Читать книгу Amy Biehl’s Last Home - Steven D. Gish - Страница 14

1

Complete Determination

“YOU WANT to raise your children so you can enjoy them as adults,” the child psychology professor told the class. Linda Shewalter had been listening intently. She and her boyfriend Peter Biehl intended to marry and start a family together as soon as they could. Born in 1943, both Linda and Peter had grown up in Geneva, Illinois, a small town about an hour west of Chicago. They met each other at the local Congregational Church and became high-school sweethearts. Peter, the son of a prominent businessman, played football in high school, and Linda did some modeling. The two remained close even after Peter’s parents sent him to Choate, the famous New England prep school. Later Peter entered Whittier College in California; Linda enrolled at Stephens College in Missouri and then Lake Forest College in Illinois. After the two were married in 1964, Linda transferred to Whittier so that she and Peter could be together. Peter’s two passions in college were acting and playing football, while Linda’s was art history. Both graduated from Whittier with BAs in history in 1965. Then they moved back to the Midwest, this time to Chicago, where Peter began working for his father at Fry Consultants, Inc. Peter’s 32-year career in consulting and corporate management was about to take off.

Children arrived in short order. Kim was the first, born in Chicago in late 1965. The next spring, Peter transferred to Fry’s Los Angeles office, and so he, Linda, and the baby moved to Santa Monica, where two more daughters were born in the next few years. Amy Elizabeth Biehl was born at Saint John’s Hospital in Santa Monica on April 26, 1967; Molly came along in 1970. Peter’s job required frequent travel. Linda was equally busy raising the children, though she did find time to volunteer in a local art museum. In the child psychology lingo of the day, the Biehls’ parenting style was neither authoritarian nor permissive. Linda consciously tried to raise the girls with a balance of openness, responsibility, and respect. “The children were curious, verbal, and responsive,” Linda recalled. “I had fun with them. We loved taking them out to help them see the world. We expected them to behave and they did.”

Linda remembers Amy as “extra-challenging—highly motivated almost from birth. Even in the womb, Amy kicked and rolled constantly.” So began a high-energy life. When she was barely able to walk, Amy would climb to the top of the high slide at the beach. When she was one and a half, she fell climbing out of her crib and broke her collarbone. When older sister Kim was learning to read at age four, Amy taught herself to read at age three. When the family moved to Palo Alto for a year in 1970, Amy went to preschool on the campus of Stanford University and played with the professors’ children. Three-year-old Amy made up her mind that when it was time to go to college, she would attend Stanford. She was her parents’ most demanding child. “Amy was very much a tomboy—challenging and active. She had a competitive spirit,” Linda recalled. At age four, Amy met the Lone Ranger during an event at a California restaurant. She then became obsessed with cowboys and insisted on going to preschool dressed as the Lone Ranger for four months straight, with a mask as part of the ensemble. It became “a battle of wills” between Amy and her mother. Exasperated, Linda finally made a deal with Amy—she could dress as a cowboy on most days as long she wore a dress (and no mask) on Wednesdays. Amy agreed. As Kim put it, “Amy was completely determined to do what she wanted to do. Complete determination, from the youngest age.”

In 1971, the family moved again, this time to Tucson, Arizona. Peter eventually became president and CEO of AAC Corporation, an electronics manufacturer. He also became active in Arizona’s Republican Party. He became the party’s state financial chairman and chaired the “Trunk ’n Tusk Club,” the party’s organization in Tucson. In this capacity he met George H. W. Bush and Barry Goldwater, and he and Linda hosted cocktail parties for Gerald Ford and Bob Dole. The Biehls were moderate Republicans and considered themselves “middle of the road” politically. They believed in civic engagement. Besides being a board member of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, Peter was also on the board of the Tucson branches of the NAACP and the Urban League. The family attended the Casas Adobes (Congregational) Church in Tucson, where the girls participated in Sunday school and performed in the bell choir. Although not unduly religious, Peter and Linda were people of faith who believed in an ethical life. Linda led the life of a busy housewife, helping with a Brownie troop, carpooling the girls and their friends to their swimming and ballet lessons, and volunteering at church, the Tucson Museum of Art, and the Junior League. She became even busier when their son, Zach, was born in 1977.

