Diplomatic Tales

SYNOPSIS

What is it like to be a diplomat in six far-flung nations? Lewis Richard Luchs gives you a behind-the-scenes look at life as a diplomat in this fascinating memoir about his career in the U.S. Foreign Service. He wore three hats at once in exotic Madagascar, witnessed a military coup d’état in Mali, saw the creation of modern Singapore, felt the excitement of working in a France emerging from the self-isolation of the Gaullist era, participated in shaping Islamic Malaysia’s future, and observed Australia’s efforts to redefine itself in a new Asia. In sharing his challenges, sorrows, and joys, he answers questions such as: What do embassies do? What do diplomats do? What stresses are put on a diplomat’s family? What is it like to face terrorist threats? Take a broader view of the world, find out what U.S. embassies do, and discover what life in the Foreign Service is like with Diplomatic Tales.

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EXCERPTS 

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MADAGASCAR

Arrival

My first glimpse of Madagascar came when our plane began to descend to the island over the

Mozambique Channel. I said to myself, It is indeed the Great Red Island. The sky, like the sea,

was colored a warm, soft blue. Meeting the sea at the shore was a streak of red clay that ran

like blood all along the coast. I saw no beaches because the fine beaches are on the east

coast, which faces the Indian Ocean. Then came miles of low, sharp hills, all in red and green.

As the plane continued to descend, I could see the mountainous and uneven plateau that covers most of the island. As the plane approached the capital, Tananarive (Antananarivo), I saw roads, bright green rice paddies, and houses. As if for my benefit, the pilot circled the capital city three times before landing. As he did so, I saw below me what seemed like a fairyland—clusters of rust-colored and light brown houses on hills surrounded by carefully terraced rice paddies, some of them full of water, which reflected bright flashes of sunlight. The colors of the paddies varied between dull brown and the brilliant green squares of young rice seedlings about to be transplanted. The neatness of the landscape impressed me. Later still, I could see large Zebu cattle foraging in the fields, and tiny roads of clay-red or black asphalt. Then I could see the very heart of the city, with the historic palaces of the Merina royals, the Rova, clustered on the highest hill, as well as centrally located Lake Anosy. From the air, Antananarivo looked much like a Mediterranean city.

 

MALI

The Coup

Our first indication that a military coup was taking place was the rumors among local employees in our office that some form of military action was under way. We began monitoring and recording Radio Mali. I happened to be standing near the radio in our audiovisual shop with James, our electronics technician, when regular programming was suddenly stopped. We stood waiting through a long silence. Then we heard the scuffle of boots and chairs on a wooden floor. An impatient, commanding voice shouted, “Lisez le!” (Read it!), and again, “Lisez le!” I imagined the terrified announcer staring down the barrel of a gun. Seconds later, we heard a brief text in French that began with, “The hour of liberty has sounded!” And then the voice went on to announce that a Military Committee for National Liberation (CMLN) had arrested President Modibo Keïta and had taken control of the government. A short while later, we heard tanks in the streets of downtown Bamako near the embassy. Soon, we could see young solders swinging AK-47’s while patrolling the area. Except for the soldiers and tanks, the city was strangely silent. Bamako’s wide unpaved streets were almost completely empty. Even the drums, the constant background noise that is Africa’s heartbeat, were quiet. Only embassy personnel drove or were driven hurriedly through the city.

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The General Soumare: Niger River Trip

In early December 1969, after the rains had come and the Niger River was running high, Susan and I boarded the river cruiser the General Soumare. We were beginning a one-week trip to Mopti, Timbuktu, and eventually Gao, on the edge of the Sahara Desert, a thousand watery miles away. En route, we saw spectacular desert sunsets every evening, and at night, wondrous star-filled skies. For much of the trip, the river did not seem to belong in a….

 

Medical Evacuation

My four-year-old-son and wife were met in Dakar and assisted by Leon Slawecki, our friend and my colleague in Madagascar, who was now the cultural attaché in Senegal. Shortly after my family departed, I was distraught to learn that Leon, while giving a talk at the university in Dakar, had been suddenly charged by leftist students, who broke both his wrists.

 

I later learned that my son Erik’s body had moved into the final stages of diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) on the long Pan Am flight from Dakar across the Atlantic. His face became flushed and his breathing began to be labored, and by the end of the trip, he continually gasped for air. During the ambulance ride from Dulles Airport, despite the noise of the siren, he began to slip into a coma. Susan screamed at him, “Erik! Erik!” trying to keep him awake.

