Washington, D.C. has a lot of museums. The National Gallery of Art has a painting by Leonardo DaVinci. The Museum of Natural History has The Hope Diamond. And, The Museum of American History has a set of the Ruby Slippers Judy Garland wore in the Wizard of Oz. Another museum features items associated with a resident of Alabama. The catch is you can’t just walk in to see them. However, that could soon change.
APR took its listeners to The National Air and Space Museum back in 2013. The original Wright Brothers Flier is there, and I was doing a story on how the Wright Brothers invented civil aviation in Montgomery. APR News featured this visit in a story about Orville and Wilbur and their connection to Alabama.
Across town in D.C. is another museum with its own Alabama connection. And some items in the collection are a lot smaller than the Wright Brothers airplane.
“So the locket, it's rectangular, and it's actually fairly large for a locket. It's made of white gold, and it's kind of on a thin chain," said Eric Duyck, the Collections Manager and Curator at the National Museum of American Diplomacy. If the name of this particular institution doesn’t ring a bell. It’s okay, we’re coming to that. Duyck describing a gold locket on a chain.
“And on the front of the locket, there's a grid of these small green stones that are inlaid into the front of it," he said. "And there's a lot of kind of delicate geometric detail on the front of it as well.”
The locket is part of the collection of the National Museum of American Diplomacy. And the facility’s purpose is pretty much what the name implies. It’s housed in the U.S. Department of State. Instead of sculptures or memorabilia, this museum has artifacts related to U.S. foreign policy. If you haven’t visited, it’s okay. Not many people have…
School groups like this collection of college students can get in with an appointment. But, the Museum is closed to the public. One reason for the extra security is its location inside the State Department.
Remember Eric Duyck and the gold locket he was describing? The value of this item goes beyond the silver and the green stones. The point is who gave the locket as a diplomatic gift and who received it. It was from the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The person who got it was U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who hails from Birmingham, Alabama. Here’s Eric Duyck again…
“When you open it up, is where the the interesting part really is. So on the left you'll have actually, or you have a map of Africa, and then on the right is actually a etched photograph of Muammar Gaddafi, who gave the gift to Secretary Rice in 2008.”
Duyck and his colleagues at the Museum explain that diplomatic gifts often aren’t just nice gestures. They often reflect the times.
“United States had broken off relations with Libya after the Pan Am bombing happened over Lockerbie Scott Lockerbie, Scotland in 1983," said Dr. Alison Mann. She the Historian at the National Museum of American Diplomacy.
“There were sanctions placed against Libya and a very fraught, tense non relationship between Libya and the United States. In the early 2000s there was a drive to normalize relations with Libya, and in 2004 that was accomplished," Mann explained. "Condoleezza Rice was the first Secretary of State should go to Libya after that bombing. And as she stated in her biography, Gaddafi was really enamored with her. She even described in a very creepy way that he paid attention to her in a way that she found disconcerting. And that locket, I think, is very indicative of how he felt towards her. It was quite personal.”
Secretary Rice received other gifts from foreign leaders. One example was a signed soccer ball from the Blackburn Rovers in Lancashire, England. That gift followed a visit by Great Britain’s Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to Alabama. Rice is known for her interest in sports, including the committee that picks college football teams to play for the national championship. Eric Duyck at the museum says Secretaries of State are also known by the gifts they give. He says Condoleezza Rice’s item of choice was a small decorative wooden box..
“The gift box is kind of the size of a small jewelry box. It's, you know, brown wood, and in the cover it actually, or the top of it, it has a ceramic tile inlaid and the ceramic tile has an illustrated map of the United States on it, there's kind of a nautical theme," said Duyck. "There's some sailing ships down, kind of at the bottom, kind of evoking early US history. So across the map, there are these kind of boxes or stamps with these different figures, different topics, uh, kind of related to US history."
The list of small tiles on Rice’s gift box included slogans like independence, emancipation, the right of women to vote, civil rights and so on. Museum historian Alison Mann says it’s not unusual for a Secretary of State to give diplomatic gifts that reflect American ideals.
"And for Condoleezza Rice, her love of America and what. It makes America great is, in her words, she would often say, it's our ability to keep moving forward," Mann observed. "And having been born in Birmingham in 1954 in the midst of deep, terrible segregation, this was something that she grew up with, an understanding of, a firsthand view of what segregation was like, and she came of age during that great civil rights era. But she often says, and will continue to say this and publish it, I'm sure, is that it never held her back, and that was another thing that her parents were instrumental in instilling in her at a very early age that she could grow up to be the President of the United States of America, that education would be a shield against racism."
And, Secretary Rice received more than signed soccer balls. The Associated Press reported she did well when it came to generating expensive gifts from foreign leaders. The news service said Rice collected over three hundred thousand dollars in jewelry just in 2007. Some leaders apparently went to great lengths to outdo each other. Federal law says no Secretary of State nor the Presidents they work for can keep gifts like these.
Even though the National Museum of American Diplomacy is generally closed to public right now, that’s scheduled to change. The State Department plans to open the facility as soon as this coming summer, so anyone can come and see it. One temporary exhibit will focus on diplomatic gifts, like Condaleezza Rice’s wooden box and the infamous gold locket from Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi.