Although all of the Biehl children were active, Amy embodied “human energy in its purest form,” her uncle Dale Shewalter observed. Her parents couldn’t simply tell her to go out and play; she demanded much more than that. Years later, Amy even admitted that during her childhood, she was “hell on wheels.” Athletics became an outlet for some of Amy’s excess energy. She and her sisters began swimming, gymnastics, and ballet in elementary school, and Amy began to accumulate a roomful of first- and second-place ribbons and trophies for her abilities. When Kim and Amy swam together in Tucson, they had to switch teams after Amy had an argument with the coach. “Amy always kind of ran the family,” Kim later admitted with a smile. Unlike her sisters, Amy insisted that her parents get her the best coaches, buy her the best sports clothing and equipment, and take her to the clubs with the best facilities. She was determined to excel in more than just sports. In fifth grade Amy started playing the flute seriously and would always be among the best in her school; she also received recognition for her skills in ballet. And she had not forgotten her dream of attending Stanford. She worked hard academically, earned all As during elementary school, and was often chosen as class president. But she had higher aspirations. In a speech contest in sixth grade, Amy announced her intention of becoming the first female president of the United States.

In 1979, when Amy was 12, the Biehls moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. There Peter and Linda opened the Los Llanos Gallery of Contemporary Art, which showcased works by Native American artists. While Linda ran the gallery, Peter worked with several different industries as an independent consultant. The family attended the First Presbyterian Church in Santa Fe, where they made many close friends.

Amy loved the natural beauty of Santa Fe, with its unique adobe houses, surrounding mountains, and deep blue skies. Adjusting to a new school proved to be difficult, however. The majority of students were Hispanic, and white students—sometimes labeled “Anglos”—felt greatly outnumbered. Amy was determined to win the acceptance of her Hispanic classmates, but such acceptance was not automatic. As challenging as the school environment was for Amy initially, it prompted her to think about issues of race and ethnicity that would so interest her in the future.

In the fall of her junior year, Amy wrote something in her journal that her mother later found significant. Amy commented that in class discussions, some of her fellow students paid lip service to helping the less fortunate but had no real intention of doing so. Amy was troubled by what she perceived as a lack of sincerity. There was nothing wrong with making such virtuous statements, Amy wrote, but only if people really meant what they said. She admitted that while helping others made her feel good, it wasn’t always her first priority. To 16-year-old Amy, honesty was more important than false idealism. “There is nothing wrong with having such wonderful intentions,” she wrote, “but our class needs to have a little more honesty—I think. From now on I’m going to do my best to be myself. I want to let other people know who I really am, a normal kid, not some phony overly mature adult.”

Amy’s drive to be the best was on full display in high school. She originally planned to become a doctor, and so she took the most challenging courses the school offered—chemistry, trigonometry, calculus, French, advanced English—and would accept nothing less than As. Her younger brother Zach remembers Amy as “driven, demanding, and difficult. She was determined. She would freak out if she got a B on a test.” Often Amy wouldn’t start her homework until nine in the evening because of all the extracurricular activities she was involved in. But she would stay up all night if it meant getting an A for a chemistry test. Her work ethic paid dividends. She earned all As in high school and was inducted into the national honor society of secondary students when she was 16. As Linda saw it, Amy earned the stellar GPA not because she was the smartest, but because she worked the hardest.

Amy played flute in the high school concert band, but when it came to marching band, she opted for a different role. She became the drum majorette for the Santa Fe High School Demons marching band in the fall of 1982, her sophomore year. “It is far more fun than being a lowly flute player following some line of people during performance,” Amy wrote in her journal. “As drum majorette I am in command. I get to do a couple of special things, and I really get to perform!” Clearly Amy enjoyed being in the spotlight and preferred to lead, not follow. She was still intent on being an outstanding flute player, but she could not always hold onto first chair. Lamenting the fact that she didn’t have enough time to practice, Amy wrote, “My problem is that I want to be the best at everything, but I do too many things!”

