Richard Lewis Baltimore III

1947—

Diplomat

Richard Lewis Baltimore III is a former U.S. foreign official who served as ambassador to Oman and in a number of senior posts within the U.S. State Department during a career that spanned more than three decades. Following his service in Oman, Baltimore served in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2006, and aided in that country's restoration of democracy. In 2007 Baltimore joined one of the largest development projects in the Middle East, the fourteen-square-mile project on Oman's coast known as Al Madina A'Zarqa, or Blue City.

Born into a Distinguished Family

Baltimore was born in New York City on the last day of 1947. The Baltimores were among the numerous accomplished, well-educated African-American families who lived in Harlem during its zenith. A free black born in Washington, DC, in 1852, his great-grandfather, Jeremiah D. Baltimore, was a self-taught inventor. A steam engine he built out of common household items won him some local acclaim, and he applied for a patent on it. "Emboldened by these events, he attempted to visit President [Ulysses S.] Grant but was shooed away by a White House guard," Baltimore told an audience in Oman in 2003. "Fortuitously, the President somehow learned of the young man's presence that day, sought him out, congratulated him on what he had done and instructed that he would be admitted to study at the United States Navy Yard. Notwithstanding persistent incidents of discrimination, he succeeded and went on to further study at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, the second black ever to do so." Jeremiah Baltimore went on to a career that included working with the U.S. Office of Coast Survey and as the chief engineer at Freedman's Hospital in the District of Columbia.

Baltimore's grandfather was Richard Lewis Baltimore Sr., who graduated from Howard University's Law School in 1905 and became an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in the 1920s. During the early 1930s Baltimore Sr. was involved in a dispute that led to the creation of a separate Federal Bar Association of New York and New Jersey when the national leadership of that organization ordered the New York chapter to rescind the membership offer extended to Baltimore Sr. and three other African-American attorneys. Baltimore's grandfather was later appointed by Governor Thomas E. Dewey as a workers's compensation referee for New York State in 1944, becoming the first African American to hold that post.

Finally, Baltimore's father, the attorney Richard L. Baltimore Jr., was president of the Knickerbocker Young Republicans Club in 1946 when it became the first black Republican group to join the Association of New York State Young Republican Clubs. Baltimore's father made history as the first African-American judge to sit on the bench of a Westchester County town in 1970.

By that time Baltimore was at Harvard Law School, where he earned a juris doctor in 1972. Prior to this, he studied international affairs at George Washington University in preparation for a career in foreign service. He joined the U.S. State Department and in 1973 was posted to the U.S. Embassy in Lisbon, Portugal, as a political and economic officer. It was a heady time on the Iberian peninsula, with both Portugal and Spain under dictatorships. In 1974, during Baltimore's time in Lisbon, the Portuguese government was overthrown in a coup by left-wing military officers in what was known as the Carnation Revolution.

Served in South Africa during Apartheid

In March of 1976 Baltimore was posted to the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa—an appointment that merited a mention in the New York Times with the headline "2 Black U.S. Diplomats Posted to South Africa." At the time, South Africa was a white-minority state, where blacks were denied basic political rights, including citizenship. Baltimore and another black State Department officer were only the second and third African-American diplomats ever to serve in an embassy or consular position there, and the New York Times article made a subtle reference to their heroism in noting that "both officers requested the assignments."

Returning to Washington in 1979, Baltimore became special assistant to three Secretaries of State—Cyrus Vance, Edmund Muskie, and Alexander Haig—during the administrations of presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. His first experience in the Middle East came with a 1981 posting to the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, as a political officer; later in the decade he served in the same capacity at the U.S. Embassy in Budapest, Hungary. Back in Washington in 1987, Baltimore was appointed deputy director in the Regional Affairs Office of the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, and became its director a year later. He returned to Budapest in 1990 for a four-year term of service as deputy chief of mission at the embassy.

