Micro-profile: the state department official who teaches big-money donors how to be ambassadors.

• Author: Peters, Justin
• Position: 10 Miles, Square - Prudence Bushnell - Interview

So you raised a bunch of money for the Bush campaign and, for your efforts, you've just been named ambassador to some tropical paradise--but the extent of your previous involvement in international diplomacy consists of watching the Harlem Globetrotters once or twice. Henry James's book The Ambassadors certainly isn't the job training manual that you anticipated. How's a patronage diplomat supposed to learn the ropes?

Meet Prudence Bushnell, the petite former ambassador to Guatemala and Kenya and current dean of the Foreign Service Institute's School of Leadership and Management. From her office on the fourth floor of Building E on the Foreign Service Institute's spacious Arlington, Va., campus, Bushnell and her staff are responsible for training those tapped by the president to be ambassadors to various countries. During two weeks of intensive coursework, the ambassadors-to-be learn the finer points of their new job: staff management, media relations, and other diplomatic skills. But the course covers more than the niceties of party planning and fork-using. In recent years, security issues have become a primary focus of the training curriculum--and as a woman whose embassy was blown up from under her while she was in Kenya, Bushnell knows the importance of precautionary measures. "We're training people to...