Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're inside the Ice House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision and global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism, right here, right now at the NYSE and at Ice's 12 exchanges and six clearing houses around the world. Now, welcome inside the Ice House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
You've heard us invoke the name, Jay Clayton, many times on this podcast. He's our chief regulator, the 32nd Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the independent agency with the three part mission to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation. The SEC was formed in 1934, 85 years ago, created by the Securities and Exchange Act signed into law by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Josh King:
There was this crash, you remember, five years before that, 1929, which sent this building into a tailspin. You know the rest of the story, the Great Depression followed. The man FDR would tap to lead the SEC, its first chairman, was 46 year old Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., a renowned businessman and fundraiser for the president who would go on, four years later, to become the US Ambassador to the court of St. James's, our man in London at a pivotal time in world history.
Josh King:
Ambassador Kennedy famously or infamously sided with British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, on a policy of appeasement toward Berlin. Shortly before the German bombing of Britain began in September 1940, Kennedy sought a personal meeting with Adolf Hitler too, as he wrote, "Bring about a better understanding between the United States and Germany." In an interview with the reporters for the Boston Globe, he said at the time, "I know more about the European situation than anybody else. And it's up to me to see that this country gets it."
Josh King:
Diplomacy, which has been around since the Italian Renaissance, designed to share information among nation states for the primary purpose of fostering peace is in much demand today as it was during the Italian wars of the Habsburg–Valois. Sometimes it's in short supply. The former defense secretary, James Mattis said in 2013, that, as I quote, "If you don't fund the state department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately."
Josh King:
We've seen that prophecy play out time and again. With each new administration, our president has the duty of appointing our ambassadors, who are then confirmed by the United States Senate. As we saw in 1940, and as we see today in the still unfolding story around Ukraine, the job of diplomat has sometimes been fraught. For thousands of others who've held that rank, it's an honor unlike any other to present the credentials of our nation to a foreign head of state and represent our interests overseas.
Josh King:
Today, a conversation with one of them, ambassador John B. Emerson, our man in Berlin from 2013 to 2017 and now Vice Chairman of Capital Group International, the firm he left to take up his diplomatic post. On serving a country at home and abroad, on advancing peace and promoting commercial cooperation, and ultimately on coming home. Our conversation with John Emerson right after this.
Speaker 3:
And now a word from John Van Siclen, CEO of Dynatrace, NYSE ticker: DT.
John Van Siclen:
We're a software intelligence company for the enterprise cloud. Software rules our world, and we bring performance and intelligence to those to develop, operate, and drive business outcomes for the digital age. We sell our products in 70 different countries. Many of our customers trade on the NYSE. It is the enterprise class customer base that we target. We're thrilled to be part of the family. Dynatrace is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Josh King:
The Brits have a deal to leave Europe. The Turks have an opening to enter Syria. The Ukrainians got a request to do the Americans a favor and the invitation to the G7 leaders to spend next June in Doral, in Miami, seems up in the air. It's enough to make a diplomat's head spin. The stakes may not as immediately fraught as when Joe Kennedy made his residence in Winfield House in London from 1938 to 1940, but any man or woman dispatched overseas these days to represent United States interests, has a juggling act to manage relationships between his or her host government and those in Washington.
Josh King:
Joining us in the Ice House today is a man who spent four years in Berlin overseeing the operations at our embassy at Pariser Platz number two. John Emerson, who I got to know as a friend working in the White House in the 1990s, was happily back in Los Angeles, California as the President of Capital Group Private Client Services when he was named by President Obama as our ambassador to Germany and confirmed by the Senate to succeed Phil Murphy, now the governor of New Jersey. After four years on post, John and his family returned to LA where he's now Vice Chairman of Capital Group International. Ambassador Emerson, welcome to the New York Stock Exchange, and welcome inside the Ice House.
John Emerson:
Hey, thanks so much, Josh. It's great to be here and it's great to see you again.
Josh King:
Good to see you too. You and I were talking, you haven't been in this building since you were a kid.
John Emerson:
No, I remember coming here when I went to ... Grew up in and around New York, went to elementary school in Bloomfield, New Jersey, junior high and high school in Mamaroneck, New York. Probably in elementary school, I remember we took a tour and came in and saw Wall Street, saw the Stock Exchange. Very exciting thing, but it's amazing, I have not been here since then.
Josh King:
What brings you back to New York on this trip?
John Emerson:
In my role with Capital now, I probably spend about a third of my time overseas, and the balance of my time split between our headquarters in Los Angeles and places like New York and Florida and Washington, Chicago, other places where we have clients, talking about geopolitics. It's an interesting time in the investment world where I think a lot of folks would say that probably more than at any time in their investing history, people are concerned about, interested in geopolitics and just geostrategically what's happening around the world, what's likely to happen. Obviously, if you look at the ups and downs of the market in the last couple of years, probably the ups and downs of our trade negotiations have tracked what's been happening in the market or vice versa. There's a lot of interest, a lot of concern.
John Emerson:
I was interested in the four issues that you picked on. Ukraine, I was serving when Russia illegally annexed Crimea and invaded Ukraine in effect with the Donbas in supporting the separatists. Angela Merkel played a principle role in trying to navigate a diplomatic solution to that. I ended up traveling to Kiev a couple of times with my counterpart there, a guy named Jeff Pyatt who was the ambassador there.
John Emerson:
You mentioned Brexit. I was in Germany when the Brexit vote took place. There was enormous distress because people feared this was the first brick out of the wall of European integration. You mentioned the G7. We had the G7 hosted in Germany in 2015. That was a great experience for an ambassador to welcome the president to that country and be a part of that whole effort as well. Lots to talk about.
Josh King:
Lots to talk about, and the cycles sort of keep repeating in interesting ways. An ambassador knows the calendar is so much dictated by these gatherings of world leaders, whether you're in the G7 cycle or in the Apex cycle. Then there's the EU Summit cycle. Last week, there was the EU Summit in Brussels. The headlines across the pond this week, are "Brexit exposes EU power struggle as Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel pull in opposite directions." Who wins that tug of war, John?
John Emerson:
Well, it's interesting. Clearly Angela Merkel at most has another two years. Assuming the coalition government holds in Germany, which is not a foregone conclusion, she would be continuous chancellor until after the elections in September of 2021. If the governing coalition doesn't hold, and right now the social Democrats, who are her party's coalition partner, are involved in a leadership battle, a leadership struggle. There's seven teams of candidates running. They do a male, female team thing here. Only one of them, the one led by Olaf Scholz, who's currently the vice chance and the finance minister of Germany, has committed to stick with the coalition for that remaining two years.
John Emerson:
If the social Democrats decide to pull out of the coalition as a result of that leadership struggle which will be resolved sometime in early December, we could see new elections in Germany in January or February. The chancellor clearly has the ability to continue governing a minority government, but all indications are that she would not do that and that we would have new elections. You got to give Macron a little bit of an edge there since he's clearly going to be around for longer than that.
Josh King:
You and I follow each other on social media. I know there certain wistfulness when you and Kimberly packed your bags to return from LA. Even after a long career of so many milestones that we're going to get into John, those years between 2013, 2017, seemed like a singular highlight.
