Books: Kind Words for Mr. Bastard

AFFAIRS AT STATE by Henry Serrano Villard. 254 pages. Crowell. $5.95.

During a diplomatic reception in Manila some years ago, a guest with a tenuous grip on the English language grew more and more perplexed. Finally he turned to another guest. “Who,” he asked, gesturing toward an obviously important U.S. official, “is this man they call Mr. Bastard right to his face?”

Whatever the man might have been called behind his back, to his face he was more properly addressed as “Mr. Ambassador,” and in Affairs at State, retired U.S. Diplomat Henry Serrano Villard, 65, describes him and his breed with an insider’s sympathy and savvy. He is admirably equipped for the job. A great-grandson of Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, Villard joined the Foreign Service in 1928 after graduation from Harvard and a brief try at teaching and journalism, spent the next 34 years in outposts from Tripoli and Teheran to Rio and Oslo as the U.S. inexorably enlarged its international role.

Herman the Hormone. As a careerist who rose from the lowest echelons of the service to become U.S. Ambassador to Mali, Senegal, and finally Mauritania, Villard reserves his greatest scorn for the political appointee, the “manufacturer of kazoos from Peoria,” who gets the choicest embassies for the fattest campaign contributions.

To Villard, the results of permitting posts to be “bartered away for political purposes” are often astonishing. “We have had an ambassador in South America,” he writes, “who imbibed so heavily that he fell flat on the embassy floor, an ambassador in Portugal who propelled whipped cream into a lady’s bosom across the dinner table, an ambassador in The Netherlands who was known as ‘Herman the Hormone’ because of his propensity for pinching the behind of any girl within reach.”

And woe to the professional who crosses an influential amateur. Villard tells of one career man, an irrepressible punster, who was hounded out of the service after his chief, a dairy tycoon, overheard him say mockingly: “All I have I owe to udders.”

Parsley Nosegay. Another pet peeve of Villard’s is the widely held picture of professional diplomats as a “striped: pants brigade of effete creatures.” Instead of striped pants, today’s diplomat wears three-button business suits. Instead of scintillating soirees, he attends paralyzing parties where his innards are assailed by “searing sauces and alcoholic depth bombs.” Many is the career man, says Villard, who echoes the plaint of the late French diplomat Jules Henri after a ten-year tour in Washington: “I drank, God help my digestion, 35,000 cocktails in line of duty.”

As for the notion that the diplomat’s life abroad is cushioned by platoons of perfectly trained servants, Villard lays it to rest by describing the time that a West African houseboy was shown how to garnish a wild boar for an important dinner. “Consternation reigned,” says Villard, “when the dish was triumphantly brought in, apple clenched firmly between the houseboy’s teeth, parsley protruding from his nose.”

On top of his other troubles, the Foreign Service officer usually has to dig into his own pockets to cover official expenses. Villard tells how, when he was posted to Senegal as ambassador in 1960, he discovered that his bathroom had magnificent picture windows but no curtains. Repeated pleas to Washington produced no funds for the curtains, until Villard fired off a cable: “Have magnificent view of Dakar from my bathroom and vice versa.”

Latter-Day Laocoöns. An avowed elitist, Villard frankly pines for the good old days when the service numbered some 600 rigorously screened officers instead of the present 3,700. He deplores the fact that “entrance requirements have been tailored to meet a lower common denominator,” bristles at the notion that preferential treatment should be given to any group—Negroes, Puerto Ricans or American Indians. With persuasive logic, he argues that to dilute the service’s caliber, whatever the reason, would be to impair the effectiveness of U.S. diplomacy.

Under Villard’s scrutiny, the Foreign Service’s parent, the Department of State, comes in for particularly pointed criticism. He considers its bureaucracy appalling, its pressure for conformity oppressive. So titanic are its flaws, in fact, that Villard resorts to Greek mythology to describe them. To him, the State Department is a Hydra-headed monster, with two committees springing up whenever one is lopped off; its officers are latter-day Laocoöns, entwined not in the coils of two enormous serpents but in miles of red tape. And the In boxes of its diplomats, neaped high with meaningless memos and wordy cables, are, of course, Augean stables.