Keen envoys get egg on their faces

Article in the Washington Post circa 1970

The peace movement

                                  By Andre Jaquet

Keenness was my second name when I was a junior diplomat responsible for press liaison at the South African Embassy in Washington in the mid-1970s. Remember, those were tough times and all of us wondered whether there wasn’t a better way to earn a living. Like, for instance, being a human cannon ball in a circus. Let me share with you a cameo of my existence at the time.

“There are definitely some advantages in this job and I must enjoy those rather than mope”, I mused. After all here I am, lazily sipping a super South African wine on the terrace of a ritzy restaurant on the Potomac. The evening is balmy and the lovely cherry blossoms compete mildly with wafts of Chanel Number 5.  My Ambassador has asked me to arrange a private, off the record meeting for him with Meg Greenfield of the Washington Post who is on her way to South Africa for an in-depth look at the aftermath of the Soweto riots. She and I are waiting for the arrival of our guest.

Then His Excellency rises to welcome her and without warning launches into a harangue listing the wrongs done in the United States to African Americans by successive white governments. Meg reads the dismay on my face and later over coffee asks me what she will really discover when she travels to South Africa. The best I can do is to mutter: “You will find some things better than you think and some worse”. I was quite proud of the little phrase I had come up with on the spur of the moment.

Five weeks later, the cover of the magazine section of the Washington Post carried a banner headline: “SOUTH AFRICA: IT’S WORSE THAN YOU THINK”.