John Emerson:
No question about it on every level. First of all, substantively, it was clearly the most interesting thing that I did. I was lucky to be ambassador to Germany during a time when, because of the fact that David Cameron was tied up with Brexit, François Hollande was struggling politically, Italy was changing prime ministers, felt like every two or three months, and Spain didn't have a government for year and a half. Pretty much everything that was in our international economic interest and our national security interest as it related to NATO, the EU, often Middle East, North Africa, all roads led through Angela Merkel. In particular, the role that she played both in the Ukraine situation and as we were trying to negotiate the TTIP trade agreement. I had an opportunity to be deeply involved in that as well. So substantively, it was fascinating. We have 35,000 troops, American troops in Germany, the USAREUR, US Army Europe, and USAFE US Air Force Europe are headquartered in Wiesbaden and Ramstein, respectively.
John Emerson:
Of course we have EUCOM and AFRICOM in Stuttgart. A great deal of work with the men and women in armed services and with particularly the combatant commanders and the leadership there. On the fun stuff, I mean, if you're ambassador to any country, particularly the American ambassador, I always say it's an excuse to meet the most interesting people in that country and the most interesting Americans that may come to visit, whether they're members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, people who are coming over to shoot movies.
Josh King:
Speaking of that, John, season five of Homeland, which aired on Showtime, which is NYSE ticker symbols, CBS, it aired from October to December, 2015, smack in the middle of your posting to Berlin with much of the action depicted in a city that historically borders east and west. Want to hear a little clip.
Speaker 6:
Season five. We are in Germany and Berlin.
Speaker 7:
Amazing. Berlin has a really rich culture of espionage.
Speaker 8:
It just is a fit. And I can't quite believe we haven't worked here before.
Speaker 9:
We have great German partners at BBO studio, which is the oldest studio, it's where they filmed metropolis.
Josh King:
So that's Mandy Patinkin, Claire Danes, F. Murray Abraham, along with the executive producer, Lesli Linka Glatter, the show's executive producer. Did that add an element of intrigue to your friends back home wondering if the sitting ambassador would have a cameo?
John Emerson:
First of all, all of those people ended up coming to our house for dinner. Lesli Linka Glatter, in fact became a good friend and we're going to a play this weekend that my daughter's in together. A couple of things about that. First of all, I think Lesli contacted me through a mutual friend who said, "Oh, they're coming over now."
John Emerson:
Kimberly and I, my wife and I are huge fans of Homeland. Actually we were pretty excited to hear this. I brought them into the embassy, introduced them to some folks, they were interested, including the costume people and the set designers to sort of walk around, how do people dress? How do they inter react, how do they relate to one another? Shortly after they got there, I put together a dinner at our residence with the writers, directors, and lead actors of Homeland and the people they pretend to be in my embassy. Obviously we got all the approvals. I'm not sure who had more fun, members of our station in the embassy, our intelligence community, or the folks with Homeland, but that party went till about two in the morning.
John Emerson:
Another funny story, we obviously visited the set, but shortly before the end of the show, and we've worked closely with Babelsberg Film Studios as well on a number of things. Shortly before the end, we'd gotten so close to everybody there that we basically had a party at our house. It was a seated dinner for about 60 people, the cast and the crew. It wasn't their wrap party. They had that separately, but it turned out to be on Halloween. I remember Kimberly and I saying, as the guests were about to arrive, it's like, "We didn't really build this as a costume party, but it's Halloween. What do we do?"
John Emerson:
Kimberly threw on a dirndl, which you think about Octoberfest. I threw on one of those jackets with the bone buttons.
Josh King:
Sound of Music looking.
John Emerson:
Sound of Music looking. We got in there and then it was sort of what idiots are we? These are people who actually work with a professional makeup crew. One guy came as a zombie. I thought I was going to get sick to my stomach. I mean, it was a like so nauseating, brains oozing out of his head. Somebody else, I mean, Claire Danes and her husband, Hugh Dancey came as, he was a mad scientist. She was a witch. I mean, fully, fully, fully made up. It was fantastic. A lot of fun.
John Emerson:
There were a lot of toasts. One of the toasts I gave was I said, "We've been and incredibly gracious to you guys, but I got a bone to pick." I said, "You actually, as part of your plot this year, you had them kick out the American ambassador to Germany." I said, "What are you trying to give Merkel ideas? I mean, why are you doing that?" Anyway? It was a lot of fun.
Josh King:
Even with that, so many people who are connected culturally or through film and books and history with Berlin associate it with a time long ago, and these episodes brought us front and center with modern Berlin. Did you find that it was actually helping people understand where Germany sits in the modern economy and modern military establishment?
John Emerson:
I think it probably did, because the fact of the matter is our intelligence services work extremely closely together on counter terrorism issues, on dealing with ... There's some countries where Germany has more insight and better relations than we do. That can be enormously helpful. From soup to nuts, my entire career over there was involved in the intelligence community.
John Emerson:
You'll remember the incident. You may not remember it was me, but six weeks after I got there, news broke.
Josh King:
Oh yeah.
John Emerson:
That we had been tapping Angela Merkel's cell phone, allegedly. This was a massive, the technical term was shit storm, in Germany because you have a country with 50 years of the Third Reich and the Stasi using intelligence gathering to really control the populous. It's a very, very sensitive issue.
John Emerson:
You know, the chancellor does not get a president's daily brief from the intelligence community the way our president does, first meeting every day, as you know. The IC doesn't report directly to her, it reports either to her national security advisor or her chief of staff. There's a level of sort of giving the Heisman to the community. When this thing broke, it was explosive internally. It was something we had to deal with in terms of trying to not only rebuild trust between our two countries, but rebuild the working relationship between our intelligence community and the German intelligence community. It's a good thing we did because there were multiple instances where, because of that work, we were able to thwart terror attacks, not just in Europe, but on German soil as well.
Josh King:
I mean, Der Spiegel wrote at the time, and I'm going to quote, "German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle on Thursday took the unusual step of summoning the American ambassador to Germany, to an afternoon meeting in Berlin in the wake of reports that the US might have sped on chancellor Angela Merkel's cell phone." John, you've just been confirmed. You've just moved your family over to Berlin. You're expecting maybe more of the fun stuff than the tough stuff. You are summoned to meet with the foreign minister. I mean, you've had a lot of experience in diplomatic type activities, but this is the major leagues.
John Emerson:
You say fun stuff, tough stuff. I actually picked Germany in part because I thought it would be one of the most interesting places. I certainly didn't hope or expect that I would have to deal with that kind of crisis so early in my tenure, but, it was a situation. I was the first ambassador since the second world war to be convoked, which is when basically, when your host government yells at you for one reason or another. It was very interesting.
John Emerson:
The meeting with Westerwelle, who I had already had several meetings with, even in just that six week period of time, was interesting. He started out and he said, "Dear John, I need to address you as ambassador." Then it was just sort of bam, bam, bam.
John Emerson:
Then after about 10 minutes of this, and my response was, "I will communicate." You don't apologize. You don't admit, "I will communicate that back to the government. I understand the concern. These are steps that we're beginning to take." Then he just sort of sighed and he said, "Okay, let's talk about how we're going to fix this." Even in that context, it was much more of two people who care deeply about the trans-Atlantic relationship. How do we go about fixing this and rebuilding it? It was interesting. The State Department was not too helpful. They sent me a cable that said, "Well, what you should do is say, 'I'm sorry, we don't comment on intelligence matters.'"
Josh King:
I can see that cable being drafted right now.
John Emerson:
I promptly ripped it up. This is one of the advantages that non-career ambassadors have. You're a little less concerned about am I going to piss somebody off who's going to be sitting on my review committee at the State Department. I knew for sure that one reason the President of the United States put me there was for my judgment on how to deal with these kinds of unanticipated situations that come up. I chose to go out in the public and took a very public role on this, which effectively was allowing people to unload on me, responding that I understood, fully understood, and letting them through my response know that I understood. Then trying to elevate the conversation back to why it's so important written that we continue to work together. I did that all over the country for a period of time.
