The Honorable Smith Hempstone

With realism smugly pervasive these days in foreign policy circles, it is gratifying to remember a fearless and inspiring champion of freedom. Smith Hempstone, who died on November 19 in Bethesda, Maryland, deserves to go down in the annals of American diplomacy as the ideal type of the American ambassador.

Not that Ambassador Hempstone was remotely typical. Neither the career-diplomat model nor the wealthy-political-appointee pattern fit his background. The son of a naval officer, he'd graduated from the University of the South, then joined the Marines and fought in Korea. As a newspaperman, he'd covered wars and written novels and produced a syndicated column for 19 years. He'd been editorial page editor of the late Washington Star for five years and editor in chief of the conservative Washington Times for three before George Bush in 1989 named him to the only diplomatic post he ever held or (by his own telling) ever aspired to, ambassador to Kenya.

Hempstone and his wife Kitty loved Africa. They'd driven the length and breadth of the continent in the 1960s, and had lived in Nairobi for five years. They had friends across Kenyan society before they ever dreamed of going there to represent the United States.

Hempstone served in Kenya from December 1989 to February 1993, the epochal end-of-history years when the world's tyrannies seemed on notice. Hempstone took to heart President Bush's announced policy of promoting democracy in Africa. At his first Fourth of July party for 600 Kenyan officials and leaders from many walks of life, he read from the Declaration of Independence, adding that when America sees "a government that has been elected by the people in free elections, and that then honestly serves the people it represents, we rejoice and support that government."

His engaging memoir Rogue Ambassador recounts the reception accorded this approach by opposition figures, struggling for oxygen in a corrupt, one-party state, and by the suave, churchgoing dictator, Daniel arap Moi, whose cabinet, a local Anglican bishop warned Hempstone, contained several "professional murderers." The warning would be abundantly borne out in the actions--ranging from slander to harassment to physical intimidation and assassination--engaged in by the agents of the ruling party.

Without seeking confrontation, and regularly cautioning the opposition not to foment lawlessness, Hempstone stuck to his guns. Some Western ambassadors backed him; so did some members of Congress, who threatened to tie aid to democratization; and some, though far from all, at the State Department. By the time the ambassador left Kenya, Moi had been forced to reinstitute the secret ballot and allow the opposition some political space. Smith Hempstone would live to see the dictator retired and the opposition National Rainbow Coalition voted into power by a landslide in December 2002.

These days, American ambassadors can only dream of spontaneous popular demonstrations of gratitude outside their embassy gates. They could do worse than take a page from our man in Nairobi.

Satisfying Our Great Expectations

Just in time for the gift-giving season, longtime contributing editor Noemie Emery has published her third book, Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families (John Wiley). Her third and, in the humble opinion of your SCRAPBOOK, her finest study of American political history to date. (If you haven't already, you will also want to acquire her biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton.) WEEKLY STANDARD readers are well aware of Noemie's learned and elegant autopsies of the American body politic. Now, in Great Expectations, she takes her scalpel to those prominent political families--the Adamses, Roosevelts, Kennedys, Bushes, and Gores--that have not just dominated politics, but combined drama and history in ways no novelist could invent. A ripping yarn, as it were, with just the kind of shrewd and pertinent observations on these fascinating characters that readers expect from Noemie Emery.

The Unfriendly Skies

THE SCRAPBOOK was at first surprised to hear that six imams had been removed from U.S. Airways Flight 300 before it took off from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on November 20. Government and corporate authorities are so terrified of being perceived as anti-Muslim that they usually go out of their way to avoid any action that might give rise even to the appearance of ethnic or religious profiling. But an underreported detail in the case helps to explain why airline security took such drastic action.

The six imams, five from Arizona and one from California, were on their way home after attending a conference of the North American Imams Federation. Like the other passengers, they boarded the flight and took their seats. Unlike the other passengers, three of the imams stood in the aisle and began reciting their evening prayers.

Now, if you are the sort of person who says a prayer before takeoff, you've probably drawn a few eye-rolls or curious looks from fellow flight-goers. So you can probably imagine the effect if the prayer you were saying was in Arabic and five other men were saying it in unison, all a little more than five years after 19 Muslims commandeered four passenger jets, turned them into weapons, and killed around 3,000 innocent people. Joe Schmoe sitting in seat 18A might get a little antsy, right?

Sure enough, another passenger slipped a note to a flight attendant wondering what the imams were up to. The captain and airport security asked the imams to leave the plane, the imams refused, and the police were summoned. (The imams deny that they refused to leave when asked.) Eventually, they disembarked and were taken in for questioning. According to the AP, none were detained longer than "several" hours--about the same time it took for the other 135 passengers, who had also been told to disembark, to reboard the plane and take off.

We were not in the least surprised, alas, that grievance groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the NAACP jumped into the fray, calling for independent investigations, laws criminalizing racial, ethnic, or religious profiling, and greater sensitivity toward the religious practices of American Muslims.

For our part, we're still waiting for the terrorists to show a little more sensitivity to their co-religionists--and to the rest of us--and to stop murdering in the name of their god.

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