Keeping Up With World Affairs in San Diego

When it comes to world affairs, some folks are content to just read the headlines and watch the evening news and grumble and mumble. If they’re moved by current events, it’s to sip a soothing glass of milk or chew on an antacid and hope the world will survive until tomorrow.

For others, however, world affairs is an ever-evolving issue that cries out to be masticated and dissected, understood and analyzed, and discussing it on a weekly basis is a necessary fix to keep the mental juices going for another seven days.

And so it is that, every Thursday morning, 25 or 30 men and women meet for two hours in a Rancho Bernardo bank’s community room to passionately discuss and politely debate world issues with the insight and expertise of, say, foreign ambassadors.

Some are.

They Know Their Stuff

They are the Rancho Bernardo chapter of the World Affairs Council of San Diego, and if they seem unusually credible when it comes to discussing such matters, little wonder. Members include former U.S. ambassadors, other retired foreign service employees ranging from economists to cultural attaches, and retired military officers whose hands-on knowledge of other governments lends credence and authority to their opinions and thoughts.

The local chapter and its parent World Affairs Council of San Diego are two of several scores of World Affairs Councils scattered across the United States, in cities such as Washington and Boston, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, which share common by-laws and whose members seem to have an insatiable need to speak their own opinions on world events and an even greater desire to soak in the opinions of others.

If the members of the World Affairs Council take their roles seriously, the discussions will spill into the community--to neighbors, in letters to the editor and to congressmen and senators in Washington, said Art Miller, president of the Rancho Bernardo chapter of the World Affairs Council.

The World Affairs Council is doing its best, however subtly, to help develop an informed and enlightened public, he said.

Minds Need Stimulation

“We need as individuals to stimulate our minds, and we have a responsibility to take our opinions and ideas and disturb our friends with them, so we can get them thinking, too,” Miller said.

“We may end up being persona non grata but society has to be disturbed out of its malaise, which is very deep-rooted,” he said. “So whatever I can do to excite people about world issues, I’m serving our nation well.”

The Rancho Bernardo group generally is retired, a few more men than women. The group is nonpartisan; its members generally are voracious readers of the national media, ranging from the mainstream national newspapers’ Sunday opinion and editorial sections to somewhat more exotic publications, ranging in political leanings from Rolling Stone to Foreign Affairs magazines. Members will spend hours researching a particular subject in a university library, will call old buddies who are still working in the foreign service, and they’ll not hesitate to challenge a guest speaker on his perspectives and opinions.

In fact, guest speakers who make presentations at the group’s monthly dinner meetings are informed in advance that one of the local members may speak on the same issue as the guest speaker, will challenge the guest speaker on his views and will answer questions from the audience along with the guest himself.

Guest Speakers Challenged

The guest speaker, Miller noted,is thereby put on notice he won’t be able to run loose and free with his facts; there may be someone in the audience even more expert than he.

The featured speaker for June’s monthly meeting, held last week, was Richard Sinkin, vice president of UC San Diego’s Institute of the Americas, who offered that “corruption is the glue that holds the (Mexican political) system together.”

If the monthly dinner meetings lend a certain social splash to the group, its heart and soul surfaces in the weekly discussion groups, when the members sit in a circle, holding note pads and pens and politely raising their hands to be recognized in order to put in their two cents’--or two dollars’--worth.

There is disagreement but usually everyone respects the others’ opinions and they leave as friends.

The weekly session’s format typically calls for a particular member to offer a 30-minute briefing on a specific issue of world significance, followed by questions and answers and a general discussion of the topic.

The group has been meeting weekly for nearly 1 1/2 years and the names of somewhat obscure nations and political leaders roll off their tongues with the same kind of familiarity as a 12-year-old talking about his baseball heroes.

Topics have ranged from the obvious--Central America and the Middle East crisis, to the Soviet presence in the Pacific Rim to the foreign debt to how pollution--and, specifically, acid rain--contributes to world tensions. Other subjects have included the two Koreas, Iberian-U.S. relations, the role of the Central Intelligence Agency in foreign affairs and the dissident movement in Romania.

One particularly popular meeting had members of the group play various roles of the American embassy staff in the Philippines--the ambassador, the political adviser, the economics attache, the cultural attache and the military adviser. In each case, the players could relate to their roles because they previously had been foreign service employees in those capacities, albeit assigned to nations other than the Philippines. But the discussion the players offered was based on their own real life experiences and was steeped in reality versus some fiction novel, and the audience reveled in the experience.

Less Than a Consensus

Last Thursday’s meeting focused on the question of who is responsible for establishing the United States’ foreign policy, and something less than a consensus was reached.

Certainly President Reagan doesn’t establish foreign policy, one man offered; “The President has never told us what his objectives (in foreign policy) are, perhaps because he doesn’t know what they are and he has no experience in foreign policy. We are being led by a blind man,” the member said.

The remark led another to complain that the nation has lacked a strong president for several administrations “because we haven’t elected one. The person who has the best qualities to be our president is not charismatic enough to be elected.”

Someone said the print media wasn’t without blame, with national political writers serving as little more than “entertainment critics covering the campaigns.”

Chapter Wins Praise

Pat Drinan, chairman of the political science department at USD and president of the World Affairs Council of San Diego, said the Rancho Bernardo chapter stands out because of the high level of participation and energy of its members.

“It’s unusual to see the kind of dedication in a volunteer organization that we see in the Rancho Bernardo chapter,” he said.

“But we in San Diego don’t consider world affairs to be a faraway issue, given the existence of the Navy in San Diego and being as close as we are to Mexico.”

The Rancho Bernardo chapter, he noted, is rich in outstanding members, given the world-class caliber of retired people who settle in North County.

One member is Richard Matheron, who spent 37 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, including three years as ambassador to Swaziland. He now lives in Escondido.

“We are people who are concerned about international problems and trying to understand the role of the United States in the world,” Matheron said.

Membership in the World Affairs Council, he said, allows him to stay current on world events, even in retirement. “A French friend of mine said, when I told him I was going to retire in San Diego, that I was a fool because it was an intellectual desert. Well, I’ve found it to be an intellectual garden.”

Jim Kelly of Vista, who spent 32 years in the U.S. Marine Corps before retiring as a colonel in 1974 because of a heart attack, said the World Affairs Council “gives me something to do that’s tremendously stimulating.”

The Rancho Bernardo chapter of the World Affairs Council was founded by Hank Zivetz, another retired U.S. Foreign Service career man who belonged to the San Diego organization and wanted to extend it into North County.

“There are a couple of us who haven’t agreed on a single issue in world affairs since we started meeting. But that’s okay,” Zivetz said, laughing. “If we didn’t do this, atrophy would set in. This is our weekly tennis.”