Why Don't We Talk Anymore?

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Diplomacy is not a matter of job title. Perhaps a thousand people, many but not all of them State Department employees, are the real U.S. diplomats, the men and women whose vocation it is to listen intently to strangers so their fellow citizens will never have to.

Over thousands of years, diplomats, by effectively navigating cultural, linguistic, and ethnic barriers, have brokered hostage exchanges, cease-fires, and peace agreements. They are a rare breed with a rarefied, often misunderstood set of skills -- and we need them now, perhaps more than ever.

My introduction to the Foreign Service was typically atypical. In 1980 I was a 22-year-old student at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens who had never met a diplomat or exhibited the slightest curiosity about what such a person might do. Then a college friend from Swarthmore came to visit. I showed her the Aegean island of Delos (and wooed her unsuccessfully). She let me follow her to Bucharest, where her father, Clint, was the economic counselor of the U.S. Embassy.

While Bucharest under communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was a Balkan nightmare, I was delighted to discover that gentle, thoughtful Americans like Clint were quietly steering U.S. national interests through the deadly shoals of the region's Cold War power politics. Protecting U.S. interests meant building a network of personal relationships with the people who mattered. Clint spoke to Romanians in their own language, and they told him what he needed to know.

I had always envied people who could talk easily to strangers. I grew up in Silicon Valley surrounded by other shy people. Archaeology coaxed me from the library. Digging in Spain and Greece, I discovered a delightful phenomenon: Foreign visitors are lovingly shielded from the bruising social competition around them. Uttering a reasonable number of polite phrases in the local language, the traveler will be rewarded with extravagant approval. Kudos is an addictive drug, and after meeting Clint I learned that diplomats are all but guaranteed a regular supply. And unlike archaeologists, they get paid a living wage for the pleasure.

When I returned to the United States in 1980 to study ancient history at Berkeley, I signed up for the Foreign Service exam. I passed the written portion easily, the oral test on the second attempt. In April of 1983, security and medical clearances at last in hand, my new spouse and I drove her aging Beetle to Arlington, Virginia, home of the Foreign Service Institute. Three months later I was sitting behind the passport/notarial counter of the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, learning to talk to strangers.

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