Full Transcript

LIZ SCHRAYER: Welcome. So well deserved. I mean, what a journey from Baker, Louisiana, to the world stage. What a remarkable career that we get to talk about.

We’re going to talk about the arc of your career, but I want to start with your day job right now. What many of you may not know is Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield only is leaving New York, I think, one day this entire month, today, because the U.S. in the month of December holds the presidency of the U.N. Security Council. So thank you for joining us.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  Linda, this is your fourth time holding the presidency chair at the U.N. Security Council, so we’re going to start a little serious. We’re going to end with some fun stuff, I promise you. So on the serious note, the world’s pretty complicated right now. There’s a lot of challenges, a lot of threats. What do you want to accomplish in this December, this last of your four times as presidency at the U.N. Security Council?

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  You know, that’s a tough question because there’s so much that is going on in the world today. We have wars on almost every front. We have the war in the Middle East, and thankfully we achieved a ceasefire in Lebanon. We have Sudan that people seem to have forgotten about, thousands of people being forced out of their homes. We have the situation in Ukraine that we just saw displayed on the video. And what I tell everyone is you can’t prioritize crises. You can’t prioritize conflict, and you cannot prioritize misery.

And so in this last month of my tenure at the U.N., I would like to leave a legacy that the U.S. cares. It’s the same thing I said at the beginning, that we care.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  And I think we’ve accomplished that over the past four years. The President instructed me to bring back multilateralism, bring back diplomacy at the U.N., and bring back American leadership. And I think we accomplished that in spades. And if there’s anything that people say about me after I’m gone, I hope they say she respected us and she was kind.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  I love that. I love that. Well, let’s talk a little bit about your legacy. I mean, you are not just retiring from the U.N. You are retiring, as was said, from almost four decades of foreign service, working on four continents. I hope somebody writes a book—I hope it’s you—and then somebody turns it into the LTG movie. I can’t wait to see it. We could spend literally the entire night talking about your legacy, but maybe you could pick one or two that really speak to you right now.

I don’t know if it’s your time in Africa, if it’s your work with alliances. It’s pointing to things that get forgotten, like Sudan. Pick one or two that you really—like, speak to you right now that capture not just those words that are so beautiful, but what you touched, what you saw.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  So, you know, I was asked by my staff to lay out the priorities that I wanted to achieve in my last year, and I think they were all surprised that one of those priorities was to motivate, mentor, and support the next generation of foreign service and international affairs. As I was walking in the door—

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  —there was one of your employees who had an LSU tag on, and now I can’t remember your name. Are you in the room?

ATTENDEE:  Kirsten.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  Kirsten. And Kirsten came up to me and she said, “You changed my life.”

LIZ SCHRAYER:  Yeah, you did. She told me that story.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  It almost brought me to tears, so thank you.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  And so that is what has meant the most to me, that I have been a life changer and that people like me changed my life. So I’m paying it forward. And, Kirsten, thank you so much for sharing that with me. And every time I meet a young person that I may have met years ago and they tell me they decided to go into the foreign service because of me, they decided to go into international affairs because of me, it really blows me away, because that’s the legacy I want to leave behind, because I can’t do this forever. You can’t do this forever. We have to prepare the next generation. And so that has been extraordinarily important to me.

As I leave the UN, I also had a goal when I got there of meeting every single ambassador, every single country. There are 193. About four or five we don’t meet with, so I think there’s 188.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  You want to mention those?

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  You know who they are.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  I have met with 187.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  Wow! Wow! Thank you on all of our behalf.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  And they all have said—you know, when they wanted to, I would go to their offices. Many of them told me I was the first USPR ever to show up in their office. Colombia, for example. Papua New Guinea. So that’s what respect is about.

And my view was when we’re sitting in the General Assembly and we’re watching those votes rack up, I don’t want the first time I call an ambassador to be just before a vote like that. I want that ambassador to have met me, to know me, and to make a decision because I showed them respect. And I think we got 141 votes condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We got 143 votes supporting Ukraine’s borders. That’s because of the diplomacy that I was able to do with all of my colleagues. I don’t take all the credit. We’re a village, and the reason I’m able to go into those meetings and know what to say and know what the issues are is because I have an amazing staff. So I also want to thank my amazing staff, some of whom are here in the room.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  So, Madam Ambassador, you know, you just said diplomacy takes a village. It takes all kinds of skills. I always think of the secret sauce, and a dear mentor and friend of both of ours, Secretary Madeleine Albright, used to have pin diplomacy.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  Yes.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  You have talked a lot about gumbo diplomacy.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  Yes.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  And I think as we are honoring you, it is time to pull back the curtain and get to the secret sauce of gumbo diplomacy. So I hope you’re ready because I’m going to bring out the USGLC kitchen table, because I want to find out what this secret sauce is all about. Are you ready?

