Ambassador Learned Duties Only After Appointment

Name: Jeff Bleich,

Age: 50

Occupation: United States Ambassador to Australia

How did wind up in this job?

It was a combination of education, jobs, and volunteering for Barak Obama election campaigns.

After attending Amherst College, I went to law school at UC Berkeley. ... I got a job in Washington, D.C., clerking for different judges. Then I returned to the Bay Area, where I worked as a civil litigation attorney. Still service-minded, I served on the California State Board of Directors. The year before I left for the White House, I served as chair of the California State Bar Association.

During the years I worked in D.C., I got to know Obama because I was trying to recruit him to serve on one of the boards I was working for, but he didn’t want to. He was in his third year of law school at Harvard, and wanted to get back to Chicago. But we really hit it off and stayed in touch, and I decided to volunteer for his senatorial election campaign in Chicago in 2003.

Then, in 2006, when he decided to run for president, I volunteered again, I was one of the first people to get involved. I was on several committees—education advisory, voter protection, and fund-raising, I also served as co-chair of his national finance committee.

After Obama was elected, I got a call from the White House. The president wanted me to come out to be his special counsel. Then the possibility of an ambassadorship came up in 2009. I think he was looking for ways to keep me involved.

What do you do as an ambassador?

When I started, I had no idea what ambassadors do, other than what I saw in movies—standing on verandahs, wearing a sash, with a gin and tonic in hand, and saying something like, “They’ll never be able to breach the wall.”  

What I learned, when I went to Ambassador School (really! I met with all the major policy makers, government departments, and former ambassadors), was that we work with 23 different government agencies and their counterparts in whatever country we are serving—in my case, Australia.

Every day, I get a three to four hour briefing, then go about the day, doing whatever comes up. For example, when the nuclear reactors were melting down in Japan after the recent tsunami, we arranged for a U.S. C-17 cargo plane to fly to Perth, in western Australia, load up a couple of huge water cannons, and take them to the reactor site, where they were extremely useful.

Australia is one of the U.S.’s best friends, and is strategically situated to interface with the rising Asian economic and political landscape.

Of all the countries in the world, Australia best “gets” us. Our style of democracy, like theirs, is wild, weird and messy. We have common challenges—cyber security, terrorist threats, scarcity of food and energy, and climate change. We’re working on a new cyber security command post right now. 

But Australia is dissimilar to the U.S. in some key ways that dismay them: they have a single-payer health system that is inexpensive and works for everyone; they have affordable, excellent education through college levels; and they have “superannuation,” or social security, which everyone pays into and which is one of the largest privately funded pension plans in the world.

What brings you to the Bay Area at this time?

I’ve been attending AUSMIN, that’s Australia-United States Ministerial annual meeting between both countries’ Secretary of State, Defense, Chairman of Joint Chiefs, and ambassador. We met at the Presidio, in San Francisco, to honor the 60 year anniversary of the signing of the Alliance Treaty between the U.S. and Australia.

How long do you think you’ll be serving as ambassador, and do you think you’ll run for public office at some time in the future?

Well, I serve at the pleasure of the President, and politics is a brutal playing field. My wife, Becky, jokes that she hopes my second wife and she get along because she’s not very interested in the prospect.

How is your family holding up in Australia?

We all miss our friends, but Becky writes home and keeps busy with diplomatic duties and raising three children.

The kids are in a Harry Potter school. It’s a private school where they wear uniforms and get Anglican training. Jake, 19, is a member of the nationwide dragon boat team, and his team wins medals. He’ll graduate soon, and will take a gap year while he’s applying to college in the U.S. Matthew, 16, is captain of the soccer team, and Abby, 13, has friends and is a good sport about wearing funny hats and plaid skirts.