Amy craved challenges and liked to push herself to do what others couldn’t. When she was fourteen or fifteen, she wrote about the high she felt when she transcended her “pain barrier.”

During a particularly hard swim practice the other day, I broke my pain barrier. It is an incredible feeling, one that is very difficult to explain . . .

In order to reach my pain barrier, I have to swim so long and so hard that it feels like I am trying to pull a brick wall behind me. Each time I bring an arm out of the water it feels like lead and each breath I take is a monumental strain on my lungs. I have to keep pushing myself far past the point when I feel like I have reached my limit to where my body starts trembling and I feel nauseous. . . . And then just when I think I am going to drown, a sudden burst of energy works its way from my heart to the tips of my fingers and toes. My lungs loosen up as though I have released a tremendous burden, and my arms feel feather-light. My stroke quickens and I develop a comfortable rhythm that continues until the end of the set.

So many people won’t even try to reach such a point, but I try as often as I can to do so. Ever since I experienced that first broken barrier, I’ve had to reach it again and again. I can’t get enough.

Being so competitive did have a downside. Amy put so much pressure on herself to succeed in academics and sports that she began to have migraine headaches. Some parents quietly dubbed her “Saint Amy” because she was such a high achiever. But younger sister Molly was full of admiration. “Amy was my beacon,” she said. “I wanted to be like her. She motivated me. I didn’t have the natural drive she had. She pushed me, she pushed everybody.”

But Amy was far from being a joyless, single-minded high achiever. She had more admirers than detractors among her peers. She had a busy social life, making friends with her swim teammates and some of the Hispanic girls who had first hassled her. She loved to party and go out dancing with her friends. One of her classmates described Amy as “consistently the happiest, most positive, most enthusiastic person in the room.” He admired her not just because she was so talented in music, sports, and academics, but because she earned the friendship of so many of her fellow students. As her brother Zach observed, “Whatever she did, she did to the nth degree”—including having a good time.

Kim was the first in the family to become interested in Africa. While in high school, she read The Struggle Is My Life, a collection of Nelson Mandela’s speeches and writings, and began listening to African music. She shared the book with Amy, who hadn’t known anything about apartheid in South Africa before. Around the same time, Amy heard the song “Free Nelson Mandela” on the radio, and Mandela became one of her heroes. As the girls got older, they identified with the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party of their parents, with Kim leading the way. These developments didn’t concern Peter or Linda, however. On the contrary, they welcomed their children’s political awakening. They had always encouraged their kids to be interested in other cultures and peoples. In Linda’s words, “When you raise your kids, you raise them to be free.”

Amy’s real passion in high school was diving. Her swim team needed a diver, and she volunteered, despite—or perhaps because of—her fear of heights. As she wrote in her journal, “I love diving because it is an individual sport that requires the ultimate control and timing. It also contains that element of danger which makes it such a thrill. A diver’s highest goal is to achieve perfection, not just beat everyone else, and I really like that. It is graceful, but exciting—so controlled and yet on the brink of disaster.” Amy would sometimes tremble with fear when climbing the platform to dive, but she felt exhilarated when she would make her dive. “There is a high in meeting a challenge and succeeding,” her mother Linda said, describing Amy’s mindset. Amy trained at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, both because it had better facilities than Santa Fe and because the university’s diving coach, Ann Jones, offered to work with her. During swim season, Amy’s day began at 5:30 a.m., when she would wake up and prepare for an hour of swim practice before school (she was both a swimmer and a diver for her team). After school she would drive 60 miles to Albuquerque to practice diving at the University of New Mexico pool. Upon returning home at around 9:00 p.m., she would start her homework. “I would often hear her cursing or crying at midnight when she was exhausted yet determined to get a problem right. Then she’d wake up the next day and start all over,” Molly recalled.

