Listen: The Only Woman in the Room – Roz Ridgway’s StoryThis audio legacy was compiled using interviews between Roz Ridgway and Arlington Community Foundation (ACF) staff members in 2024 to discuss her life, career, loves, and legacy fund with ACF. The audio legacy transcript is included below, and you can download the audio file to your device by clicking the 3 dots on the right side of the media player.
Photo descriptions/attributions:
1. The Chairman of the State Council and General Secretary of the Central Committee of the SED, Erich Honecker, welcomes Ambassador Rozanne “Roz” L. Ridgway (1983). Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1983-0126-309 / Gahlbeck, Friedrich / CC-BY-SA 3.0
2. President Ronald Reagan During a Trip to Switzerland at The Geneva Summit and a Working Lunch at The Pometta Residence with Don Regan and Roz (1985)
3. Roz with her husband Captain Ted Deming
4. Roz’s headshot, American Foreign Service Association
5. In 2010, Then-Prime Minister of Latvia, Valdis Dombrovskis, with Roz. Photo: Aivis Freidenfelds, Valsts kanceleja
[Ronald Reagan, 1984]: Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
[Host] In 1985, these 10 words helped make history as part of a Joint Statement by the United States and The Soviet Union, officially and publicly declaring their shared commitment to quote, “maintaining peace.”
In the four decades since, these ten words have appeared in countless history books and continued to be a driving peacekeeping message on the global stage. Like in 2009…
[Barack Obama, 2009]: Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
[Host] And again in 2022…
[Joe Biden, 2022]: Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
[Host] While these 10 words of that historic Joint Statement have continued to be in the spotlight, the dozens, and even hundreds, of people who made that Statement happen, haven’t been in that same light. And often times, as you’ll hear in this White House press briefing from 1988, that was by design.
[National Archives audio, 1988] Good afternoon. Welcome to the background briefing on the forthcoming NATO Summit. For your information only and not for use in print or by sound or camera, today’s background briefer is Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs, Rozanne Ridgway. [Roz, 1988] Let me give you just a few broad themes on this summit. Secretary General Carrington invited…[fades out]
[Host] The speaker introduced in that clip, which is now publicly available, is Roz Ridgway, one of the key negotiators at the 1985 Regan-Gorbachev summit in Geneva, resulting in that historic Joint Statement. Here’s Roz today, reflecting on how she became a part of what she calls the “extraordinary team” that made the statement possible:
[Roz] In 1985, while I was the Ambassador in East Germany, I received a telephone call from Secretary of State, George Shultz, asking me to return to Washington to become the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs, and to assist him in supporting President Reagan in the forthcoming Reagan-Gorbachev summit scheduled for Geneva in 1985. I inherited a process already underway.
[Host] A multi-year process with what Roz calls “constantly evolving dialogue” managed by this extraordinary team.
[Roz] …including Paul Nitza, Mark Palmer, Dom Simons, people like that who had been running the arms control dialogue and the nuclear stuff, the nuclear negotiations at these.
[Host] And while this years-long process and the negotiations in Geneva ultimately produced that historic Joint Statement, the extraordinary team that helped make it happen, didn’t do it to be in the spotlight.
[Roz] For 4 years, we negotiated with the Soviet Union and you’re not going to find my name in the history books. I saved a newspaper of the guy who was explaining what he did: The years he spent negotiating behind the scenes. The formal statements that were always issued after the negotiations are this wonderful statement. They take years to negotiate. It takes years to settle every issue that’s in those statements. And I was able to because of my fisheries experience.
[Host] Yes, you heard that right. She said fisheries experience. You can’t talk about the Geneva Summit without first getting to know Tuna Roz; a nickname Roz earned as Ambassador of Oceans and Fisheries. And ironically enough…
[Roz] I don’t like seafood… When I joined the team around George Shultz, I was an experienced negotiator. My efforts on behalf of the American tuna industry created the name “Tuna Roz.”
[Host] And during this part of Roz’s career, the seafood nicknames didn’t stop there.
[Roz] We had problems in Brazil as Brazil was seizing American shrimpers at the mouth of the Amazon, and I became “the shrimp lady.”
[Host] And they just kept coming.
[Roz] I left the Ecuador desk and moved up to the Office of Policy Planning, my own little desk, to do fisheries disputes because there was another one which was the lobster dispute between the United States, the Bahamas, and Cuba, and I became “the lobster lady.” I am pleased, however, that I ended up as Tuna Roz, and I’ve kept it.