John Emerson:
One of the biggest honors I received was when I left. The day before I left, I got a call from our station chief. He asked me to come to there, which is unusual, because usually they would come to me as ambassador, come down to the floor where they were. I walk in and there's a number of people gathered there. They all start applauding and he presented me with the CIA medal, which is the highest civilian honor that the CIA can give. It was for standing up for and defending the intelligence community during a time of great distress. I'll tell you, that meant a lot to me.
Josh King:
John, talking about how you've been able to hone your judgment on unexpected situations that come up, I want to take you back 25 years, January 17th, 1990. Let's hear from Tom Brokaw of NBC News,
Speaker 10:
Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, reporting tonight from Southern California.
Tom Brokaw:
Good evening from the San Fernando Valley, where night is beginning to settle in after what has been a very long day. All of Southern California still is reeling from that major earthquake that struck at 4:30 Pacific time this morning in Northridge in the San Fernando Valley, a heavily populated area, just Northwest of downtown Los Angeles. The quake was severe at 6.6 on the Richter scale, the damage extensive, including five major highways cut, water supplies threatened, gas mains exploding, a half dozen communities in flames. The death toll has been going up all day long.
Josh King:
So John, you are still relatively new in the White House, as am I. Disaster strikes on that January morning. How do you and the federal government and the state government respond?
John Emerson:
Your listeners may not know is that I, not only is from California, but I had run the Clinton campaign in California in 1992. It was the first year actually since LBJ's landslide, that California went Democratic as opposed to Republican. It was an essential win for him if he was going to win the presidency. This was my home. Los Angeles was my home.
John Emerson:
It happened at about 7:30 in the morning. It was a Martin Luther King Day. I think my wife got the news first, and it was two things. Number one, quickly calling family to make sure that they're okay. Fortunately we were able to get through to her mother. Then I immediately went into the White House and I immediately went down to the Oval Office. I remember the President was there with Dee Dee Myers and George Stephanopoulos and a couple of other people. James Lee Witt, the head of FEMA came in. Within three hours, I was on a Air Force jet with Witt, with Henry Cisneros, who is the secretary of HUD, and with Federico Peña, who was the secretary of transportation.
John Emerson:
The four of us were heading out to Los Angeles. We literally were on the ground that night. These were the days when California felt like it was the day of the locusts. They had just had fires. They'd had floods. FEMA already had a operation center set up in Pasadena, California because there had been terrible fires. A lot of homes destroyed in the hills above Pasadena. We immediately went there.
John Emerson:
I remember that first night, there were three aftershocks, each one of which was greater than a 5.0, and you feel those, even for us experienced Southern Californians. It was an extraordinary experience, and it was basically one of those things that Bill Clinton was so extraordinary about is just all hands on deck. We had as our chief of staff, Leon Panetta, also a Californian, who had just run before that job, the office of management and budget and had been the budget chair of the house of representatives, so boy, he knew how to get money out and get it deployed and get it out there fast.
John Emerson:
Literally within 60 days, we were able to get some of those freeways, bridges rebuilt, freeways repaired, and we made decisions on the ground. I don't know how deep you want to get in this, but decisions on the ground, on the fly that just got assistance and aid to people much more quickly than would otherwise have been the case. I think it ended up, to be honest with you, being a very, very positive story, not just for the federal government and the role it played, but also for governor Pete Wilson and the state emergency operation center, and for mayor Richard Riordan, Dick Riordan in the city of LA.
Josh King:
I mean the cooperation between Riordan, Wilson, Pena, Wit, Panetta, yourself, I mean really did create a model, not only for the many natural disasters that followed during the eight years of the Clinton presidency, but the administrations that followed. We have seen sometimes when all of the cooperation has not gelled in that way, but this administration learned a lot from that critical few days and the weeks that followed.
John Emerson:
I'll tell you this. This is the benefit of Bill Clinton having been a governor, and having been a governor for a long time. He understood as a governor, you could have a tornado, you could have a hurricane, you could have an earthquake, you could have any number of natural disasters and you want to have the ability to respond to that and help people as quickly as possible.
Josh King:
Let's fast forward now, because in all the intervening experiences that you've had, you started in California and you returned to California after your time in Berlin. Jerry Brown, as the 34th and 39th governor led the state for 16 years and seven days. Succeeded now by Gavin Newsom. There are many New York Stock Exchange listed companies headquartered in your state. Chevron, Wells Fargo, Disney, Intel, just to name some of the largest. With a population of 40 million people, give us a quick state of the state as we begin the Newsom years, compared to where it was when Dick Riordan was looking at the highway and was broken.
John Emerson:
One reason Bill Clinton won California in 1992 was California was in a recession. The California economy had been humming in large part because of president Reagan's massive buildup, military buildup, which a lot of people credit with helping to end the Cold War. A lot of that money went to California. Southern California was sort of the place where aerospace really was based.
John Emerson:
Then with the fall of the wall and that began to fall off. Then you had several other dynamics occur simultaneously, California was in a severe recession. We had the riots. We had the Rodney King riots in the spring of 1992. When you look at where California was then, and on top of that fires and floods and earthquakes and all that, and coming out of a recession to where it is today, it's a pretty extraordinary journey.
John Emerson:
California is now either the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world. Jerry Brown, when he came in eight, nine years ago, I guess it is now, as governor, there was a massive deficit. He turned it around to his last year. There was about a 20 billion dollar surplus, and that money is put away for a rainy day fund, but it's a very extraordinary success story. Of course, Silicon Valley and the amazing growth and success of that and the tech world and the internet, all of that is an important piece of it.
John Emerson:
But you know what? Manufacturing's starting to come back to California as well. Here we are, a high tax state, kind of place that normally, maybe economists would look at and say, "Well, this state, you got 40 million people. You've got terrible homelessness problems. You've got very, very high taxes. You know, this is a recipe for disaster." We're still growing. We're still thriving. I'd say the one negative thing about California from then to now is our school systems, our public school systems, if anything, have gotten worse.
John Emerson:
That's a huge danger, not just for the California economy, but for the national economy. I know there's a lot of focus on that, both from governor Newsom and from our local, some of the school superintendents, and we actually have a pretty good charter school movement out there as well.
Josh King:
We mentioned at the beginning of the show, John, that you do have a connection with New York City. You grew up in New Jersey. Your grandfather, Presbyterian minister, John Sutherland Bonnell was the pastor of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church here in the city. He would reach, I think, 3 million radio listeners with his talks on ABC network, beginning in 1943, lived to be 99. What are your memories of hearing him on the radio?
John Emerson:
I'm named after him. I'm John Bonnell Emerson, actually, that's what the B stands for. He baptized me at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. He was there for 26 years, and it was an extraordinary time. The New York Times actually had a Monday religion section where they'd cover his sermon and also the sermons of Harry Emerson Fosdick at Riverside, Norman Vincent Peale at Marble Collegiate, Stephen S Wise was the kind of leading rabbi at the time. Francis Cardinal Spellman at St. Patrick's Cathedral.