Diving brought Amy more recognition. She won many competitions, including the first-place trophy at the Rio Grande Invitational in 1985. That year, the National Interscholastic Swimming Coaches Association of America ranked Amy as one of the top high-school divers in the country. Amy was pleased, but disappointed that she didn’t make All-American honors in swimming as well. Her drive to excel was as strong as ever: “I kind of am addicted to exercise and get very bored if I’m not constantly busy. School is very important to me, but being active and well-rounded are necessary for me to be happy. I want to have a 4.0, but I also want to be an award winning drum major, first chair flute, and a state champion diver. As far as I’m concerned, why can’t I?”

Amy’s work ethic continued to pay dividends. Her list of awards went on and on: participant in New Mexico Girls’ State; honors society president; 1984–85 New Mexico Scholar; certificate of outstanding academic achievement; and 1984–85 Presidential Fitness award. She was one of 21 seniors to be recognized as “super scholars” by the Santa Fe superintendent of schools in 1985. She even won an oratorical award from the Optimist organization. Amy graduated with a perfect 4.0 grade point average and was co-valedictorian of her class.

With such a stellar academic record, Amy was a college admissions officer’s dream. In the summer of 1984, after her junior year in high school, Amy and her father visited Stanford, Northwestern, Amherst, Harvard, and Indiana, where they met with admissions counselors and swimming and diving coaches. She was offered diving scholarships at Northwestern and Princeton, but not Stanford, which she had wanted to attend since preschool. Seeing that Stanford was still her top choice, her parents agreed to pay the steep tuition fees there so that Amy could realize her lifelong dream. Whether she would make Stanford’s diving team remained to be seen.

Just about the time Amy headed to Stanford, her family moved again, this time to Newport Beach, California, a wealthy coastal community in Orange County. Peter and Linda were concerned that their art business wasn’t providing enough of an income, especially as they thought about paying their four children’s college expenses. Peter became president of McCormick & Co., a New York–based consulting firm, while Linda worked as a manager at high-end retailers I. Magnin, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Neiman Marcus. As of fall 1985, the family’s livelihood would no longer depend on the vagaries of the art world. They settled into a house right across from Newport Harbor High School, less than a mile from the Pacific, in one of the most desirable areas of Orange County. Although newspapers would later refer to Amy as being from Newport Beach, she had spent her formative years elsewhere.

Now she was headed back to Palo Alto, halfway between San Francisco and San Jose, where as a preschooler she had played with the children of Stanford professors and dreamed of attending college. The “Farm,” as Stanford was colloquially known, was one of the most prestigious universities in the country. If Amy had “a fullness of life, a vitality,” as a family friend later remarked, then so did Stanford. While a student there, Amy thrived. She put even more energy into her academics, athletics, and social life than she ever had before and somehow managed to balance all three.

As a freshman, Amy’s first priority was to make the Stanford diving team. Even though diving coach Rick Schavone hadn’t offered her a scholarship, she was determined to earn a spot on the team. During the first week of practice in September 1985, Schavone didn’t view Amy as one of his top prospects, but he believed she did have some talent. “What stood out was how timid she was—a quality not useful in diving and one she worked very hard to overcome,” he said. Sensing Amy’s fear, Schavone initially discouraged Amy from attempting dives from the 10-meter platform, but she insisted on proving she could do it, even though she would be trembling before she dove. Schavone was known as “a yeller” and “grinded on” his divers continuously. The practices were clearly hard on Amy psychologically, but she and her teammates realized that Schavone cared about his divers and wanted to make them better competitors. As Amy became used to Schavone’s gut-wrenching practices, she toughened up and became an indispensable part of the team.

