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“Now, I wonder what he meant by that.”—Metternich,
on being informed of the death of a rival diplomat on the eve of
the Congress of Vienna
I’ve been searching the Web for an institution that honors
diplomats—a diplomat’s hall of fame, if you will—and it’s
been tough going. I’ve turned up halls of fame for dentists
and chambers of commerce that count diplomacy among the characteristics
required of inductees. I’ve found college sports halls of
fame that recount exploits accomplished against the “Diplomats”
of Franklin & Marshall. And I’ve turned up rival halls of
fame for players of a board game called “Diplomacy.”
But it appears that no set of town or city fathers has yet determined
to build The Diplomacy Hall of Fame (“And unwind at the end
of your tour with an aperitif in the Richelieu Cafe!”) as
a way to return traffic to Main Street.
It’s probably just as well. However essential diplomats are
to the proper management of the world, their credit card receipts,
boiled shirtfronts, nibbled pencils, top hats, liver pills, and
other memorabilia of suasion, cunning, resolution, and patience
are hardly likely to draw the kind of crowds that the National Freshwater
Fishing Hall of Fame regularly brings to Hayward, Wisconsin, for
example.
This is not to say that diplomatic lives are necessarily dull and
unheroic, but that they are necessarily hidden. Successful diplomacy—whether
it’s being practiced by Raul Wallenberg or von Ribbentrop—depends
precisely on avoiding the transparent celebrity that is the natural
right of pioneering oral surgeons, businessmen of the year, and
the man who pickled a muskie in a Jim Beam bottle.
Machiavelli, who is said to have invented modern diplomacy in his
“Advice to Raffaello Girolami When He Went As Ambassador To
the Emperor,” there instructs his protégé to study the local
prince well, to listen to gossip, to keep his own counsel, to send
frequent reports, to host “banquets and entertainments,”
to find ways to make repeated information in those frequent reports
seem fresh, and should the need arise “to conceal a fact with
words, [to] do it in such a way that it does not become known or,
if it does become known, that you have a ready and quick defense.”
This is not a role to be played by Clint Eastwood, but Henry Kissinger;
not Russell Crowe, but George Kennan, the real-life exemplary diplomat
who conceived the West’s containment policy toward the Soviet
Union in a celebrated 1947 Foreign Affairs article under
the nom de plume “X,” a renaming so self-effacing
that it may constitute the consummate diplomatic act.
Kennan would certainly be in my Diplomacy Hall of Fame, and not
simply because containment worked, but because he wrote only one
memoir and it’s well done— striking oddities in diplomatic
self-account. George Marshall would be there, too, for saving Europe;
and Raul Wallenberg, Angelo Cardinal Roncalli, and Chiune Sugihara,
for saving lives. And I’d find a place for Talleyrand, because
whatever his (many) faults, attention must be paid to a man who
survived diplomatic service under six successive French tyrannies,
including the revolution, Napoleon, and the Bourbon restoration.
(Once asked who was winning a battle in the streets of Paris, Talleyrand
replied, “We are.” “But who are ‘we’?”
an aide countered. “That I shall tell you tomorrow,”
said the ever-discreet Talleyrand.)
And finally Dag Hammarskjold, the U.N. secretary general who is
less well known today for his distinguished diplomatic career than
for his diary—“a sort of white book concerning my negotiations
with myself—and with God,” was the way Hammarskjold referred
to it. Posthumously published (Hammarskjold died in a plane crash
in the war-torn Congo in 1961), Markings earned its late
author comparisons with Pascal and Kierkegaard, sold 450,000 copies
in 18 months, and has been reprinted so many times that Knopf no
longer keeps count of editions.
A slim, even anorexic, volume, Markings is the kind of work—tense,
puzzling, pained, overwrought—that you’d expect from
a lonely, driven, and often exhausted admirer of early Christian
mystics, a man who made a moral point of apologizing if eloquence
inadvertently crept into his expressions of diplomacy by day, and
who wrote to God at night if he had the strength. Markings
was a slog when I picked it up in 1964, and it’s a slog today,
maybe one of those best-sellers that are bought not to be read but
because the purchase of them brings the soul some comfort.
Whether this is so doesn’t matter. Nor does it seem to matter
at this date whether Hammarskjold was the martyr to peace that he
was made out to be after his death shocked the world. (He received
a posthumous Nobel.) What gets him into my Hall in any event is
that he carried two books to the Congo, and they were Martin Buber’s
I and Thou and Thomas a Kempis’s Imitation of Christ.
In Leopoldville, he had them at his bedside, where any chambermaid
could have seen them and seen who he really was. Talk about indiscreet.
Our story on NATO Ambassador Nicholas Burns begins here.
Ben
Birnbaum
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