Most of today’s tributes to Shirley Temple Black, who died Monday at 85, focus on her days as America’s most famous movie star. That was back in the 1930s, when she was a very young child.
We prefer to remember the accomplished public official who served four Republican presidents in key diplomatic posts. Not that her celebrity status didn’t help: In Czechoslovakia, where she served as ambassador from 1989 to 1992, she was greeted by locals who proudly showed her their well-worn, decades-old membership cards in Shirley Temple clubs.
The respect for her was well-earned. With her trademark curls and dimples, she sang and danced her way across the silver screen at a moment in history when optimism was in short supply. Ronald Reagan — another actor-turned-public servant — said that a Shirley Temple performance was the time “a depression-haunted world forgot the drab dreariness for a few hours.”
Shirley’s second husband, businessman Charles Black, introduced her to GOP politics. After her failed run for Congress, President Nixon named Shirley to our UN delegation; Gerald Ford made her chief of protocol followed by a stint as ambassador to Ghana; George H.W. Bush appointed her ambassador to Czechoslovakia; and her former co-star, Ronald Reagan, would enlist her to help train other American ambassadors.
President Clinton probably summed her up best in 1998 when he noted she had done “a masterful job” as ambassador, which made her beloved in Ghana and led her to make common cause with Vaclav Havel in the Velvet Revolution. “From her childhood to the present day,” Clinton said, “Shirley has always been an ambassador for what is best about America.” RIP.