In order to succeed in the pool and the classroom, Amy had to be ultra-organized. Her friends noticed her habit of making lists of things to do and then crossing items off one by one. She eventually got a moped so that she could speed across Stanford’s campus and zip from her dorm to class to diving practice. To the amazement of her friends, Amy could dance all night at one of her favorite clubs and then get up early the next morning to run or go to the library. She studied with as much intensity as she practiced diving. As her freshman humanities instructor remarked, “I remember the big smile, the freckles, the blond hair (short when she was a freshman, longer later), and her ebullient personality. She seemed like an archetypal California girl. I remember her hair was often wet from diving practice. She was an excellent student, always in the A range with her papers, always ready to pitch in to a class discussion, never less than enthusiastic.”

Even before she arrived at Stanford, Amy had decided against preparing for medical school. Instead she initially planned to study political science and prepare for a career in law or business. Her interest in Africa resurfaced when she took David Abernethy’s course The Politics of Race and Class in Southern Africa during her freshman year. The antiapartheid movement was highly visible at Stanford in 1985–86, and Amy heard Archbishop Desmond Tutu speak on campus during the winter quarter. Her sense of moral outrage over apartheid deepened as she took Professor Abernethy’s class, and she even began signing her letters “Free Mandela.” She decided to major in international relations after taking history professor Kennell Jackson’s course Africa since 1945 during her sophomore year. Jackson, an African American who had taught at Stanford since the early 1970s, was impressed with his new student’s commitment to Africa. But at first he worried about the dynamics in his Africa seminar.

[The class] had a large share of black students in it, mostly from the ranks of the black student leadership on campus, and greatly militant. Amy was one of two white students in the class, and at first, I wondered how the mixture of a majority of black militant students and a very few white students would work out. Amy swam through it all with the greatest of ease, and made friends with people and made other people become friends with one another. In addition to her devotion to learning, she was already a social agent of rare mobility.

By the end of her second year at Stanford, Amy was thinking about a career in the Foreign Service or international law. She was interested in third world development, particularly in Africa. In her proposal to major in international relations, which she submitted in June 1987, she discussed her interest in African nationalism and her desire to travel to Africa or the Caribbean so she could conduct research for an honors thesis, although she did not yet have an exact topic in mind. She took as many Africa-related courses as she could during the next two years, including Africa: Development and Dependence, South Africa and the British Empire, and Education and Radical Change in South Africa. Amy made her presence known in the classes she took. As an undergraduate, she was the most outspoken person in her class on African politics, even though a number of her classmates were graduate students, had been to Africa, or were from Africa. Hardly a class went by in which Amy didn’t speak out boldly and substantively about some issue regarding contemporary Africa, whether it was Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, American attitudes toward Africa, or the way Africa had been portrayed in film.

Stanford was an ideal place to focus on sub-Saharan Africa in the late 1980s. It had a federally funded African studies center with high-profile speakers, special course offerings, conferences, and language instruction. Faculty with special expertise on Africa included political scientists, historians, economists, anthropologists, and drama and literature specialists. These professors usually sympathized with the antiapartheid movement, while some scholars from the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank on campus, supported white rule in southern Africa. Besides Archbishop Tutu, a host of well-known Africans and Africa experts spoke on campus during Amy’s years at Stanford, including Chinua Achebe, Chester Crocker, Nadine Gordimer, Pallo Jordan, and Donald Woods. There were many African students at Stanford of different backgrounds and nationalities, both graduate students and undergraduates, who contributed to campus life, both inside and outside the classroom. The university was also home to a talented group of American students interested in Africa, many of whom were on campus while Amy was enrolled. Jendayi Frazer, a graduate student in international development, would eventually become US ambassador to South Africa in 2004 and assistant secretary of state for Africa in 2005. Michael McFaul, a graduate student studying Soviet foreign policy in Africa, would become US ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama. Susan Rice, an undergraduate history major, would become Bill Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for Africa and ambassador to the United Nations and national security advisor during the Obama administration. Stephen Stedman, a graduate student in political science, would become assistant secretary of the United Nations under Secretary General Kofi Annan. For someone as curious and as motivated as Amy, Stanford’s faculty and students, campus speakers, and active antiapartheid movement combined to create a superlative learning environment.