John Emerson:
He was always a larger than a life person. He was large, anyway. He was about 6'5", 6'6", a very big man. Youngest of 10 kids who had a sixth grade education. Grew up on Prince Edward Island, Canada. Worked in a mental institution and a fellow who was there, who was a genius, but also sadly had struggled with mental illness, really in effect homeschooled my grandfather. Went over and fought in World War I, and he had one of those famous pocket watch that saved his life stories. Actually, the family has the pocket watch. Mortar shell exploded, the two people on either side of him were killed and he ended up and woke up the next day in a hospital feeling like someone took a sledgehammer to his stomach. That pocket watch really did save his life.
John Emerson:
He started out as a circuit pastor with small churches. Ultimately in the age 42 comes to take Fifth Avenue and really built that into an iconic, certainly at the time, church in the United States of America. Hearing him on the radio, he was friends of presidents, friends of ambassadors, friends with ... He'd met Churchill several times. He wrote a book called Bombs Over Britain. He was asked by the government to go there in the late 1930s. As you know, FDR was concerned about us doing everything we could to help, and came back and preached sermons and spoke on the radio about what was happening in Britain at that time. Of course, this is before we got into the war, '39, '40, that timeframe. He was a pretty extraordinary man and very much a larger than life figure in my life.
Josh King:
Courageous, too. At the time that Joe McCarthy was crusading against sort of the potential communist influence in religion, he really spoke up and spoke directly to power.
John Emerson:
He did. It was so funny because I'd never heard this story and grandpa was not shy about sharing his stories with us, but we watched a TV show, my friends in law school and I, called Tail Gunner Joe. It was done by the same people who did Missiles of October, which was sort of the first real dramatization of the Cuban missile crisis. Well, this was about Joe McCarthy.
John Emerson:
There's a scene where a guy bursts into the Oval Office and he says, "Mr. President, this time he's gone too far. He basically said all Protestant clergy are communist or something like that. I have this telegram." He read the telegram and it was signed by, I believe, a Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame, a prominent rabbi. It might have been Steven S Wise and John Sutherland Bonnell. I'm like, "Oh my God, Gramps."
John Emerson:
I called him up and I said, "Why didn't you ever tell us that story?" He said, "Because the president asked me to keep it confidential." I was like, "Well, how did it get out?" But in any event, apparently the story is a good one because what happened was he and Eisenhower were trading calls and Eisenhower, here's our chance. Of course, as you would imagine, being in the White House, that telegram went back and forth and was drafted in a way that it could be used most effectively by the President, because he sure wanted to come after McCarthy as well. A great story and a wonderful piece of our family lore that I would've had no idea about but for that presentation in Tail Gunner Joe.
Josh King:
So you head up to college upstate in Hamilton, you get your law degree at the University of Chicago. You head west to practice law in LA and eventually find yourself among the young cohort, challenging party establishment by backing Gary Hart over Walter Mondale in 1984. Let's listen to Peter Jennings, David Brinkley, and Senator Hart as the votes were coming in for super Tuesday, early 1984.
Gary Hart:
Well, I think we did very well. We showed up in three major regions of the country, two northern industrial states, a major southern state and some western states.
Speaker 13:
How did you like it when this AFL CIO began talking about where's the beef? A nice big fat hamburger roll, but no beef. What do you say to it?
Gary Hart:
I showed the beef last night in Mobile, Alabama, actually. I had two buns and a copy of my book. The book is 176 pages long, and it's got a lot of beef in it. What I said was that I think a lot of people don't like that beef or can't digest it, because it's not grown on special interest cattle
Speaker 14:
Senator, a lot of our exit polls show that you have the least amount of strength tonight, among people who are looking for experience and who are looking for stability in a crisis. Now that's a very important vote come November. What can you do to overcome that?
Gary Hart:
Well, we have, however many months there are, eight or 10, for this campaign to settle down and get into some very serious discussions and about the depth and breadth of our commitment and our policies on arms control, on approach to foreign policy, not just east and west, but north and south, international economics, economic redevelopment here at home.
Speaker 14:
Can I interrupt for a sec?
Josh King:
I mean, John, thinking about all those issues that Senator Hart just rattled off, how would our country and our world maybe be different today if Gary Hart had taken on president Reagan instead of Vice President Mandale?
John Emerson:
Well, I mean, that presumes that he would've been president, but I will tell you, I think it would be a lot better off. This is a guy, who in the early 1980s, and this was part of why I was attracted to him. He said, "Look, let's quit fighting about how to cut up the pie. Let's figure out how to make the pie grow." He was the first politician of note to actually talk about the hollowing out of our manufacturing base in large part because of technological advances. He was sort of ridiculed by some, I think others didn't see it as a ridicule, called an Atari Democrat because he was so focused on the technological advances, but also on taking care of the people who are going to inevitably lose their jobs during this.
John Emerson:
You could trace that all the way to the Trump revolution, in effect. He was the first one to really talk openly about the environment and climate. He was very well known for his military reform ideas and the concern of spilling blood in the Middle East because of our dependence on foreign oil and the need to move away from that. Maureen Dowd wrote a piece on him. There's a movie that came out about the campaign a year or so ago.
Josh King:
Tommy Dewey played you.
John Emerson:
Yeah, he did. He's much better looking than I am so nobody knows it's me, but anyway, but he did a great job. Maureen Dowd wrote a piece on it. She interviewed Gary before the movie and she said, "He's sort of a Nostradamus. He can see around corners. Of course sitting here just blocks away from ground zero, it was Gary Hart and Warren Rudman who chair the terrorism commission that Bill Clinton and Secretary Cohen of the Secretary of Defense put together in the late 1990s that in effect predicted a massive attack led by Osama bin Laden on American soil.
John Emerson:
Losing Gary from, and this is I think maybe part of the message of that movie, it's called The Front Runner by Jason Reitman, is that losing him for what happened, which was probably quaint by today's standards, was a loss for the United States of America, because he was a great public servant.
John Emerson:
Just a month ago, we had at our house, a gathering of some of the old Hart crew with Gary and with Hugh Jackman to really inaugurate a Gary Hart Center at Denver Metropolitan University to try to get young people involved, not just in politics, but in public service, much more broadly spent. That, I think would be ... Let me tell you, there were a lot of people in the Clinton White House in those early days who were veterans of the Hart years and in those two Hart campaigns, '84 and the one that ended in '87. That was sort of my baptism in politics. I'll tell you, I was really quite fortunate to have the opportunity to work with him.
Josh King:
You had great role models and mentors. They go back to your grandfather, John Sutherland Bonnell, your father, George McGovern, Gary Hart, Bill Clinton. It all adds up to where you find yourself in the 2012 campaign. John, John Quincy Adams was our first minister at the US ligation in Berlin, 1797 to 1801. You followed a long line of distinguished Americans in Bonn and then Berlin and after World War II, taking over from Phil Murphy. Talk to me about your preparation for this job, the modern selection process, confirmation, and ultimately training for a political appointee to present his or her credentials to our most important allies.
John Emerson:
First of all, just for the listeners to know, we are a little bit unusual in our country in that 30% of our ambassadors tend to be non-career folks. They could be former senators, governors people from government. I was probably there in large part because of my past government service. They could be business people, they could be academics, or they could just be a friend of the president. I mean, sometimes people who've been involved in the campaign. So you get all sorts of those. 70% of the ambassadors though, are career foreign service. I will tell you for those of us who are non-career, we come into these jobs knowing we've got an awful lot to learn from the extraordinary non-career people who are there. By the same token, hopefully we have something to offer and something to bring to the table as well.