[Host] Over three decades, Roz’s diplomatic and foreign services career brought her everywhere from Italy…
[Roz] I had a Sicilian accent that was so thick, I think I told it in that one story, I got up to Rome, and I checked into a hotel, and I handed in my ID, which showed I was an American, and he said, “If you’re an American, speak English, because at the moment, you’re speaking Sicilian.”
[Host] to the Bahamas…
[Roz] Then he called and he said, “Roz, I need a deputy. Would you come to the Bahamas to be my Deputy Chief of Mission?” And I said yes, of course… O, I tell you, I had a penthouse apartment on a beach!
[Host] to Japan…
[Roz] The Japanese came to me, they had seen the governing international fisheries agreement and said we can’t sign that agreement. We understand there has to be something, but we need help getting support at home from our fisheries industry for us entering into this agreement. Would you come to Japan and help us sell it?
[Host] To dozens of other places, and often in heels.
[Roz] And so you do, you jump out of the car, and you run, and you’re in high heels because you’re instructed to look all proper. And then when you get there, it’s an elevator that must be at least 300 years old. I’m surprised it didn’t have people pulling it. But only 2 people could get into it. So what do you do? You get to the stairs. Where are the nearest stairs? So you run up the stairs, and then you catch your breath, and you arrive as if it’s just the easiest thing in the world, and hope the perspiration doesn’t show.
[Host] In fact, for much of Roz’s career, she was the only woman in the room, and she knew she belonged in those rooms because, even in her childhood home in Minnesota, as the 1 girl between 2 boys, gender was a non-issue.
[Roz] You were, I think I wrote it down, you were what you are. The theme at the table was, you should do your best. You bring your best report cards home. Whatever it is you’re doing, you do your best. We were people, and we were encouraged to be people.
[Host] Even after Roz started living and working abroad, she still found a special kind of comfort with her family in Minnesota.
[Roz] The three of us; My grandmother, I, and my mother would sit in the kitchen, and I forget what we were drinking, but we got pretty silly at one point, some, you know, fruity kind of drink that makes you sick or something… but anyhow, we would sit there and laugh and talk and that kind of stuff, and it was just different. It was just going back to where I was comfortable and where I knew all of the signals and where I didn’t have to worry about anything.
[Host] In 1981, on a first date in Annapolis, Roz received another signal from her future husband and Coast Guard officer, Ted, through a small, timeless gesture.
[Roz] It was a cold January day, we had lunch, and we were walking back to his car. And he reached over and took my hand. That took care of that. We held hands for the next 40 years. And if you ever knew Ted, you’d know what a kind and warm person he is, but he was also accomplished. And you know, it is a hard world, and you’re working your butt off and all the rest, and then somebody comes into your life who’s soft and warm and kind.
Ted saw me through the ups and downs of the Reagan years. He wasn’t challenged by me. He didn’t feel that he was. Many of the people I met along the way resented my achievement… Ted didn’t need that. Ted had his own spine.
[Host] And Roz knows a thing or two about having a spine. Just one example, in an endless list of examples, was during the 1985 Geneva Summit. Both parties had agreed ahead of time to use this meeting to finish a joint statement. But when they sat down to do just that, the Soviet representative across from Roz presented an unexpected contingency.
[Roz] And I said, “We’re here to do this joint statement for this meeting. We’re not going to play that game of doing something on the sideline that I have to pay a price for in order to get this, what we’re supposed to be doing. And I said when you figure it out, let me know.” And I shut my book, and I walked out.
[Host] And how does someone not just shrink in fear in those moments?
[Roz] So when I shut the book and walked out, it was the thing to do. So I don’t remember worrying about it. I don’t remember saying “what in the world have you done, Roz?” It was just the right thing to do, and Shultz took it the same. I knew my people. And I think they knew me. And so it means you just go through these things as if it’s the normal thing to do, the normal way to behave, and you’re not scared.
[Host] And in 1989, only a few months after retiring, Roz – and the world – witnessed the fruits of this matter-of-fact fearlessness of the entire extraordinary team that supported Reagan and Shultz.
[Roz] I was in Taiwan, turned on the TV and watched the Berlin Wall come down, November of ’89. I had retired at the end of June. But I’d like to think we’re the ones who brought that wall down.
[Host] By the time Roz retired, she had spent decades building a reputation that caught the attention of – surprisingly enough – corporations. Specifically, corporate boards. Before Roz had even officially retired, 3M, based in her home state of Minnesota, was working behind the scenes to get Roz on their board.
[Roz] They saw that I was retiring because there was a little bit of a gossipy kind of thing here in Washington that I was leaving, so they picked that up and immediately went through the legal office at the State Department to ask if they could approach me because I didn’t retire until the end of June, and they wanted me on the board for the August meeting.
