Ambassador Laurence Silberman 1935-2022

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. 

E-Gram A-169 // A Trip to Kosovo // June 19, 1976

Pristina Airgram A-169 19760619

 

Albanian Infuence Grows in Backward Yugoslav Province, by Dusko Doder, Washington Post, June 5. 1976

Titograd Airgram A-433 December 16, 1975

Ambassador Toon: A Short Biography

Excerpt from Draft Chapter 11.3
Belgrade 1974-1976


Ambassador and Mrs. Toon.
Malcolm Toon was my first Ambassador, and as such, he had a huge influence on my career and my views on the Foreign Service. As a first-generation American, Ambassador Toon, or "Mac," was born in Troy, New York on July 4, 1916, three years after his parents had emigrated from Scotland. He graduated from Tufts in

Ambassador Malcolm Toon  (Photo: Getty)

1937 and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1939. He served in World War II as a PT boat commander in the Pacific, winning the Bronze Star. He married Elizabeth Jane Taylor (Betty) shortly after the war and had three children, Alan, Barbara and Nancy. He joined the Foreign Service in 1946, beginning what was to become an extremely successful career.

Toon's first tour was in Warsaw under Ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane. Even at age 30, Toon was highly independent and opinionated and did not suffer fools gladly. One time, in an episode he only half-jokingly characterized as one of the “ten great disasters” of his career, Toon was asked to walk the Ambassador’s dog and he refused. Toon, a decorated PT boat skipper who had seen combat, "didn't take guff from anybody," including the Ambassador. Lane, for his part, was arrogant and strident and the two did not get along well, even though both were in agreement about the Soviet threat and appalled at the steady takeover of Poland by the Communists.

Toon had similar problems with George Kennan when they served together in Moscow, he as a middle-grade officer, Kennan as Ambassador. Toon and another future Ambassador, Richard Davies, disagreed with Kennan's containment policy. Just before Kennan was appointed to Moscow they wrote an essay for the Foreign Service Journal in March 1952 entitled “After Containment, What?” in which they argued for a much more confrontational policy and active efforts to detach Eastern Europe from the Soviet orbit. Kennan did not appreciate the criticism. He regarded Toon as brash and disrespectful and gave him such a bad fitness report that Toon was actually demoted. Kennan himself was PNG'd by the Kremlin shortly thereafter for making indelicate comparisons between diplomatic life in Moscow and his internment in Nazi Germany. Toon and Kennan eventually patched up their relationship, but I suspect that there was still a gulf between them that could never be bridged.

Despite his rocky start, Toon rose steadily in the Service and served one more tour in Moscow as Foy Kohler’s Political Counselor. There, he earned the enmity of the Soviets for his straight-talking approach. He developed a reputation as a hardliner who would not mince words with his hosts and thus was the ideal person, from the U.S. point of view, to be appointed as Ambassador to Czechoslovakia in 1969, only a few months after Prague Spring and the Soviet intervention to overthrow Dubcek. Toon moved on to Belgrade in 1971 and he was still there in 1974 when I arrived, as a brand-new Junior Officer.

For me and for others at the Embassy, Toon was a fearsome presence. A dour Scot with a reputation for penny-pinching, Toon seemed austere and remote, irascible and opinionated. Everyone at post seemed to be a little bit afraid of him, myself included. Toon, who was entering the peak of his career, was in his late 50's. He had a florid complexion, white hair, a thick Massachusetts accent and a habit of clearing his throat with a loud "Buh!" sound as he began speaking. When he spoke, everybody listened, especially Junior Officers like me.

While Toon ran a tight ship at the Embassy, he exercised even firmer control of the Embassy’s satellite missions, which included a Consulate General in Zagreb and separate USIS posts in Skopje, Sarajevo and Ljubljana. Because of this, relations between the Consulate General and the Embassy were often prickly due to Toon’s insistence on complete control of substantive reporting.

Toon’s insistence on overall control was not without justice. After a resurgence of Croatian nationalism during the “Croatian Spring” of 1967-71 and Tito’s suppression of dissent there, Croatians tended to look to the U.S. Consulate in Zagreb as their Embassy, and, at least in Embassy Belgrade’s view, the Consulate’s reporting began to vary in its outlook and substance from that of the Embassy. The Leonhart-Enders feud exacerbated the problem by leaving the Consulate General in Zagreb to its own devices even more than usual. As a result, by the time that Toon had succeeded Leonhart as Ambassador, there was considerable daylight between the Consulate’s position on the issues and that of the Embassy. Toon put a stop to this by requiring that all of Zagreb’s substantive reporting be cleared through Belgrade. This was an unusual move, but it was warranted by the volatile situation, which called for extremely careful and coordinated reporting. I was not involved in the bureaucratic politics, which were quite a bit above my pay grade, but I heard later that Zagreb’s Consul General Orme Wilson, a Yugoslav Hand from an old Foreign Service family, was not at all happy about the reporting restrictions, nor were his staffers. Toon had to be obeyed, however, since his word was law for all of us. It was perhaps ironic that Toon, a Cold Warrior if there ever was one, often took a very Soviet approach to the craft of diplomacy.

