The following is one in a series of adapted excerpts from “America’s Other Army: The U.S. Foreign Service and 21st-Century Diplomacy.”
Victoria Nuland wasn’t necessarily looking for love when she joined the Foreign Service in 1984, but she found it anyway — fairly quickly and not too far away. While working on the China desk at the State Department, she started dating a young speechwriter for then-Secretary of State George Shultz.
When they got married three years later, the inevitable question arose: What would her husband, Robert Kagan, do while his diplomat-wife served abroad? He didn’t think that joining the Foreign Service himself would be the best solution, and he really wanted to write. So that was what he did.
“He wrote his first book, on Nicaragua, in the spare bedroom of our Moscow apartment,” recalled Nuland, who was a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Russia from 1991 until 1993. “The KGB used to rifle his office regularly — we could tell by the lingering stench of cigarettes and body odor. They couldn’t fathom that he was really just a writer.”
Since then, Nuland has built a career that is the envy of many American diplomats. She was the first female ambassador to NATO and is currently the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs — most of her colleagues never get to be ambassadors, let alone assistant secretaries…
Photo by U.S. Mission Germany
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