Ambassador Laurence Silberman passed away on Sunday, October 2, after serving on the DC Appeals Court for decades following an illustrious career in several Republican administrations. I never knew him as a politician or a judge, but only as President Gerald Ford's Ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1975-1976. Ambassador Silberman was abrasive, opinionated, controversial, and outspoken but also open, honest and in many ways quite admirable. Needless to say, he did not get on well with most of the career Foreign Service staff. Here are my memories of him.
Ambassador
Laurence Silberman.
Ambassador Larry Silberman arrived at post on May 26,
1975, about three months after Ambassador Toon's
departure for his new posting in Israel. The appointment of Silberman was
controversial and somewhat unexpected.
Balding, overweight, and wearing glasses, Silberman looked much older
than his 39 years and fit the standard description of a conservative Republican
lawyer who knew the ways of Washington. Silberman had no foreign policy experience,
but he had lots of political clout and had already served in many responsible
positions in the Nixon and Ford Administrations. In October 1973 he had been named Deputy
Attorney General after the Saturday Night Massacre in which Attorney General Eliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney
General William Ruckelshaus had refused a presidential order to fire Special
Prosecutor Archibald Cox and were themselves fired. Silberman reportedly did a good job under the
new Attorney General William Saxbe, but with the change of
Administrations, both Saxbe and Silberman left the Justice Department, Saxbe to
replace Daniel Patrick Moynihan as Ambassador to India and Silberman, at first,
to become the next Special Trade Representative. This appointment was derailed, however, when
Finance Committee Chairman Russell B. Long raised
objections over Silberman's lack of trade experience and said that he would
agree to confirmation only if he could name Silberman's deputy. Silberman would not agree to this and so he,
too, got a vacant Ambassadorship -- Yugoslavia.
The career Foreign Service, by and large, took a dim
view of the Silberman appointment. Most
considered Yugoslavia
a country that demanded a professional who was already familiar with the ins
and outs of Eastern European diplomacy.
Yugoslavia was not normally considered a post for political appointees,
particularly those with no prior foreign affairs experience. This was not Silberman's only problem,
however, in the eyes of the career Service.
The key concern most people had was that Silberman often behaved like a
bull in a china shop. Although
brilliant, he could be very aggressive and abrasive in his manner, and the fact
that he was a neocon and in tight with Donald
Rumsfeld did not help his cause in a Department that was largely liberal
and democratic in outlook.
For his part, it was clear that Silberman was not
particularly enamored of the professional Foreign Service. Even before coming out to post, he had
crossed swords with European Bureau Assistant
Secretary Arthur Hartman and Counselor
Helmut Sonnenfeldt,
whose policy toward Yugoslavia
he thought too accommodationist.
His relations with the Eastern European Desk were also strained. On arrival at post, he immediately sensed
that most of the staff, particularly Acting Political Counselor Ken Hill and DCM Dudley
Miller, were not on his side. In
addition, his wife, Ricky, told him that she
was having difficulties in dealing with the Foreign Service wives at post,
largely because of the uncooperative attitude of Pat
Miller, the DCM's wife. This
seemed to confirm his impression that the professionals were hostile to him at
every level.
As for me, I was blissfully unaware of all this,
working away in my Executive floor office, operating under the assumption that
all would go on as before. I briefly
introduced myself to Ambassador Silberman and he seemed to be a nice enough person
as far as I was concerned. The first
night after his arrival, as I walked home from work, I could still see him
through the window in his office, puffing away on his pipe and reading
classified documents late into the night.
Not being as conscious of the intelligence threat then as I was later,
it didn't occur to me to tell him to draw the curtains. Undoubtedly, the UDBA was reading everything
over his shoulder.
I soon found out that my own professional life was
about to undergo a sudden change, however, when a couple of weeks after the
Ambassador had arrived, Ricky Silberman poked her head in my office, looked
around and then said to her companion, as if I were so much furniture,
"Yes, I think this will do nicely," and then left without further
explanation. The next day, I was told to
get my things together and move down to Political. My office was to be taken over by Brandon Sweitzer, a
friend of the Silbermans, who had worked as his assistant before. Brandon, who was in his 30's, was a nice enough
sort of guy, but also had no foreign policy experience, and, strictly speaking,
could not be appointed to a career position in the Embassy. But this did not stop Silberman and in came Brandon. There was no room in Political, so I wound up
in a vacant office on the landing between Political and the Executive Office.
Soon, rumors began to spread that
Silberman actually wanted Brandon to be his
Deputy Chief of Mission. I didn't believe this, but then, about a
month after Brandon had first taken up residence
in my former office, Ambassador Silberman called a staff meeting in the tank,
and, with a flush-faced Dudley Miller in
tow, announced to a stunned staff that Dudley
would be leaving within the next few days.
