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Item Kurzman, Harold--Oral History Interview(2012-06-08) Kurzman, HaroldKurzman was a graduate of Haverford College in political science and economics and there, he was learned that after graduated, he would be particularly interested in focusing on international relations. At that time, he remembers there being a choice, basically, between the Fletcher School and Johns Hopkins, SAIS, and he chose SAIS for its location (he much preferred being in Washington, D.C., for this field). He also came to SAIS as he appreciated the three-part curriculum with a language, an area specialization requirement and a subject matter requirement. At that time, Kurzman remembers the school being quite small (about 200 students) and they all studied in the old, red brick building on Florida Avenue. They developed close relationships and there was a lot of interaction out of the classroom. He also recalls living on Wyoming Street with other students, several international, and that it was walking distance from the school (in Adams Morgan). During the summer, he was able to do work in the field as an intern and then was later hired as a research assistant for USAID and got to do some teaching. Eventually, this led him to the State Department, which is where he started his career. After working for five years in the State Department for the USAID program (where he worked part of the time in Washington, D.C., and part traveling to Africa and living in East Africa, where he met his wife), he decided to go into the private sector where he could continue efforts in the international realm, but work in a smaller environment. So he was hired by a consulting firm that did lots of work with the World Bank and other international organizations and spent the rest of his career working for such firms, in 50 different countries. In that time, he lived seven or eight years in Africa, and also lived in Argentina, Brazil, Turkey, the Philippines, Uganda, Cameroon and Malawi. He enjoyed Malawi the most where he met his wife who was from the West Indies and resident of England at the time. He lived in Malawi twice during his career, and the second time he lived there, he worked closely on efforts related to refugees from Mozambique. He has now been retired for five years. During his career, if he was not living overseas, he was living in Rockville, MD. When his wife passed away (recently), he moved down to Florida (Gulf Coast), which is where he resides now. During the interview, we also focused the camera on four of his photographs that sit on the wall of the Alumni Relations Office. He described each one as the camera gave a close of look of them, one at a time. One photograph was taken of pelicans in Florida. Another was of an alligator in Florida. The third one was taken in Berkina Faso at a market place. The last of four was taken at Lake Como of some gardens. Photography is a hobby of his and since he has moved to Florida, he devotes a good deal more time to this effort (and, in fact, was wearing a camera around his neck during the interview). In terms of advice he has for current students today, he says, “consider strongly the type of work environment in which you want to work (e.g. large organization or small, international or not, profit or non-profit, etc.)….also, if you are going to live overseas for a good deal of the time, that has personal consequences in terms of moving your household for a couple of years at a time. Be sure that you are married to someone who is willing to pick up and move around and make new friends.”Item Miller, Hope Simon - Oral History Interview(2010-04-01) Miller, Hope SimonWhat originally brought Hope Simon Miller to SAIS was seeing an ad in the New York Times that said that this new school was being formed with money from big business as well as government funds and as it sounded like a splendid partnership, she decided to apply for a fellowship. Prior to attending SAIS, she attended the Calhoun School and then Barnard College as an undergraduate. There, one could specialize in an area of the world of that person’s choice, and Miller chose the Soviet Union and Near East. Incidentally, Miller had originally wanted to go to Wellesley College (wanted to get away from home), but she (and others) was refused on a religious basis and that had caused articles to be printed in several well known newspapers in the country (i.e. the Atlantic Monthly). She was told that if she got good marks, she could transfer….which she did, but they still did not take her. In what she thought would be her last year at Barnard (before transferring), she decided to get heavily involved in everything….she stood at the opera, stood in Carnegie Hall (for concerts before Lincoln Center existed), etc. At the end of the year, she liked New York and therefore decided to stay at Barnard. Also, war broke out and no one had dates then, but because Columbia was there, we had dates from the Mitchell School. While at SAIS, Miller recalls there being about 30 students of which roughly 12 were women. Most students lived in the dorm. She and three other women lived on the same floor as the men, which she says was a lot of fun and was unusual for the time. Also, C. Grove Hanes, the professor who started the Bologna Center, lived right across the hall. She was impressed by the faculty and remembers having class sometime at 7:00 or 7:30 a.m. One time, she remembers having to have class early because a certain professor had to catch an early flight to New York to deal with a UN issue related to Iran and oil. She liked that they were always getting the most recent / updated news. Miller recalls there being a rigorous language program while she was at SAIS, requiring students to have a working knowledge of four languages while they were there. She learned English, French, Russian and Spanish. When she graduated from SAIS in 1946, she thought she would work at the State Department. She was invited to a reception being held at the Wildenstein Art Galleries in New York. At this reception, she ran into a gentleman who asked if she would be interested in working with him – he worked for the UN on human rights issues. She agreed and then worked with him for three or four years. Next, she met and married her husband, a gynecologist, Arthur Miller, and they moved to Brooklyn. The commute was not easy. She soon got pregnant with her first son, Lane Miller (who later became a student at SAIS). At that time, she worked at home, editing papers for the assistant or under secretary general. Eventually, she went back to the UN (hospitality committee) once her youngest of three sons was able to go to school by himself. She is still heavily involved with the UN. In her career, she mostly got involved on the subject of women and children. She worked for UNICEF on related projects for several years. Part of this involved working with the mothers of these children on a project called UNIFEM. Eventually, UNIFEM became a part of UN WOMEN (currently run by the former U.S. Ambassador to Chile). In life, Miller also remembers meeting high ranked figures like Hillary Clinton, Madeline Albright and Eleanor Roosevelt at different times in her life. She met Eleanor Roosevelt when she was in college. Every Tuesday, there was an assembly in the gym where they would try to have a notable speaker come for a presentation. As the dean of Barnard was good friends with Eleanor Roosevelt at the time, she was asked and willing to come be a speaker one day. Eight of them had lunch in the dean’s apartment and Miller got to sit next to Eleanor Roosevelt. Later, when Hillary Clinton was at the White House (as First Lady), she and Madeline Albright had invited 100 outstanding women to the White House. They both addressed the group….that was exciting and they took lots of pictures. Miller also had a chance separately honor Hillary Clinton and Madeline Albright at two other separate occasions. In her career, Miller travelled every two years for UNICEM. She recalls being in Moscow, Barcelona, Manila and Beijing. She thought it was absolutely fascinating and made wonderful friends. No one country stood out for her – they were all great. Today, Miller is still very active in her work. In terms of advice for current students, she recommends having strong language skills (and to be bi-lingual if at all possible). She also thinks that the internship program is very important for students and that they should take full advantage of it. On a personal note, Miller has been living in NYC for decades. She is still married to her husband, Arthur (now 92) and had three sons, Lane, Scott and Lloyd. Several years ago, Scott passed away from a condition he had had since he was young (growth of benign tumors in his body of which one later became malignant). Both Lane and Lloyd are married. Lloyd has a daughter and Lane is married to Anne Lyons who is of Native American decent (significant as they are both lawyers who work on Native American cases). Miller also had a 93 year old brother who passed away earlier this year.Item Huey, Talbott - Oral History Interview(2011-04-01) Huey, TalbottMr. Huey was drawn to SAIS because it represented the culmination of the transformation of where he was headed. In college, he had no conception of anything dealing with international relations or politics or history. He was a major in German literature, but that begin a period of gradually learning more and more. When he was in the Army, he was thrust into an intelligence program which involved international relations and he found it fascinating. So he went back and spent a year at the London School of Economics after he got out of the Army. He found their approach to be very enlightening but very analytical. He explains that British technique is to have you sit in on lectures and write essays from time to time for your tutor. He remembers some of the lectures he took there very well and says some of them were outstanding but gradually he began to see what international relations was all about. To come to SAIS was the culmination of all that and quite different than what he experienced in England because SAIS was very practical. He says it wasn’t exactly training but it tried to give you real experience in diplomacy, economics, area studies and languages all of which was new to him and very, very useful. It was not only useful to him in terms of his career, though that was the point, but also in terms of his understanding of the world. When he looks back on it now 50 years later, he can’t understand how someone could go through life without getting that understanding because it’s so critical in making decisions about your own life, about your own politics, about where you live and what you do and so forth. Because it is such an international small world, Mr. Huey says he ended up living quite an international life that SAIS was