John Emerson:
During my period of time in presidential personnel in the first year of the Clinton White House, I took the leadering role in selecting our ambassadors. I had a sense of what was important. One thing that's important is the ability of someone to draw a connection to the country in which they're interested in serving. I was approached by the Obama administration after the 2012 campaign, is this something you'd be interested in? I said, "Yeah, depending on where." Obviously it's a big dislocating effort for our whole family. A daughter about to start college and identical twins going into 11th grade at that point. They said, "Well, tell us where." I put Germany at the top of the list, both because I thought it was interesting, but also I had a connection. I'd taken the language in high school and college. I had been over to Germany as part of a young leaders program in my mid thirties. I'd been there several times beyond that.
John Emerson:
I also knew I'd done a lot of work on trade in both the Clinton White House and then in the first term I'd been part of President Obama's trade negotiations and advisory council. I knew that the TTIP negotiation was going to be a big piece of the economic issue. Also candidly, being with Capital Group, an international investment management firm gave me a, I wouldn't say a fluency, but certainly a pretty good understanding of some of the broader business and international economic issues that you would deal with in a country like Germany. That was sort of the argument as to why. Fortunately, the President agreed and put me in that position.
John Emerson:
Then the question is what do you do in terms of training? Once you go through the vetting process, which by the way is miserable, you're filling out documents about like who did you borrow lunch money from in elementary school type of thing, I mean it's very, very detailed. Every foreign trip you've taken in the last 15 years. Why? Who you went with, who you met, who do you keep in touch with? So on and so forth, all that stuff. Mostly geared towards trying to understand if you can be flipped. You have vulnerabilities that could be exploited by one of our enemies as an example, but in any event, you get through the vetting process, you pass all the ethical hurdles. Then you go to what we sardonically refer to as charm school. That's about a three week course.
John Emerson:
That's, in effect, you're learning the ins and outs of the State Department. How embassies work. I had 2000 members of Mission, Germany and five consulates. The largest consulate in the world in our consulate in Frankfurt, which served as the back office for other embassies in Europe and Africa. There's a lot to learn there. Then you go through a couple of months of what we call consultations. Those are typically meetings of an hour and hour and a half in the intelligence community at the White House, in the State Department, every element of the State Department, over at the Pentagon, at the Department of Commerce, at the Department of Treasury, particularly on issues where your posting are going to touch. Because Germany was a NATO member, because it was an EU member, a lot of NATO EU issues.
John Emerson:
In a way, this is like studying for a final exam. Your final exam is actually your confirmation hearing. You then go into your confirmation hearing having had this almost drinking from a fire hose, and all that being said, when you get over there, you realize how little you know. There's so many people in the government to meet, understanding the nuances of different relationships. The good news is being trained as a lawyer, having worked in the White House, you have to develop an ability to be a pretty quick study. That fortunately, I think, was helpful to me.
Josh King:
Shortly before you arrived in Berlin, President Obama visited June, 2013, and in front of the Brandenburg Gate, he said this.
Speaker 15:
Well, thank you, Chancellor Merkel for your leadership, your friendship, and the example of your life. From a child of the east, to the leader of a free and United Germany, as I've said, Angela and I don't exactly look like previous German and American leaders, but the fact that we can stand here today, along the fault line where a city was divided, speaks to an eternal truth. No wall can stand against the yearning of justice, the yearnings for freedom, the yearnings for peace, that burns in the human heart.
Josh King:
I mean, no American president, no German chancellor had looked like Merkel and Obama. What are your particular sensitivities about being our representative to a country with whom we've fought two world wars in the past century, gradually rebuilding relations through the chancellorships of Adenauer, Brandt, Schmidt, Kohl, Schröder, and now Merkel?
John Emerson:
Well, first of all, just pause and think about how eloquent Barack Obama was there. I mean, it was just a extraordinary honor and privilege to represent him and the administration and the entire country in Germany. There's several things that become very clear, and you can read about them in books and people can tell you about, but when you're on the ground is the deep visceral relationship that most Germans, particularly Germans who grew up in the west during the Cold War, and now everyone feel towards the United States of America. You defeated us, but then you came in and you rebuilt us. You taught us about freedom. You taught us about democracy, and you taught us about a free press. You've worked with us and been our partner. That's why it hurt them so much when they thought we were spying on them. By the way, that's part of why I think there are challenges now to the relationship.
John Emerson:
It's the most important relationship, I think, to particularly Germans who grew up during the period of the Cold War, or not too many of them are left from the period of the Third Reich, but it's the most important relationship that they see. I used to say that our alliance with Germany was an indispensable relationship and for sure it was then, and I believe that it is today and will continue to be in the future. I also wear the hat as the chairman of the American Council on Germany now. I'm not just saying that because of that role. I honestly believe that. It was an honor. It was a different kind of role than, say an ambassador to Russia would have, or an ambassador to China, or even an ambassador to France where sometimes there's some complexities in that.
John Emerson:
There were things we were pushing Germany about. We wanted them to get more involved in taking a bigger role militarily. We were able to get Germany to provide the lethal aid to the Kurdish Peshmerga when we basically outsourced the ground game against ISIS to them. Germany stepped up and did that and played an important role there in the effort to degrade and defeat ISIS and did that beautifully.
John Emerson:
There were other places where we were pushing. We were pushing on some of the issues that president Trump is talking about. We were pushing the them on burden sharing and playing a bigger role. We got them to agree to the 2% of GDP commitment on NATO. We're obviously working hard with them to get a free trade agreement through the EU that would level a playing field in terms of manufacturing, automobiles, and that kind of thing.
John Emerson:
We are also encouraging them, particularly during the Greek financial crisis, you guys need to be investing more in the Southern tier of Europe. Germans, they want that balanced budget. That was something else we were pushing against. It's not like we were just over there singing kumbaya all the time. We had our issues, but our issues were always in the context of an understanding that this is one of the handful of most important bilateral relationships we have with any country on the planet, and that at the end of the day, a 99 out of 100 things, this is a country that stands with us with our shared values and our shared commitment to democracy and human right and freedom around the world.
John Emerson:
It was a great honor. I will also tell you, I am a huge fan of Angela Merkel. I had the privilege of having dinner with her about a month ago when she came to New York for the UNGA meetings, and her ambassador to the UN, Christoph Heusgen is a friend. He was her national security advisor during the time when both Phil Murphy and I were there. In fact, he invited both Phil and me to that dinner. She's an extraordinary person, an extraordinary leader and I think will go down in history as one of the great ones.
Josh King:
I mean, few people have as much insight into Mrs. Merkel as you do. Her singular force, she's now been in office for 14 years, lived in East Germany from her infancy to her entrance in politics when the wall came down in 1989. This followed her training and doctorate in quantum chemistry and her work as a research scientist. In an age when most leaders last less than a decade on the world stage, what's been her staying power?
John Emerson:
I think as much as anything it's her sensible pragmatism. She's not really ideological. She's about what works, how we can move things forward. She's not afraid to take bold action. I mean, energyvenga folk can move away from nuclear into renewables. That was a big deal. In some parts of Germany, still unpopular. She's not afraid to do that, but I think there was a sense of she's steady. She's solid. She knows what she's doing. She's thoughtful. She doesn't react impulsively. That gives the, I think particularly Germans, a sense of comfort.
John Emerson:
You know, the one negative thing that happened, of course, when I was, there was the whole immigration crisis and her vershaffendaus, which was effectively, "Hey, we can handle this. We have a human rights catastrophe occurring on our border. We do need to let these people in." People confused that with, "Oh, she invited a million and a half people in." No, she actually didn't. She was trying to deal with a catastrophe on the border and did deal with that.