Amy’s social life also took off at Stanford. She eventually joined the Pi Beta Phi sorority along with her close friends Mimi Ballard, Katie Connors, Carole Sams, and Miruni Soosaipillai. Amy developed a passion for reggae music and dance clubs. She often invited her friends to go dancing with her at Club Afrique in East Palo Alto, a poor, mostly black and Hispanic neighborhood across Highway 101 from leafy, affluent Palo Alto. At Club Afrique, she and Katie would sometimes get up, take over the stage, and start singing until they collapsed in a fit of laughter.

Amy met Scott Meinert during her sophomore year. Meinert, a political science major from Salem, Oregon, was a six-foot-two point guard on the Stanford basketball team. After the two athletes met in the weight room, their friends “actually forced us to go out on our first date,” Meinert recalled. The two went to a formal together and began a relationship that would last for seven years, from 1987 until 1993. Scott was Amy’s first and only serious boyfriend and would become her best friend and confidant. When he met Amy, she had already developed a strong interest in Africa and was committed to the antiapartheid movement, which had inspired students on many American campuses in the 1980s.

By her second year at Stanford, Amy was beginning to come into her own as a collegiate diver. Coach Schavone believed she had improved “tremendously” and called her “one of the most improved divers on the team.” The pair’s initial wariness toward each other had eased considerably. They became closer, Schavone recalled, “mainly because I found her so interesting and dynamic. We have what we call ‘mat chats’ when the divers stretch before practice and we discuss issues. She was the most informed and extremely intelligent.” Amy was determined to please her coach and earn his respect. Divers would lift weights in the morning, go to class, and then go to practice. This constant training meant that Amy, five foot five, never weighed more than about 100 pounds in college. For an athlete, she may have been physically small, but she had a “depth and a discipline” that struck her teammates.

As an upperclassman, Amy was an indispensable part of the Stanford diving team. In 1988, she placed second in the Pac-10 championship in the dive from the 10-meter tower. She was then named co-captain of the team in her senior year. This was an opportunity that was made for Amy. “Amy knew she wasn’t the best diver at Stanford,” Scott remembered, “so she figured out how to make it the best team.” She motivated her teammates and encouraged them when they were struggling. Her efforts paid off. In 1989, the Stanford women’s swimming and diving team won the National Collegiate Athletic Association championship, and Amy scored points that helped the team clinch the title. She felt justifiably proud that as a walk-on, she contributed to the victory.

There was still an academic hurdle ahead. Amy decided to apply for an honors degree in international relations, which required students to do an independent research project with a faculty advisor. As Stanford’s course catalog stated, “Such a project requires a high degree of initiative and dedication, significant amounts of time and energy, and skills in research and writing.” This would be a colossal understatement in Amy’s case.

Amy decided to do her honors thesis on Assistant Secretary of State Chester Crocker’s role in the negotiations for Namibian independence. Crocker was instrumental in forging the key agreements, the Brazzaville Protocol and the Tripartite Agreement, which were signed at the UN in December 1988, Amy’s senior year. These agreements paved the way for Namibian independence—South Africa agreed to leave Namibia, which it had administered illegally for decades; Cuba agreed to withdraw its troops from Angola; and free elections would be held in Namibia. The timing for Amy’s thesis was perfect. The negotiations had just been completed, and some of the participants were available at Stanford. Kennell Jackson agreed to serve as Amy’s advisor for the project, which dominated Amy’s attention for much of her senior year.

Amy secured interviews with the key people involved. She interviewed Crocker at the State Department in Washington, D.C., on December 16, 1988; Edward Perkins, US ambassador to South Africa, at Stanford on March 13, 1989; and the recently retired secretary of state, George Shultz, at Stanford the next day. Amy’s substantive questions revealed her knowledge and thorough preparation. Reflecting on her interviews, Jackson recalled, “Amy definitely had in mind what she wanted to get out of these people.” When questioning Secretary Shultz, Amy coaxed him, and if he responded too briefly, she would say, “And?” During his meeting with Amy, Shultz praised Crocker’s commitment to Africa and made a comment that foreshadowed Amy’s future approach to Africa. He said, “Africans look for people especially who are willing to take an interest and try to understand Africa—be friends with Africa . . . they respond very much to genuine friendship and they reciprocate on a personal level.” During the next few years, Amy would take Shultz’s words to heart.

