It’s somewhat disarming to watch a United States ambassador rummage through his jacket for a business card and inadvertently reveal a 50-cents-off coupon for Arm & Hammer toothpaste.
“With baking soda,” Ambassador Harold Geisel said.
With all the other failings of U.S. foreign policy, add this: Harry Geisel cannot get Arm & Hammer toothpaste with baking soda in the Republic of Mauritius, which is in the Indian Ocean, 500 miles east of Madagascar and, apparently, even farther from a Walgreen’s.
“Mauritius is a tiny place, in the middle of nowhere, on the road to everywhere,” Geisel said. “It’s tiny. You feel cramped. But there’s an interesting similarity with Washington. They both think they are really in the center of the world.”
Mauritius is two-thirds the size of Rhode Island, has just more than 1 million citizens, very hot weather, palm trees, membership in the British Commonwealth, five TV channels, seven golf courses and a few movie theaters. There are even ditch diggers who speak three languages: French, English and Creole.
A major landmark in the capital, Port Louis, is a 3 1/2-story tower in the shape–Are you ready? You sure?–of a can of Pringles.
“Yup,” Geisel said. “It’s actually a can of Pringles. We call it the Pringles Tower.”
So how does a nice guy like Geisel, 50, who resembles a somewhat overweight third-base coach reluctantly stuck in a dark suit for an awards dinner, wind up in a place where a building pays homage to a mix of dried potatoes, vegetable oil, wheat starch, monosodium glutamate and hydrogenated soybean oil?
“I actually wanted to go there,” swears the Hyde Park native. “First, I love Africa. Second, it’s the African success story. There’s a standard of living equal to Spain and Portugal. The highest gross per capita product in Africa.”
For sure, his late dad would be surprised. He figured Harry would wind up in business and a younger son, Jerry, in diplomacy.
The father was a German Jewish immigrant who scrapped a legal education and plans to be a judge when he fled Hitler and came to Chicago in 1938. There, he met his future wife, also a German refugee from Hitler, settling in Hyde Park and becoming a hide broker in the Stockyards.
Harry loved books, music, finance and stamps. He was heavy on the extracurricular activities at Hyde Park High School, including heading the student government.
“In fact, the Tribune had a regular column, called the Voice of Youth, and while in high school I wrote two or three of them,” Harry recalled during a chat in a State Department office with the charm of an interrogation cell.
“He was more interested in writing, I was more interested in diplomacy,” says brother Jerry who, alas, wound up editor-at-large for Business Insurance, a longtime publication of Chicago-based Crain Communications.
“In fact, though I had no intention of going into government, one column was about foreign aid,” Harry said. “I think I wrote that aid was as much in our interest as the people who got it.”
Fully intending to be a moneybags, Harry attended Johns Hopkins University and then the University of Virginia, where he earned a graduate degree in finance. But while at Virginia, and in what he and his brother claim was a total lark, he took the foreign service exam.
He found it “challenging,” though the brother adds that Harry “got a phenomenal score on the general knowledge part.” Harry decided to see what the foreign service might be like.
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He began as an assistant budget and fiscal officer in Brussels in 1971, with an array of numbers-cruncher posts following, including during the mid-1980s in a political volatile Durban, South Africa, where he met his South African wife (they have two children).
He also spent time in Bonn and Moscow (our latter embassy, he says, “was really messed up”) before being beckoned to headquarters to be top aide to the undersecretary of management.
Then, largely due to accident, he fell into a critical but less-than-desirous post, namely that of inspector general. Technically, he was acting inspector general during a time of bureaucratic flux. Acting or not, it’s not a job through which to gain many friends, since you’re chief detective, assessing all sorts of real and imagined misdeeds within the department. “Looking back, I feel like the little boy who rode the big roller coaster. I’m proud I did it, glad it’s over and happy that I didn’t lose my lunch.”
He won his freedom when named deputy assistant secretary for information management, meaning he was Mr. Telecommunications and Computers. Then came the ambassadorship.
“One gets a nice house with huge grounds, actually four acres,” he said. “A car and driver. A cook and butler.”
The seven American personnel make this a microembassy. Throw in that he’s also non-resident ambassador for two other countries each 1,200 miles away–the 85 islands known as the Republic of Seychelles and the Comoros–and we probably get their money’s worth.
“My No. 1 job is representation of the U.S. Cutting ribbons, cocktail parties, seeing the prime minister unveil a bust of someone.”
He will be there Dec. 14 when Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) becomes the first congressman to visit in seven years.
His duties can include finding caskets. After two Americans were killed in an airline crash near Comoros, he found one in Mauritius, another from the French Embassy on the way.
He is posted far from home during a period in which America’s traditional ambivalence to the world is vivid. Our troops have been in more places simultaneously than ever before, but Congress doesn’t even want to pay our whopping United Nations debt.
No surprise, our ambassador to Mauritius counsels our greater interest.
“We are all so utterly interconnected. If you don’t think so, just remember the Arab oil embargo, when we would line up for gas for hours. And then consider the Asian financial crisis of today. If you want to live in the world, you better know it.”
For sure, there are many ways to learn about it. And, wouldn’t you know, Mr. Telecommunications has become a bit of an Internet fan.
“Hey, we are one of the very few nations (embassies) with our very own home page!” he announced just as the drugstore toothpaste coupon surfaced from his jacket pocket.
So, for more than you’ll perhaps want to know, check out http://usis.intnet.mu and immerse yourself in Mauritius, including pictures of proud South Sider Harry Geisel and assorted dignitaries.
You’ll at least be prepared for a “Jeopardy” category on Odd Foreign Postings.
A military secret
The Defense Department sends this “memorandum for correspondents”:
“During the regular DoD News Briefing conducted on Nov. 18, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Ken Bacon responded to a reporter’s question as follows:
Q: What about the INTREPID? What’s the latest on the Intrepid heading to the area?
A: The INTREPID is going from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean.
Mr. Bacon, and presumably the reporter, were both referring to the British aircraft carrier HMS INVINCIBLE. The USS INTREPID is currently permanently docked in New York as a museum.”
Just don’t tell Saddam.