John Emerson:
By the way, if you look at Germany today, a lot of those people, a lot of them have been sent back, but many of them, the refugees who came in are working, they're contributing to the German economy. Germany has a demographic problem, and that is a society that's growing older. They need some of these younger workers and they have been able to honor vershaffendaus, but boy, at the time, there's no question that that immigration surge provided rocket fuel for AFD, the Alternative For Deutschland, which is the right wing party that got into the Budenstag, this last time. Even with that, she's someone I think people have great confidence is going to do the right thing.
John Emerson:
I'll tell you something else about her. She's got a great sense of humor. People don't necessarily see that in terms of her public dealings, but she's got a great sense of humor. She's extremely warm and just a terrific person on top of that.
Josh King:
You were in your post when the Brexit referendum went down, June 23rd, 2016. Right here at the New York Stock Exchange, the Dow was down nearly 900 points over the course of two days. From someone in your position, it can't have been a complete surprise. I want to hear, speaking of chancellor Merkel's sense of humor, maybe a dry sense of humor, here she is in London speaking before the British parliament, February, 2014.
Angela Merkel:
I've been told many times during the last few days that there are very special expectations of my speech here today. Supposedly or so, I have heard some expect my speech to pave the way for a fundamental reform of the European architecture, which will satisfy all kinds of alleged or actual British wishes. I'm afraid they are in for a disappointment. I've also heard that others are expecting the exact opposite and are hoping that I will deliver the clear and simple message here in London, that the rest of Europe is not prepared to pay almost any price to keep Britain in the European union. I'm afraid these hopes will be dashed too.
Josh King:
These hopes certainly dashed. The referendum goes down. John, how does President Obama, Senator Kerry, and ultimately someone like ambassador John Emerson, react to what it seems overnight, a changed world order?
John Emerson:
Well, I'll tell you, President Obama and Secretary Kerry both made it very, very clear in the UK, in Europe, that they thought this was a bad idea, were concerned about it. The interesting thing, immediately, there was a real ... Again, Germans react more emotionally than people normally think. I think they think of Southern Europeans as being emotional. Germans can be emotional. There was this sort of emotional reaction of you don't want to be with us anymore. Germany likes being parts of a group of nations doing things. They tried it the other way. It didn't work out too well. There was real concern and great anxiety, and I think that anxiety was probably shared at the highest levels of our government that, oh my gosh, is this the first brick out the wall of European integration?
John Emerson:
Are we going to see a Nexit in the Netherlands? Are we going to see a Grexit? Are we going to see a Frexit with LaPen in France? Are we going to see an Italy? In point of fact, one of the silver linings of this whole Brexit process is it's been such a horror show that no other countries, none of the other 27 remaining member states of the European Union are interested in going in that direction.
John Emerson:
I think that's a bit of a silver lining. The second silver lining is the 27 member states actually came together. They came together and they weren't fighting across purposes. It was sort of, "Okay, UK, you figure out what you want. You come to us with a proposal. We're not going to negotiate against ourselves. When you're ready to talk, then we'll talk." The proof in the pudding of all this kind of moving to a more positive place is if ... My guess is if you were to have asked Angela Merkel, and at the time, I guess it was François Hollande, and Prime Minister Renzi of Italy, named the top five items on their worry list, Brexit would've been number one.
John Emerson:
Today, number five, number six. I think they they're dealing with it now quite well. There's no question. There was a lot of anxiety, particularly on the ground in Germany when it happened. There was also a little schadenfreude. I was at a party watching the European Cup at the time, somebody's house. There were about a hundred people there. This is when Iceland beat England. Some of the Germans, this is about three days after the Brexit vote. They go, "Well, I guess we're having a Brexit out of the European Cup." A little schadenfreude there. I don't think too many people were rooting for England in that tournament, sitting in Germany.
Josh King:
You were the 2015 recipient of the State Department's, Susan B. Cobb Award for Exemplary Diplomatic Service, given annually to the non-career ambassador who used private sector leadership and management skills to make a significant impact on bilateral or multilateral relations through proactive diplomacy. I'm curious, John, you mentioned your work in Capital Group, your work in the White House personnel office, all the things leading up to your appointment. What skills do you think you brought to the job once you were there, both from government and business, which might have otherwise been hard to find among those whose careers stay squarely within the diplomatic ranks?
John Emerson:
First of all, it was a great honor for me to receive that award. I mean, I said 30% of us are non-career. It's about 65 or 70 ambassador ranked people around the globe. One of those gets it every year, which is really ... It was a real honor to get it. The other thing I appreciate is there's always tension that the press plays up between the career people and the non-career, but why are these donors getting ambassadorial posts? The people who nominate you for this and the people who ultimately select it are the career folks. You really almost feel like I'm getting respect from the people I would most want to get respect from in this world. I think, just to go back for what skills, I mean, I think the reason I got this was, number one, the way we handled the aftermath of the whole cell phone disclosure situation and rebuilding the intel relationship, and then also what I was trying to do in terms of the TTIP negotiations.
John Emerson:
There, one of the roles I played for President Clinton was I ran the war room to get the Uruguay round of the gap agreement through Congress. Interestingly enough, there was a young White house Fellow who was assigned to that war room by Bob Ruben. His name is Michael Froman. Michael then became my boss as the US trade representative. I was sort of his wing man as we were not just relating to Germany, but also the two of us did some tag team presentations to the rest of the European ambassadors when we were back at the State Department a couple of times on how do you build domestic political support for a complicated trade agreement?
John Emerson:
I think that was something that, I don't know if it was private sector or public sector, but the ability to speak to businesses to help mobilize business community to support this agreement was probably also part of why I got it. A lot of it's just your own judgment and how you live your life and how you respond to situations. I will tell you, I was very deeply honored to get that award.
Josh King:
When we come back, more with Ambassador John Emerson on the future of Germany relations with the United States and what happens when an emissary finally has to give up his sash. That's right after this.
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Josh King:
Back now with former ambassador to Germany and now chairman of Capital Group International, John B. Emerson. So John, I don't know what your thoughts might have been about your future on the night in the United States of November 8th, 2016. I know where I was. I was the Javits Center. I don't know if you came back for election day or you were in Germany for it, but was it a surprise? Where were you at the time?
John Emerson:
Well, it's interesting. I mean, one of the roles that an ambassador plays in the run up to a presidential election, which pretty much if you're serving for the full term of a president, you're always going to have, is explaining what's happening in our country to the host country. Let's just say, and you know, I mean the good news is with my background in presidential politics and a number of different campaigns, this was an area I was very comfortable with. It was almost like I was an analyst. Just as we went through the primary processes, as we went through the debates, and after every major event, we would do something comparable to this. An interview at the embassy that would then be sent out, put online, what have you, about what does this mean? What has happened?
John Emerson:
On election night, we had two parties simultaneously that the embassy was a co-sponsor of, each of which had 2000 people at it. I mean, just huge interest in Germany on this. A ton of press at both places. I went and spoke at both events. Don't forget the polls wouldn't start closing until 2:00 AM German times. This was going on well past midnight. People would ask me, they would say, "Well, you must feel pretty good," because obviously they knew while I was completely nonpartisan and analytical in the way I would describe things, they knew my background, they knew I was close to the Clintons. "Oh, you must be excited." I just said, "Let me just tell you something, this election is going to be extraordinarily close, and by no means is it a foregone conclusion that Hillary Clinton will win."
