With President Clinton and Amb. Derek Shearer at the Clinton-Yeltsin Summit in Helsinki
An American Tune tells my story as an American diplomat for nearly thirty years in Europe and Africa during the most critical conjunctures of the post-World War II decades. It tracks the depths of the East-West confrontation we call the Cold War, its end and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Few places experienced the Cold War more intensely than Finland where I served twice. During assignments In Greece and Italy, urban terrorists operated freely, nearly unchecked. I was in London when Reagan triumphally returned from Moscow after signing a missile agreement with the Soviets. I was the American embassy’s Counselor for Economic Affairs in South Africa during the tumultuous days of that country’s transition to democracy, when Nelson Mandela assumed the reins of power, and apartheid with all its atrocities finally ended. I stood outside the room where President Bill Clinton, met one-on-one with Russian President Yeltsin, to reach an agreement that opened the door for NATO expansion into the Baltics. I organized embassy support for the final negotiation that stopped NATO’s bombing in Serbia and brought Milosevic’s role in the Balkans to a close. An American Tune tells about these times through my eyes.
Much has changed since those decades, but perhaps not so much as one might think. Certainly, Russia’s aggression and Ukraine’s turmoil undermine the security and confidence in Central Europe of the 2020s and remind us that history runs deep and still intertwines with the present. The same might be true of today’s State Department. Years pass quickly by, but many of the same issues the Foreign Service wrestled with then – both internally and diplomatically – have not disappeared.