Interviews > Richard Boucher
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Can you recall a moment at the podium when your words had a powerful or surprising impact?
There are times when we didn't say things that had impact. Right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we got a message from President Bush, “no gloating.” And so we were very careful at the podium not to do anything that would be interpreted as gloating because the goal was to avoid putting Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev in a bind. So it was what we didn't say that left open the door to a more measured response.
What did your time as spokesperson teach you about being a better FSO?
I think that there are a lot of jobs where you're “feeding the Beast” and are on autopilot for a lot of your tasks. Even in these instances, it is important to remember to keep your constituency on board and happy and informed and more or less with you, even if they're hitting you on the head. This is true working with Congress, it’s true for commercial or business folks, it’s true in every Embassy that is dealing with constituencies. Therefore, you focus efforts to do everything you can to achieve bigger policy goals. And so, when I was on the podium, I told the Secretary if it helps the policy for me to talk, I talk. If it helps the policy for me to shut up, I shut up. With whatever problem, figuring out the right answer or the solution or the negotiated solution is the easy part. It's getting people to carry out the solution or the proposal that's the hard part. And so the press spokesman job, the Congressional Liaison jobs are about molding a constituency and getting them to support you. You aim to create an atmosphere in which policy can take place, whether it's by saying something, taking certain actions, or trying to find inducements to create a desired political atmosphere. This is a principle to follow that is important no matter where you work.
What's the most frustrating aspect of working in Washington DC? What was positive about it? And then also do you think it's a necessary box checking for any FSO?
Because of the bureaucratic requirements of Washington, the meetings, the memos, the process, and the deadlines from the Secretariat (7th floor principals), you spend a lot of your time in Washington meeting bureaucratic requirements and it's really hard to remember that your job is not to get the memo up by 6:00 p.m. without any typos. Your job is not to use commas correctly. Your job is to achieve policy goals on behalf of the United States. It can get so oppressive that it's hard to remember what your job is when you're patching a call to the Secretary in the Ops Center or when you're finishing a set of talking points. The easiest thing to do is just copy the last set of talking points and I'm afraid that's what happens all too often. But it is important to give yourself a moment to sit down and ask yourself ‘is this the right thing to say at this moment to achieve what we're trying to achieve?’ It’s hard to do that and you can often turn your goals into bureaucratic goals instead of policy goals. The second thing is when you get to Washington you learn very quickly that you need support for the policy. You need everybody on board and that means the Defense Department, Capitol Hill, AIPAC or whatever constituency or interest group that cares about the policy you are working on. The worst sin during any negotiation a negotiator can make is to negotiate an agreement for which you don’t have support back home, like say a peace treaty with the Taliban. And it's hard. It's hard to know when you have it. You don't always know if you do, but if you go out and propose something and you can't sell it back home, you look like a total jerk. I've done that a couple times. You have got to make sure the domestic support is there for whatever you want to do overseas and that's where outreach, working the press, speeches to constituency groups, meeting NGOs, it all matters to build this support.
Even at an early stage in your career, you can get to know Congressional staffers, folks in the interagency, get to know people at your level—this outreach will help you when you need to build support later; this outreach and relationship building is something officers can and should be doing every day at every level.
How did you manage intense jobs? How did you manage yourself?
It is critical to get control of your schedule and aim to do what you want to do, not what people tell you you should do. When you are in Assistant Secretary type jobs and even in a lot of desk officer jobs, it may seem that your whole job is to go to meetings. One of the things I did in Hong Kong was I sat down with my office manager every month and we put stuff on my calendar that I wanted to do—for example, I would say that I want to go see a labor leader, a CEO, a politician. I might say I want to meet one of them every week. It would go on my calendar before all the other crap started getting put on and so the answer would be, “no I don’t have time for that” or “Sorry. I can't do that or we'll have to reschedule.” So things that I wanted to do got on the calendar first. Second, I tell people I practiced “American zen” which has elements of “ I don't give a shit.” It's not completely true, but it's mostly true. You have to say I'm responsible for what I do and what I put into the process and I have to be aware of how it turns out, but I'm not always the one responsible for how it turns out. Sometimes there are other factors. So, you know, you keep working at it, but you don't say I'm a failure, or I lost, just look at each setback as the start of another stage. It is important that you don't think that every setback is a judgment on your ability.
What would you tell your five years into the Foreign Service self?
Get away from group think. This is really hard sometimes and at every single level you should be the one that says “hey, I tried that before and it didn't work. Let's do something different, here's an idea.” We're so bad at just processing the same proposals time after time. We're encouraged, in fact we're trained not to be too imaginative, not to rock the boat, not to disturb a tried and true approach or process. We should remember that big breakthroughs happen when there's an environment that allows it. And so even if you can't solve or negotiate a resolution of a specific issue, you can change the environment—whether it's through working with press, through developing economic incentives and pressures, or just through the politicking of it. You can create an environment where it becomes possible to solve problems that have been “impossible.”
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