John Emerson:
They'd say, "What, why?" I'd say, "Well, she's only two to three points up in the polls, and I can tell you most of those numbers are going to be in places like New York and California. As far as I can tell, the swing states are tight." I said, "To be honest with you, the fact that she went to Michigan and Pennsylvania on the day before the election is a bad sign, because those are states that should be in the wheelhouse." Normally you'd think she'd be going to Florida and North Carolina right before the election. There were sort of signals that, and that I expressed to the press and the people there. Then once the polls closed, I wanted to be, in effect by myself, not literally by myself. I mean, Kimberly was there.
John Emerson:
We became very good friends with the Bureau Chief of the New York Times, Allison Smail, who's now here spokesperson for the UN. In any event, we invited her and her husband and I think one other friend to sit with us as we, I just said, "Get me a room somewhere where I can watch the polls." You could tell having lived through this, I could tell pretty quickly that things weren't going to be going in a surprising direction.
John Emerson:
I then at 6:00 AM started making the rounds of the press. This had all been set up. I literally was doing live television commentary and radio in Germany until about one in the afternoon. Then David Weston asked me to come on Bloomberg to talk about what are the implications of this overseas? I did that for about half an hour at that point in time. I felt my responsibility as ambassador, as much as obviously I, close to Hillary Clinton and was extremely upset and concerned about the election. I felt my responsibility is to try to calm everybody down about this election.
John Emerson:
That was the tone that I took. I said, "Look, people say things during campaigns. Once they get in the White House, once they learn the facts about a situation, they often will change positions. They kind of tone down the combative rhetoric," things like that. I made the point that, look, there are a lot of things that we knew from the campaign that there's going to be disagreement with Germany on. For instance, COP 21, the Paris Climate Change Agreement. We knew there was going to be a disagreement on the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal.
John Emerson:
Several of other things. I said, "Look, there are going to be disagreements that we haven't had." Trade. The trade relationship was going to be somewhat different. He'd made it clear he had no interest in pursuing the TTIP or the TPP negotiations. I said, "You know, there may be differences government to government, but you've got the business to business relationship, which is hugely important." I made the point that this is an administration that'll probably want to be pulling back regulations, try to cut red tape, make it easier for companies to invest in the United States, which actually had been a priority of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Josh King:
He has immediate ancestry in Germany. He has bankers in Germany. I mean, he has a lot of connections.
John Emerson:
Yeah. I didn't know about the bankers at that point, but I actually did talk about the ancestry. Let's just say that the concerns that a lot of Germans had about the election have been more than realized, if you step back and look at it and look at where we are today. I'll tell you this. This fits with my role as Chairman of the American Council in Germany. I talked about the importance of the people to people relationship. There's 65 million Americans that have German heritage.
John Emerson:
Then the business to business relationship continues. BMW now makes more cars over here than it does in Bavaria. It's Bavarian Motorworks. VW is planning, they built a huge during my tenure factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I worked with Senator Corker on that. They are going to make all their electric vehicles there, is what they want to do. Siemens has 60,000 employees in the United States of America. I try to get people to understand that the relationship is a lot bigger and broader than simply how do the two leaders of the governments get along?
Josh King:
I mean, you've got to effect at that point in November, and then December and January, your own transition. You go from what would probably have been a friendly handover to someone you probably would've known to eventually a year later, Rick Grenell. We do know how the transition between Barack Obama and Donald Trump went down. One meeting and they've never spoke since, but what did you do to establish continuity with the next person in the post?
John Emerson:
Well, President Obama was clear. He wanted everybody in his administration to do everything they could to make for a very smooth transition. That was something that the President Bush had done for him. He wanted to do the same for his successor. We all put together, papers, analysis of what are the top issues, where are we, et cetera. They're doing that at the State Department, doing it at post.
John Emerson:
Now, on election night, I did say to Kimberly, we need to cancel our Christmas vacation because I'm sure we'll be leaving on January 20th, and we need to start our whole farewell process. Now what normally happens, and obviously if it was a president of the same party, I probably would've stuck around through July, which is when the G20 was slated to happen in Hamburg. That kind of would've been my swan song.
John Emerson:
Even if there's a change administration, what Bush did for Clinton people, and what Obama did for Bush people is typically you don't tell them you got to be out on January 20th. You say, "Stick around for another month or two, do your proper farewells. By the way, if you have kids in school, let's talk. Maybe it'll be appropriate for you to stay through the end of the school year." Bob Kimmitt, one of my predecessors who is George HW Bush's ambassador to Germany when Bill Clinton came in as president and Warren Christopher as Secretary of State, Bob Kimmitt had kids in school. He stayed as ambassador until the summer of 1993, as an example. That's normally what happens.
John Emerson:
Then when you come back, come to the State Department, we'll have most of our senior people in place. You can brief us. Often, there was a reception at the State Department for returning ambassadors. Anyway, needless to say, none of that happened here. That was my instinct was just that there'd been enough hostility in the campaign that he's going to want everybody out of there. By the way, I felt I couldn't in good faith, what had I been talking about? Negotiating the TTIP, getting the Iran nuclear deal done, getting the COP 21 signed and approved, a whole host of issues that I knew the administration had diametrically opposed positions on, it wouldn't have been right for me to ... What'd I say? You know, everything I've been saying about X, Y, and Z? Nevermind.
John Emerson:
I was perfectly fine with our departure, but I must say when you're moving a family of five and a dog and all the household goods and then you're trying to get around a large country with five consulates and touch all the bases, it was a pretty frenetic 10 weeks.
Josh King:
A few months maybe earlier than you planned. How do you personally, you and Kimberly, reestablish your footing in California? Was a return to Capital Group always in your plan?
John Emerson:
Well, it was actually something that we'd talked about when I left. I had to retire, but there was discussions that well, who knows where we'll all be in three or four years, but it's something we'd certainly talk about. It wasn't like I was leaving to go for a competitor. Once it became clear that I'd be leaving and when, I actually set up a meeting with a couple of my friends who were very senior folks in the organization for late January when I knew I would return. We started having the conversation.
John Emerson:
Mainly you are, like I said, 10 weeks to unwind all this, that's a tall order. Our kids, by the way, it was great, because our twins did 11th grade, 12th grade at an international school. Then a gap year in Germany where they worked on an organic farm, they worked at Babelsberg Film Studios, some other things, all unpaid internships, and had an extraordinary period of time.
John Emerson:
Our oldest daughter who started at Stanford literally a month after we arrived at post, but Stanford has a Berlin campus. She got out to come back and go to school there during part of her junior year, they all felt deep connections to Germany. What happened was they came back obviously for the Christmas holidays and then they wanted to stay through that period. All three of them missed the first couple of weeks of return to college, but it was so important and for them to be a part of all that. We did that, and by the way, Kimberly and I felt such a connection to the country and so many friends, we actually got an apartment in Berlin during 2016. When I go back and travel there for work, that's where I stay during the weekends.
Josh King:
So John, you and Kimberly are now back in California, 2017, Chancellor Merkel visits Washington. Whether it was an obsessive focus on body language of which I can sometimes fall victim, or a true chilling of relations between the United States and Germany, most obviously over NATO funding, but so many other issues that you've talked about in our conversation so far, the relationship seemed to grow as cold as a missed handshake. Let's take a listen to John Oliver of last week, Tonight.
John Oliver:
This was a week of diplomacy for the president, or as it turned out, the opposite of that.
Speaker 19:
President Trump posting Chancellor Angela Merkel at the White House today. Will be their first face to face meeting since Mr. Trump ridiculed the Chancellor on the campaign trail, accusing her of "ruining Germany."
