Rich Hayse, It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! …Oops, No, It’s a Still a Destroyer.

Rich Hayse

It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! . . . Oops, No, It’s Still a Destroyer

In April, 1975, two U.S. Navy destroyers were scheduled to dock at the Port of Dakar, Senegal, to, among other things, give their crews some shore leave after weeks of anti-submarine duty in the Atlantic Ocean.  As Information Officer/Press Attache in the American Embassy in Dakar, my job description included drafting a news release for the Senegalese media and public about the approaching event.

This was not my first rodeo, putting words together for others to read. After a college degree in Speech, with a Radio-TV emphasis, I had written copy for radio newscasts; edited three editions of a law journal; written legal opinions for the Kansas Attorney General; prepared policy output for the U.S. Missions to NATO and the European Community; and created and edited six issues of a glossy news magazine about the U.S. for British consumption. (At right, Rich in 1960)

I did not feel the task of writing a news release was above my pay grade, especially since I could draw on Navy PR Office material that had presumably been cleared through the military bureaucracy. My draft began as follows:

         ” Two U.S. Navy destroyers will visit the Port of Dakar April 28-30 as part of a routine operational cruise. The ships, USS Brownson and USS New, are Gearing class destroyers whose primary mission is anti-submarine warfare.“

(Left, USS Brownson) The draft continued with a summary of past assignments, future port visits and identification of the captains of each vessel, a grand total of four Pulitzer-worthy paragraphs. I passed the draft to my boss, the embassy Public Affairs Officer, for approval. In the usual course of events, the press release would then be translated into French and distributed to our local media contacts. But—not so fast. I found myself summoned to the Ambassador’s office.

Convened with all due solemnity were the Ambassador, the Deputy Chief of Mission, the Military Attache, my boss, the Ambassador’s secretary and me. The Ambassador and the Deputy were career State Department foreign service officers who had risen to their current postings through years of devoted duty in the foreign affairs establishment. The Military Attache was a seasoned Marine colonel. My boss had decades of experience in a variety of posts for the U.S. Information Agency, our employer.  In other words, an abundance of wisdom far greater than mine had convened to deal with this press release. Had I unwittingly incorporated some breach of security into the draft?

The problem that led to this high-level meeting turned out to be a concern by the Ambassador that the news release left an unduly bellicose impression on the reader. Ever the careful representative of America, the Ambassador expressed reluctance to see the words “destroyer” and “warfare” in a news release coming from his embassy. There followed an hour or so of searching for alternative ways to accurately express the looming event without offending the tender sensibilities of the Senegalese.

Confounding the worry was the inevitable translation into French  since, when we hauled out the French-English dictionary, we found the French word for “destroyer” was—wait for it—“destroyer.” No getting around that one. So, after the world of American-Senegalese relations stepped back from a yawning precipice of misunderstanding, the final version of the news release read in its entirety like this:

         ” Two U.S. Navy destroyers, the USS Brownson and USS New, will visit the Port of Dakar April 28-30 as part of a routine operational cruise.”

That was it; that was all. No mention of the history of the vessels or even the names of their captains. And that wasn’t even the end.  The translation had also to pass muster by the Ambassador who was fluent in French and by the DCM.

At this stage of my foreign service career, I turned my attention to a different kind of drafting: employment application letters to law firms back home.