PARTNERS PHYLLIS AND ROBERT OAKLEY : A Diplomatic Alliance : Deputy Assistant Secretary of State + Special Envoy to Somalia = Power Couple

The deputy assistant secretary of State had only one stipulation about the assignment of Robert B. Oakley as special envoy to Somalia.

“Just make sure he’s in Berkeley for our son’s wedding on Jan. 2,” Phyllis Oakley told Gen. Colin Powell.

The chairman of the Joint Chief of Staffs took the admonition under advisement. “I hear you,” Powell responded. And sure enough, Bob and Phyllis Oakley were at St. Clement’s Church the day after New Year’s--greeting guests like any other proud parents.

The no-nonsense nature of the negotiations with Powell is typical of a partnership that might be viewed as one of modern diplomacy’s most successful alliances. For the better part of 36 years, Bob and Phyllis Oakley have traipsed around the globe, choosing trouble spots over glamour spots. A shared quality of forthrightness has made them anomalous in the silver-spooned sphere of international statesmanship, where tact sometimes tramples truth and protocol often ordains policy.

Refinement and a perpetual sense of restraint frequently seem to define embassy life. The Oakleys, by contrast, seem uncannily candid, traveling with a full quotient of opinions and their beloved Labrador retrievers.

“Bob is quite the opposite of the stereotyped view of Foreign Service officers so concerned with their careers that they pull their punches,” said Sam Lewis, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel who is now with the U.S. Institute for Peace, a private think tank. “Bob has never pulled a punch in his life.”

As for Phyllis Oakley, “She operates with a kind of gut wisdom, a sense of how the world works,” said a former State Department official who worked closely with her under Secretary of State George P. Shultz. “She got to the top, quickly, by being extremely effective and practical in difficult situations.”

Bob Oakley, 61, entered the Foreign Service 36 years ago, with a degree from the same Princeton class as former Secretary of State James A. Baker, former National Security Adviser Frank Carlucci, and Don Oberdorfer, a longtime foreign correspondent for the Washington Post who remains among Oakley’s closest friends. He rose through the ranks to attain the rare title of “career minister” before officially retiring in 1991.

But Phyllis Elliott Oakley, 58, took a more unusual route to her post as deputy assistant secretary of state for regional analysis in the Bureau of Intelligence Research. The daughter of an executive in the Rawlings sporting goods company, she was raised in St. Louis with a love for a good baseball glove and a sense that the future was hers to conquer. Straight out of Northwestern University, she headed to Tufts University to earn a “one-year cheapo” master’s degree at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy.

In Washington, her plans to run the State Department were sidetracked when she met a young Foreign Service officer named Robert Bigger Oakley. Bob Oakley had an easy laugh, a gentle Louisiana accent--and a ticket to Khartoum. They courted for six weeks, and were married in Cairo.

“In those days, they didn’t permit spouses--that meant wives--to be in the service together,” Phyllis Oakley remembered. “I was the good Girl Scout. It didn’t even occur to me to object.”

So for years--while her husband was assigned to the Sudan, the Ivory Coast, Lebanon, Zaire and Somalia, with postings in Washington in between--”I did all kinds of volunteer things,” Phyllis Oakley said. “That was what you did.”

They moved so often that she joked that switching continents meant never having to clean out the closets. There were long separations--standard operating procedure when Bob Oakley was sent to posts, such as Vietnam in 1965, with “no dependents permitted.”

All the while, Bob Oakley said, a feeling gnawed at him that “I had deprived her of something” by pursuing his own professional goals at the unintended expense of hers.

Then, 18 years ago, said Phyllis Oakley, “the State Department finally decided that to avoid lawsuits they would acknowledge that they had indeed been guilty of discrimination against women.”

She marched right down to the State Department and signed up for an entry-level position. Phyllis Oakley was 40 years old, and had been out of the work force for years.

“I came in as the oldest living FSO-7,” she said--basically, a pencil-pusher. “But I was just so happy to be working. It’s great to find out that the brain still works.”

By 1986, she had worked her way up to a mid-level job on the Afghan desk when a television appearance brought her to the attention of Shultz, who tapped her as his deputy spokesperson. Her notoriety was ensured at a press conference the following year, when a reporter asked if it was true that Shultz had a tiger tattooed on his fanny.

“I’m not in a position to comment on that,” Oakley deadpanned.

This penchant for humor under pressure leads a friend like Sam Lewis to observe that “both she and Bob are very funny. But she’s funnier.”