This did not go down well with the Embassy staff, who gave Dudley a farewell party to remember. Several dozen of us also accompanied him and
Pat out to the airport, clapping and cheering as they boarded their plane.
Shortly after Dudley departed, Brandon, who had already taken over Don Tice's residence
at the Marble Palace,
moved into Dudley's office and became DCM in
fact if not in name. I got to know Brandon over the next year
or so and actually liked him. He was in
an impossible situation. As far as I
could tell, he did very little work that could traditionally be construed as
within the purview of a DCM. He confided
to me that he had really been hoping that Silberman would be posted to Germany. As it was, he spent much of his spare time
learning German and planning to start a business venture in Vienna.
Basically, the rest of the Embassy just worked around him. In any event, Silberman didn't really need a
DCM -- he wanted to do everything himself.
Mark Palmer arrived as
the new Political Counselor that summer and was enough of a political animal to
know immediately which way the wind blew.
He urged all of us to make our peace with the Ambassador and to serve
him to the best of our ability, a suggestion that I took to heart, as did most of
the political section. Some, however,
like Ken Hill could not and departed post
early. Ken felt, with much
justification, that Ambassador Silberman had unfairly targeted him and actually
enjoyed bullying those subordinates who disagreed with him. As it was, Silberman wrote a scathing review
of Ken’s performance -- accusing him of insubordination -- that set back his
promotion chances for many years.
Fortunately, Ken's career was not hurt in the long run, and he ended up
as Ambassador to Bulgaria
in the early 1990s. Others, like Sheldon Krys, did their best to lighten the
atmosphere and unite the Embassy staff behind the Ambassador, and as a result,
much of the friction that had been developing within the Embassy gradually
disappeared.
The same cannot be said, however, for Silberman's
relations with the Department. While he
had the support of the White House and the conservative media (Evans and Novak
in particular), his name was mud with Hartman and Sonnenfeldt and much of the
State bureaucracy. Things got so bad,
that I even saw one cable go out from Silberman to a couple of leading lights
in the Department, in answer to an instruction, with the curt reply: "Kiss
my ass."
Silberman's relations may have been bad with the
Department, but they were even worse with the Yugoslavs. Silberman's direct and abrasive approach
brought out the worst in them, particularly the cosseted Communist elite, who
were arrogant, used to being toadied by diplomats and not at all pleased when
spoken to bluntly. The principal driver
of tensions between the Yugoslavs and Silberman was the arrest of Laszlo Toth, a naturalized American citizen, on
the last day of President Ford’s visit to Yugoslavia in August 1975. Toth, who was in the sugar manufacturing
business, had returned to Yugoslavia
to look into business opportunities with local firms. Instead, he was arrested in an UDBA
operation, accused of espionage and sentenced to seven years in jail. Toth was not a spy, just a victim of Yugoslav
paranoia, in a society that in Tito's final years was slipping increasingly
into authoritarianism and xenophobia.
The State Department wanted to take a restrained approach, hoping to
solve the problem quietly, but Silberman would have none of it. He beat the Yugoslavs over the head with the
Toth case every chance he got. The
Yugoslavs were infuriated, even more so because they had been caught out and
Silberman was completely in the right.
Eventually, Toth was freed after enduring almost a
year in prison, apparently through a personal decision by President Tito.
Silberman released a statement crowing about his victory and criticizing
the Eastern European Desk for its lack of aggressiveness in seeking Toth's
release. The next day, Tito made a statement of his own, personally
criticizing Silberman for his behavior and leading to rumors that the
Ambassador might be declared Persona Non-Grata.
In the event, Silberman was not PNG'd, although he was shunned by the
Yugoslav establishment for the rest of his tour. Many in the Department believed that Silberman
had gotten his comeuppance. Personally,
I thought he was right to adopt the stand he did. Sometimes, you just have to call a spade a
spade. Most of the U.S. media also agreed
with this view, with Malcolm Browne of the
New York Times and Dusko Doder of the
Washington Post emphatic in their approval of his actions. President Ford
also came out foursquare behind him, so that was that.
I was not involved in the Toth case, but during my
final year in Belgrade,
I did find myself working more and more with the Ambassador. Silberman did not like to use Yugoslav
interpreters for his meetings and as I was one of the few officers who could
speak Serbo-Croatian well enough to interpret for him and take notes at the
same time, I found myself accompanying him to quite a few high-level meetings,
at least until the big freeze-out began.
I recall one particularly interesting meeting between the Ambassador and
Yugoslav Minister of Defense Nikola Ljubičić, during which
we discussed the details of an agreement for TOW missile sales to the
Yugoslavs. Despite an increasing
divergence in US and Yugoslav foreign policies, the USG was anxious to provide
the Yugoslavs with sophisticated defensive weaponry, in order to provide some
sort of deterrent to the Soviets, should Tito die suddenly and the Soviets be
tempted to intervene. Of course, we
didn't say any of this out loud, but the Yugoslavs understood and negotiations
went ahead fairly quickly. The
Ambassador's bluntness often got him into trouble, however. At one meeting with Ljubičić, the
Yugoslavs raised some sort of trivial objection to a part of the sale
agreement, at which point the Ambassador replied, "Well, then, I guess the
sale is off." Stunned, I asked him
if he really wanted to say this.
