Good Grief! An Embarrassing Career-Endangering Episode.

• Author: Tuch, Hans
• Position: Personal account

When I was Public Affairs Counselor in Bonn, we received frequent visits from administration officials. Our routine preparations included preparing briefing materials for the officials and press packets for the accompanying traveling journalists. Although we were pretty skilled at these activities, there was always room for error, as we discovered in December 1982 during the first visit to Bonn of the newly appointed Secretary of State George Shultz.

What under another secretary of state would very likely have been an abrupt career-ending blunder for a public affairs counselor, instead showed the new Secretary in a humane and forgiving mode. With a scheduled arrival of 2 am, Shultz had cabled strict instructions to his close seventy-eight-year-old friend and mentor, Ambassador Arthur Burns, not to meet him at the airport. Other embassy officers were on hand that cold December night to meet him and perform the usual functions, including distributing the press packets.

It was not until the press party had arrived at their hotel that one of the reporters glanced at the press packet and found his lead story right on the cover: it announced in bold letters "Visit of the U.S. Secretary of State Charles P. Shultz." It was a slow news day, and the cover of the press packet found itself displayed on evening network news shows and in newspapers throughout the United States with the comment that the American embassy in Bonn didn't even know the secretary's correct name.

Secretary Shultz treated this gaffe unexpectedly lightly, recalling that it was not the first time this had happened to him. He told us that when he was president of the Bechtel Corporation, his secretary interrupted a board of directors meeting one day with the urgent message that President...