very much a basis for. Mr. Huey remembers the faculty or “characters who taught us” well such as Dr. Franklin, who taught diplomatic history. He also remembers some adjunct professors who he describes as very unusual but also very helpful to him. One was Helmut Sonnenfeldt, who later went on to a glorious career as a Kissinger protégé in Treasury most of the time. Mr. Huey says he was a tough guy, a careerist, who would sit them down at the beginning of class and tell them he was going to teach them how to clip the New York Times and that it would be something they would do every day for the rest of their lives. Mr. Huey concedes that he was absolutely right. Another adjunct professor Mr. Huey remembers was Victor Sulom [check spelling], an Italian who did consultant economic work around Washington who was brilliant but tough. At one point his class was discussing tariff barriers and currency barriers. The professor brought the case of Spain and told them to suppose they were trying to move money from Spain to France and they had to deal with the tariff and financial barriers. He asked what the class would do. After what seemed like a year of total silence when the class was waiting for an answer or a hint, someone finally said something that was wrong. But that’s how he talked and that’s things worked. Mr. Huey says he knew what to teach them and how to make them learn the material. Mr. Huey describes Paul Linebarger as the biggest character of them all. The only course he took from him was a course in psychological warfare, which was especially interesting to Mr. Huey because he got into that later on himself in an entirely different way. Mr. Huey describes what Linebarger did as entirely off the wall. Linebarger had written the book on psychological warfare because he had been a psy. war officer in the Korean War and so forth. Linebarger told them, what we do in this course is you read the book and I talk about other things. Linebarger spent at least half the course describing, according to Mr. Huey, 57 ways to analyze at history. Mr. Huey said Linebarger would tell them that history for people is mostly a matter of their diet or he might say history always revolved around the medical history of a people. Mr. Huey found these theories of history very interesting and probably more apropos than the nitty-gritty of psychological warfare. Mr. Huey remembers Linebarger as a guy who was unconventional enough, bold enough and brilliant enough to do something unconventional like that which was very valuable. Paul Linebarger is always remembered as a great science fiction writer too. Mr. Huey attended the old SAIS on Florida Avenue and he thinks that almost all students lived in the neighborhood. He lived on P Street in a house that he found is now a veterinary clinic. He says that living in the neighborhood was an education in itself. But part of the allure and value of SAIS was being in Washington so that you could be part of what was going on in Washington, which was very much a part of his education at SAIS. He remembers being active in Washington life. Every night around 11:00 pm he would take a walk in the neighborhood and sometimes that was quite an adventurous walk for him around Dupont and a few other places. He remembers hearing odd screams and scuffles and being followed by people. For him, that was introduction to the other side of Washington life. He says most SAIS graduates gradually eliminate what you’re going to do until you get down to one thing. When Mr. Huey got down to one thing it turned out to be USIA because he thought he could handle the cultural part and the informational part as they were interests of his. It turned out to be good that he had chosen that in one sense, but in another sense it didn’t really make a difference because he never did a conventional job for USIA. He entered the agency as a junior officer and was asked his preferences for where he’d like to be assigned, which was a shock for him because he was being asked his preferences before he’d even been sworn in. He was then asked to take a language aptitude test. He had majored in a language and studies some other languages so he ended up maxing the test—the first person in USIA to do so. He says USIA then tried to find the hardest language they had and sent him to Vietnam as a result of that. He had a wonderful personal experience there and enjoyed every minute of it and learned a lot, despite the fact that he was there as part of a totally flawed and failed American experience. He learned to be involved in Asia in a way that followed him the rest of his life. The first thing he did in Vietnam was assign down to a branch post in the delta where he immediately started to interview people for an American Field Service trip to San Francisco and doing things that were pretty routine liking holding a Fourth of July party with local dignitaries. He found that suddenly there was a war on and there was no more USIA in Saigon. There was the JUSPAO, the Joint US Public Affairs Office, which was mainly in charge of psy. war in connections with the Vietnamese and press relations in connection with the local reporters and media. That’s what when on for the next couple of years. Mr. Huey was able to work in the countryside a lot which was very exciting and very stimulating for him. He learned to respect the culture there and Asian civilization very much. That also determined the trajectory of the rest of his life. Mr. Huey did two years in Vietnam, and then came back to Washington. They wanted him to do a Washington tour so he could prepare others for Vietnam which eventually meant that he was sending scores of somewhat reluctant USIA officers to Vietnam willy-nilly. He worked as a personnel officer for Asia at that point he thinks he sent 150 people to Vietnam over a couple of years. He was also doing some lecturing. He would go to Fort Bragg and tell the young officers that they should be thinking about hearts and mines, which was also fascinating for him. But even then, he had a feeling that this was an exercise in futility. He decided he was an Asianist and since he was a personnel officer, he assigned himself into Chinese training. They started a new program at George Washington University that he was able to go to for a year and then he went to Taiwan in a State Department school for a year which was very productive and useful. Mr. Huey then went to Hong Kong. Theoretically, he says, it was just as an information officer but he was a China watcher and ended up editing a semi-scholarly/semi-propaganda bulletin about mainland China. This became a respected journal while he was there called “Current Scene”. After 1968 when a lot of bad things happened including the Tet Offensive and some assassinations in America and after he examined Chiang Kai-shek’s regime in Taiwan, he began to find that American foreign policy vis a vis the Far East lacked a great deal of foresight. He left and got his PhD at MIT in political science, taught for a while, traveled for awhile and worked as a librarian for a while. Mr. Huey found a bonus to attending MIT was getting Harvard. He was theoretically a protégé to Lucian Pye who had done some good work in that field before. Some of Pye’s other protégés were Dick Solomon, who became Assistant Secretary (of State). He paid much more attention to some of the people at Harvard and he found the blend very useful. He wanted to stay in Boston so he got a job at the University of Massachusetts. He says UMass was a battleground for 7 years between people who wanted to do certain things and others who did not so he was not unhappy to leave. The next stage of Mr. Huey’s career was totally unexpected and something about which he knew nothing at the time. He ended up at the Overseas Program of the University of Maryland. University of Maryland decided it was going to be an international university by teaching overseas focusing in particular on military bases. They do it through a contract with the Defense Department. If you are a GI on an army base in Korea, you can take university courses that are the same courses that they teach at College Park. Mr. Huey taught in the program for several years and found it simply wonderful. Students were self-selected, wanted to get ahead, had some discipline as a result of their military training, were terrific students and he did not deal with administrative headaches. He enjoyed the freedom to write a report, go to the beach or do as you chose when you finished lecturing students and then do the same thing four to five months later in a different part of Asia. Because it’s not something you can do forever and there’s no tenure, he came back and got a library degree at the University of Maryland. At Michigan State, Mr. Huey got a job as the Asian librarian and worked there for 20 years. The job was ideal. He was simply asked to buy the books and materials in his field, of which he had several. He said in a way it was like retirement—just doing as you please and not making much money with a very nice working atmosphere. The university was particularly interested in third world development which he found interesting. Mr. Huey says working with the Overseas Program at the University of Maryland was the favorite part of his career. He says it was completely care-free and always stimulating. Now he is enjoying retirement and sometimes wonders why he didn’t do this 40 years ago. He volunteers at a National Historic Site outside of Baltimore, Maryland called Hampton and he does a lot of exploring Maryland. His wife is a fanatic kayaker but he is not so she goes by water and he goes exploring by land. Mr. Huey would tell current SAIS students that they’ve already made the key decision and that is to become internationally-oriented people. He values the practical education that SAIS students receive but would encourage them to try to think outside the box—something new to do for the international world besides working for the World Bank or State Department. He suggests perhaps continuing in the academic world.Item Feldman, Gerald - Oral History Interview(2010-12-01) Feldman, GeraldMr. Feldman was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, so SAIS was prominently featured and he became aware of it sooner than other people would have otherwise. When he started as an undergraduate, he thought he wanted to go into the exact sciences and was leaning towards physics, but he found that he was much more interested in politics and international affairs. