Born Leaders
Telling America's Story
Expert Witness
Since she was a young consular officer, Ambassador Ruth Davis has been setting the record straight.
By Katherine McIntire Peters
kpeters@govexec.com
mbassador Ruth Davis remembers a flood of phone calls in early February. Friends from across the country wanted to know about Secretary of State Colin Powell's pending speech before the United Nations. Powell was expected to detail Iraq's alleged violations of U.N. resolutions.
"Everyone I know, and not just in Washington-a lot of things are a Washington phenomenon-but people from all over the United States were calling me, sitting on the edge of their seats waiting for the secretary's speech," says Davis, director general of the Foreign Service.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, there has been a heightened interest in foreign affairs, Davis adds. And now, with crises in Iraq and the Korean peninsula, diplomacy has become a front-burner issue. These politically sensitive times have raised the stakes for the nearly 10,000 people in the Foreign Service. Yet their roles and missions haven't changed much since 1969, when an idealistic Davis headed off to Kinshasa, Zaire, as a young consular officer. Now, 34 years later, Davis says the mission is the same: Tell America's story.
Growing up in a military family, Davis always had a strong allegiance to her country, but it wasn't until she spent 15 months overseas that her deep love for the United States truly blossomed. During that time, in her junior and senior years of college, Davis lived in France and traveled to other distant lands. With frightening regularity, her encounters with foreigners revealed what she calls a misperception of America. French students had a negative view of America's capitalistic ways. African students questioned her devotion to a country that so blatantly discriminated against blacks.
"All countries have problems," Davis says."The point in America is that we make an effort to deal with our problems. I think the civil rights movement was one of the most significant movements in recent history. It took a problem and put it on the table to be dealt with."
Engaged in these philosophical discussions, Davis began to feel that she wanted to set the record straight and spread the American gospel.
After getting a master's degree in social work from the University of California at Berkeley, Davis signed up with the Foreign Service and became a consular officer. While in Zaire, Davis was aware that many of the people who came to the embassy for visas had never before met an American. She also was an authority figure with the power to say 'yes' or 'no' to visa applicants.
"I was not an African-American. I was an American," she says. "What you do and how you act conveys a large message and image of America."
In the following years, Davis had stints in Nairobi, Kenya; Tokyo; and Naples, Italy. In 1987, she became U.S. consul general in Barcelona, where she helped the Spanish government prepare for the 1992 winter Olympics. In 1992, after having helped her hometown, Atlanta, win a bid to host the 1996 summer games, she was named ambassador to the African nation of Benin.
Davis returned to the United States in 1995 to become principal deputy assistant secretary for consular affairs. In 1997, she was named director of the Foreign Service Institute, the State Department's training ground. It was there that Davis achieved one of her proudest accomplishments-establishing the School of Leadership and Management in late 1999.
The concept behind the school was simple-give Foreign Service officers leadership and management training throughout their careers, starting from their early days as junior officers all the way up to their time as senior officials or ambassadors.
"People have been saying ever since I came into the service that Foreign Service people don't know how to manage. They don't know how to lead," she says. "I, as director of the Foreign Service Institute, would be remiss if I came back 10 years after I retired and people were still mumbling that Foreign Service officers don't know how to manage."
Davis says the school is flourishing. Attendance is voluntary, but Davis says there is a plan to make it mandatory.
As she looks ahead, Davis says she wants to be remembered as the director general who changed the face of the Foreign Service. Principally, she wants the service to better reflect America's diversity. As of 2001, the Foreign Service included roughly 560 African-Americans, 420 Hispanics, 358 Asian-Americans and 43 American Indians.
"I want to be one of the movers," she says. "What I want in the next 10 years is to have this place look like America."
For more than 50 years, Defense historian Alfred Goldberg has had a front row seat for America's defining moments.
By Matthew Weinstock
mweinstock@govexec.com
lfred Goldberg commands an extraordinary view of Washington. From the bank of windows behind his desk in an Arlington, Va., office tower, the Defense Department's senior historian has a perfect line of sight to some of the country's greatest monuments. Goldberg's view goes far beyond the memorials to past presidents, however. Fifty years of historical research from the battlefields of Europe to the corridors of government have left him with unrivaled insight into the machinations of democracy and military power.
"I've been very lucky," Goldberg says. His career as a military historian began at the London headquarters of U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe during World War II. The office commanded the 8th and 9th Air Force in Western Europe and the 15th Air Force in Italy.
Those were exciting, fascinating times, Goldberg recalls. "I had access to the war room at the time, so I could see what was going on and what was likely to happen, and I even had access for a while to Eisenhower's war room."
It was a job Goldberg got by chance. Although he had done graduate work in history at Johns Hopkins University in his native Baltimore before joining the Army in 1942, the Army planned to give him a job in food service.
"I went in as a private, went to Officer Candidate School and was commissioned. After a while I wound up in Europe. I was about to be made the mess supervisor for the 8th Air Force in England, when just by chance I encountered an old friend from graduate school," Goldberg recalls.
That old friend was Leonard Kamsky, who worked in Eisenhower's war room. Goldberg hadn't seen him in years. "He asked me what I was doing. I told him I was being trained to be a mess supervisor. He said 'Do you want to be a mess supervisor?' I said, 'No,'" Goldberg says laughing as he emphasizes the "no." Kamsky made a trip to the personnel office and soon Goldberg had a new job, as a historian.
By 1946, Goldberg had been promoted to captain. He left active duty for the Air Force Reserve in 1946, taking a job as senior historian in the U.S. Air Force Historical Division, and he returned to Johns Hopkins, where he earned his Ph.D. in history in 1950. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren picked Goldberg to serve as historian on the commission he headed to investigate the assassination.
Goldberg's work on the Warren Commission proved to be one of the most demanding periods of his career. "I worked about as hard as I've ever worked in my life," he says. "There was a great deal of pressure to complete the work." Goldberg co-wrote the commission's report, released 10 months after the assassination, that concluded Kennedy was gunned down by a lone assassin. It remains frustrating, but not surprising, to him that so many people continue to believe various theories about conspiracies behind the assassination.
"Most people never read the report, so they don't even know what it really says," Goldberg says. "They just know that they can't believe that [Lee Harvey] Oswald could have done this, so it must have been the result of a conspiracy. The interesting thing is that the day before the assassination, when Kennedy was in Fort Worth, the conversation turned to protection, and he himself made the observation that somebody with a rifle up in a building could shoot him any time. That's in the Warren Commission report."
Goldberg returned to the Air Force Historical Division following the release of the commission's report, but left in 1965 for a senior staff job at RAND, a research corporation. In 1973 he returned to government, as senior historian for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he works today, overseeing several major history projects.
"The thing that distinguishes Goldberg is his extraordinarily long tenure and unmatched breadth of experience," says retired Army Brig. Gen. David Armstrong, historian for the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What's more, his experience is that of an insider, Armstrong says.
So what does this eminent historian think about the world we live in today and the future of American power?
"We have a bird's-eye view of the past, but not the present," Goldberg says. While historians could be expected to have a more-informed understanding of the world we live in, they aren't necessarily any better prepared for the future than the rest of us. "Forecasting in as unstable a world environment as we have today is an impossibility," he says.
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