In the late 16th century Sir Henry Wotton said that an ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country. Benjamin Franklin modified that: A soldier dies for his country, while a diplomat lies for it. Vernon A. Walters was a soldier often in the line of fire and an ambassador incorrigibly honest. An aide to seven presidents, he helped shape the Marshall Plan, served as deputy director of the CIA, member of the NATO Standing Group, and ambassador to the United Nations and Germany. A behind-the-scenes man, he helped secure the release of American hostages in Lebanon while holding his UN post.
He had studied in Britain and France as the son of an immigrant British insurance salesman, but when his father suffered financial reverses, he returned to the United States, dropped out of school, and worked as an insurance claims investigator. The future lieutenant general was summoned as an army private to translate for a visiting Brazilian officer because he knew Spanish. When Walters informed his commanding officer that Brazilians speak Portuguese, he was ordered to learn it, which he seems to have done overnight. That was the start of his career as a translator in French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Russian, and respectable Chinese, all without a high school diploma. Years later, de Gaulle would say, “Nixon, you gave a magnificent speech, but your interpreter was eloquent.” He accompanied the Nixons to Latin America, and when his mouth was cut as stones smashed their limousine in Caracas, the vice president told him, “Spit that glass out—you are going to have a lot more talking to do in Spanish for me today.”
As an aide to General Mark Clark he entered Rome in triumph in 1944, giving a ride on his tank to the future King Hassan II of Morocco. He filmed Truman’s meeting with MacArthur on Wake Island and took the only recorded notes when Truman fired the general. His “silent missions” included one visit to Castro and smuggling Henry Kissinger into Paris for the Vietnam peace talks. Kissinger stayed incognito in his apartment in Neuilly, and Walters once got him into France from Frankfurt under the pretext that he was the mistress of Georges Pompidou. When I recently asked Kissinger to summarize Walter’s diplomacy, he instantly replied, “Flamboyant discretion.” “Dick” Walters loved the drama of it all. As a teetotaling, non-smoking, chaste bachelor, he was a kind of ascetic James Bond, with the added advantage that he was real.
He was the only one present during Eisenhower’s negotiations at Rambouillet with de Gaulle. He was dashing enough to accompany Maurice Chevalier as an escort for ladies to the opera, and to him Clare Booth Luce, upon being decorated with an Asiatic nation’s “Order of Chastity, Second Class,” confided that she did not know if it was an honor or an insult.
In foreign negotiations, he stuck to his Catholic guns on eugenics issues and was a fervent promoter of orthodox Catholic institutions. Pastorally, I was aware of his regularity at the sacraments in Manhattan where he welcomed people on the front steps of church and took up the collection. A year before his death, I flew with him from Paris to New York, and even then, with “flamboyant discretion,” he mentioned mysteriously that he had been doing work for some North Africans. He colorfully described explaining Star Wars to Pope John Paul II, laden with maps. Our last time together was at a dinner where Helmut Kohl, his wife overwhelmed by a bizarre illness and only a few months short of suicide, embraced “Dick,” then in a wheelchair, and enjoyed the ambassador’s mellifluous German. With bravery and integrity, Vernon Walters conjured a brand of diplomacy that fooled many who thought honesty was a clever deceit.