In the pantheon of full-circle moments, it had to be one of the fullest and fastest on record.
Two years after Bill White helmed an unsuccessful effort to split the Buckhead neighborhood away from the city of Atlanta, White was at Bones steakhouse in Buckhead Wednesday night being toasted as President Donald Trump’s new U.S. ambassador to Belgium.
Also on hand was fellow honoree Herschel Walker, who will be Trump’s ambassador to the Bahamas, three years after losing his Trump-backed bid for Senate in Georgia.
Along with the friends and family you’d expect at a send-off celebration, White also invited several you might not, including Kenyatta Mitchell, a top aide to Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens at the height of the Buckhead City movement, whom White seated directly next to him for dinner.
Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts was there, too. Like Dickens, Pitts vocally fought the effort to split Fulton’s premier city in half, but White happily invited Pitts to speak on Wednesday as toasts were being made. Pitts obliged.
It was a moment of civility that would have been impossible to imagine when White announced at a 2021 news conference in Loudermilk Park that a group of GOP lawmakers would soon introduce a bill to create the “city of Buckhead City.”
White said that day that Atlanta was a “war zone” because of “a total lack of leadership from the city of Atlanta.”
The mayor of Atlanta then was Keisha Lance Bottoms, who had already announced that her single term as mayor would be her last. Her tumultuous four years in office included the COVID-19 pandemic and a stark increase in violent crime that roiled every corner of the city, including Buckhead.
Within months of White’s Buckhead City announcement, Dickens was elected mayor of Atlanta and quickly set out to defeat the Buckhead secession effort that White was driving. The mayor famously reached out to Republican leaders before the sun rose the day after his victory. He opened a new police precinct in Buckhead and invited Gov. Brian Kemp to speak at the ribbon-cutting. By the next legislative session, crime was down, Buckhead City was defeated, and White was packing his boxes to decamp to Mar-A-Lago and help Trump run for the White House one more time.
But all of that was history Wednesday night, when White gave “Bill White” challenge coins as mementos and offered olive branches to the people he had once bitterly battled. He praised Dickens as “a good mayor and a good man,” and noted that Pitts had introduced the original city council resolution declaring Atlanta and Brussels sister cities.
“We gave each other hell,” White said of his past confrontations with city leaders. But they were all on the same team now, he added, to promote the city and the state on the world stage.
White said he plans to use part of his time in Belgium strengthening ties between Atlanta and Brussels and encouraging continued Belgian investment in Georgia. He also reminded the crowd he still owns property in Rabun County and may be gone from Atlanta for now, but he said with a laugh, “I’ll be back.”
A soft-spoken Walker did not mention his 2022 Senate run in his speech at all. Instead, he explained that his path to becoming an ambassador may have begun earlier this year after an interview with Fox News about his decision to return to the University of Georgia as a 63-year-old senior to complete his college degree.
“They asked me what I would do next, and I joked, ‘Well, I think I need to go out and get a job.’” Walker said. “The president must have been watching because he called about an hour later and said, ‘Herschel, I’ve got a job for you.’”
Walker has ties to the Bahamas since his wife’s parents owned a home there for decades, and his mother-in-law still lives there.
He started his remarks by thanking Jesus, as is his custom, and he ended by promising to represent the country well. “I’ll never embarrass you,” he said.
Several State Capitol Republicans and City Hall Democrats with whom White fought in the past were skeptical that his softer, gentler message is fully sincere. Maybe he’s planning a run for governor or mayor once Trump leaves office, they wondered?
But the new ambassador seemed to have bigger and better things on his mind. He’ll soon meet with the king of Belgium, as all American ambassadors do, to present his credentials to the royal leader. He and his husband, Bryan Eure, are planning their move into the palatial ambassador’s residence in Brussels, where White is hoping to add a work by Atlanta artist Steve Penley to the extensive art collection there.
While Walker’s duties will focus on trade and tourism, along with drug interdiction efforts in the Caribbean, White’s new role will include both high-level policy and politics, since the European Union and NATO are both headquartered in Belgium, too.
Above all else, in a sensitive job like the one he’s now got, White will need to actually be diplomatic. It’s a transformation his adversaries may never have thought possible, but Wednesday’s dinner showed it is already well underway.
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