Toon was known for his acute perception of the Yugoslav political scene and he had good relations with the Yugoslav leadership, including Marshal Tito. Relations between the two were not totally without friction, however. When Toon first arrived in Belgrade, he had come directly from Prague and had not learned Serbo-Croatian. A week after he arrived, he had the good fortune to escort Tito on a trip around the United States and the opportunity to get to know him quite well. Naturally, the two spoke Russian when they talked with each other. As Dick Miles retells the story, Tito, who liked Toon, complimented him on his Russian but reminded him that as Ambassador to Yugoslavia he had better learn Serbo-Croatian. Accordingly, Toon took daily lessons from the Embassy language teacher, Marija Andželic. His Serbo-Croatian slowly improved, but the Russian language overlay continued to dominate.

In late February of 1975, Toon learned from Secretary Kissinger that he was about to be reassigned to Israel. We spent the next couple of weeks in a flurry of farewell calls and other departure preparations and Toon left post on March 11, 1975. Before he departed, however, he took the opportunity to bid farewell to the local Yugoslav staff in the main restaurant on the Embassy compound. Toon read his farewell speech to our local staff in Serbo-Croatian, with one of the strongest New England/Russian accents I have ever heard. The staff was amused, but appreciated the effort anyway. I don’t know what Tito would have said.

Toon spent two years in Tel Aviv and then was assigned to Moscow from 1977 until 1979. Toon's Moscow tour was sweet revenge of a sort. In 1973, while still in Belgrade, he had been put up for Moscow by NSC Advisor Henry Kissinger, who saw the value of a hardliner in the Moscow post and who recognized the need to replace Ambassador Jacob Beam with an envoy who would be more forceful. But Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. Anatoliy Dobrynin balked at the appointment, and, after gaining the support of the Politburo, used his back channel access to persuade Nixon to drop it. Ambassador Walter Stoessel, who was much more congenial and less hardline than Toon, was sent instead. In 1976, Ambassador Stoessel came to the end of his tour and President Ford approved Toon's assignment to Moscow, presumably at the behest of the new Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. It was made clear to the Soviets that if Toon were not accepted, Dobrynin would be asked to leave. After three months of foot-dragging and only after they realized that newly-elected President Jimmy Carter was not going to change course, the Soviets sullenly backed down. Toon served as Ambassador to the Soviet Union from January 18, 1977 until October 16, 1979 and I served with him for most of that time, once again as his Aide.

Toon retired after Moscow. We remained in touch and whenever I was back in Washington, the old Belgrade gang would get together for periodic lunches and dinners. One time, the Toons even took my Mom and me out to lunch at a local restaurant, which -- characteristically for the Toons -- was very inexpensive.

One of Toon's favorite places to eat in Washington was “The Dancing Crab,” primarily, I guess, because you could get a lot of seafood for a very cheap price. I would occasionally go out to dinner there with Ambassador and Mrs. Toon and Don and Judy Tice. Our conversations were pretty wide-ranging, but every now and again things would turn personal. One time, we were discussing how hard it was to become an Ambassador and Toon fixed me with a steely gaze and said, “Jim, do you know what your chances are of becoming an Ambassador?” “No,” I answered brightly, expecting Toon to give me some encouragement. “One in 200!” Toon barked. I was suitably deflated.

Ambassador and Mrs. Toon moved to Pinehurst, North Carolina sometime in the 1980s, primarily so Toon could indulge in his passion for golf on Pinehurst's four courses. In 1992, Toon came back up to Washington to meet with Ross Perot, who was looking him over as a possible Secretary of State in a Perot Administration. Toon politely begged off, noting to me in private: "The guy is nuts."

In the early 1990s, Toon co-chaired the U.S.-Russian Joint Commission on POW/MIAs with Russian General Dmitriy Volkogonov. He would drop by the desk every now and again to say hello -- I was Deputy Director of ISCA at the time. Toon was getting on in years and one requirement of his taking the POW/MIA assignment was that he get to fly everywhere first class. The Department transportation types were scandalized, but I lobbied hard for the necessary authorizations. Nothing was too good for my old boss.

Toon mellowed with the years, but he still displayed flashes of his old curmudgeonly self. Louie Sell recalls one time in the mid-1990’s when Toon was visiting Moscow and came over for dinner at his NEC townhouse. Things were going swimmingly until Toon asked for a martini and Louie confessed he didn’t know how to make one. As Louie recalls: “he [Toon] gave me that look I remembered so well and asked how in the world I could consider myself a Foreign Service officer and not know how to make a martini.”

Despite his retirement, Toon kept popping up in my life, sometimes rather unexpectedly. For example, when I was in Moscow on my third tour (2002-2004),  the Institute for US and Canadian Studies was holding its annual review of US-Russian relations and as per protocol, invited all living US Ambassadors to the event -- except for Toon, because the Russians really hated him.  When I asked why Toon wasn't invited, the Director said, "Oh, we thought he was dead."  Michael McFaul​ now carries on the sad tradition of being the odd man out when American Ambassadors are invited to a Russian ceremony.

Betty Toon passed away on April 25, 1996. At around the same time, Ambassador Toon retired for good and continued to live at Pinehurst. He turned up at the 30th Anniversary Moscow Fire Reunion, held at the Ellis' house in Columbia, Maryland on September 9, 2007, looking relatively spry for 91, at least judging from the photos I received. I had hoped to see him the next time we were both in Washington, but unfortunately, before that could happen, he passed away at the age of 92 on February 12, 2009. He is buried next to his beloved wife Betty in Arlington Cemetery.

Note: for additional posts on Ambassador Toon, see "Ambassador Toon in Moscow 1977-79" (July 1979) and "The Moscow Fire of 1977" (August 1977).

Chapter 11.3 Belgrade 1974-1976 ver.20241028 Final w/Acrobat Link