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to go to an extracurricular physics lecture but he did find himself drawn to international discussions. When it became time to declare a major, he decided on international relations. At that time, in the ‘60s, Johns Hopkins was building a very strong international relations undergraduate major which led him toward SAIS, which had the best balance of things for his interest. He was interested in government service. Everything at Johns Hopkins was very highly theoretical…he found the same thing in classes in international relations, international politics and international economics. He was told that SAIS had quite a different approach—that is was good to have a theoretical approach, but SAIS was much more policy oriented. That’s what he found when he got there and he felt it was a very good balance. He had always had an interest in international affairs, even before he started undergraduate studies at Johns Hopkins. He would watch the news, debate the news and his interest started that way. He describes himself at that time as an armchair expert on politics and international affairs. He felt like public service was what he wanted to do after graduating. Mr. Feldman was very impressed with the mix of students at SAIS and Johns Hopkins, but especially at SAIS. He says it was a very enriching experience, especially as a graduate student. He loved the mix of backgrounds and students and the idea of everyone coming together with a common interest in international affairs but from different perspectives. He also found students to be extremely intelligent and well-versed, but also quite well grounded. Students were more mature than you would expect beginning graduate students to be. He did his first year in Bologna and at that time it was typical they were taking the entire first-year class. Most students met in Bologna, though there were a few students who were in Washington, DC. In his opinion, that was a good experience in an international environment which was then, and may still be, the real institutional repository for what was then the EC and now the EU. He said there were guest professors who had been in the door as far as getting the EC started. In Bologna, he roomed with three others—an American, a Frenchman and an Ethiopian. The Frenchman went to work for an international organization—last time he heard it was with the World Health Organization. The Ethiopian went home and got caught up with revolution—he says he was a firebrand to begin with and he remembers his roommate talking about the “horrible” Haile Selassie and how the US had back him all these years. The roommate went back to Ethiopia and got caught up in the overthrow of Haile Selassie and then took on a senior government position in the following government. That government was overturned and he lost track of him since. His American roommate was John Isaacs and he’s in Washington now. What Mr. Feldman most recalls was the whole intellectual ferment taking place during the ‘60s. He remembers all the debates about the Vietnam War. He and classmates used to have debates with students from the University of Bologna who weren’t affiliated with SAIS. At the time, Nigeria was being torn apart by Civil War and he said a person he met insisted he was an Igbo—he would not admit to being Nigerian. Mr. Feldman says it was a great ferment going on at the time. The Vietnam situation caused a lot of debate and internal struggle even among students at the Bologna Center. He says that was the background against which everything seemed to be focused at the time. Vietnam was such an enormous strain on students everywhere at that time and it colored their perspective on everything. He had a low draft number and was due to get married in the summer of ’69. While he was in his final semester at SAIS, he got a draft notice. When he contacted the board, they in essence took it back. If you were in the final semester of a graduate program, you were allowed to finish, all of which had been on file. When the board finally opened the file and saw that he was in his final semester, they gave him an extension and said he would be called in the first draft call after he graduated that summer. The only way he could get a guarantee that he would be around at his wedding that summer was to buy a delayed enlistment through an army OCS program. Not too long after he finished at SAIS and got married, he ended up at Army OCS and did various forms of training. He was then shipped to Heidelberg, Germany as part of the draft which he says was not bad at all. He worked for about a year and a half for the Office of the Chief of Staff for Intelligence where the US Army Headquarters in Europe was. With the understanding that after what was thought to be a 2 year assignment, he would then be ready to go to Vietnam or Korea, what they called an unaccompanied tour, for a year, but by the time that came up, the US was already starting to draw down its forces in Vietnam and there was much less need for junior officers. They were offered a chance to discharge and he jumped at it, being discharged in Europe and then came back to the States. After that, Mr. Feldman had a very short duration job at the Naval Academy in Annapolis and kept it long enough until an opportunity opened up at the Department of Commerce in DC with some sort of a management intern-type program. He relates that they were staffing up then in what was called the Bureau of International Commerce and specifically they were creating a bureau of East-West trade to deal with trade with what was then the Soviet Union and Soviet Republics. That had been his background and what he specialized in at SAIS. He took the proficiency exam at SAIS in German and had studied German in college but took Russian his last two years as an undergraduate thinking he could continue the Russian in Bologna. He couldn’t and had to go back to German which is why he took the language requirement in German. His Russian never got as good as it should’ve been. He could read with some difficulty. But his German turned out to be pretty decent. When he was living in Heidelberg he found that he could discuss political and economic article but had trouble calling a plumber. The way the internship at the Department of Commerce was set up was that the first year you did a rotation to get a picture of different things throughout the bureau. He did one or two on the East-West trade side and got a taste of different things. He eventually ended up going to the Office of International Finance and Investment (which does not exist anymore) and he worked on international investment policy. He essentially examined the affect of US multinational corporations, what they did to the rest of the world and how they were treated. From the Department of Commerce’s perspective, he says, they were always trying to get the best treatment for US companies possible. But at the same time, they were examining both sides of the question. At the time there was the thinking that they could be a destructive force in some cases. But they found that countries that supported US corporations tended to be better off than those that didn’t. Mr. Feldman spent several years working on international investment and, because he worked in a small unit, they sort of had to break up the world. He ended up with around 82 countries, including all of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. He was not a specialist in any of the countries but just looked at the foreign investment regime in those countries. His work with African countries led him eventually to move into the unit that turned into country policy for sub-Saharan Africa. He spent the rest of his career doing sub-Saharan Africa. When he retired in 2003, he had the title of Director of the Office of Africa in International Economic Policy—a unit within the International Trade Department Administration of Commerce. Mr. Feldman never really lived in Africa but would travel there. That tweaked another interest that he has followed up on since he retired. When traveling, his schedule was such that he used to be in Africa on the weekend and could go to game parks. He used to love the game parks and they just thrilled him. When he retired he knew he wanted to do something that was nature-oriented, wildlife-oriented. He ended up volunteering on a regular basis, several days a week, at a national wildlife refuge close to where he lives called the Patuxent Research Refuge in Laurel. That was an altogether new learning experience for him. He explains that there are around 550 wildlife refuges throughout the United States operated by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, part of the Department of Interior. The Patuxent Research Refuge is one of them and the only one with a mandate to conduct cutting edge research to conserve and expand our wildlife resources. A lot of the results of that research have been picked up by the rest of the world and by other refuge systems, state refuges and various other places. It’s something he could have studied at SAIS today with relation to climate change but at the time no one was talking about it. Mr. Feldman works in Visitor’s Services at National Wildlife Visitor’s Center, a very elaborate, modernistic center with displays. There are also hiking trails and an electric tram system with a narrated tour, which Mr. Feldman does some narrations for. Of his career, what Mr. Feldman has enjoyed the most was the opportunity to travel to sub-Saharan Africa and especially to southern Africa (South Africa, Botswana, etc.). There have been a number of frustrations with these good experiences, but if it had not been for his career, he probably would not have had a chance to travel to these places. Mr. Feldman would tell current SAIS students that SAIS has it right, or at least in his experience they did. Because it was not an Ivory Tower institution, a lot of the faculty had a hand in policy issues. Two courses at SAIS made a big impression on him. One of them was a Soviet foreign policy course taught by Helmut Sonnenfeldt, who at the time was head of Soviet Affairs at the National Security Council. This was a time shortly after the Soviets had crushed the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. Mr. Feldman remembers putting together a matrix for this class about the situations the Kremlin will consider in whether them move in to crush a Nationalist’s revolt or stand by. Mr. Feldman was excited by how topical and policy-oriented that course was. Another class he didn’t fully appreciate at the time but ended up relating directly to what he did career-wise was an economics course called Foreign Trade and Economic Growth, taught by Isaiah Frank, who was a respected professor and had spent a lot of time at State Department dealing with the issues they discussed in class. Those courses showed, in Mr. Feldman’s opinion, that SAIS had the mix of policy and theory right. He says that when you get into government you change from the macro to the micro, looking at small parts and that could be very frustrating for many. He believes that if you talked to Tim Geithner, you’d find that most of Geithner’s time at SAIS was spent dealing with global issues. Mr. Feldman says that Geithner