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Postscript A Good Night’s Sleep

President Corazon Aquino on a state visit. Del Rosario was a strong advocate of
economic diplomacy, and so he made it a point to introduce Delia to his business
friends, including Wash. Wash fussed over every detail of President Aquino’s visit, and
was roundly impressed when Delia arranged for a Luftwaffe plane to ferry President
Aquino on the next leg of her European trip, to Paris.

When she was Ambassador to Australia, Delia would fly from one end of the country
to the other to host Wash at dinners with leading Australian bankers and business
leaders. “And he said, nobody has ever done that for me in all the years I’ve been
going around. I said, well, Mr. SyCip, you mean a lot to my economic diplomacy!”
In one reception that he in turn hosted for her, Wash introduced her as “the next
Secretary of Foreign Affairs;” it was to prove prescient.

Many years later in 2010, after Delia had served as Ambassador to Germany and
DFA Secretary, Wash took advantage of her retirement to get her to advise him at
SGV. Immediately, she asked to hold a seminar on how SGV staff could address
ASEAN clients. Wash was the first to arrive and the last to leave. He had so many
questions that she had to ask him to tone it down so as not to intimidate the others.

“I served him for seven years and seven days,” says Delia. “The mandate that he gave
me when I entered SGV was to continue serving the country. It was an open-ended
thing which meant I would do what he saw me doing as Ambassador to Germany
and to Australia, and there I usually put together people who could make a difference
in the relationship, and he appreciated that. One thing that Ramon del Rosario and
Wash SyCip had in common was that they asked questions, which to me was an
indication that they were interested in and respected your ideas. Wash would leave
an article on foreign affairs on my desk and ask me what I thought. After an hour,
he would be back. I had to ask him for more time to gather my thoughts about the
subject.”

That morning, Delia came to see Wash in his office to review their plans for the
dinner he was hosting for American Ambassador Kim Sung Yong upon his return
from the US. “That was one of my jobs,” says Delia. “I organized dinners to bring
together the top businessmen to sit down and break bread with the ambassadors. It
made a huge difference if he hosted dinner at his home.”

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