In 2011, Arab Spring uprisings were spreading across the Middle East. In Libya, tribal factions resumed warfare that had been suppressed during the reign of Muammar Gadaffi, who ultimately was killed by rebel forces.
As the fighting intensified, Americans – including 40 Embassy personnel – needed to be evacuated from Tripoli.
Douglas Kmiec had a solution. Kmiec, the U.S. ambassador to Malta, a largely Catholic and democratic outpost in the Mediterranean, came up with the idea of sending a Maltese passenger catamaran to Tripoli to ferry the evacuees out.
“Among my many local contacts in Malta was James Satariano, a businessman whom I had met at church,” Kmiec recalled in a recent interview. “When I told him that we had 108 American nationals who had to get out and we needed a vessel, he did not hesitate to step in. Since the ferry held more than 400 passengers, we took another 230 evacuees of other nationalities on board. All got home safely.”
Kmiec’s 2009 to 2011 stint in Malta was but a small part of an accomplished life that took him from the halls of academia to the upper ranks of government, where he even helped make history.
Retired and ensconced for the past two years in the Towers residential buildings in Laguna Woods, Kmiec, 71, spoke modestly of his life, one that has left him fulfilled, he says, with few regrets – “too few to mention.”
An early memory of the Village resident – an event that may have played a part in setting him on his path – is of accompanying his father, Walter, an engineer by trade and Democratic precinct activist, as they went on rounds through Chicago neighborhoods, soliciting votes for John F. Kennedy during the 1960 presidential campaign.
Kmiec remembers sporting a huge button reading “If I were 21, I’d vote for Kennedy.”(He still has that button.)
Although father and son stayed close, rooted in their Polish heritage and Catholic faith, until the elder Kmiec’s death in 2010, Douglas Kmiec…
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