Q&A > David Johnson

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What inspired or motivated you to become a diplomat?

Not to be cute, but it was an attractive profession, it suited my interests, and it allowed me to strike out on my own. I was young—23—and at the time didn’t know some of the family costs of that, but it was, nonetheless, a very good bargain. My entry was at one of the episodic times that the Department rediscovers its needs to better understand economics. I was a Treasury employee at the time, a bank examiner, I was fluent in and very interested in economics, and so was a more attractive applicant than I might otherwise have been. I’m also an example of why the U.S. Foreign Service is unique among its counterparts and also why it could be much more diverse without tremendous effort: I had never been out of the country and didn’t speak a language other than English. The Department felt it needed what skills I had and would see that I was schooled in those I didn’t have.

Who was your best boss and why?

Joseph E. Lake; he was the Operations Center’s Director when I was Deputy Director. He understood that I was really interested in being a manager and leader, had thought and read a lot about how to do it, and he gave me room and opportunity. At the time, he was preoccupied with a bevy of compartmented programs driven by the latter stages of the Cold War and didn’t have a lot of time to manage the Operations Center, so it was largely mine to run. I learned a great deal during those 24 months and had a wonderful time leading some of the Department’s finest officers, many of whom are the Department’s senior leaders today. It was also good preparation for the rest of my career, since I never again had any real, day-to-day oversight in any subsequent job. Joe is the last supervisor who actually wrote my EER, and I had another 22 years to go in my career.

What would you tell your a-100 self?

Don’t take yourself too seriously but take your work, and the opportunities it affords, very seriously.

Describe a day you felt you made a difference.

December 13, 1981—This is the day martial law was declared in Poland in order to crush the Solidarity Labor Union Movement. At the time, I was posted to Embassy Berlin, the U.S. Embassy to the German Democratic Republic, a/k/a East Germany. One of my Embassy Berlin colleagues, whom I knew from my first Operations Center tour, had also arrived in the summer of 1981, and had earlier been posted at the U.S. Consulate General in Poznan, Poland.
Since language training, we had been talking about visiting Poznan for him to see his friends and for me to see Poland, and how different and more welcoming it was than East Germany. We left on the evening of December 11, in light snow, had a delightful and unseasonably warm Saturday exploring Poznan, and had a party for his friends, at the Consulate, that night, and then we all bedded down, us and our guests, at the Consulate.
When we woke up that morning, our Polish friends all looked like they had just lost a parent, and they began to explain to us the tragedy that had befallen their country. The phones had been cut at the consulate, so my colleague and I went around town looking for a working phone or telex at the town’s hotels and post offices to reach out to the Department, since we were quite certain that no one in Washington knew anything about what was happening in Western Poland. At the same time, our spouses were attempting to use the consulate’s radio to reach out to Embassy Warsaw. None of us had any luck.
By early afternoon, we decided that we should depart while we still could, since we couldn’t reach anyone to provide any news. The daughter of the then Deputy Secretary of State, Walter Stoessel, was a teacher in Poznan, so we confirmed she was fine and did not want to depart with us and then headed back to Berlin.
About ten minutes out of town, it became clear that we were going to be meeting significant elements of the Polish army, on a two-lane road, headed east to deploy into Warsaw. We divided up counting and observing responsibilities – one of us counted tanks, another ACV’s, another artillery tubes, and another trucks. And we observed anything we thought unusual, including a significant number of vehicles that appeared purposefully to have been driven off the side of the road and stuck in snow embankments.
When we arrived at the border, we were quickly waved through, likely because the Polish authorities were glad to be rid of us. At Frankfurt an der Oder, the first town in East Germany, we found a night Post Office and called the Embassy to report in as well as to give the news about the Deputy Secretary’s daughter so the Ambassador could call and reassure him that she was well.
Then we drove directly to the Embassy and started writing, sending out, if I recall correctly, a handful of cables before retiring for the night. You don’t do that in any other line of work! 

What has a colleague done for you that made you wish all of us had a colleague like that?