"Translate it," he replied.
I did and it was the Yugoslavs' turn to be stunned. Later, the Ambassador realized he had been
too harsh and smoothed things over. As
it was, an Evans and Novak column explaining the real reasons why we were
willing to sell TOWs to the Yugoslavs nearly derailed negotiations again. We were still discussing terms when I left Belgrade in July of 1976.
Ambassador Silberman was impressed with a couple of
Airgrams I had done on my trips to Montenegro and Kosovo and as a result, when
he decided to visit Montenegro, he was very receptive to Mark Palmer's
suggestion that I accompany as note taker and general factotum. It was good that I did. Our first stop in Montenegro was the Miločer Hotel near Sveti Stefan. Ambassador and Mrs. Silberman and I had a
great dinner at a local restaurant and spent the evening walking around the
port, enjoying life. It was one of the
few times I ever saw the Silbermans in relatively normal circumstances and we
all got on well together. The next
morning, we were in the breakfast room, getting ready for the new day when a
rather ratty-looking Yugoslav man came over to our table and began
talking. It was clear that he was not
quite right in the head and had some consular grievance against the
Embassy. I gave the Ambassador and Ricky
the high sign to get back to their room and offered to stay with our
"guest" and get his full story.
I interviewed him at length and then told him that we would be in touch
with him soon. He became belligerent, in
an unhinged sort of way, and said he wanted to talk to the Ambassador. I left, on the pretext that I would find out
if this could be done. Instead, I went
to the front desk and asked the concierge to call the police. I then went up to the Ambassador's room and
told him what had happened. The
Ambassador was in an agitated state, mainly out of concern for Ricky and he was
afraid that this nut case might actually get violent. I went out into the hall to wait for the
police, while the Ambassador locked himself and Ricky in their room. After about a forty-minute wait, the police
finally showed up and escorted our deranged Yugoslav consular case out of the
hotel. After that, the rest of the Montenegro
trip, while pleasant, was strictly an anti-climax.
The Ambassador, thinking about the incident later,
concluded that it was a put-up job from the beginning. We were being closely shadowed by the
UDBA. One word from them and the
incident would have been over before it had started. On reflection, I think that the Ambassador
may have been on to something. We'll
never know for sure, but one thing we do know is that all of us were under the
scrutiny of the UDBA and any signs of vulnerability would be exploited to the
full. Many of our employees were
reporting to the UDBA and the Ambassador was sure that most of his personal
employees were. He told me once that, in
order to test his driver, Salih Zučanin, he
had left his briefcase in the car while going into a meeting. Looking out of an upper window, he saw Salih
hurriedly going through the briefcase, looking for documents. Proof positive.
My tour in Belgrade
came to an end in July of 1976. In the
months that followed, Ambassador Silberman’s relations with the Yugoslavs
continued to deteriorate. Virtually
ignored by Tito and other high-level officials, who were still in a snit over
the Toth affair, his effectiveness as Ambassador had become limited at
best. That November, Jimmy Carter
defeated President Ford and Republican political appointees began heading for
the exits. Silberman was one of the
first to go, vowing that he would never work a single day for someone like
Carter.
The Silbermans departed post on December 26,
1976. Shortly after Jimmy Carter was
sworn in as President, Larry Eagleburger came
out to Belgrade
as the new Ambassador, to the vast relief of the remaining Foreign Service
staff and the even greater relief of the Tito regime. Silberman worked for a time at the American
Enterprise Institute and authored two articles on his foreign policy
experiences. The first, which appeared
in the Spring 1977 edition of Foreign Policy, was entitled "Yugoslavia's
'Old' Communism: Europe's Fiddler on the Roof;" it pretty much burned any
bridges he might have left standing between him and the Yugoslavs, not to
mention the State Department. The second
article, which appeared in the Spring 1979 edition of Foreign Affairs,
was entitled "Toward Presidential Control of the State Department;"
it suggested doing away with Presidential appointee status for career
Ambassadors, something which no doubt endeared him even further to the members
of the career Foreign Service.
In 1985, Silberman was appointed by President Reagan to the US Court of Appeals for the DC
Circuit. In
2001, he presided over the swearing-in ceremony of his old friend, Donald Rumsfeld, as Secretary of Defense. In February of 2007, his wife of 49 years,
Ricky Silberman, passed away from cancer.
Ambassador Silberman did an interview for the Oral
History project and his recollections
of his tour in Yugoslavia
are very informative.
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