Former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch to speak in Rogers City June 4
by Richard Lamb–Advance Editor
A major figure in world diplomacy is coming to Rogers City June 4 to share her interesting life story. Best-selling author Marie Yovanovitch will be a guest of the Rogers City Area Zonta Club and the Presque Isle District Library at a speaking event at the Rogers Theater. Yovanovitch is the author of “Lessons from the Edge: A Memoir” about her 33-year career in foreign diplomacy. She served as United States ambassador to Kyrgyzstan (2005-2008), the Republic of Armenia (2008-2011) and Ukraine (2016-2019).
SHE HAS been called a pioneering diplomat who has spent her career advancing democracy in the post-Soviet world.
She became a public figure during the first impeachment of former President Donald J. Trump shortly after she was abruptly called from her post in Kyiv, Ukraine. Months later, Trump’s self-described “perfect call” to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy further slammed her personally.
In her book, Yovanovitch described the events that followed that July 25, 2020 telephone call between Zelenskyy and Trump.
“Zelenskyy had told Trump that Ukraine wanted to buy more Javelin missiles from the U.S. in order to bolster its defenses against Russia. Trump replied not with a yes, no or maybe but with this: ‘I would like you to do us a favor, though.’ Trump then pressed Zelenskyy to launch investigations into two of the baseless allegations circulating since March (2019) in Trump-affiliated media: first that Ukrainians had interfered with the 2016 U.S. elections to aid Hillary Clinton and second that then vice president (Joe) Biden had corruptly blocked a prosecution in Ukraine to help his son,” she wrote.
SHE DESCRIBES how Trump then took the occasion to slam her and her reaction to those claims.
“I couldn’t believe that an American president was praising a corrupt prosecutor and trashing an American ambassador—me—to a foreign president,” Yovanovitch wrote.
“It was chilling and infuriating. Not just Trump’s willingness to hold our bipartisan foreign policy and Ukraine’s security hostage to his personal ambitions, but also what he was saying about me personally. Months after he and his cronies had baselessly trashed my reputation and booted me out of our embassy in Ukraine to help Trump’s re-election efforts, he was, incredibly, still focused on me. I know that he had a habit of demeaning women, but I saw red when he reduced me to four words: ‘the woman’ and ‘bad news.’ Rationally I know that his behavior reflected more on Trump than on me, but still, his comment enraged me even as they frightened me,” she wrote.
YOVANOVITCH WAS born into a family that fled from the Communists in the Soviet Union and then escaped the terrors of Nazi Germany before arriving in the United States. The book tells about her family origins beginning in 1921, calling the family travelers, not by professional privilege or leisure, but as “an act of survival.”
She chronicles her career as a diplomat, shedding light on things that go on behind the scenes to help secure relationships with foreign countries. Those stories lead up to her exit from government service and lessons learned from the experience with Trump.
“Like so many Americans, I have spent much of this cataclysmic period in angry disbelief. During the Jan. 6 insurrection and beyond, Trump and his cronies exhibited the same traits and behavior that I had witnessed when I was attacked and then fired as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. Just as in the Trump-(Rudy) Giuliani Ukra
Yovanovitch will speak at the Rogers Theater June 4 at 7 p.m. Preregistration is required due to space concerns by calling (989) 306-5730.