is certainly dealing with global issues now, but they’re scaled back from what he was probably discussing in class. Mr. Feldman has noticed from reading alumni magazines and bulletins that SAIS students today and Johns Hopkins students today are much more focused than they were in his time. He says they seem to be a quantum leap ahead of anything he was familiar with. He’s glad he’s not applying today because he states there’s no way he could compete—Mr. Feldman is very impressed with caliber of SAIS students. When Mr. Feldman was in government and hiring people, half the people who worked for him turned out to be SAIS students because they were much more focused, grounded and well-versed in their interviews.Item Martin, Douglas - Oral History Interview(2011-04-01) Martin, DouglasPlease view attached audio file. Thank you.Item Hersch, Jay - Oral History Interview(2010-11-01) Hersch, JayJay Hersch ’68 was at the University of Wisconsin from 1960 to 1964. After graduating from Wisconsin, he applied to Law School at North Western and graduated school in Agronomy at the University of Wisconsin, though he really did not want to go back to school. Instead, he wanted to join the Peace Corps (at the time, heavily promoted by Kennedy and Humphrey), so he went to Colombia (was in Cooperative Development). He finished his time there in June of 1966 and was interested in Economic Development and applied to several graduate schools – Columbia, Princeton, SAIS and Tufts – and he chose to come to Washington (SAIS). There, he focused on Development. He recalls some of his favorite professors and that he met his wife at SAIS. Spanish was his language and he had to learn non-colloquial Spanish and remembers having friends from Mexico and other Latin American countries. When he was looking for jobs in his second year, he interviewed with Exxon in New York and with US AID. He ended up working for the Department of Health Education and Welfare as an intern. He recalls the period of 1968 to 1969 being very exciting times (when Nixon came into power). As an intern, he received a tremendous amount of responsibility because no one was threatened by his status. In Cleveland, he worked with Huff Development Corporation and worked on pairing them up with other major corporations. He also got involved with the Ford Foundation and work they did on building brownstone apartments in poor neighborhoods. In addition, he did work on the rural agrarian reform program in Lee County, Georgia. He then went on to work for the Federal Government for the next 17 years. At the beginning, it was exciting and after a while, he reported that it became frustrating. In 1987 or 1988, he decided to branch off and start his own business. He and his wife, he started looking for property in rural Virginia (Highland County) and began started raising a breed of cattle called Beefalo. This triggered his getting involved in the production of healthier, all-natural, leaner meats (later organic). He got involved in market outreach of this leaner meat through Safeway grocery stores and to date, he still owns the corporation, which has evolved to fresh beef and refrigerated sausage. He says that if there is one lesson he would impart to current SAIS students is to embrace serendipity when it happens and to follow leads when they come up. Also, be sure to follow your dreams.Item Chamberlain, Robert - Oral History Interview(2011-04-01) Chamberlain, RobertPlease view attached audio file. Thank you.Item Black, Dorothy - Oral History Interview(2011-01-01) Black, DorothyDorothy went to Stanford for her undergraduate degree and was an International Relations major there (International Relations was in the Political Science Department at that time). When she came to college, she had an interest in going overseas (traveling and working there). During her sophomore year, she went to the Stanford in France program. She spent six months in tour and absolutely loved Europe. She studied French and traveled around. When she graduated from Stanford, she wanted to do a post-graduation degree and applied to SAIS, Fletcher and American. SAIS accepted her to go to Bologna for her first year and she was delighted with this option (and did attend both Bologna and DC campuses). She mentioned never really traveling much when she was a child and she grew up in California, but she was mentored by one of her 8th grade teachers who had shared some of her international experiences with her….and wonders if this is part of how she got interested in International Relations to begin with. Dorothy continued with her Italian only informally after leaving Bologna and studied more French while she was at SAIS DC. She did this as she had more of a background in French and wanted to be sure to pass her Orals. She also mentioned that just last year, she went back to visit the Bologna Center and had a wonderful time. While studying at the Bologna Center, she recalls being able to travel around Italy quite a bit (Florence, La Scala, Milan, Ravena, Venice and Rome). She also remembers going on to field trips (one to the European Communities – several European Countries – and the other she cannot recall). At Bologna, she has memories of Villa di Liorti, where they had one whole side of an apartment house – three apartments were for women and others were for men. In her case, she had one American roommate and one Austrian roommate – most other apartments had four people. In the apartments, people had fun dinner parties and also studied together. It was a 45 minute walk to the Bologna Center itself, so they typically traveled by car. She also remembers some of her professors. Specifically, she recalls Professor Wilson Schmidt who was the Economics professor – he taught International Trade and International Finance. She also remembers Professor Lapergola who taught United Nations and International Organizations. There was also Professor Grosser who traveled down from Paris to be there. She also remembers Ivano who ran the snack bar – which they frequented often. It was in that period that Ivano grew the snack bar a lot. When she came to SAIS DC, this was the first time that Dorothy had ever lived in DC. She lived with two of her friends from Bologna on P Street, just across from SAIS (where Brookings is now). There were other SAIS students upstairs, too. One of her favorite professors was Isaiah Frank who was a wonderful economist who taught courses on International Trade and He helped her find her first job. Dorothy’s first job was in the Commerce Department. In those days, the Dept. of Commerce produced several publications on foreign trade, foreign investment, tariffs and trade regulations. She was hired in the Far Eastern division. Part of her job was to produce pamphlets (on Malaysia, barriers in Asian countries, etc.) She would receive tariff books and others would ask her for information to be looked up in those tariff books. She wanted to move on and work for the Foreign Service, so she did take the exam and passed both the written and oral parts. She was then assigned to a job in October of 1967. When Dorothy first went into the Foreign Service, there was no need to specialize (although later, that became necessary and they were split up into ‘cones’). Since she had an interest in Economics anyway, she went into the Economics section. Her first posting was Germany (Bonn). It was right at the time when the world was experiencing balance of payment problems. Prior to going, she went through a three-month orientation course, which was typical at that time. She also had to take a consulate course. So she started in Bonn in October, 1967, but because of the balance of payment problems, President Johnson put a hold on all positions overseas, etc. So, she had to wait for a while before proceeding with her job. They were also in the middle of the Vietnam War in those days as well….and there were a lot of protests. She recalls being in DC during the big anti-Vietnam march. Most of the bachelors in her class were assigned a role in Vietnam. So when she found out that Bonn could take her and she could proceed with work there, she took the position of Central Compliment (a training position). She started out in the Economic section of work (compared with others like Transportation, Financial or Political). Her fourth assignment was supposed to be at the consulate in Bonn, but because it was such a small office, they re-assigned her to Hamburg. She agreed to be transferred there and spent two years there. She very much enjoyed it. She was there in an Economics position. After Hamburg, Dorothy was assigned to Lagos, Nigeria. So, she had nine weeks of home leave (came back to the U.S.) and then went to Lagos (in 1971). She was there for two years (a typical length of stay for a junior officer). She describes Lagos as a rough country with crime (less then than there is now). She enjoyed riding horses there and playing tennis at tennis clubs. There were the leftovers of a Colonial society. It was two years after the Bideford War and there were still a lot of guns around – things were a bit tense and there were a lot of armed robberies. On the first day she arrived, they were publicly executing three armed robbers. It was difficult to travel there and it was particularly hard to get out of Lagos since it was so populous. She did a few trips into the country-side and enjoyed those. After Nigeria, Dorothy came back to the U.S. and took an Economics course at the Foreign Service Institute and it was very good. After that, Dorothy was assigned to the State Department (in the Latin American Regional Office) and she stayed in Washington, D.C. for two years. Then, she went to Princeton for a year to do some more course training and then went to Athens for four years on her next assignment. Dorothy says that she loved Greece. It was interesting at the time because it was about two years after the Xunta had fallen – she came there in1976. Greece was applying, at the time, to be part of the EC and she followed those negotiations. Even though the U.S. was not a participant, it was still interesting to her to be a part of the expansion beyond the core members (and then Greece became a member is 1980). In 1980, she came back to the U.S. and spent a year on Capitol Hill on an exchange they had (with Congressman Jonathan Bingham). He had her follow the authorization of the Foreign Aid bill. She also got involved in other legislation (related to El Salvador). Next, she came back to the State Department and worked in Management Operations (different from Economics which is what she had been doing). She was there for two years. After that, she was assigned as Economic Counselor to Colombo, Sri Lanka. She loved Sri Lanka – that was in 1983. Before going, she stopped by Hong Kong for a few days. The day she was supposed to fly into Colombo, they closed the airport there (due to Sinhalese and