Gerald Scott

Ambassador Gerald Wesley Scott is a retired career member of the Senior Foreign Service.  He joined the Dept. of State in 1969 and was posted to the Consulate General in Tangier and then to Gabon.  He then served as a staff assistant to the Asst. Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs and in 1973 was posted to Da Nang, Republic of Viet Nam.  After the fall of Viet Nam, he worked dealing with refugees, and then was briefly posted to the Republic of China office.  He then served as desk officer for Somalia during much of the Somali-Ethiopian conflict.
 
In 1979 he served at the Consulate in Genoa, and thence to the political section of the Embassy in Rome.  From 1983 – 85 he was responsible for the Africa portfolio in the political section of the US Mission to the UN in New York.  He then served in Swaziland for three years as Deputy Chief of Mission, and as Political Counselor in Zaire from 1988 to 1992.  He then served briefly as Political Counselor in Kenya, and returned to Zaire as Deputy Chief of Mission in 1993.  He next served as Ambassador to the Gambia, from 1996 to 1998, immediately following a coup d’etat.  His last two years of full service were as State Department representative and faculty member of the Naval War College.
 
In 2001, immediately following 9/11, he was asked to serve as the Senior Advisor on African Affairs to the U.S. Delegation to the General Assembly, our principal African expert and lobbyist, an annual three month position to which he was also sometimes called during other portions of the year, serving also at one point as Alternate Special Representative for Special Political Affairs (USUN’s alternative Ambassador to the Security Council). During his fifteen years as Senior Advisor he was responsible for securing African cooperation in both the General Assembly and the Security Council on a range of political, economic, social and budgetary issues.  He fully retired from service in 2015.
 
Before he joined the Foreign Service, he was an officer in the Naval Reserve, and served one year in Viet Nam as a psychological operations officer and advisor to the Vietnamese Navy.
 
He was graduated from Georgetown University, and holds Master’s degrees from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the Naval War College.  
 
He was accompanied during most of his diplomatic career by his late wife, Frances Scott, and by their sons, Charles and Michael Scott.