Jerome Casper, Counsel for Hemispheric Affairs in the State Department’s Office of Legal Advisor. He was very good at the centerpiece tasks expected of foreign service officers: observation, analysis, reporting. He enjoyed them. What he really loved, however, and what he had really missed since his retirement, was operations: making things happen, getting the treaty signed, talking the drunken and obnoxious American businessman out of jail, engineering transfers for excessively uncongenial CIA station chiefs. That was what he was doing now. He found himself grateful to Wendy Gardner for giving him a concrete problem he could really get his teeth into again. He reached a secretary who said that Mr. Casper was engaged and asked if she could have him return Mr. Michaelson’s call. Michaelson said that she could. Mr. Casper was in fact not engaged in anything more demanding than skimming a summary of a dense report on the Commerce Department’s chronic inability to grasp the relationship between foreign trade and foreign policy.
What do You think about Washington Deceased (2013)?