Tamil fighting) and she couldn’t get there. So, she stayed with a friend from the consulate in Hong Kong for another week before coming to Colombo. She was in Sri Lanka for three years, until 1986, and the insurgency got steadily worse. She did get a chance to visit Kandy, Jaffna and other places while she was there. Next, Dorothy went to Jamaica, her last post, and she was there for four years (her last year she spent there, retired). She then applied to law school and wanted to start a second career. So, she worked for US AID for one year to earn money, to pay for her law degree. After coming back from Jamaica, she went to Georgetown Law School from 1990 to 1993. She loved law school and has been in DC, more or less, ever since. She sometimes wonders if going to law school before the Foreign Service might have helped her (with things like treaties and other foreign policy law). After graduating, she worked full time for Morgan Lewis & Bockius for a few years, until her husband died and mother had a stroke. She still sometimes works there on a contract basis. To current students, Dorothy says, “Well, the world has really changed since I went to SAIS, starting in 1964…the technology, the communications….So, it’s kind of hard to base a career today on my career 40 years ago. But, I guess what I would tell them is…do what you enjoy doing. The reason I worked in the Foreign Service is that I wanted to travel and work overseas…if you really want to affect policy, you need to work in Washington, D.C. (in the Foreign Service, it’s more about implementing it).”Item Westfall, Ralph - Oral History Interview(2011-06-01) Westfall, RalphMr. Westfall originally came to SAIS because he was heading towards the government and because SAIS offered him a very nice scholarship. He had already wanted to go to CIA before starting at SAIS and he thought SAIS was in the right direction. When he graduated from Colgate, he turned down a Fulbright to go to Egypt and study Arabic and he turned down an all-expenses paid offer to Harvard to get a PhD in history. He was hoping to get into the CIA or State Department and recognized that SAIS was the place to go to do this. He met Grove Hames (sp?) in New York who told him more about the school and they offered him a scholarship for $1,500 which Mr. Westfall says was very good money in those days. He ultimately came to SAIS because he wanted to go somewhere specifically for the government and he did not want to go anywhere else which did not lead to a degree. He also did not want to go to Harvard to be a college teacher. He came to SAIS exactly because he wanted to. Mr. Westfall wanted to come to Washington, DC because of its important location. He knew nothing of SAIS until he saw an announcement on a bulletin board at Colgate. They were offering scholarships so he submitted an application and got a note back to him telling him to see Grove Hames up in New York. That settled it for him. He said his decision made some other people very unhappy—his father did not understand what he was doing at all. Mr. Westfall had had three years of Russian at Colgate which he wanted to continue but he also wanted to start Arabic. He finished his Russian his first year at SAIS to the point where he could take his oral examination in it and he started full-time Arabic. He was studying both languages at the same time while in the Middle East program with Majid Khadduri (sp? 3:42) and Dr. Talbori (sp? 3:48), who taught history. Bill Phillips taught economics. Priscilla Mason was the woman in charge who ran the place and Phil Thayer was the dean. He was a member of the student council as the Social Chairman. He very quickly learned that if you wanted to hang out with Thayer, you didn’t go in the morning, you went in the afternoon after he had had lunch at the Cosmos Club. Mr. Westfall remembers that at that point, you could get anything you wanted from him. He points out a photo that was their spring party of 1954. He said it was their big spring party and they got everybody into one big picture. Mr. Westfall remembers that SAIS was known as the little, red schoolhouse on Florida Avenue at that time. This was a common joke among students in reference to Communism and McCarthyism because the school was a bunch of liberals. He liked the small size of the school and how compact it was. He also worked part time in the library while he was there. He remembers that while he was at SAIS, Joe McCarthy had called George Marshall a traitor. Mr. Westfall sat at typewriter in the library and wrote a letter to the White House saying Eisenhower ought to take a stand on this and that it was absolutely awful for McCarthy to call Marshall a traitor. It never occurred to him that he was going into the government and might get himself into trouble for the letter. Mr. Westfall also remembers that everybody was very bright. There were a few people who didn’t belong, but they didn’t last—there were no dummies. It was very hard work—particularly when taking two languages and taking courses at the same time. He remembers that the faculty was really good—he particularly liked Majid Khadduri, Bill Phillips and Paul Linebarger. Mr. Westfall does have one distinction from other SAIS graduates—he’s pretty sure he’s the only one who got a criminal record in the District of Columbia while he was a student. Even though Mr. Westfall had a scholarship, he still had to work in the summertimes. He got a job driving a Jack and Jill ice cream truck…The first Sunday he was working, he looked up and one of the metropolitans asked him what he thought he was doing. He responded that he was selling ice cream! He was then taken to the station house and was shown that it was illegal to sell things in the streets of Washington on Sunday. He was booked for illegal vending! He didn’t know that and the company didn’t bother to tell him…The company admitted they were wrong. Per protocol at the time, Mr. Westfall did not show up for time and forfeited the collateral, but the violation stayed on his record. Every time he had to get a security clearance, illegal vending showed up on his record. Twice his clearances were held up. When he got out in ’55 he went right to duty with the Army and ended up at the Army Intelligence School. The night he arrived at Fort Holabird in Baltimore, a Colgate classmate of his came in a patted him on the back. The classmate was processing Mr. Westfall’s paperwork for the Army and asked about the illegal ice cream vending, informing Mr. Westfall that they were investigating the issue. He got held up for 6 weeks while they were investigating until they decided it was all innocent. After graduation from SAIS, Mr. Westfall went right on duty with the Army in July of 1955. He had already enlisted in the Army reserve intelligence unit with the goal of heading towards the CIA. He went with the Army counter-intelligence core and finished the training course. They had no requirements for anybody who spoke Arabic or Russian but did have requirements for those who spoke French, which Mr. Westfall had studied for three years in college. He ended up going to France as a French linguist. He could write and read it but had no knowledge of it spoken whatsoever. The first night he was in France he ended up at a tough, local bar. The woman who ran the bar had a previous employment in Paris and this was her retirement home. She had been a high-class courtesan with government ministers. She took one look at Mr. Westfall and decided to teach him French. Every night for about two months he would go down to the bar and she taught him French. That’s how after two months he was able to carry on business in France. But he had to be very careful because he picked up a lot of “dock” French. Every now and then he’d slip into very colloquial French. After going through Russian and Arabic at SAIS, he had to learn French and that ended up being the rest of his career. He landed with the Agency in the Africa division in a bunch of French speaking places…He finally got to use his Arabic when he landed up in Casablanca, but even there he relates, most of his business was conducted in French. He also uses his Russian with Russian contacts. One thing they really wanted to find out from him was how much Russian he knew. He says this turned into a gag. He knew enough that he could fool them because he didn’t want them to know how much Russian he did know. Regarding Arabic, he had studied classical Arabic which is different that the Moroccan Arabic in Casablanca, so it didn’t do him too much good. During that time, Mr. Westfall was spying. He was a professional case officer recruiting spies. He finally ended up in Paris as the African representative for CIA. This was from 1971 to 1974. He not only handled all of CIA’s Africa business, he also handled the Near East division. Mr. Westfall would advice those who want to be spies to avoid thinking they know too much—there is always more you can learn. He also advises being careful with how you deal with people, especially journalists. He got burned by a journalist in the beginning when he joined the Army and suggests if you’re going to be a spy, stay away from journalists. He also suggests working on your language. The biggest problem the Agency has now is that people don’t speak any languages. He was lucky that at the time he had three languages going in—he also spoke German. His entire career with the Agency was keyed to French because he was a French specialist. When he came back from France and took the language exam to go on duty with the Agency, he came up with native fluency. He ended up being a member of the examining board for the CIA for people in French for a couple of years while he was still at headquarters. He received the Career Intelligence Medal…He got it from Inspector General Jack McMahon because he had been one of the hotshots in the Africa division…The day George Bush Sr. left he was down in the cafeteria shaking hands with people and Mr. Westfall wanted to shake his hand and tell him what a good job he had done. Mr. Westfall says the place had been in pretty bad shape with the Church Committee. After Mr. Westfall retired, he and about 5 others ended up working for Bush’s headquarters when he was running for president around 1980. He says a whole bunch of spies ended up working at Bush headquarters because they all thought very highly of him and wanted to get on board. He landed up in national politics with George Sr. Mr. Westfall’s career worked exactly the way he wanted—he landed up where he wanted to work and doing what he wanted to do. He says SAIS was the way to go. One of the recruiters came around and looked him up in his senior year. He was called in by Priscilla one day and told that a recruiter from the Agency wanted to talk to him—SAIS had recommended him. He does not know how closely the relationship was but he was not the only one. He