A Team of Expatriates

Gration first met Obama when he was serving as director of Strategy, Plans and Policy for the European Command. In that capacity, he briefed then Senator Obama on foreign affairs, and later joined him on a trip to Africa in 2006. Last year, Gration left the Republican Party to vote for Obama in the New Jersey primary. He was attracted by Obama's interest in issues "that are borderless": the environment, trade, energy, human rights. "When you grow up as I did, surrounded by Africans, you see them as individuals—the kids I grew up with, the kids I played soccer with, [the people with whom] I went and ate around the fires," says Gration. "These were my African buddies, and so for me, when I see the strife in Darfur and when I see what's happening in eastern Congo, it's not just a problem. It's people."

Expats also learn, in a personal way, the resentments that foreigners sometimes feel toward the United States. Growing up in France after World War II, the future General Jones went to local schools outside of Paris, then to a NATO school. "In postwar France there was a lot of anti-American sentiment because of the number of bases we had and the heavy footprint we showed."

As a child and a teen, Jones would return to Missouri for two-week stints every few years, and he yearned for the kind of life where he could play baseball instead of soccer and fencing. But he also recalls watching footage of the civil-rights movement—the marches, the struggle for school integration in Little Rock, the atrocities of the Ku Klux Klan—on French television. "It was absolutely just a surreal experience for me," he says. He was very proud to be American, yet also shocked and confused by what he was watching.

Relatives in the United States sent Jones care packages—blue jeans and other American-style clothes. When he rode the French buses, the locals thought he was a tourist. "What they didn't know was that I understood everything they were saying," he says. "It wasn't always very flattering." One morning, his father woke up to find U.S. GO HOME splashed in white paint on his black Chevrolet Bel Air. At other times, tensions resulted in conflict. " I got in more fights as a kid as a result of nationality than any other reason."

But Jones grew fond of France, and he also had classmates from Germany, Spain and other NATO countries. That proved useful when he became Supreme Allied Commander in Europe years later. "You develop a fine ear for listening to nuance, and to what it is people are saying, but also how they are saying it," he says. "You have to be able to look at the same problem through different prisms to be … successful in the international environment."

Now Jones encourages young people to go out and see other countries and cultures. Anyone who has the opportunity and doesn't seize it "is really missing out on one of the most important components of how to be successful in today's shrinking world," he says. "And if you're going to hold national office, I think it's an imperative." Obama would surely agree.

With Richard Wolffe and Dina Fine Maron in Washington

© 2009