[Host] From there, Roz served on a number of corporate boards, being referred by the likes of George Shultz, former Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, presidential advisor Vernon Jordan, and even an NFL player, Willie Davis. And once again, Roz was often the first and only woman in those board rooms.
[Roz] They saw me doing things that they hadn’t seen women doing before in places where they hadn’t seen women before. I had served with the Chief Executive Officer of Boeing, who asked me to fill a vacancy on the Boeing board. I was the first woman on that board. There were some people who didn’t know why they would have a woman on the board because, after all, they were all boys out there flying airplanes.
[Host] In addition to corporate boards, Roz also served, and continues to serve, on the boards of nonprofits, often ones that aligned closely with her career in foreign service and diplomacy.
[Roz] I’m a member of the board and have been for a long time of the Senior Living Foundation of the American Foreign Service, and we help retired Foreign Service personnel who find themselves with not enough income to meet those extraordinary requirements that come up.
When you retire from the government, it takes forever to get your first retirement check, and we help fill that period where there’s no income at all. There’s staff that we have that advises people who call in and they’re looking for a place for their mother, and they don’t know where to go for this or how to do that, all around the country.
[Host] As a career government employee, with a second career on boards spanning the entire spectrum from nonprofits to corporations, Roz gained a number of unique insights. For one, the compensation for government service and corporate board service was…different, to say the least.
[Roz] I had never seen so many zeros in somebody’s pay packet. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I was astounded at the difference between my government zeros and the world outside.
[Host] What isn’t different, says Roz, is the level of commitment by both corporate and nonprofit board members alike.
[Roz] They get the job done. They know how to do their jobs. They can meet problems, they can solve problems. It’s just a little more hard to do in the not-for-profit world. At one point I’m doing both. I’m in the world of lots of zeros, and I’m still doing not-for-profit work.
Then I retire from the world of zeros, and I get back to reality, which is people scratching for the last dollar to move their programs forward.
[Host] Which brings us forward to today. Roz lives in the Arlington home she bought with Ted in 1985. Ted passed away in 2022. And Roz is working through her charitable giving legacy plan with the Community Foundation. While Roz’s history of giving and planned giving through her legacy fund are dynamic and widespread – some giving honors Ted, some continues her legacy as Tuna Roz, some reflects her appreciation for history- she isn’t quote, passionate, about much of her giving in the way you might expect. Instead, she approaches a lot of her giving with the same matter-of-fact values that she was raised with, and that she brought to her work.
[Roz] I just like to know that I can help in some way. Because if you’re in the community, that’s what you do.
[Host] But of course, there’s always an exception. One thing Roz would say she’s passionate about goes all the way back to her childhood home in Minnesota.
[Roz] I mean, music, classical music for me, was just always a part of my life. We had it in the home.
[Host] For as long as Roz has been able to donate to causes and organizations financially, one of her priorities throughout her life and in her legacy fund is supporting music and the arts. And when she was young and didn’t quite have the means to donate?
[Roz] The truth of the matter is the only time I really felt inspired, but I couldn’t immediately actively do anything about it… I went to New York with my roommate right out of college. We were living in Dupont Circle when it was a different kind of circle in those days at $50 a month. Those homes had not been renovated. So we went up to New York, we both liked music, so we went up to New York and happened to get tickets for one of the smaller opera houses, and they were performing La bohème, and I have been a fan of opera since the first note of the overture for La bohème.
[Host] And if you’re not so familiar with the opera La bohème, here are those thrilling opening notes of that overture.
[Roz] That first opera I went to is the only time I could honestly use the word “thrilled” by something and thrilled by other performances along the way. That just set me off. I mean, I just love opera.
[Host] And with her legacy fund at the Community Foundation, this love that was set off by the first opera, will continue to grow as the fund supports music, the arts, and those thrilling moments, for lifetimes to come, as well the other charitable priorities Roz has designated in her legacy plan.
And in that life and legacy of Roz Ridgway, of which there is so, so much more than what we’ve covered, and you can find a lot of it in 200-page State Department interviews, in Washington Post articles, in the National Women’s Hall of Fame.. but for the sake of this piece, and for the love of what Roz loves, and as a special thank you to Roz for entrusting her charitable legacy with the Community Foundation, we can think of no better note to end on, than closing out with a few words of wisdom from Roz paired with a song from La bohème: a duet where the characters realize they’re falling in love only moments after the man makes a small, timeless gesture and reaches over to take the woman’s hand on a cold day.
[Roz] And so how did I get through it? The life lesson? You do your best, you work hard, you’re known for integrity and effort. Try to be kind to others along the way, an honest friend, a true friend, that’s all you can do.
