WaPo: "His Diplomatic Coup: Getting Them on the Record"

By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 19, 2007; Page C01

Diplomats are trained to be, you know, diplomatic, but somehow Stu Kennedy gets them to say what they really think.

He waits until they retire, then he sits them down in front of his tape recorder and pretty soon they're telling him great stories about wars and revolutions and coups -- lots of coups! -- and about the Berlin Airlift and the fall of Saigon and drug lords and dictators and how it feels to get stabbed and bombed and shot.

"The crowd started beating me up," Frank Carlucci told Kennedy, recalling the day he was attacked by a mob in the Congo in 1960. "I didn't know I'd been stabbed until I saw the pool of blood. "

"All of a sudden, the window blew in," Robert Dillon told Kennedy, describing the day in 1983 when the American embassy in Beirut was bombed. "As I lay on the floor on my back, the brick wall behind my desk blew out. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. The wall fell on my legs."