LIZ SCHRAYER:  She does not know we’re doing this. I’ve got a few ingredients that we bought. Now, we’re going to get to the heart of this. While they’re bringing this out, you created gumbo diplomacy. Why don’t you tell everybody what you mean about gumbo diplomacy while we’re rolling out our kitchen table here.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  Oh my God.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  And then I’ve got a few questions. Now, what does this all mean? What do you talk about? Gumbo diplomacy is what? We’re going to get to the gumbo. We’re going to get to what this gumbo is, because I want the recipe. Do you have a recipe?

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  Washington Post, gumbo diplomacy.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  Yeah. Well, what are the ingredients?

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  You’ve got them there.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  Do I have them? Somebody showed up with tomato sauce, and it’s like, no, no, no. You do not use tomato sauce in Louisiana gumbo, right?

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  No. You do not use tomato sauce. The basis are these two things. They don’t look very appetizing. Flour and oil.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  Flour and oil. Okay.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  And with flour and oil, you make a roux. And the secret to a good roux is making it really, really dark, and you brown it until just before you burn it. And I can tell you I’ve burnt it many, many times. You have to know when to stop.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  Do you invite these—like the prime minister of some country over and you make them chop an onion? I mean, is that the diplomacy part of it?

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  The diplomacy part of it is sitting at the table. Now, I do sometimes invite people who might chop the celery. Please chop the onions because I don’t want my eyes to burn. And in that process, you start to talk to people, and they kind of forget you’re the U.S. Ambassador.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  So they tell you state secrets?

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  They tell me state secrets.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  Really? Whoa!  Okay. Really?

LIZ SCHRAYER:  So tell us, what if somebody is allergic to something? Have you ever had a problem with that?

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  I did. My nephew was allergic to shrimp, and he was sitting, eating gumbo. Really, you could see he was enjoying it, and then his face blew up. So I always check.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  So I have a few photos that I want to share with you, and this is called my “lightning gumbo diplomacy round.” So here’s how it’s going to work. I’m going to throw a photo up there. I’m going to ask you a question. You can’t go too long, but you can give us a little sound bite on my question. Game? Okay. So here’s the first one. This is you—it’s not quite showing. Oh, here. You can see it down here. I don’t know if everybody else can see it.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  Yes.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  Can you guys see it?

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  It’s behind us.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  You can kind of see us. Oh, you can see it behind me. Got it. Okay.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  Yeah.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  Got it. I can’t see what you’re seeing. All right.

So obviously, this is the president of Liberia, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. You have called her your role model and mentor.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  Yes.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  Why? Because if you don’t know, Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield was a graduate student in Liberia. Thirty years later, she goes back as the first U.S. woman ambassador to the country.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  So gumbo diplomacy. Did you ever have gumbo with her, and did she love it?

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  She loved it. It was when she got the Nobel Peace Prize. I said invite a few of your family members over, and I’ll make gumbo for you. So we started out with like 15 people. We ended with 40.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  But gumbo, you don’t make gumbo for 15. You make gumbo for 40.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  Fantastic. I was going to have you make gumbo for 1,000, but I thought that was not nice to ask.

All right. Here’s another photo. So this is gumbo diplomacy in action. This is you with Houston chef Chris Williams. You’re cooking gumbo, and you’re opening up a new U.S. embassy in Africa. So my question for you is—be honest. This is off the record.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  Give us your best worst gumbo diplomacy story. It can either be like the worst gumbo or the worst diplomacy. Okay, we’ve got the picture of it. Tell us.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  So when I make gumbo, I can make gumbo anywhere, and I don’t have to have all these ingredients. I’ll make it up if I have to. He told me, “I put a secret in your gumbo. It was Mopane worms. And so I’m there. I put it—you notice my face.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  I put it in my mouth, and when he told me, I went, “Oh, crap.”

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  And I swallowed it just like without chewing. That was the worst experience.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  All right. Tell us your best. Like, what’s one where you did it, and it’s like, “Oh my goodness, diplomacy worked.”