John Oliver:
Wow. But first, that is a major insult because historically the title of chancellor synonymous with ruining Germany is pretty much taken. If you are thinking that Trump made an extra effort to smooth things over you would be wrong, because watch what had happened when the media and a photo op made a very routine request.
Speaker 20:
Handshake? Handshake? Handshake?
Speaker 25:
Thank you.
Speaker 20:
Handshake please? Handshake. Okay.
Josh King:
John, earlier this year, Chancellor Merkel said, and I'm going to quote her. "There is no doubt that Europe needs reposition itself in a changed world. The old certainties of the postwar order no longer apply." That was taken to meant that Europe must consider the United States along with China and Russia as rivals in the future. Where do you think things stand?
John Emerson:
Well, first of all, that John Oliver thing is hysterical. In point of fact, if you were to ask Merkel and her people, they think Trump got a bum rap on the handshake thing. The reason is, first of all, he came out to the car to greet her. That, by the way was unusual. I mean Obama'd usually greet them when they came to the Oval Office. He did come out to the car to greet her. Then they had about 30 minutes one on one, the two of them. Their sense, her staff sense was in the ... You know, you've been in there a million times in the Oval when the press scrum is in there for these photo ops. You can't hear yourself think with the cameras clicking and all that. They actually think he didn't hear her say, "Let's shake hands."
John Emerson:
That being said, obviously it's not the best relationship that she's had with any president. She had very good relationships with Presidents Bush and Obama. I do think this. I think it's good and important for Europe to take more of a quit waiting to follow the United States. Start thinking seriously about what is in our interest, where do we need to take a leadership role? Don't wait for America to lead, because there is this dynamic of a gravitational pull in terms of pulling back. We see it reflected in both parties, certainly in the policies of the Trump administration. I think it's important for Europe to begin to be more forward leaning itself. That's something we were trying to encourage at the same time. Obviously with us, but the idea that Europe is going to focus on being a little more forward leaning as it confronts some of these issues is probably not a bad thing.
Josh King:
While you were in Berlin, career ambassador Marie Yovanovitch took up residence in 2016 as our Emissary in Kiev. She was recalled earlier this year. She came in at a difficult time. Russia had annexed Crimea. President Poroshenko struggled to fight corruption. Then here comes the new administration with a different set of objectives. Ambassador Bill Taylor is testifying up on Capitol Hill as we sit here and talk today in New York. From where you sat in Berlin, what did you make of the mess in Ukraine as you saw it unfold? As you return to private life, how does any career ambassador's mission change when power shifts in Washington and there's a new Secretary of State sending the cables?
John Emerson:
Well, just to answer that last question first, every one of these career ambassadors, first of all, you don't get to be ambassador until you're well on in your career, they all have served presidents of both parties. They actually pride themselves, as do the members of the intelligence community, in dutifully serving presidents of both parties. If there are shifts in policies implementing those policy shifts, whether or not they might agree with them. Now they'll clearly let their position be known, but at the end of the day, if we're going in direction A and they prefer B, they're going to go in direction A and follow the lead of the administration. That's why I think it's been so hurtful to so many of the career diplomats and to so many of the career members of the intelligence community to have this sort of sense that they're not trusted or not loyal, or what have you.
John Emerson:
I just want to put that down. As ambassador to Berlin, I actually worked very closely with Jeff Pyatt, who was her predecessor in Ukraine. He came in literally at the same time I did. We served for three full years together, and then she and I overlapped for a very brief period of time, because it was really only about three and a half years I was there. He was the lead on Ukraine and in particular Toria Nuland, who was the assistant Secretary of State for Europe, who was really the lead on Ukraine. My role was to be a wing man where I could in helping to deal with the German government.
John Emerson:
Again, Merkel's leadership through some something called the Normandy Process, which was France, Germany, Ukraine, and Russia, basically Putin, Poroshenko, Hollande, and Merkel. She was kind of the leader of that effort, which was trying to basically get a diplomatic solution to, which unfortunately it ultimately didn't come to success, fruition, but of that situation.
John Emerson:
The second thing we did was work very closely and in particular with Toria, but working with Merkel and in particular Christoph Heusgen, her national security advisor, to get sanctions imposed on Russia through the EU. The EU is a consensus organization. You need every country to sign off on it. There was interest in having sanctions that we didn't want to see a gap between where the United States of America was and where the EU was. We worked very, very closely on those matters as well.
John Emerson:
That is the proper role for an ambassador career, a non-career, to play. As opposed to supplementing or supplanting the person who has in fact been appointed by the president and confirmed by the United States Senate to represent the government, represent the country, represent the people of the United States of America to that country. We're hearing that maybe that didn't quite happen in this particular case in the last couple of years.
Josh King:
There are young people who are going to listen to this podcast who may want to follow in the footsteps of these career foreign service officers after they get out of college. It can make for an extraordinary career, as you've seen firsthand. You wrote over the weekend regarding a piece in foreign policy by Bill Burns that I'm going to quote your comment. "We need to back our talented and experienced diplomats who pride themselves on ably serving presidents on both parties." What's your message to these young people? Maybe you saw some of them when you were on post and you certainly see them back when you're talking in California to them and your fellow citizens about navigating that path in today's world.
John Emerson:
Well, first of all, what I would say to them is there are a few things that are more rewarding, interesting, exciting than serving your country overseas in any capacity. In particular with the foreign service, you opened the show with a quote from Jim Mattis about you need to buy me more ammo if you hollow out our diplomatic services. The fact of the matter is diplomacy is really the front line of national security. It's interesting as a foreign service officer. Every three years, you're moving to a different country. Sometimes you come back to the same country in a different capacity. Sometimes you'll come back to Washington DC, but it's extraordinarily interesting and extraordinarily important as well. You can have a very significant long term impact on our national security, on our foreign policy, and overall on really humanity and depending on where you're posted and what the circumstances are.
John Emerson:
If any young person has an interest in going into that area, I would absolutely encourage them to do it. I think it's important. Learning language is important. By the way, when you get to the State Department, when you get posted to a new country, if you don't know the language, they'll give you a year of a crash court at the Foreign Service Institute to learn that language. Learning language is important. Read newspapers. Papers like The Economist. Maybe some non-US papers like the Financial Times to get a sense of other of things that are happening around the world. Read books. I would recommend an extraordinary book by George Packer about Richard Holbrooke.
Josh King:
Our man.
John Emerson:
One of my predecessors.
Josh King:
I was going to mention Holbrooke.
John Emerson:
Yeah, exactly. Really, if you want to learn about life as a foreign service, I mean, he talks about when he and Tony Lake, who WAS the national security advisor when you and I were in the white hOuse, starting out as young FSOs in Vietnam as that was getting underway. I'm telling you, it's a great thing. think about studying international relations, but also think about studying philosophy, think about studying history. Really important to have a historical context for what's happening in the world. Popular line is history doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme. You'll see our best generals are students of military history.
Josh King:
Mattis.
John Emerson:
Mattis, for example. Yeah. For sure.
Josh King:
John Emerson, thank you so much for joining us.
John Emerson:
Thanks so much, Josh. It's a pleasure to be with you again and really enjoyed it. Thanks.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was ambassador John B. Emerson, former United States, ambassador to Germany and now Vice Chairman of Capital Group International. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. If you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us @icehouse podcast. Our show is produced by Pete Ash and Teresa DeLuca, with production assistance from Stephen Romancick and Ken Abel. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
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