This is not a ‘nothing comes to mind.’ It’s more like too many things that aren’t individual stand outs but are part of a fabric of engagement and friendship over decades, but here’s one that’s unusual:
From 1993 until 1997, Mike McCurry, the spokesman for the Department and then the White House was my boss, first when I was Director of the Press Office and then as NSC Spokesman.
In 2017, Joe Scarborough was on his ‘Morning Joe’ program talking about the habits of the current administration and its casual relationship with the truth. He then started an anecdote about someone who was testifying before the House for the Clinton administration, whom the late Congressman Lantos confronted and said, and Scarborough quoted: “You have done nothing but lie. You lie so much you should just go kill yourself.” Scarborough went on to say that he couldn’t remember the person’s name but then, suddenly, said ‘his name was David Johnson.’
A friend who heard it called me up, and I listened to the online re-broadcast. I confirmed through a friend at the Clinton Presidential library that I was, indeed, the only ‘David Johnson’ who had worked at the White House during the Clinton Administration.
I reached out to Scarborough’s producer, explained the situation, and asked for a retraction. They wouldn’t budge. I was apoplectic, having just been damned on national television for something with which I had nothing to do.
I hadn’t talked to Mike in more than five years, but I emailed and then called him, explained the situation, and asked him if he could help.
He did. And as a result, there was an on-air retraction the following day, a true rarity.

What was the mistake you learned the most from?

In 1987, as a line negotiator, I drafted a first-person for my Ambassador about the state of the negotiations. I made it ‘only’ for the Assistant Secretary but failed to make it STADIS, so she was the only one who saw it in the Department, but it otherwise went all over the interagency. My interagency colleagues were livid they were blindsided and wanted to throw me under the nearest bus.
Flash forward 12 years; I’m the Ambassador now, and I have to make a set of recommendations on an operational matter that could put the Pentagon into low-earth orbit. I’m thinking about when to send it in but decide first to call my military advisor, ask him to read it, and then to email a copy to the LTG to whom he reports for a reaction. He does. The General is content with the recommendations. It goes in front channel. I get the instructions I need and want.

What was your best and worst experience working with the interagency?

Best and Worst: I was Afghan Coordinator from April 2002 until July 2003. Worst: The first four months, State and DoD were fighting over whether to invade Iraq. Since that debate could not be articulated in any open NSC meeting, they used the Afghan meetings as a proxy, and for all practical purposes, my head as the soccer ball. It was brutal, and truth was the first casualty. Best: Beginning in September, when the Iraq decision had clearly been made, the inter-agency fighting subsided, and we did some of our best work.

What is the one tour you would recommend FSOs consider?

The Operations Center as early in your career as you can. It educates you about how the Department works with the interagency and with posts abroad, it teaches you the alphabet soup of the USG, and it potentially gives you a seat for some of the most important foreign policy issues the country confronts. But most important, it gives you a large, highly-skilled group of peers—much larger than in any other office or embassy—with whom you will work throughout your career. There’s nothing like the bonding that takes place in the middle of the night during a crisis. Oh, and it’s where I met my spouse. 

What is your leadership philosophy?

Know your team well, their strengths as well as their other qualities. Give them your backing, and make sure they understand that they have it. Prepare them well. And then give them the autonomy they need to go out and do their work.

What tips would you give a first-time manager?

Treat managing like you would any other skill. Become a student of it. Read the literature. Talk to people who you think do it well—and listen. Don’t treat it like the proverbial fool who thinks he knows how to run a restaurant because he’s eaten at one.
Be sure you know your team. Go see them in their workplace and in their environment and learn from what you see and hear.
Give continuous feedback—bad news doesn’t age well and good news shouldn’t be kept for a special occasion. But also have a formal sit-down episodically to really go over the waterfront.
And if someone is keeping the team from performing, do everything you can to fix the problem, and, if you can’t fix it, remove them. It’s better for everyone concerned, especially including the individual who departs.

What would you change about the State Department?

I would encourage everyone concerned to quit with this constant obsession about reinventing the Department and such issues as ‘too many clearances’ and other nonsense. But I would also formalize a training regimen for the Service, perhaps modeled on the Harvard Business School’s ‘Case Study’ program. Heretofore, we have been hobbled by the need for a ‘training float,’ more resources, etc. If we’ve learned anything in the last dozen weeks, it’s that you can do a lot of distance learning, including seminar studies, without being anywhere near your professor or your peers.

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