Their ability to poke fun at themselves--along with much of the rest of the world--has made the Oakleys stand out in the often stuffy and always strait-laced diplomatic lane. Some officials of Bob Oakley’s stature, for example, might have thought twice about missing a visit from the boss to attend a family wedding.

But “my wife called me in Mogadishu and said, ‘Look, President Bush isn’t going there to see you ,’ ” he said. “It was a very good point.”

President Bush asked Oakley to serve as special envoy to Somalia early in December. Oakley insisted that returning to diplomatic service, “was the last thing on my mind.” Ironing out the woes of a country devastated by famine and clan wars, he added, “sounded like sort of a nasty job.”

But his experience in international hot spots made him the right choice for the job, colleagues said.

“There couldn’t have been a better choice than Bob to do this emergency task in Somalia,” said Richard Murphy, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former ambassador to Syria and Saudi Arabia. “Bob Oakley is a fire horse, a war horse. When the bell rings, he’s there.”

Over the years, said former Assistant Secretary of State Chester A. Crocker, the bell has rung for Oakley in “the hard spots, where there are conflicts and where there is controversy, the place where you send your really heavy hitters.”

As Crocker pointed out, “he didn’t wind up in places like Copenhagen, if you get my drift.” Instead, Oakley opted for “rough duty, places where you spend seven days a week walking through a minefield of ambiguity.”

Longtime Foreign Service watchers say many U.S. emissaries meet with leaders of remote lands over feasts of wild boar and showers of tropical petals. “They fawn all over these people and do anything to avoid delivering unpleasant news,” said a retired State Department strategist. Summarily, “they return to Washington and report that they have won the hearts and minds of the people.”

Only a handful, old diplomatic hands say, venture into the trenches to rub elbows with the citizenry--and, perhaps, to ruminate on the real sources of present and future conflict. In this latter category, Crocker, for one, lauds Oakley as “one of the top five of his generation.”

Loquacious and prone to speaking with his hands (and also, to the occasional annoyance of his listeners, one inch from their noses), Oakley quickly grasps the big picture, his colleagues say. They marvel that he is as comfortable relating diplomatic complexities with Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or George Bush as he is with Somali warlords Mohamed Farah Aidid and Ali Mahdi Mohamed.

But his bluntness is not universally adored. “It doesn’t make you terribly popular,” Oakley acknowledged. “It makes you controversial. When you’re the ambassador, it’s a lot easier to fudge things, to tell people what you think they want to hear.”

Dictators are among those who have not been thrilled when Oakley spoke his mind about their autocratic rules.

In 1982, Zaire’s President Sese Seko Mobutu ordered Oakley to leave Kinshasa, where he had served as ambassador. And Siad Barre, the Somalian despot who fled to Nigeria in 1991, also found Oakley’s frankness so unappealing that he ejected him as ambassador in 1984.

Oakley served as ambassador to Pakistan from 1988 to 1991, retired, and joined the U.S. Institute for Peace. With his friend Sandy Charles, Oakley also set up an international consulting firm, C&O; Resources Inc.

Meanwhile, Oakley said he will stay in Somalia indefinitely, “until the job is done.” Phyllis Oakley, too, faces an uncertain future in the State Department, where political changes may mean personnel changes.

She has been approached twice about accepting an ambassadorship of her own, and each time she declined. But a Clinton Administration that failed to offer her an ambassadorship would be “unwise,” Sam Lewis said. “And if they don’t try to change Bob’s mind about leaving (the Foreign Service), they’d be damned stupid.”

Phyllis Oakley admitted that the possibility of her own embassy is not without appeal. “Anybody who comes into the Foreign Service naturally would like to cap their career with an ambassadorship,” she said. “On the other hand, I have driven around in big cars, and I have lived in nice houses.”

Bob Oakley, meanwhile, said he was perfectly suited to fill the role of ambassador’s spouse. “I’ve told Phyllis that I’d be glad to go anywhere and bake cookies and serve tea,” he quipped. “But she doesn’t believe it.”

Tea parties never did figure prominently on the social calendars of Phyllis or Bob Oakley. But while the dinners often come from Fete Accompli or the Sutton Place Gourmet--culinary staples of the Washington career couple--the two do love to entertain in their big house in Washington’s chic Wesley Heights district. Guests from the worlds of journalism, government and world affairs say the conversation is always lively--their home is a kind of salon, one friend said, “with Bob and Phyllis presiding jointly.”

The separations on occasion have been difficult, Phyllis Oakley said, and sometimes it has been awkward to resettle two children in distant and unfamiliar lands.

“But everybody’s marriage works for different reasons,” Phyllis Oakley said with a shrug. “Bob and I really do think very much alike politically, and I think that has helped.”