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SINGAPORE

Introduction to Singapore

Modern Singapore was still an infant nation, only five years old, when I arrived, and for four years I watched its early development with fascination. I was impressed by the efficiency with which a brilliant, pragmatic, authoritarian government, and an intelligent and disciplined people, began to transform Singapore into a wealthy and dynamic new nation.

 

In 1970, Singapore’s population of 2.2 million people were crammed into a land area of 225 square miles (at low tide). Fresh water had to come across a causeway from Malaysia, a jugular vein that Malaysia’s leaders sometimes threatened to cut. Singapore had no hinterland. Singaporeans did raise much of their food on the back side of the island, but Singapore’s historic role as a colonial entrepôt made it unusually dependent on international trade. It was a one-industry trading town.

 

Worse yet, in 1971 the British withdrew their armed forces east of Suez and ended their extensive military presence in Singapore, which had been an important source of income and security. Singapore was pressed to develop its own defense capabilities rapidly against its much larger and sometimes hostile neighbors, Indonesia and Malaysia. Indonesia pursued a policy of open konfrontasi (confrontation) with Singapore for years, which caused Lee Kuan Yew to articulate his so-called poison shrimp doctrine. “You may,” he said, “attack us and even defeat us, but we will be like a poison shrimp that you will have to spit out.”

 

Few observers at that time believed Singapore could survive as an independent nation. The island state had almost no natural resources apart from some tin. The resources it did have, however, turned out to be the most important ones—brilliant and incorruptible leadership, and the brains and work ethic of its people. Singaporeans did not waste time blaming others for their predicament. They simply got on with the job.

 

FRANCE

A Grand Night at Versailles here was another issue that required long transatlantic negotiations. For the grand night at Versailles, the French wanted the tenue de soirée to be black tie. The Carter team, representing the “cardigan sweater presidency,” balked and would agree only to business suits. They did not budge, which unnecessarily irritated the French. As the presidents and their wives passed me during the grand soirée at Versailles, I thought I sensed disdain in Giscard, but perhaps I was only seeing his usual haughty aristocratic manner. Carter’s face revealed no sense of what I imagined Giscard was thinking.

 

Hotel Talleyrand

My new office was on the third floor of the Talleyrand building occupied a space originally taken by a bedroom, a study, and a dressing room—in other words, a small apartment. It had a fireplace I did not use, and floor-length French windows that looked toward the southwest across most of the Place de la Concorde. The view included the entrance to the Champs-Élysées, and, in the distance, the Eiffel Tower on the Champ de Mars.

 

The Hôtel de Talleyrand’s hundreds of bullet holes were an indication of the neighborhood’s violent and bloody history. From my windows, I could have watched the guillotine slice off the head of Louis XVI in 1793. His head was placed at his feet when he was temporarily buried in the Madeleine with a minimum of sacerdotal attention. I would have had a balcony seat to observe the thousands more executions at the same spot before and during the Reign of Terror. I often thought of that as I walked over to the embassy in the rain. Just outside the Hôtel de Talleyrand, at the entrance to rue Saint-Florentin, was a major barricade fought over during the suppression of the Commune in l871. During World War II, the building was taken over by the Vichy government, and during the Nazi occupation, it housed German naval officers. In a cruel departing act, German Gestapo agents who had been interrogating French patriots in the basement of the Talleyrand lined them up against the wall opposite my office and executed them. A photograph taken in 1944 showed a tank standing just below my office and street fighting across the Place de la Concorde during the liberation of Paris. Memorial plaques describing that event are on the wall today.

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MALAYSIA

A Radical Islamist          

Educational exchanges with Western countries caused a few young Muslim students to become radicalized. Some believed the West was in decline and had reached its twilight. A case in point is Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian and leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s. His many books are still influential among Islamic extremist groups today and supply much of their ideology. His radical anti-Western views were formed while he was a student at a Colorado university. He was shocked by the materialism and violence he found in America, and what he considered sexual immorality. Curiously, he found the popular song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” which he had heard at a church dance, solid evidence for his views.

 

The Achenese Threat

On the night of the twelfth, at dinner with my family, I told them of the threat. Our mood was somber. I spent a longer time than usual with my sons in their bedrooms after supper. We decided the boys would go to school by taxi, rather than on the clearly marked International School of Kuala Lumpur bus. We agreed Susan would use taxis to commute to her job at the junior college in distant Shah Alam, and we would avoid the use of our Volvo with CD plates altogether. Since we did not have a closed garage, I would continue to check with my mirror for bombs under the car each morning.

