Franklin Pierce Huddle Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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During this period, when you did some traveling, was that when you took up photography, or was that later? I want to talk a moment about it and then later we'll show some of your photographs.
I took up photography when I was traveling as a graduate student. I was offered a job [as] a contract worker for National Geographic, shooting pictures in far western Nepal, and then later Corsica, actually. There were people who [made a living] taking pictures, but I had a girlfriend that wanted me to get a straight job that paid regular wages. So I took the Foreign Service exam instead.
And you passed it, obviously.
Yes.
And never looked back, I guess?
I looked sideways a couple of times. When I first came in, I was an academic, and I wasn't sure I wanted this -- to sit in an office from nine to five, and the different culture. There's always an adaptation. But the Foreign Service work was inherently interesting, and every two or three years you had a new job, a new boss, a new location, often new languages, new housing, and so on. So in a sense, you had all the joys of being able to job to new companies and yet get credit for working for the same employer.
Language has also been important, both in your career and also in your academic work. If you were a linguist at one time or another, you would have mastered a number of languages?
I had learned them in linguistics, and I had Arabic and German, and a smattering of some other languages when I came in. And the Foreign Service teaches you languages. They're essential skills for your job. Unfortunately, I'm one of these people ... Shakespeare had it right. He said, "One language drives out another, like one nail drives out another." So whenever I learn a new language ... Now, I use Russian all the time in my job, and I can barely speak in Thai to my wife, even though I used to be the interpreter for the State Department in Thai.
As someone trained in the academic world, but who chose the Foreign Service, what do you see as the prerequisites for being able to be a Foreign Service officer? What skills does it take, what temperament, and so on? Compare that to the academic life, as you knew it.
Both of them allow for a wide range of personalities and skills. In academics, if you don't have originality, and you don't have, especially in modern-day graduate student work, the ability to run a subject into the ground, as it were, it's probably going to be hard slogging. You have to like sitting in a library, if you're in history, for ten hours a day.
The Foreign Service, on the other hand, demands a lot of different kinds of skills. You have to be good at negotiating. You have to know, for example, that when you look right eye to right eye at somebody, that's truthfulness. Left eye to left eye is deception. "I have a great, new, used car for you, but we're doing really well." There are many skills like that. And then conversation of skills, interpersonal skills. You have to have leadership and management skills, which you may not need in academics. Both, of course, will have substantive knowledge and intellectual skills.
The Foreign Service is much wider in the sense that it melds a whole raft of skills that is fairly hard to get together in one person. We have good training programs, and it's a pretty difficult exam to start with, and I think they look for some things.
I guess it's very important that you actually understand your own country before you can understand other countries, in terms of our values and our history, and so on?
Yes, very well said. If you don't know what the United State is about ... I just would like to say, I've been to all fifty states, and for many years. I even drove one weekend to Kentucky to get that fiftieth state. That's emblematic. You have to have a sympathy for and understanding for ... it's probably a little bit of a crude analogy, but in a way, you're like a lawyer representing a client, and you have to know where the client is coming from, what he's about, what she or he needs in life, and so on.
We come back regularly in the Foreign Service. One reason I'm back here now is for a conference. But we come back every couple of years, just so you don't wind up being one of these people that suddenly becomes like a wealthy expatriate, disconnected from your home country.
Once you're in a place, and we'll talk a little about some of the places that you've been, how do you get a sense of the terrain? How do you prepare, and then learn that environment you're in? Obviously, if you were still in an academic, you would go to the library a lot, assuming you were doing distant research. But what do you do as an ambassador or as a charge d'affaires, or whatever?
Let me give you Tajikistan, for example. While I started relearning Russian, brushing up on Tajik, which is similar to Farsi, the language of Iran, I started reading some of the standard books on the area, reading cables and longer papers -- some academic, some in-house papers -- on their country. Once you're there, there's a whole welter of things that you may do. Everybody has different ideas. I get out and I literally walk around in the streets and pop up the shopkeepers and ask them, "How are sales doing?" Or I'll go to a movie theater and see a movie. Or I go to the zoo. The first week I was there, I went to the zoo, watching people. How they relate to animals, and how they treat their animals tells me something. I look at the signs, are there freshly painted signs? That's usually a sign that the economy is actually doing okay.
There are a thousand little tricks like that that you do the first week or two. One of the things that you do, too, is to keep learning. The first week or two, you'll notice many different things. You'll notice that the roofs are painted blue in Japan, instead of, say, white, or red like in other countries. After a couple of weeks, it's just part of the landscape, and you don't notice it anymore.
The trick is to ask new people as they come in, "What did you find, Harry, that was different in Tajikistan when you first arrived at the airport? What struck you?" By asking people like that, you can continue that learning experience for years to come.
Next page: The State Department and its Culture
See photos of Tajikistan by Ambassador ("Pancho") Huddle
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