couldn’t go with the Agency then because he had to go on duty with the Army but the Agency got in touch with him again while on duty. They sent him the paperwork and he was already to go when he got back. Mr. Westfall’s father never knew about his career until the day Mr. Westfall left to come down to Washington. After he left the Army, he was with his family in New York for a little while waiting for his clearance to come through at the Agency. It was not until the night before he came down to DC to join the Agency that Mr. Westfall told his father what he was doing. But then his father turned into a menace and wanted to tell everyone his son was a spy! Mr. Westfall deliberately kept this information hidden from his family. He used to tell them he worked for the State Department and he did end up doing tours for State Department under cover. In Dakar and Casablanca, he was integrated with the State Department—he was a State Department officer. When he went to Paris, there were no slots for integrated people, so he had to resign from the Foreign Service to go to work in the embassy in Paris. He says it was absolutely crazy. All of his household affects had to be shipped in a very circuitous matter. Mr. Westfall ended his career in 1978. His wife, Eugenia, who was at the Agency too, had three heart attacks while in Paris. During the last one, the medics told him to go home. Her state of health was so bad that he knew he would not go overseas again. After about 20 years of service, he resigned in 1978 though he didn’t want to. The first thing he got involved in after retirement was his local bank. He was tied up looking after Eugenia most of the time, but he was talking to his local bank manager one day who told him about the problems she had getting people to work there. Mr. Westfall ended up working part-time as a bank teller. Working with him was a retired Marine colonel who had gotten bored in retirement. Mr. Westfall also worked for 8 mortgage companies in 8 years during the mortgage racket in the late ‘70s. He finally ended up at the Treasury Department doing financial crimes enforcement for 9 years until he got an opening with the Agency to come back as a finance officer in 2003. He spent 7 or 8 years with the Agency as a finance officer. His contract ended the 30th of September as part of Obama’s plan to cut back 5% on contractors. They decided they would not have any more contractors on reserve status. He is now retired, though not necessarily happily. The other day in fact he went to the Virginia Appointment Commission to sign up to see if he could find a job, which he says is very difficult for someone 80 years old. The week that Mr. Westfall retired, his wife broke her hip. She got a hip replacement and was in the hospital several weeks for that. Then she was in the hospital with pneumonia. Then she had to go back in for an E-coli infection. Then Mr. Westfall landed in the hospital getting a defibrillator and pacemaker. He’s doing fine and that’s why he decided he wants a job doing something part-time. He’s not ready to quit! He’s not happy with the Agency, but they were stuck. He says he got caught in the numbers but this was after he was told in August that they were going to keep him on. Ms. Westfall says the Agency these days is not what is used to be. Most of the fun he had in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s you couldn’t do anymore. They had no rules—the only rule was don’t get caught. He says it was a lot of fun and he loved every minute of it. He would not want to be a case officer these days though. He says there are too many rules and regulations…His recommendation to anyone from SAIS who wants to join the Agency today is to be careful what you’re getting into. He says to not be surprised if it does not turn out to be what you want because the Agency has turned into one, enormous bureaucracy that is not going to change. He thinks things are much less efficient than they used to be. He has no regrets and absolutely feels he made the right decision going to SAIS.Item Fishmanm, David - Oral History Interview(2010-12-01) Fishman, DavidWhat originally brought Mr. Fishman to SAIS was his interest in international relations and the ability to take the BA/MA program at Homewood and SAIS. He started at Homewood in ’65 and received a very good education, in his opinion, in international relations and politics. He was originally drawn to international relations because of his interest in the Soviet Union as a specialization. He had three years of undergraduate education in Russian at Homewood before going to SAIS. He never lived outside of the US growing up because his folks were not well off. He grew up in the New York area in Yonkers and went to a private school, Fieldston, as a scholarship student. He did not get to grow up the way kids do these days and get to travel all over the world and backpack or stay in fine hotels, depending on what their parents have. Mr. Fishman remembers that he was at SAIS during the time of the Vietnam War. There were about 19 incoming students, only one of whom was a woman. He has not heard from or about his former classmates and is very interested to know where they went and what they are doing. One story he does know of a former classmate is very tragic. He was in the same class as Mr. Fishman and had the wretched fortune to be on a navy ship off the coast of Vietnam. He was killed by a shell offshore, so his name is on the wall (of the Vietnam Memorial). He also recalls quite fondly Professor Liska. He left with a BA. After one year he left to pursue a doctoral degree in political science at MIT which had a joint program with Harvard and was a three year program. In those days, he describes himself as being “blind as a bat” with thick lenses. He says it wasn’t a Vietnam –type issue. He volunteered for OCS to get it settled one way or the other. They put his classes in a machine and it wouldn’t close on them so that was the end of that. If it had, he would have gone into a Russia-focused program because he had the language and that was his area of interest. But when he came to SAIS, he remembers that he had to complete the language requirement—he had had three years of college Russian. But in those days, to pass you had to take the exam in French, German or Spanish. Fortunately he had had very good high school French so he didn’t have any problem with the exam, but it was a mild disappointment. It may have, to some small degree, colored his impression at the time. Mr. Fishman is not a professor, though he is a visiting scholar at SAIS. He is a lawyer by trade. What he remembers the most about SAIS was Bologna. The junior summer they were sent to Bologna for five or six weeks of political science training and three or four weeks of language training in country, which in his case was in Dijon, France. He recalls that Dijon, France in August has no French speakers around. On the end of his second day, they called the dean and informed him. So he went to Prague instead—it was the summer of ’68. He was pondering the idea of getting a visa from Bratislava to Ukraine but they weren’t giving out visas that week. He found out later that it was because the (Soviet) tanks got into Prague about a week after he left. So that further stimulated his interest international relations and Soviet studies that he keeps to this day. After going up to MIT (the person who recruited Mr. Fishman actually went off to Chile for a sabbatical for two years), he was interested in taking a historical approach to political science. He states that in those days, MIT was very quantitative so had three math courses and an elective. It was a joint program with Harvard so had good electives, a chance to study with Barrington Moore one semester and Nathaniel Glazer and Patrick Moynihan another semester. But after another year and a bit at MIT trying to figure out what he wanted to do next, he ended up leaving and went out to the west coast to go to law school, becoming a lawyer. For about 20 years, he practiced in the field of labor law, both management and plaintiff union work. But, he says, when Gorbachev came along, he got interested in possible changes in the Soviet Union and wanted to get back into that aspect of his career. He met Bruce Parrott at SAIS and registered to become a part-time student. He took Professor Parrott’s class and Natasha Simes’ class to get his Russian back. She made an exception letting him in under the condition that because he could not speak Russian, he would not speak but he could listen and read her superb textbooks on political Russian to engage his mind. As a result, he got his capabilities in the Russian language back. Today he reads Russian fluently, listen pretty fluently and can speak sufficiently to do legal business, though his bar talk isn’t as good. This past spring, Mr. Fishman was invited to become a visiting scholar at SAIS, where he currently is, along with Judge Stephen F. Williams, who is a senior judge, US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit. They are working on a project of study and analysis of developments in the contemporary Russian legal system. SAIS submitted an application to the US Russia Foundation last fall. It wasn’t funded. They were told that the foundation hadn’t quite gotten itself organized to figure out how they wanted to spend the money. Now they are in discussions with the Obama administrators of the bi-lateral presidential commission in relation to the US Russia Foundation. They hope to have a project up and running in the very near future with Russian law firms as primary partners and an academic relationship between SAIS and conquerable Russian institutions in Moscow, St. Petersburg, etc. In that capacity, Mr. Fishman is now reading Russian just about every day. He goes over from time to time working with people he’s known now for about 20 years. Back in ‘89/’90 the American Bar Association had a program for Soviet lawyer interns, the ABA Soros program. The Soviet lawyer interns in that time has become Russian, Estonian, Ukrainian and Georgian lawyers and they are now marching their way up through their respective careers. From time to time he meets them and shares that he’s an alumnus from that program—there are probably a couple thousand of them. Some of them are good friends to this day. One woman who now lives in Aragon came in from Aragon for his wedding in ’96. Mr. Fishman hopes that his greatest career accomplishments are still ahead of him. He was a lawyer in the government and worked for the Postal Service and Metro. Although it has a different scale than the government, he left the postal service as a GS-15. Notwithstanding what you see in the papers today, Mr. Fishman contends that there are healthy parts of the legal Russian system and he looks forward to encouraging a productive evolution that will be good for them and good