Richard A. Boucher, veteran State Department spokesman, dies at 73

Boston Globe

a day ago

His knowledge and analysis of issues, based on his own foreign service career on multiple continents, was such that officials around the State Department paused their work to tune in to his briefings.
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Speaking daily in public without rehearsal 'is one of the most difficult jobs' in the foreign service, R. Nicholas Burns, a former undersecretary of state for political affairs, said in an interview. 'The job of Richard was to advance, explain, and defend the administration's position on any issue. He was able to distill very complex issues into understandable language for the American public.'
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Mr. Boucher, who in 2008 was appointed a career ambassador, the highest rank for a diplomat, was traveling with Secretary of State Colin Powell in Peru on 9/11.
On the emergency flight home, Mr. Boucher was updating his boss on a department to-do list, he recalled, when Powell cut him off: 'You don't understand,' he said. 'This changes everything.'
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Indeed it did, for Mr. Boucher as for many other Americans.
He was midway through a career that had included consular postings in China and stints as the ambassador to the island nation of Cyprus from 1993-96 as well as consul general in Hong Kong from 1996-99, both before and after the British handed Hong Kong back to China.
He rotated in and out of the job of State Department spokesperson from the late 1980s through the early 2000s, for Secretaries of State James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger, Warren Christopher, Madeleine Albright, Powell, and Condoleezza Rice.
In 2006, Rice promoted him to assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, a position that included partial responsibility for policy in Afghanistan. The United States was ramping up financial support of the pro-Western government in Kabul while waging a bloody counterinsurgency against the Taliban.
'Talking about things and actually doing something about them is quite a bit different; that's one thing you rapidly learn when you leave the podium,' Mr. Boucher later reflected.
He met frequently with George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in the White House Situation Room.
In a candid 2022 interview for an archive recorded by former State Department officials, Mr. Boucher said that the US aim in Afghanistan -- to defeat the Taliban and establish a modern democratic nation, or what he called 'Washington on the Kabul River' -- was misguided and ultimately tragic, ending in the humiliating 2021 US withdrawal and a Taliban takeover.
American policy, he said, did not recognize how unpopular the corrupt Kabul leadership was in the rural provinces, attitudes that fed the Taliban movement. 'The fighting in Afghanistan was about the Afghan government, and we weren't going to be able to leave until people respected the Afghan government,' he said.
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That never occurred.
'I think we walk around with this idea that wars end on the deck of the battleship Iwo Jima,' he said. 'We kept thinking that you could win this militarily. And part of that was because politically we were so distracted by Iraq, part of that was because those of us on the political side didn't assert ourselves enough.'
He did not spare himself blame. As an assistant secretary, he supported building roads in rural Afghanistan to connect it to the outside world. But after Taliban fighters used a US-built road to attack near Kandahar, Rice ruefully told him, 'Richard, it looks like the Taliban have gotten pretty good at using these roads you built.'
Richard Alan Boucher was born Dec. 13, 1951, in Bethesda, Md., to Melville Boucher, who became a National Security Agency officer, and Ellen (Kaufmann) Boucher, a German Jewish immigrant who was a member of the Women's Army Corps in World War II. The couple met at Camp Ritchie, Md., while training US intelligence officers.
Mr. Boucher earned a bachelor's degree in English and French comparative literature from Tufts University in 1973 and then served in the Peace Corps in Senegal.
He joined the Foreign Service in 1977.
Besides his son, he leaves his wife, Carolyn Brehm, whom he married in 1982; a daughter, Madeleine Brehm Boucher; a grandson; a brother, Douglas; and a sister, Anita.
For nearly two decades after Mr. Boucher stepped away from the State Department podium, his guidelines for public affairs officers, 'Richard Boucher's Words of Wisdom,' remained posted in the office. Among his advice:
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'If you don't want to see it in print, don't say it.'
'Good guidance can explain the issue to your mother.'
'Talk about results. If you don't have results, talk policy. If you don't have policy, talk facts. If you don't have facts, talk process. You'll always have process.'
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