I wrote Attaché Case for several reasons. First, I felt that people outside the walled garden of foreign affairs didn’t really understand what diplomats did, or the culture of the State Department as an organization. I wanted to get that across. There are many good books by military veterans—what they did in the armed forces, what it felt like, how the institution worked—but that granularity of experience was missing from many of the books I read by former diplomats. Maybe it’s because the field draws people with a habit of discretion, which it is hard to give up. Second, I had a bunch of stories I thought were funny or poignant or revelatory about American power over the last 30 years, and its projection. I wanted to get those out. Finally, as a lifelong celebrity-watcher, I wanted to chase down this notion of the US as the celebrity nation, as the place no one can avoid having to think about, witness, have an opinion about. I wanted to trace the arc of this from the end of the Cold War into the first Trump Administration.
When I was in college and figuring out what to do for a career, I thought the Foreign Service sounded interesting: I liked politics, I liked travel, I liked writing, I liked intrigue. I was a news junkie and I have an ear for languages. My whole life I’ve had dyscalculia, where I mix up numbers and cannot grasp fairly basic mathematical concepts, but I’ve got a steel-trap memory when it comes to country names, flags, and capitals. I can use the subjunctive. This was my modest and esoteric skill set. I was too into creature comforts for the Peace Corps, but also too gay and way too chatty for the CIA. This left the US Foreign Service.
I had known about diplomats from childhood. In 1977, the US diplomat who lived a few doors down killed his family. Two of his sons had been on my swim team. A manhunt ensued, but he vanished forever. It was the first press stakeout I ever saw. A couple years later, the US embassy in Teheran was taken over by Iranian college students, who held fifty or so American diplomats hostage for 400+ days. This story on the news every night, with footage of the US Embassy, now covered in anti-US graffiti.
Still, I was hazy about what diplomats actually did. By the time I was in college, I’d worked at a city newspaper, so I understood what reporters and editors did during the day. One summer I interned at IBM, so I got, in the vague way of someone with math anxiety, what engineers were doing at the office and in labs. But diplomats? I knew they were discreet in an ostentatious way. Unless they were Henry Kissinger, they made a virtue out of their unobtrusiveness. I knew they rarely said what they meant or meant what they said, and that insincerity was an idiom, a tool. Being a diplomat seemed like more of a mood, a role, a status, an expert glide across wars, cultures, time zones, languages. There was something enigmatic there, and as de Chirico said, “What do I love if not the enigma?”
Wilfrid Hyde-White as Crabbin in The Third Man (1949)
When I was a junior in college I saw the movie The Third Man. It’s a terrific story, beautifully shot, but the real takeaway for me was this minor character, Mr. Crabbin, who’s a cultural attaché. Here it was, at last, the diplomat at work, talky and distracted and opinionated as I was. Unlike, say, Dean Acheson, this was someone who was relatable. And here he was at work, running a speaker program on the Western genre of novel in postwar Vienna. He was occupying the liminal zone between his country and another, navigating a furrow full of hazard and ambiguity and promise. He seemed to have a lot of leeway. It looked fun.
Was this still a thing people did? I knew about the Alliance Française from my French studies and found out that, yes, the US too had a cultural and press service at our embassies and consulates. Every autumn, the State Department offered the Foreign Service exam, so, based on this character I saw in a movie and a tendency to imagine myself in faraway places (Port Moresby, Algiers, Vladivostok, anywhere but here, really), I took it. I passed the test and joined, again with only the vaguest notion of what I would be doing, other than acting discreet and organizing lectures.
Over the next three decades, I figured it out. More people became aware of what diplomats do. There was Richard Holbrooke, wrangler of Balkan dictators, who was in the Kissinger mode of self-promoter, never more comfortable than when in a room of reverential journalists. There were the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. There were the celebrity ambassadors: Shirley Temple Black, Pamela Harriman, Caroline Kennedy.
But when people with normal jobs, like baker or management consultant or oral surgeon or florist, would ask what it was I did, and I told them, they seemed surprised. It was odd because if they were Americans, they were, as taxpayers, paying my salary. There was a general bafflement about the culture. This even went for new Foreign Service Officers. When I spoke to them they often seemed a little taken aback, puzzled by the culture of the State Department. They were usually less, uh, florid than I was, but they had, in their way, been just as fanciful.
End of part one.
© 2025 Todd Pierce; all rights reserved
Attaché Case: Backstage at the Embassy is available in hardcover, softcover, and ebook editions. Click HERE to buy on Amazon.
.jpg)
