bout de papier, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1985) — Winter 1985 // Hiver 1985, pp. 27–28
Napoleon gave this advice to his Ambassador going to Warsaw:
Soignez les femmes et tenez bonne table. The first part will have to await a future article on women, love and diplomacy. This essay deals with experiences with the diplomatic dinner.
The term “diplomatic dinner party” suggests a brilliant occasion with champagne, caviar and truffles, beautiful bejewelled ladies and distinguished, witty ambassadors. Alas, we know that the reality is often very different. Some official dinners are pleasant and worthwhile, even memorable occasions; others are tedious and without obvious purpose.
The best dinners serve some clear objective and are usually based on the visit of some important person or turn on a guest of honour. These can be very useful tools of our trade. The sit-down dinner with designated places according to rank is both the most rewarding and the riskiest and most exacting. The buffet dinner, whether stand-up or sit anywhere, is less demanding and sometimes the only social solution. But it is a poor substitute for the real thing. The cocktail reception is an entirely different and inferior institution, a kind of cop-out of social exigencies, when it scarcely matters who comes or at what time. The customary national day party is one of these.
Some of us have vivid memories of dinners that have been our responsibility. The routine successes are quickly forgotten, but not so the more painful failures.
When in Peru I hosted a dinner during a naval visit. The Peruvian Minister of the Navy, a uniform-wearing admiral, was the guest of honour and the Canadian officers, resplendent in summer whites, headed by then Captain Harry Porter, were on hand, ready to do their duty. The Minister, trained in the best British tradition, arrived with his wife at the appointed hour. Then there was a growing delay waiting for the Chief of the Naval Staff. I realized that this was more a problem for the Minister than for me. I told him we were awaiting his Chief; he got to the telephone and eventually the wayward No. 2 admiral arrived, with his wife. I had passed the main burden to the guest of honour. I survived the delay without visible aging, to live and fight another day.
In Tunisia I gave a farewell dinner party for the Foreign Minister, Habib Bourguiba Jr., who was to represent the President, his father, at EXPO ’67. This was a men’s occasion and, other than the dancing girls for the festivities at the Tunisian pavilion, we invited the team going to Montreal. Everybody accepted but several did not show up, being persons less used to the discipline of the official life. Here again I transferred the problem to the guest of honour, a very sophisticated and ex perienced person, who made several telephone calls, but with limited results. I had already learned the technique, suitable to much of the Third World, of using round tables for up to eight persons each. This makes it easy to pull out one or more chairs, without having to re-order a whole long table. This simple, rather obvious device, really helps an ambassador to survive.
Back in Peru I had been persuaded, against my better judgment, to give a Saturday luncheon on the visit of the World Scout Commissioner, our General Dan Spry. The local scouts wanted particularly to have out the Minister of Education and the Minister of Finance, to whom they were looking for financial and other support for the movement. Both Ministers accepted, but that lovely Saturday in a good season we received telephone messages at the residence from each of them that he was unable to attend. A rump luncheon did take place with the visitor and the support of British and American colleagues, but the purpose had largely failed. You can’t win them all.
Probably the most hazardous dinner I every gave was in Bolivia. I was the first appointee to the highest office that the Canadian Government can confer, Ambassador to La Paz (altitude 12,500 feet). As a non-resident, living in Lima, with no local base of operations and no staff with me, it was difficult to make arrangements. There was no honorary consul on the spot in those days. Fortunately in 1961 La Paz was small, friendly and informal.
Early in the week of a visit I decided to give a dinner on the Saturday evening and secured the general consent of the maitre d’hotel, a Frenchman, at the Hotel Crillon, leaving the menu and other details to be worked out later. During my calls I extended invitations, often writing confirmation cards, across an invitee’s desk or in a secretary’s office. Thus, I invited the Minister of Development, the editor of a Catholic newspaper, various officials, some Canadian missionaries and local representatives of Canadian business interests.
On the Thursday morning in the hotel elevator I read a notice that the Saturday, being the Dia Gastronomico, people living in the hotel were not to have guests in the dining room and it was to close at 9:00 p.m. When I hastened to see the maitre d’hotel he was horrified; he had forgotten earlier about the Dia, which he explained was not a gourmet celebration but a holiday of the hotel workers trade union. He wanted me to cancel or postpone the dinner which I clearly could not do, in my non-resident situation. He accepted that he had committed himself to the dinner earlier in the week. The solution was to pay the cook a bonus and have the maitre d’hotel and his assistant, also a foreigner and not a member of the union, provide the service.
Saturday in December dawned bright and cool as usual, but with noisy rioting in the streets. There were political demonstrations for some reason I cannot now recall. The hotel desk advised me not to go out. I was to pay a visit on the Rector of the University but he telephoned to say I should not try to cross the students’ picket line at the entrance to the campus; and instead he came to see me at the hotel. He and his wife also made it to the dinner that night.
My wife was not with me and I had asked the resident representative of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Margaret Anstey, a very bright Englishwoman, to be my hostess. She said she had had experience in shuffling seating plans at the last moment, and this skill proved to be very helpful. Most of the invitees arrived more or less on time, some with streaming eyes because of the tear gas still in the streets. The Minister and his wife made it; the editor, atter an eventtul, hectic day putting the next morning’s paper to bed, arrived with his highly decorated and decorative wife in time for left-overs and dessert. We were a happy band, sitting on the top floor of the hotel, well above the battle, in a section of a vast empty room, with good food and impeccable service.
But how many such harrowing occasions should an ambassador be expected to experience and survive in the service of his country? A
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1985) — Winter 1985 // Hiver 1985, pp. 27–28. Read the rest of this issue →
