Obituary: Josiah Beeman

Josiah Beeman

* United States Ambassador. Died aged 70.

Josiah Beeman, then 58, was chosen by President Bill Clinton as the United States Ambassador to New Zealand in 1994.

His allotted task was clearly to warm up relations after the chill triggered by the Labour Government's locally popular anti-nuclear legislation of 1985.

Josiah Beeman arrived with a smile, considerable charm and a slightly eccentric enthusiasm for his large collection of walking sticks.

The pleasant demeanour of this big man, tall enough to look his President in the eye, was pervasive. He was smiling in all but one of the many photographs the Herald ran of him over 5 1/2 years. In the other one he was half-smiling.

But it soon became clear that this pacifist and Presbyterian churchman was no soft touch. Behind the charm lay the hard edge of a professional envoy. He had served as his church's representative to the United Nations and he had held key posts in the Democratic Party. He also owned Beeman and Associates, a political consulting firm.

He was inclined on arrival to praise New Zealand's restructured economy, to hope for a thaw in New Zealand-American relations and to talk of a possible future visit to Washington for the then Prime Minister Jim Bolger.

It actually happened in 1995, the first such visit to the White House since Sir Robert Muldoon went in early 1984.

In Mr Beeman's time the US and New Zealand talked over a raft of trade and other issues, several of which, such as free trade, made little progress.

Some topics were simply not negotiable. In late 1994 Mr Beeman referred to the 1991 US decision to remove tactical nuclear weapons from surface vessels and attack submarines. He suggested that obviously meant that American forces in the South Pacific region were not nuclear-armed.

But the Americans immediately attacked some New Zealand media reports on his comments suggesting they indicated a softening of the American attitude to the anti-nuclear policy.

Mr Beeman reiterated America's uncompromising view on the nuclear issue in 1995, stressing the need to keep the "neither confirm nor deny" policy on whether American warships were nuclear armed or propelled.

Even in 1999 he had to spell out that President Clinton's relaxing of the ban on military exercises with New Zealand was confined to peace-keeping operations, not conventional defence exercises.

And while avoiding direct comment on the state of New Zealand's armed forces, Mr Beeman later commented that East Timor highlighted New Zealand's security interests.

He said they required a defence capability beyond "simply defending New Zealand against some imaginary foreign invader".

In 1995 Mr Beeman attended the Treaty celebrations at Waitangi when Governor-General Dame Catherine Tizard was spat on and a New Zealand flag trampled. Saying he felt "hotter than a firecracker", he decided the matter was "New Zealand internal politics" and he would not go again.

But when it came to walking sticks it seemed little could spoil Mr Beeman's pleasure. He had well over 250 and he and his first wife, Linda, used to publish the then Cane Collector's Chronicle (circulation about 300). After his first marriage ended while he was in New Zealand, Josiah Beeman married Suzanne Sturman.