 

Then, as was usual on Saturday morning, Susan walked to a local shopping area to do some errands and buy groceries. I spotted her as she returned, running quickly from Jalan Conlay up our driveway. When she entered the house, she was out of breath and shaking. She said two strange men had been following her on foot. She had tried to shake them off but could not and came to the conclusion that she and we had been targeted by the Acehnese Movement.

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AUSTRALIA

The Birds

One of Australia’s glories is its birds. The number of species of birds that have been recorded in Australia is 727. Of those, 23 were introduced, and 571 species are known to breed on the Australian continent, in Tasmania, or on the coastal islands. Of that list of native breeding species, 329 breeds nowhere else on earth.

 

The morning bird chorus was magnificent and yet was so foreign to my ears at first that it seemed to be coming from another planet. Some birds made truly unusual sounds—the whip bird, for example. Its call sounds exactly like the crack of a long black whip. Best known outside Australia is the kookaburra, the large kingfisher easily recognized by a call that sounds like raucous laughter. Adding to Australia’s wild abundance of birds and bird species are thirty varieties of wrens in colors that range from dull brown, like the wrens in the United States, to iridescent blue.

 

BOOK REVIEWS

 

Kirkus Review 

A memoir details the author’s world travels and diverse responsibilities as a United States Information Agency officer.

Luchs’ (Children of the Manse, 2009) book explores “the behind-the-scenes activity and the lives of diplomats and their families,” using his own “experiences as examples.” After passing the rigorous examination needed to get a position in the foreign service, Luchs began his career in 1966 and was soon posted to a position in Madagascar as a junior officer in training. Upon arrival, however, he found the embassy understaffed and he was immediately given responsibility “for the direction of the economic and commercial, consular, and USAID offices of the embassy.” This was a lot for a young staffer, but Luchs threw himself into his work and was mostly successful in dealing with his many duties and, memorably, a very spoiled American traveler who tested Luchs’ patience. In 1968, the officer and his family moved to Mali for his next posting, where he toiled in a country with a decidedly anti-American atmosphere due to its socialist government and then worked through the country’s military coup. His next stop, in 1970, was Singapore, where he got to witness the nation as it began to modernize and turn into the financial hub that it is today. In 1976, Luchs received an unexpected opportunity at the Paris office, one that was personally rewarding but professionally frustrating—the place was a hotbed of rivalries and lacked focus. By 1984, he was in Malaysia, focusing on the educational exchange between that nation and the United States, and then finished his career in Australia, culminating in the organization of a visit by President George H.W. Bush in 1992. Throughout the absorbing book, Luchs shares captivating geographical and historical tidbits about every country he worked in (A “key to Singapore’s success was the government’s zero tolerance of corruption”). He extensively and lovingly discusses his family, his living arrangements and vacations, and the various political and personal problems that he had to deal with at every stop, from a Navy helicopter landing in “the most public place in Singapore” during the Vietnam War to his son receiving a juvenile diabetes diagnosis. Luchs’ tone remains informative and heartfelt throughout, and the reader gains trenchant insights into an intriguing profession.

 

“An engrossing look at a wide-ranging career in the foreign service as well as a sweeping story of a globe-trotting life.”

 

Kirkus recently informed the author that Diplomatic Tales has received the Kirkus coveted “Recommended Review” in their “Books Worth Discovering” series.

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Review by James Earl, Retired University of Oregon Professor

Jan 7, 2017

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Diplomatic Tales is a lively and engrossing memoir of Lewis Luchs's 25-year career, from 1967 to 1992, as a US diplomat in six countries around the world--Madagascar, Mali, Singapore, France, Malaysia and Australia. What was going on in Americas's far-flung embassies during this tumultuous period? Largely the patient, challenging work of devoted professionals like Luchs, helping Americans abroad, maintaining smooth international relations, arranging cultural and educational exchanges, repairing cultural misunderstandings, working with the foreign press, projecting the highest American values with the greatest cultural tolerance, as well as a host of other duties that non-professionals can hardly imagine, all the while negotiating political crises of all sorts at home and in the host countries. Luchs was in Mali during a coup d'etat, and had to duck assassination in Malaysia. He witnessed the transformation of security issues over the decades. He portrays the official diplomatic life, but also the personal life of diplomats and their families, in this case a family with four boys growing up in these six extraordinary environments. One can only hope that the State Department and USIA have a robust supply of professionals as smart, humane, motivated, and culturally sensitive as Luchs. Anyone interested in such a career would certainly profit from the model he presents, for he is the exact opposite of the Ugly American stereotype. The road was not always smooth for him and his family, but to hear him tell it, his career was not only satisfying, but exhilerating.

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