during the waning hours of the Stalin regime, in which there was little communication among the great powers.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Last American Diplomat by George W. Liebmann. Copyright © 2012 George W. Liebmann. Excerpted by permission of I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd.
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