Remembering Richard Boucher
by Judith R. BaroodySo many of us had the honor of knowing Richard Boucher, who passed away June 27, 2025, at the age of 73. A Foreign Service Officer for 32 years, rising to the rank of Career Ambassador, he served as State Department spokesman under six Secretaries: James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger, Warren Christopher, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, and Condoleeza Rice. As such, he was the longest-serving Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs in State Department history.
Richard was born in Bethesda and may have seemed genetically destined for a career in diplomacy. His grandfather was a Consular Officer and regaled Richard and his sister with stories about living in Rio and China. His father worked for the National Security Agency and took a job in Paris in 1955, where Richard had his first lessons in French. After earning a B.A. in English and French literature from Tufts, he joined the Peace Corps and served for two years in Senegal. A stint as a contractor for USAID in Conakry, Guinea, segued into his entrance in the Foreign Service as an Economics Officer in 1977.
After a year of language training in Taiwan, he began as a consular officer in Taipei, later serving in Guangzhou and Shanghai. Back in Washington as the Senior Watch Officer in the Operations Center in 1986, he realized he had taken on a huge responsibility. “There’s nothing like having the midnight to 8:00 a.m. shift and you’re in charge of the world,” he wrote. “When you wake somebody (such as the Secretary of State) up at 2:00 in the morning, he’s not thinking ‘gee, I wonder what’s going on in the world.’ He’s thinking ‘what’s this kid’s name, because if this ain’t good I’m going to fire him in the morning.’ And he remembers your name.”
He worked in EUR on issues related to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and NATO. This led to a job as Deputy Spokesman, then as Spokesman when Margaret Tutwiler left the job along with Secretary James Baker to help President Bush win re-election. He worked for Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger, who suggested his name as ambassador to Cyprus.
It was in Cyprus that I got to know Richard, or “Ambassador Boucher” as we called him. Cyprus is a small divided Mediterranean island, with Turkish Cypriots in the north and Greek Cypriots in the south. Getting the two sides to come to a peace agreement was the primary goal of the mission. As PAO, I worked in preparing the two societies for peace from the grass roots up. As Richard expressed it, “We did a lot of bi-communal activity. We had $15 million that Congress gave us as aid for Cyprus whether we wanted it or not. So we spent it on bi-communal activities [for anything that would bring] Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots together.” That included groups of architects, educators, lawyers, and other professionals.
The island remains divided to this day. Richard wrote that, “The problem was coming up with the political will to make the deal, and there were a lot of people in Cyprus who wanted to argue. It defined them. Their position on the Cyprus issue defined them.”
Despite the political frustration, the Boucher family enjoyed the tour of duty. “It was a beautiful island with an enormous number of relics...Every weekend we went somewhere, me and the family in our Chevy... We would visit ruins, Greek and Roman ruins, amazing places that were not well maintained and certainly not guarded. We would walk on the walls and stand in the amphitheater and I’d hold my daughter up and we would sing together.”
His family also enjoyed the swimming pool and big garden at the Residence. “And we had rabbits. We bought a couple of rabbits and the gardeners who got the rabbits for the kids said, ‘don’t worry, Sir, they’re both males.’ And of course they immediately started having babies... At one point we had 44 rabbits.” When he left in the summer of 1996 for Hong Kong, my husband and I inherited two of the "Boucher bunnies," as we called them.
Richard served in Hong Kong as Consul General from 1996 to 1999, for the last year of British rule and the first two of Chinese. He described it as “the best job in the universe.” His first year saw 130 Congressional visitors as well as meetings with labor unions and democracy activists, establishment politicians, and endless reporters.
Returning to Washington, he worked as senior official for APEC before getting a call asking him to return as Spokesman for Secretary Albright in 2000. “That was the world I wanted to get back into... You could predict with 70 or 80 percent accuracy what most of the press corps was going to be interested in. And then you had to manage the briefing room that way and sometimes the shark frenzy would get to the point where you had to stop it... You know, a lot of what goes on in the briefing room is fear... You are the confident voice of authority. You’re telling people don’t worry; we’ve got this under control. And so the most important thing is you maintain your composure.”
As NEA Office Director for Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy, I sometimes had to brief Richard before his meeting with the press corps. He required detail and answers to any of the questions he might be asked. He enjoyed working with Madeleine Albright and Colin Powell, both of whom he greatly admired.The next time I encountered Richard Boucher was in Paris in 2009, where I was Minister-Counselor for Public Affairs and he was ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. When we met for coffee at an outdoors café, he pulled up on his bicycle, which he used to make his way around the city. My husband and I noticed that Richard was fit and relaxed and seemed to be enjoying his first post-Foreign Service job.
He went from there to teaching as an adjunct professor at Brown, George Mason, and the University of Michigan, about which he said, “I have a real soft spot in my heart for undergraduates. They are just incredibly curious and are able to learn stuff really quickly and start writing it up and going for it. So they’re a lot of fun... One of the things I teach my students is the first skill in diplomacy is learning how to listen.”
Richard enjoyed his post-retirement life, seeing his son and daughter launch into adulthood and teaching while his wife, Carolyn Brehm, traveled the globe for work. They later enjoyed spending time with their grandson and traveling together for fun, living in Northern Virginia, and retreating to their home in the woods of West Virginia.
It was a rich and interesting life. As the song goes, so long, old pal.
Much of the material for this remembrance is from an oral history Richard Boucher recorded in 2015, with thanks to the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.
Photos: Top photo taken at ADST; courtesy of Judith R. Baroody. Middle Photo in the State Department Briefing Room, courtesy of Department of State; Bottom photo shows Richard Boucher and the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, courtesy of Department of State.
Judith R. Baroody served as Executive Director of ADST and as Chair of PDAA’s Awards Committee.