NEWS FEATURE: Boggs Ending Term as Envoy to Vatican

c. 2000 Religion News Service ROME _ This is Lindy Boggs’ last assignment. At the end of the Clinton administration she will leave her job as U.S. ambassador to the Vatican and return to New Orleans, even if Vice President Al Gore, an old family friend, wins the presidency and asks her to stay on, […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

ROME _ This is Lindy Boggs’ last assignment.

At the end of the Clinton administration she will leave her job as U.S. ambassador to the Vatican and return to New Orleans, even if Vice President Al Gore, an old family friend, wins the presidency and asks her to stay on, Boggs said Monday (April 10).


“I’ve had enough,” she said in an interview in her office overlooking the ruins of Rome’s Circus Maximus, where chariots once raced for the emperor. And while she remains willing to lend her name and time to favorite causes back home, “I have no desire to have another difficult job,” she said.

Like all ambassadors, Boggs, now 84 and a great-grandmother, serves at the pleasure of the president. She arrived in Rome in December 1997, as a Clinton appointee. She would almost certainly be replaced under an administration headed by Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

On the other hand, Boggs is close to Bush’s rival for the White House, Gore. Her friendship with his family dates back to the future vice president’s birth, when Gore’s mother, Pauline, the wife of U.S. Rep. Al Gore Sr., called on Lindy Boggs, then the wife of the newly elected U.S. Rep. Hale Boggs, D-La., to welcome her to Washington.

In the early 1950s, the Boggs and Gore families visited the Far East together. Both families recall an evening in which Boggs held an exhausted Al Gore Jr. in her arms as the toddler slept through an official concert. Years later, the vice president asked to administer the oath of office to the new ambassador as a gesture of affection, she said.

Still, Boggs made clear Monday, she will not ask to stay on in Rome, even under a Gore administration.

“It’s been an honor and a privilege and a wonderful opportunity to be in this position, but it’s also extremely exhausting,” she said. A nagging case of what she called Roman flu has dogged her on and off for weeks, she said.

And yet, she has not begged off on a single Vatican function in which the ambassador’s attendance is customary, said Deputy Chief of Mission Joseph Merante. “She’s got a perfect attendance record.”

DEA END NOLAN

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