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  I made a gumbo for Condoleezza Rice, and when she was eating gumbo—and I hope she’s not hearing this—she was just raking up against the bowl, and I just knew she enjoyed it. And I said, “You know there’s more.”

LIZ SCHRAYER:  All right. Here’s a photo. It’s a little unconventional, but rumor has it that right after gumbo, you have a little bit of a fascination with hippos. This is a picture of the Botswana National Park, where after you were there, a #Hippo showed up on your social media feed. Ever use #Hippo diplomacy, like bringing somebody there and say let’s talk?

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  No, hippos are about me. I love hippos. I don’t know when I started loving hippos, and then I started attracting other people who loved hippos, like the former—

LIZ SCHRAYER:  Like an ambassador hippo club?

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  The Secretary-General’s Special Representative to Liberia. I go to her house the first time, and there are hippos everywhere. And I’m like, “Ellen, what is this about?”  And she said, “I don’t know. I just started collecting them.”  And I said, “Really?” and she said, “Yeah.” I said, “I collect them too. How many do you have?” and she said, “Thousands. How many do you have?” and I said, “Thousands.”

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  I love hippos. They’re fascinating animals.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  So the last photo I have is—I’m not sure if it’s a gumbo question. It might just be a Linda question. But these are five women that all are the women representatives of the UN Security Council, and I don’t know if you’ve ever done gumbo diplomacy with them. But I certainly want to know if this is the powerhouse of how things get done at the UN Security Council.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  This is the powerhouse. We call ourselves the “Fab Five.”

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  Before the Guyanese ambassador came on, we had the ambassador from UAE. So we’ve always been five.

When I went to New York, Secretary Albright said to me, “I had a group called the G7,” and so I get there, and I’m disappointed because we’re only five. So I say to her, when I see her later, “I can’t believe we’re only five and you had seven,” and she said, “No, we were seven in the whole UN system.” So we have made progress with us five. We meet regularly. We share ideas. We fight each other. But when women fight, we forgive. And so we have accomplished so much because of the passion we bring to the job. We have cried in the Security Council together when we passed the resolution on humanitarian carve-outs. We cried when we passed the first humanitarian resolution on Gaza. So it’s been amazing working with these four women.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  Amazing. Beautiful.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  So let me end our conversation with a photo that has nothing to do with gumbo and has everything to do with you. There is nothing that speaks to you more than what you have done, because I know everywhere you travel, you meet with young people.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  I do.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  So as you are retiring, not from life and the world and the things you want to do, but from your years in the Foreign Service, what is your message to young people—you mentioned one of my colleagues—that you want to tell them of why they should pursue what you did as the unexpected individual back in Baker, Louisiana, to say, “I’m going to go see the world”?

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  Well, what I will say to them and what I do say to them is that the world needs you. We need you to fix the problems that we couldn’t fix. We need you to build the bridges that we couldn’t, that we broke down and we couldn’t repair. We need you to go out to the world and make a difference, and so that’s the message I give to young people. I tell them you can do it. All you have to do is want to do it.

What I’ve learned growing up, again, in a very, very challenged economically family and in the segregated South, is that if you put your mind to it, there’s nothing you can’t do. So even if you think you can’t do it, try it. I certainly didn’t think I could be a good UN ambassador. I had no clue what I was getting into. I think I’ve done a pretty good job.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  And, you know, I hope that what I have done in the last, nearly four years will leave a legacy that every American can be proud of.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  I think that this group will join me in saying you have done a great job, and all Americans should be so proud. Please join me in congratulating and thanking Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  Thank you.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  Ladies and gentlemen, Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, LTG.

AMB. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD:  Thank you. Can I take the celery?

LIZ SCHRAYER:  You can take it. She’s going to take the whole gumbo.

I’m going to close out our program with just three final things, not only to join me in not only thanking our Ambassador, but let’s give a round of applause for all four of our extraordinary honorees.

LIZ SCHRAYER:   Number two, join me in thanking our co-chairs tonight, Edgar, C.D., and Jenelle, and all of our sponsors for this evening.

LIZ SCHRAYER:  I may be up here, but really all the work that gets done is my colleagues, the USGLC amazing staff.

LIZ SCHRAYER:   Last but not least, please join us, for we are running late because the Christmas tree lighting made everybody get here and take a little bit longer. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still celebrate. We have dessert reception out. Kazual is playing music, and let me wish all of you a wonderful holiday season. And may we go from strength to strength in 2025. Thank you for joining us. Wonderful to see all of you.