In 1994 Baltimore became senior policy adviser to Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs, Richard C. Holbrooke, a role that called for seeking and signing private-sector support for the newly created Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina during a tumultuous period on the Balkan peninsula. A year later Baltimore entered the U.S. State Department's rigorous Senior Seminar program, which trains diplomats for work in international and national security affairs at the highest executive levels abroad. He was elected president of his 1995-96 class.

At a Glance …

Born December 31, 1947, in New York, NY; son of Richard Lewis Baltimore Jr. (an attorney and judge) and Lois Madison Baltimore; married, 1980 (divorced, 1990); married Eszter Ekue, 1993; children: Krisztina, Josephine, Natalie. Education: Attended MacMurray College, 1967; George Washington University, BA, 1969; Harvard Law School, JD, 1972.

Career: U.S. State Department, foreign service officer; U.S. Embassy in Lisbon, Portugal, political and economic officer, 1973-75; U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, political officer, 1976-79; special assistant to Secretaries of State Cyrus Vance, Edmund Muskie, and Alexander Haig, 1979-81; U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, political officer, 1981-83; U.S. Embassy in Budapest, Hungary, political chief, 1984-87; U.S. State Department Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, Regional Affairs Office, deputy director, 1987-88, director, 1988-90; U.S. Embassy Budapest, Hungary, deputy chief of mission, 1990-94; senior political adviser to the assistant secretary for European and Canadian affairs, 1994-95; U.S. Embassy in San Jose, Costa Rica, deputy chief of mission, 1996-99; U.S. Consul General in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 1999-2002; United States ambassador to the Sultanate of Oman, 2002-06; U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, counselor for the Rule of Law program, 2006; Blue City (Oman) development project, consultant, 2007—.

Addresses: Office—c/o Al Sawadi Investment & Tourism Company, Beit Lima Bldg., Beit Al Faraj St., PO Box 3619, Ruwi 112, Oman.

Posted to Oman

Following completion of the Senior Seminar executive leadership program, Baltimore was posted to the U.S. Embassy in San Jose, Costa Rica, as deputy chief of mission. In 1999 he was appointed U.S. consul general in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Three years later, President George W. Bush appointed him as the new U.S. ambassador to the Sultanate of Oman, which borders Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates on the Arabian Peninsula. The country is run by a hereditary sultan, but during Baltimore's time there Oman instituted universal suffrage in its first steps toward a representative democracy. He lived in the capital city of Muscat with his wife, daughters, and father, who was by then retired.

Baltimore served as ambassador to Oman until 2006, when he relocated to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, to assist with its Rule of Law Program. In 2007 he joined the Al Madina A'Zarqa/Blue City project in Oman as an international consultant. Blue City is one of the Middle East's famed "mega-city" developments and is projected to house 200,000 residents upon its completion in 2020. The fourteen-square-mile coastal development project, with integrated sites for education, housing, business, shopping, tourism, and entertainment, is planned as a rival to that of neighboring Dubai and its ultra-luxurious coastal showcase.

Baltimore developed an affinity for the Arab world during his long career with the State Department, after visiting ninety countries around the world during his long years of service. As the senior U.S. official in Oman, Baltimore was feted even in the remotest villages, where residents "insist that I join them for coffee, tea, dates, and often a meal. They have no idea who I am other than a guest in their country," he told Laura Ewald in the George Washington University alumni magazine, GW. He conceded that Oman—which had undergone a rapid modernization in the past few decades but still had a tribal-based political structure—and the United States diverged in some matters of foreign policy regarding the Gulf States region, "but what we have in common outweighs the differences. This is a safe country that has a long history of people-to-people friendship with the United States."

Sources

Periodicals

New York Times, March 14, 1976, p. 8.

Online

"Ambassador Baltimore's Remarks to Inaugurate the Celebration of African American History Month," U.S. Embassy—Muscat, February 1, 2003, http://www.usa.gov.om/blackhistorymonth.htm (accessed October 24, 2008).

Ewald, Laura, "Shaping Modern Oman," GW Magazine, Fall 2005, http://www.gwu.edu/~magazine/archive/2005_fall/docs/alumni_newsmakers/dept_alumni_oman.html (accessed October 24, 2008).

—Carol Brennan