for us. Bruce Parrott is the SAIS leader on the project and Judge Williams is now an active visiting scholar at SAIS. His memories of Bologna are very vivid because that was his first time overseas. He didn’t end up their first, but he spent the longest there. Mr. Fishman still remembers and was trying to find for her wife, the part of the old city where the SAIS building was and where the University of Bologna, the Italian school is. They were in Italy last summer and made sure to include Bologna has a stop. The route they took led them to come upon the area of Bologna where the SAIS campus was at the end of their walk and when they arrived, he could remember the old arches and narrow streets from more than 40 years ago. Mr. Fishman says that current students at SAIS these days are so lucky compared to what he recalls he was. He states that now we live in a world with internet, the SAIS student body is much more diverse these days in terms of where people come from and what age they come in at, and the languages that are offered. In these days, he says, wanting to do Russian would have been a major plus. He says that SAIS has one of the best reputations for international relations in the US, it has partnerships in Italy and in China (he hopes to work with the Bologna part as it’s a natural place for meeting Russians) and that it’s a great place if you can take advantage of it. Thinking in terms of his training, he says that on the one hand, we live in a world with a lot of complicated problems. On the other hand, compared to other periods of our history, we don’t have these days what our predecessors had in World War II with the Nazis and the Communists. (Another professor he remembers is Professor Rothstein from Hopkins talking about Herman Khan’s thinking about the unthinkable). Mr. Fishman says we have smaller, more manageable threats if we have the wisdom to get it right. In his opinion, students who can navigate that are going to have some interesting careers. He would enthusiastically recommend SAIS as a place to begin to have that career.Item Barr, Albert - Oral History Interview(2011-04-01) Barr, AlbertPlease view attached audio file. Thank you.Item Mills, Scott - Oral History Interview(2011-02-01) Mills, ScottAfter three years in the Navy, Mr. Mills came back to Grinnell College in Iowa for his senior year of college. When he was in the last weeks before graduation, he looked in the administrative office and saw a poster for SAIS. He decided to check it out even though he wasn’t sure what he would be doing next year. He wrote SAIS a letter to SAIS and that’s he got there. Mr. Mills remembers that the students met at a big house on Florida Avenue and found out soon that most of the students lived there and ate there too. Mr. Mills was assigned a roommate from Puerto Rico whose name was Angel Gonzalez. They soon ate together and got acquainted with each other. It seemed to Mr. Mills that there were only 35 or 40 students, most of whom were living right there and most of whom had roommates. Mr. Mills remained friends with a number of classmates. What Mr. Mills remembers first is that everybody was assigned research papers that involved using the Library of Congress, which was convenient with public transportation. Many of the students did research on their own for the first time in their lives. He also remembers that one of their professors was Donald Hiss who was in the news because his brother, Alger Hiss, was caught up in Senator McCarthy’s accusations. But nobody brought up any comments of Donald Hiss, but what was rumored was that what probably bothered his brother bothered him. Professor Grove Hanes taught diplomatic history and was very scholarly. Mr. Mills remembers with gratitude that Professor Hanes wanted Mr. Mills to continue studying with him and go for a doctorate. Mr. Mills did not think so much of this then but he realizes now that it was quite a complement. Professor Hanes did give Mr. Mills the contact that got him the job with Army Intelligence at the Pentagon. Mr. Mills did not want to go on for his doctorate. He had never had a job other than being in the Navy. Harry Truman won his upset victory shortly after Mr. Mills graduated from SAIS in 1948. The Chicago Tribune printed a “Dewey Victory” headline already. All the time, Truman himself predicted victories in all the states he won, which was plenty to win. Mr. Mills was at his first job in the Pentagon and he got off to see Truman get back from his parades from his election and come Pennsylvania in his triumphant motorcade. He saw a couple of teen-aged kids up in a tree watching so he climbed up too so he could get a good look. It was quite fun for him because he wanted Truman to win and because to get so close to it seemed great. Mr. Mills describes his job at the Pentagon as hum-drum, but says it was easy to do and paid well. He enjoyed it for awhile because he had been in the Navy and studying his whole life and here he was getting paid for something. Mr. Mills stayed at that job for some time, but got a little more responsibility. He then got another job from them called the Army Corellation Center which was a way to obtain intelligence by sound. It was a way to detect Soviet launch sites because of the blast it made when it penetrated the atmosphere. Mr. Mills got a civilian job for a couple of aerospace companies out in California. He came to DC supposedly to help sell some aerospace equipment. During that time, he got in touch with one of his old officemates in the Pentagon who was working for NASA who got Mr. Mills a job there. Mr. Mills then came back to Washington and worked at the Goddard Space Flight Center. There, Mr. Mills had fun doing different things. He ended up being the editor of design criteria manuals that were given to companies that got contracts with NASA to do things. He edited and put out about 15 different environmental criteria manuals for a particular project. For example, Mars would be the particular environments that a contractor would have to design against. This gave him a chance to contact other NASA centers to get the experts in a particular parameter that had to be put together. That was the job he ended up with and that he liked the most. He was there for 10/12/15 years. Mr. Mills’ favorite part of the job was contacting different scientists and writing up the best estimates of what they were doing. Mr. Mills was about 55 when he retired. He started working on a book the day after he retired. His daughter had been going to West Nottingham Academy in northern Maryland that was founded before the Revolution and it had been going ever since. It had never been written up as a history so Mr. Mills did a history of the academy. Its founder was a Presbyterian minister and the school educated two signers of the Declaration of Independence. Mr. Mills says it was a fun project to follow all the way through. Mr. Mills next book was connected with the Pacific War. Don Bell wanted Mr. Mills to write the book which became Stranded in the Philippines. Don Bell was the son of the family stranded there. They had finally been rescued by a submarine. Mr. Mills went to a reunion they had of all the people who had been rescued by that submarine. He ran into some American soldiers there who had been rescued and who had been prisoners of war. So Mr. Mills wrote one book on each for them. Mr. Mills is currently working on a book about the memoirs of the American diplomat in Berlin during the Wall crisis. Mr. Mills notes that SAIS has a piece of the wall at its current location. The diplomat had an interesting career going back to the Soviet Union before the Soviets even got into the war. The diplomat was then sent to Norway after the Germans had taken it so he observed the German occupation of Norway. Mr. Mills has written a total of 4 books and is currently working on his fifth one. Mr. Mills applauds SAIS when he goes down there for their lectures and other programs. He thinks that it’s so valuable for students to have that kind of experience and he is very conscious of how important American policy has been since the war. Right now Mr. Mills is interested in the Berlin Wall and the crisis the US had with the Soviet Union. He is interested in how American policy has continuously had to balance itself against Khruschchev and Stalin—each different, but each a big challenge. Yet, the US never gave up on Berlin even though there were two very critical times. One was right after the war when the Soviet-occupied territories surrounded Berlin and Stalin wanted to drive the US out but Truman, who turned out to be a big hero, authorized General Clay to send in fleets of airplanes to keep a city of over a million and a half or two million alive for a year even though they had no ground transport. The Soviets finally gave up on trying to block all ground transport. And then 10 years later, the diplomat about whom Mr. Mills is writing was in London part of that time as a less important, lower-ranked diplomat, though still important. In the Berlin Wall crisis, 10 years later the Soviets under Khrushchev were still trying to drive out the US and still unable to. So the diplomat was imprisoned and all that kind of thing. But in the bigger picture, Mr. Mills thinks it is so important the United States since World War II has tried to stay in Europe and hold back from an aggressive Russia and bolster Europe. After World War I, the US couldn’t even get started or join the League of Nations because of the refusal of the Republican congress to let President Wilson join the League of Nations and start doing what Truman and Marshall did after World War II. Mr. Mills would recommend that SAIS students stay flexible intellectually…and be challenging in their own minds and not hesitant in taking on new projects and challenges.Item Gillum, Gary - Oral History Interview(2010-12-01) Gillum, GaryAround the time he attended SAIS, Gary was looking for a career and mostly to do work in the South America (specifically Colombia), in the field of economics. Prior to SAIS, he was at MIT at a time when the Peace Corps first came to be. As he did not know, at the time, exactly what he wanted to do, he joined the Peace Corps. Gary reports that he almost didn’t get into SAIS, but in the end, his grades were good enough. He remembers interviewing with one of the professors, though he can’t recall his name. He talked with him for a while and after the conversation, he said, “We’ll take you.” Gary recalls everyone being very nice and bright at SAIS. He recalls professors with fondness and made friends in his area of Latin America while he was there. He also recalls having to take the Orals (Spanish was his language). At the time, there were only a few Economics courses offered at SAIS. He recalls that the SAIS building was on Massachusetts Avenue (and is still there) and that the Brookings Institute was