Scribbler, Sailor, Attorney, Ambassador

“I’ve had four careers,and they all built on each other,” says the USC Gould alumna, speaking by Zoom from the embassy in Tbilisi.

Since joining the Foreign Service in 1993, Degnan has worked 12 assignments in eight countries, including senior-level posts in Italy, Kosovo and now Georgia. Earlier postings took her to Pakistan, Botswana and Turkey. She personally assisted two Secretaries of State—Madeline Albright and John Kerry—and three undersecretaries for political affairs in Washington, D.C.

As a State Department military liaison, she advised NATO’s U.S. Mission in Brussels and the four-star commander of U.S. Naval Forces in Europe/Africa in Naples. For her work as a diplomatic attaché to Brigade Combat Team Salerno in Khost, Afghanistan, she received the Secretary of State’s Expeditionary Service Award in 2008.

Degnan’s peripatetic career synchs with a nomadic childhood. Born in Detroit, she lived in Ohio and Maryland before coming to Los Angeles in the early 1970s. Her dad worked for Hilton Hotels, and the family moved around a lot. Her mom juggled a career as a graphic artist while raising three daughters, all of them high achievers.

“My sisters were my role models, and they set the bar very high for me,” says Degnan, the youngest of the trio. Kim Degnan is a space industry executive; Kate Degnan made her career in IT marketing.

Kelly Degnan majored in journalism at Northwestern University. After a few years working for glossy trade magazines in Chicago and L.A., she decided to get her JD and move into communication law. She was drawn to USC Gould because it shared a campus with the respected USC Annenberg School for Communication.

After passing the bar, Degnan went to work at Hahn Cazier & Leff, a mid-sized L.A. law firm where she focused on corporate transactions. Then in 1987, she did what others only dream of doing: she took a year’s leave of absence and embarked on a cross-Pacific sailing adventure.

Avid recreational sailors, Degnan and her then-boyfriend co-owned a 36-foot ketch and regularly cruised the Channel Islands on weekends.

“We had this crazy idea that we would have a sailboat built in Taiwan, sail it back to the United States, and sell it to pay for the trip,” she recalls.

Sailing around Santa Rosa Island hadn’t prepared them for the hardships of an open-sea voyage pummeled by headwinds and cyclonic circulations. The Far Side, the 42-foot cutter-rigged boat they had built in Kaohsiung, proved to be a sturdy home, but the long days at sea took a toll.

“It was just a hard beat all the way,” Degnan says, of the sail from Hong Kong to French Polynesia. When cyclone season arrived, they were forced to “haul up” for months in Tahiti. Rather than finish the trip to California, they took another year to sail with the winds from Tahiti to Japan. By the time they reached Micronesia, money was tight, so Degnan found work as a government attorney.

A former U.S. trust territory, the Federated States of Micronesia follows Ninth Circuit law, and Degnan was “the perfect candidate—a California lawyer who’d just sailed right into their harbor,” she says.

A year later, Degnan and her companion continued their voyage, sailing 1,000 miles west to the Republic of Palau—another former U.S. territory where Degnan’s California bar membership served her well. She found employment as legal counsel to the chief of the Palau Supreme Court.

One more year passed. When her boyfriend finally headed for home in the new sailboat, Degnan opted to stay behind in Palau. She liked the expat lifestyle and enjoyed her work. “It was very, very interesting to practice constitutional law in a new country,” she says.

A year later, after passing the U.S. Foreign Service exam, Degnan returned to California. She completed the “A-100” diplomatic boot camp, and on “flag day” learned her first posting would be in Peshawar, Pakistan.

It was an intimidating assignment for a novice. A religiously conservative city of 2.3 million, Peshawar was a place where women mostly stayed indoors. “It was very difficult being a single woman in charge of a staff of local men who had never had a female boss before,” Degnan recalls.

But Pakistan’s sixth-largest urban area turned out to be “the perfect place to start my diplomatic career,” Degnan says. “It broke through all my stereotypes, and I learned about Islam. That experience was extremely valuable 15 years later, when I served in eastern Afghanistan. It’s the same Pashtun culture.”

Her partner of 17 years, Douglas Morris, is a professional travel writer who is happy to tag along wherever Degnan’s diplomatic career leads.

“I feel very lucky to have met someone who was so comfortable with this way of life,” she says.

These are dangerous times for the South Caucasus. Russia already occupies 20 percent of Georgian territory and periodically threatens to take more. Yet Degnan is sanguine about the future.

“This country is in a really tough neighborhood, but Georgians have been in this precarious geopolitical location for 26 centuries,” she says. “So many occupiers and empires have crossed through here: the Ottomans, the Persians, the Russians, the Mongols. Amazingly, Georgia still has a unique identity: its own language, a unique script, its own church, a very unique polyphonic way of singing.” Degnan believes today’s upheavals won’t shake that bedrock.

Her professional path may seem circuitous, but Degnan values each stage. “It was a progression that brought me to a career I love,” she says.

Journalism taught her “how to conduct an interview, how to discern when someone is lying, what’s opinion, what’s fact, what’s persuasive, what’s objective.”

Sailing built grit and stamina. “Many times, we went out in a storm, fearing a cyclone, and it was scary,” she recalls. “I had to think for myself, develop a sense of resiliency and independence.”

As for her legal background, Degnan taps it regularly in carrying out her diplomatic duties, which can range from interpreting regulations to negotiating treaties.

“Law school changes the way you look at the world,” she says. “It teaches you to problem solve and organize issues.”

She looks back fondly on her years at USC Gould. Her favorite course had been “Law, Language and Ethics,” taught by the late Christopher Stone. “I loved his textbook,” she says. “He was teaching it from the heart.” She keeps that volume on her bookshelf in the Tbilisi embassy, along with her constitutional law hornbooks.

“I still read Supreme Court decisions when they come out. It can be useful in countries still developing the rule of law and building an independent judiciary,” explains this adventurous journalist-turned-lawyer-turned-diplomat.