No Longer Serve This President,” he
said that Trump had “warped and be-
trayed” what he regarded as “the tradi-
tional core values of the United States.”
For months, Feeley had tried to main-
tain the country’s image, as Trump’s pol-
icies and pronouncements ofended
allies: the ban on travellers from Mus-
lim-majority countries; the call for a
wall on the Mexican border; the polit-
ical bait and switch concerning the
Dreamers; the withdrawal from the Paris
climate accord and the Trans-Pacific
Partnership. As a result, Feeley wrote,
“America is undoubtedly less welcome
in the world today.” Increasingly, he
feared that the country was embracing
an attitude that was profoundly inimi-
cal to diplomacy: the strong do what
they will and the weak do what they
must. “If we do that,” he told me, “my
experience and my world view is that
we will become weaker and less pros-
perous.” It was not only Trump’s poli-
cies that troubled him. In the Post, he
wrote, “My values were not his values.”“
Y
ou either get your politics from
your family or you reject its pol-
itics,” Feeley told me. “I inherited mine.”
Feeley was born in the Bronx and grew
up in suburban New Jersey. His grand-
parents were of Italian descent on his
mother’s side, Irish on his father’s. “They
were New York City middle class—fis-
cal-responsibility types, strong-defense
types—but also strongly believed that
education was the vehicle for mobility.”
Feeley’s father worked for A.T.& T.,
but the men in his extended family were
mostly cops and firefighters. His ma-
ternal grandfather, Frank Cosola, was a
fireman and a former Navy sailor, who
had earned a Silver Star in the Pacific
during the Second World War. Although
he hadn’t made it past high school, he
was an incessant reader, as was his wife,
Cookie, who volunteered as a Braille
typist, transcribing books for Lighthouse
for the Blind. They passed on their love
of reading to Feeley’s mother, who later
taught English at Fordham. The family
watched William F. Buckley’s show “Fir-
ing Line” reverently. “It was his erudi-
tion that impressed my folks,” Feeley
said. “That’s what they wanted for me.”
His mother forced him into elocution
classes, and his grandfather chided him
not to speak like a “goombah.” Every-one pressed books on him. As a teen-
ager, Feeley was accepted to Regis High
School, an élite Jesuit academy on the
Upper East Side.
He went on to Georgetown’s School
of Foreign Service, where he met Che-
rie, who studied Russian history. But he
soon diverted from scholastic life. In
1983, a recruiter for the Marines came
to campus, and he signed up, without
giving it much consideration. “I thought,
Wow, that would be cool,” he recalled.
“It was just a function of my kind of
halftime-speech, be-all-you-can-be, get-
your-ya-yas-out, young-man stuf.” After
graduation, Feeley trained to fly heli-
copters, and for five years he was based
at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina,
and served stints in Europe and on air-
craft carriers in the Mediterranean. “I
had no combat flight hours,” he told me,
laughing. “I had a very undistinguished
military career.” Still, his ecumenical
views impressed his peers. Tom Hoban,
a former Marine buddy who is now a
commercial pilot, said, “He was an ex-
ception to the rest of us knuckle drag-
gers. But he was definitely one of the
guys. And you knew he was going places.”
By the late eighties, the Feeleys were
married, with two young sons, and they
were feeling constrained by life on a
military base. Cherie told me, “There
were less than ten copies of the Sunday
New York Times, and to get one you
had to be there at 7 a.m.” They passed
the Foreign Service exam, and were sent
as a team to Latin America: first to the
Dominican Republic, and then, in search
of “action,” to Colombia, where Pablo
Escobar had gone to war with the state.
In 2009, Feeley became deputy chief
of mission in Mexico, where he found
that his forthrightness could get him
into trouble, and sometimes out of it.
After secret cables released by WikiLeaks
revealed that U.S. diplomats—includ-
ing Feeley—had criticized the Mexican
Army’s role in the drug war, President
Felipe Calderón demanded that the
Ambassador be removed. The U.S. ac-
ceded, but Feeley was allowed to remain.
“He almost single-handedly righted the
course,” Jorge Guajardo, a former Mex-
ican Ambassador to China, told me.
“There were hard feelings in State about
the U.S. having caved to Mexico’s gov-
ernment, and John was able to navigate
both the U.S. and Mexican sides.” Fee-ley recalls that he kept quiet for a few
months. Then, in a meeting with
Calderón, he asked, “Am I radioactive,
Mr. President? Because, if I am, I will
make my preparations to leave.” Calderón
said, “You aren’t toxic. But maybe stay
away from the press, O.K.?” The ten-
sion subsided, and Feeley spent several
years strengthening his network through-
out Latin America. “In Mexico, John
was U.S. foreign policy,” a U.S. diplo-
mat in Latin America told me. “He was
one of just a handful who could walk
into any Presidential palace in the re-
gion and know someone there.”A
t the end of January, before Fee-
ley left his post in Panama, I went
to visit him and Cherie at their resi-
dence, a nineteen-forties hilltop man-
sion that looked out over Panama City
toward the Pacific Ocean. The rooms
were cavernous and sparsely decorated.
Oversized black-and-white photo-
graphs of Nina Simone and Etta James
hung on the walls, left over from a jazz-
themed party the Feeleys had thrown
for the Fourth of July.
When I arrived, a camera crew was
there, to film a video that was part of
Feeley’s extended goodbye to Panama:
a skit in which Feeley, declaring that
he wanted to stay in the country, told
Cherie that he intended to ask some
local people for a job. After he marched
out, Cherie adopted a telenovela-style
despairing look, as if to say, “No one
will ever hire him.”
Feeley is a showman, and early in his
tenure he began filming himself encoun-
tering Panamanians outside the confines
of rabiblanco society—a local term, mean-
ing “white tail,” used to describe the tra-
ditionally Caucasian upper class. In one
video, Feeley, in jeans and a black T-shirt,
visited a tiny open-air barbershop, be-
neath a highway overpass in the gritty
neighborhood of El Marañón. While a
barber named Jesús trimmed his hair,
Feeley said that he was planning to par-
ticipate in the upcoming Carnaval cele-
brations. Jesús ofered a mild response:
“Even though nobody knows you around
here, believe me, wherever you go you’ll
be welcome.” Feeley’s staf posted the
video on social media, and it went viral.
Panamanians are uniquely sensitive
to the U.S. presence, and with good rea-
son. The country was founded, in 1903,