“Sometimes I think I’ve seen it all” says Kathleen De Carbuccia, nee McDonough. “I mean, I am a small-town American turned spy, turned foreign diplomat, turned lawyer in Paris.” She is petite, elegantly dressed and has a bob of silver hair that follows her gestures to a tee. The small town she refers to is Cooperstown, located in upstate New York, where baseball was invented. Her demeanor is kind and inviting, she is warm, easy to talk to. Now retired from diplomatic work and the law, she talks about her experience as an ex-pat in Paris.
As a young adult, De Carbuccia studied at Wellesley College, the all-women’s institution outside of Boston. Here, Kathleen developed an interest in foreign governments. The Vietnam War was in full swing, there was increasing mistrust between the then USSR and the American government. “We all thought a nuclear bomb could drop at any moment.” De Carbuccia’s eyes have a far off look. She is remembering.
What De Carbuccia felt, along with many of her peers, was frustration in the face of the drastic changes happening across the world. They all wanted to be involved, one way or another, in the shaping of the world. Some opted for the artistic route, others became involved in the anti-war movement, still others got involved in local government. At 21, Kathleen chose to join the foreign service. She took exams for the CIA and the State Department, both of which offered her positions. Though she began CIA training to become a foreign spy, her most probable posting being Eastern Europe, De Carbuccia ended up on the diplomatic route, but she kept in touch and often dealt with covert agents in her future work as a diplomat. Kathleen is a little reticent when it comes to her own covert work; however she has no trouble recalling the irony of her working alongside her CIA counterparts: “spies needed covers. Some were placed at the State Department, so anytime I would mention I was a diplomat, everyone simply assumed I was a spy. It was like a badly kept secret that is never confirmed. Sometimes I would receive sensitive information from undercover operatives who mistook me for one of their covert colleagues!” She smiles, but it is evident the times were far from amusing, and relating any sort of information was dangerous even for the lowliest of diplomats.
During her years as a diplomat, she served as an interpreter for the American Embassy in Paris and helped with the relations between representatives from across the globe. “Cultural exchange was done through the State Department and we were trained specifically to handle different situations,” she says. “The most complicated portion of our jobs was to interpret other cultures, to know how to act in front of different representatives and to advise our higher-ups on the better ways to handle certain events, talks, deals, etcetera.” De Carbuccia’s work, however, also focused on the promotion of her own culture abroad: “Until the 1990’s the US government had an agency (US Information Service) which promoted US culture (art exhibits, speakers, concerts) abroad; they had an active center in the Latin Quarter that put on lectures and had movie screenings on a daily basis.”
Once married, De Carbuccia became a licensed lawyer after studying at the University of Paris and becoming a member of the New York State Bar Association in 1987. She worked at the Paris branch of an American corporate law firm. Though out of the State Department, De Carbuccia still acted as a go-between different cultures, except this time her work had less to do with the understanding and promoting of cultural heritage, and more to do with the intricacies of perspective each culture perpetuates. As she says herself, “there are two attitudes toward culture: that of art and that of business.” De Carbuccia says her work as a lawyer fell under the second category. She would arrive at meetings with her own culture, her colleagues arrived with theirs, and collectively they’d try to find a balance.
She continues, “I had just spent so much time understanding the small workings of politics and culture, this time I was thrown into conference rooms and dealings. I wouldn’t worry that the way a single prime minister holding his spoon could offend a foreign visitor, instead I worried that the conditions of a contract would be acceptable to an American and not to a Frenchman.”
A 30-year veteran diplomat of Paris, De Carbuccia found roots in her posting , like many other foreign workers before and after her. She remains on the board of various American citizens’ abroad organizations, and sometimes still acts as go-between, an interpreter for her grandchildren, her husband and her fellow ex-pats.