Unfortunately, Amy’s tape recorder hadn’t worked during her interviews with Crocker and Shultz, but she chalked it up to bad luck and consoled herself with the fact that she had taken detailed notes. But that was only the beginning of her bad luck that year. In April 1989, a wall socket short-circuited in the off-campus house Amy shared with friends Carole and Miruni and started an electrical fire, seriously damaging the house, gutting Amy’s room, and destroying her possessions. Everything was gone, including all the material for her thesis, which was due in a matter of weeks. Amy was devastated. After the fire, she went to Professor Jackson’s office in tears and told him that all of her work had gone up in smoke. “She felt sorry for herself for about a day,” Scott recalled. “She’d invested so much in it, it was too important to abandon.” So she started over, working every day between 2 and 9 p.m. in Meyer Library to redo her thesis. Jackson was amazed that Amy could find the resolve to recover from such a misfortune. “She reconstituted the whole dang thing,” he said.

Amy completed her thesis in May 1989, not long after the fire. Titled “Chester Crocker and the Negotiations for Namibian Independence: The Role of the Individual in Recent American Foreign Policy,” her thesis was comprehensive, well written, and multidimensional. She didn’t just report what Crocker thought and did but revealed the problems and controversies that his approach sometimes generated. She was sensitive to how events beyond Crocker’s control forced him to shift his approach at critical times. She criticized him for being too tolerant of South Africa’s slow pace of internal reform and its regional destabilization campaign, but she praised his “persistence and tenacity” that led to the eventual breakthrough. In her judgment, Crocker’s role in forging an agreement among such disparate and hostile parties (South Africa, Angola, Cuba, and the USSR) was a considerable achievement.

Reading the thesis, one would never suspect that it had been started again from scratch in the spring of Amy’s senior year after fire destroyed her notes. Jackson thought the thesis was outstanding. In fact, he would later get requests from other scholars and UN officials for the work, because it was the first to so fully analyze the negotiations leading to Namibian independence. Crocker’s own discussion of his role would only be published three years later, in 1992.

With the thesis finished and submitted just in time, Amy participated in Stanford’s ninety-eighth annual commencement in June 1989. Before the ceremony, held outdoors in the Stanford stadium, Scott helped tape the words “Free Mandela” on Amy’s cap. The clear and sunny skies of that late spring California day mirrored Amy’s mood. But her work was not quite done.

International relations majors were required to have an overseas studies experience in order to receive their degrees. Amy had postponed this in order to continue her diving training in the off-season. Now, fresh from her final championship season, Amy could begin planning her overseas studies program. In May 1989, she had been awarded an International Student Identity Card scholarship to support a 10-week trip to southern Africa. Out of 102 applicants, Amy was one of only 17 to be awarded the scholarship, whose recipients were known as Bowman scholars. She proposed to observe Namibia’s transition to independence and then write up her observations as a kind of epilogue to her thesis. Armed with the travel guide Africa on a Shoestring and a book on staying healthy in the third world, Amy prepared for her first trip to Africa.

She arrived in Johannesburg on July 5, 1989. South Africa was still under a state of emergency after nearly five years of ongoing political unrest. Now Amy would get to see firsthand the region that she had studied so intensively from a distance. While in Johannesburg, Amy met with professors of African studies at the University of the Witwatersrand and visited a teacher training center in Soweto, the largest black township in South Africa with well over a million residents. She and a student from Columbia University were shown around Soweto by an African guide. He took the two Americans to see the illegal shacks, the upscale areas, and everything in between, including the homes of Nelson and Winnie Mandela and Walter and Albertina Sisulu. At one point, Amy and her companions saw some African women at a well filling up jugs of water and carrying the jugs on their heads. The Americans asked if they could take photos and the women agreed, even giving Amy a jug to balance on her head. The photo of a smiling Amy getting her first “water-balancing lesson” might seem like a typical tourist pose, but it foreshadowed the genuine kinship Amy would develop with African women in the years ahead.

