Former KC man now speaks for the West

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Kenton Keith, a saxophonist's son and the product of an all-black, segregated school in Kansas City, now speaks for the West's war on terrorism from his diplomatic post in Pakistan.

Keith, 62, had stepped back from a career that took him from the center of the cultural scene in Paris to an embassy surrounded by an angry mob in Baghdad, Iraq, to a narrow escape from a bomb that destroyed his car in Istanbul.

But, now he's back in the trade as director of the Coalition Information Services, which requires him to represent more than 40 countries in the war against terrorism.

Keith arrived in Islamabad, Pakistan, last week to bolster the public relations campaign and assure people there that the bombing of Afghanistan is a harsh but necessary tool to allow the already war-torn land to find peace.

Keith is the son of the late tenor saxophonist Jimmy Keith and civic activist Gertrude Keith. At Kansas City's all-black Lincoln High School, he busied himself with sports, the French club and student politics.

But it was a British television drama "called 'Foreign Correspondent' or 'Foreign Intrigue,' something like that," that turned his gaze beyond the Midwest.

"It seemed all about wearing trench coats and driving fast cars and spending time with beautiful women," he said. "I subsequently realized that isn't what international relations was all about."

He attended the University of Kansas, and after four years in the Navy as a gunnery officer, he joined the U.S. Foreign Service and moved through the ranks. In 1992 he was named ambassador to Qatar and moved from there to a high-ranking post in the U.S. Information Agency in 1996 before signing on with a nonprofit cultural center in Washington.

This month he took a call from the State Department. Would he speak for the war effort? He agreed to the posting, and now tries to assure Pakistanis that the war is against terrorists, not Muslims. And he tries to assure the rest of the world that the situation is not futile.

"People have a tendency to look at Afghanistan and say it will always be this way, violence and feudalism and backwardness," Keith said. "What we are trying to communicate is that the future need not be this way."