Next Amy headed to Namibia to observe that country’s transition to democracy. During her six weeks there, Amy was in overdrive. She attended political rallies and protests, spoke to a wide range of Namibians and foreigners on conditions in the country, visited the headquarters of the UN peacekeeping force, and spoke with an official from the United States Information Service. She also met a German reporter who took her to press conferences and shared his information on Namibia’s election preparations. The press conferences Amy attended gave her the opportunity to hear from many different groups, including a black student organization that held a press conference in Katutura township near Windhoek. Already Amy was comfortable going into black townships, something few white Namibians ever did. She found Windhoek a hive of political activity and was energized by the opportunity to convert her academic interests into real-life experience. For her thesis she had studied Namibia from the perspective of American foreign policy, but now she could observe Namibian perspectives firsthand. She was excited to see a democratic transition unfolding before her eyes. While she was in Namibia, voters were registering for the November election and exiles were returning to the country. Amy believed that the scheduled election was irreversible, but she worried about the contentiousness of the preelection process.

Amy’s stay in Namibia was not all work. She lived with a German-speaking family in Windhoek who took her on a memorable four-day camping trip in the vast Namib Desert. Amy had a marvelous time, traveling with her companions in huge Land Rovers, seeing the wildlife and unique desert vegetation, sampling Namibian beer at sunset, and sleeping outside. Far from being intimidated by being alone halfway around the world in an unfamiliar country, Amy was exhilarated. She had gathered information, made contacts, traveled extensively, and sought new experiences. She was clearly in her element. “So far, this trip has been very good for me,” she told Scott. “I’ve had a chance to see things the way they really are, to test myself out on my own, and to think about what I really want to do.” As stimulating—even life changing—as the trip had been for Amy, she also realized how much she missed Scott and wanted to be near him.

But Amy’s journey was not quite finished. She returned to South Africa for two more weeks in mid-August 1989 and traveled around the country. She frequently caught rides in minivans—often called “kombis” in South Africa—which were the most affordable mass transit option for the country’s black citizens. Amy could easily have flown to her destinations, but she wanted to understand what conditions were like for the majority of South Africans. As Scott later recalled, “She told me about a conversation she had with a woman on a kombi about that woman’s journey and life, and I remember she marveled at the woman’s matter-of-factness and spirit in talking about a really challenging life.” After two weeks of traveling within South Africa, Amy spent early September in Zimbabwe and returned to Johannesburg on September 7, the day after a South African general election. F. W. de Klerk’s National Party had been reelected on the promise of a reformist agenda, giving Amy much to talk about with the South Africans she met.

Amy returned to her family’s home in southern California on September 11, 1989, after a brief stopover in Paris. She wrote a short report on her trip for Stanford’s International Relations Department and a longer analysis discussing the status of Namibia’s independence process. Kennell Jackson was so impressed with her longer paper that he assigned it to his modern African history class at Stanford. Most revealing was Amy’s journal, in which she recorded her experiences during her southern African trip that summer. Searching for a way to end the journal—she didn’t expect to begin another until her next trip and already wanted to return—Amy wrote,

I guess what I want to express is how lucky I feel to have had this opportunity to make this trip. This is a great time in my life—I feel young, independent, fairly attractive, and now worldly! It’s kind of scary to think of what lies ahead. I just hope I can keep building on these great experiences and find a life in which I can do something meaningful and stay as happy as I am right now. I am so fortunate to have had the great family, friends and education that I’ve been given—I really hope that I can give some of that back to the world (I’m not trying to be some kind of idealist, but I do believe this) . . . And here I go!