across the street (also still there). Gary says that his career after SAIS took an evolving path. He worked on his Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Chicago for five years, which he describes as one of the best programs in the country at the time. After five years, he began looking for a job. The AEA had a program and he worked with them to get a job in Philadelphia with the Federal Reserve. There, he struggled at first with his team and says that only five or six of them were really interested in doing good work. On that team, he also worked closely with Anita Summers (Larry Summers’ mother), with whom he and his wife are still closely acquainted. At the time, she was working on several projects related to the Philadelphia School System. Later, there was a blow up in his department, though he stayed there because he wanted to have a job. After Philadelphia, he and his wife moved to Washington, D.C. where he continued work as an Economist at the Federal Reserve. There, he was given a big project to work….related to the ‘Discount Window’ (tied to the 12 Federal banks that existed then). This effort took several years and he set up a model within which to work that was very different than what anyone else had done at the time. He set up various teams in different locations around the country. Later in his career, he got involved in working on the Y2K project. On January 1, 2000, Gary had to be at work at 7:00 a.m. He knew about all the big banks and he sat around for a while until the banks opened at 9:00 or 10:00 a.m. Fortunately, nothing major happened. The banks were fine and life proceeded, business as usual. It was an exciting time for him. Gary also recalls sometimes sitting behind Greenspan during their meetings (and he was involved in taping those meetings). One time, Greenspan complained of not being able to hear in the meeting (as he sat on the other side of a long table) and Gary was involved in making better equipment and improving the design of the room. To current students, Gary advises that they should be open. Sometimes you’re given a problem in life and it’s hard to do…and sometimes you just can’t do it…but you usually get through it. Gary also recalls being in New York on September 11, 2001. He took the subway down to the Federal Reserve bank. When he came out of the subway, paper was flying all around. He decided something was wrong and ran into the building (he was the last one allowed in). Someone told him that a plane had gone into the building. He then heard a ‘crunch’ (the second plane had hit). So, he immediately called his boss. Greenspan was in Europe at the time. So, Gary stayed there all day, watching TV in the Bank building (with 50 other people). He recalls that the dust came into the Bank. They stayed there until 6:00 p.m. and then had to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge to the nearest subway. At the end of the day, he ended up in Brooklyn. The next day, he got a train going back to the Board – which took the whole day. He walked right in and talked with others in the building. He describes that it was quite a trip to get back to the Federal Reserve Board building. He worked that day until about 3:00 or 4:00 p.m. and was then asked to leave to go to a place where he would be safe. He went to this new place and gave a speech. He ended up staying with people that he didn’t know.Item Ward, Barclay - Oral History Interview(2011-04-01) Ward, BarclayBarclay Ward was always interested in international affairs. When he went to college, he thought he would be a geologist at Hamilton College, but after two years, got more involved in government and international affairs. The summer between his sophomore and junior years, he spent at a camp in Austria, digging dirt…and this fixed his interest in international relations. SAIS was the school that he had picked out, quite early, as the one that he really wanted to attend. He was attracted to the practicality of SAIS, the fact that it was in Washington, D.C., and it turned out to be the only school at which he interviewed. So he came down for his interview from Clinton, NY and interviewed with Ellie Salem, who asked him questions, not about his studies and what he wanted to do, but instead he asked him substantive questions (like a quiz) (e.g. when did Napoleon invade Russia?) While at SAIS, Barclay recalls the school being smaller and in a declining building on Florida Avenue. Many of the faculty were adjunct professors and many of them added a great deal. He did Russian studies while at SAIS and many of his classes were taught by Sonnenfeldt, who he recalls as a tough and straight forward teacher. He had students write two page essays on topics that spanned several decades. He also remembers that registration was a quick process (it essentially was a chat with the Dean where courses to be taken were discussed – and if Emma Baker, the Registrar, disagreed on those courses, she would speak out). The students were the key factor for Barclay. He recalls it just being wonderful to be with a lot of people who were so capable and interested in the same kinds of things. He also remembers the strong people on the faculty. He remembers the first day at SAIS and orientation being over at the Quaker meeting house…and Paul Linebarger, one of the great figures at SAIS, greeted them and pointed out that too many of them were straight out of college. Being in Washington was a wonderful thing. Barclay recalls the speakers being fantastic. He also remembers working at the library – didn’t have to apply for it – at the information desk, with Mr. Shork – in this job, he received a 100% increase in salary the following year. Barclay also met his wife at SAIS. He met her on their first day. At the time, he was living with three friends in an apartment on Connecticut Avenue (now the Albanian Embassy). He came out of the apartment with pots and pans and dishes because he was moving and when he got to Union Station, he called his land lady and she said “I can’t let you into the place because I found out that you’re students and my son says that I can’t rent to students.” It was the evening and I had to go somewhere, so I recalled that a friend of mine lived closed to SAIS, so I contacted him to see if I could stay with him….and I could, but he said, “I’ve agreed to help three women move into their apartment house.” They had bought furniture from the old dormitory, and that is how he met Joan, carrying furniture into her apartment. They were married the year following SAIS. Today was their 49th wedding anniversary. Barclay joined the Foreign Service. He took the written exam in his second year and passed the oral exam and entered on September 11, 1961. His wife, Joan, also passed her oral exam and started in 1962. In those days, the Foreign Service required women officers who were married to resign, with one small exception…that if they had a Washington assignment, they could complete the Washington assignment. Barclay had a mind that he and Joan should get married, so he worked hard to get a Washington assignment, and encouraged Joan to do the same…and they both did. That enabled them to get married and allow her to complete her role in Washington. Barclay wanted to go to Eastern Europe (Poland, Yugoslavia, etc.) So he worked hard to try and get such an assignment, but he was told that junior officers were not sent to the Soviet Block (as it was labeled in those days) on their first assignment abroad, and he was encouraged to Western Europe. So he did…he applied to Helsinki, Berlin and Vienna and he was assigned to Ottawa, Canada. He supervisor thought Barclay was very close to getting his first choice. So, Barclay and his wife, Joan, moved to Ottawa and found it to be a wonderful assignment. One of the first things he learned is that Canadians have a completely different view of the world than Americans. He then had a year of Polish language training and finally got his Eastern European assignment and moved to Warsaw, where he was in the Consulate section one year and the economic section the next year. During this time, he ended up doing something very different, which affected his career. The SS Administration required that when a certain amount of money was distributed abroad to beneficiaries, that there had to be a survey. It turned out that one part of the survey could not legally be conducted in Poland…and that was checking the records that the SS Administration had against the originals. They worked out an arrangement where an Embassy officer and a SS person and someone from Polish SS would travel together in a three-person delegation. For five weeks, Barclay traveled with this group, close to 6,000 miles, six days a week, going to places that most people never had a chance to go to. Many years later, Barclay was doing a Doctoral dissertation on Polish provinces, which came from his previous experience in Poland. After Poland, he was back in the State Department in Washington, D.C. for a couple of assignments and he was feeling like he really, really wanted to teach. He realized that if was going to pursue teaching, he would have to do it then. So, he applied to the University of Iowa, spent three years there and then took a position at the University of the South, in Tennessee, where he taught for 31 years. Then, somewhere down the line, something almost like a mistake happened. Barclay was planning his first sabbatical in Warsaw (spring 1982), but because Poland had been in upheaval until 1981 and there was unrest and pressure placed on Poland, he opted to not go. Instead, he met a friend in the field with whom he connected and began working and suddenly he moved to Washington, D.C. Exactly 10 years after he left the State Department, he walked back in to the Arms Control Agency, working on nuclear non-proliferation, and was asked to remain as a consultant, which he did (he sometimes goes back). One of the things that Barclay has treasured in his teaching career is to have one foot in academia and one foot in the government. He feels that this has helped him both ways and it’s having the combination of the two that has been important for him. In terms of giving advice to current students today, Barclay feels that the most important thing is for the students to remain open minded about values and directions they might take. Their two years at SAIS, become two years of really intense exploration and self-examination. He recommends taking a breadth of courses at SAIS (which he recalls happening anyway) and if they stay open minded, they will be in good shape for any number of careers.Item Leonard, Graham - Oral History Interview(2011-02-01) Leonard, GrahamBefore coming to SAIS, Dr. Leonard was a self-proclaimed east Tennessee hillbilly from Kingsport, Tennessee going to the University of Tennessee. During that time, he says the most important person was Ghandi and he wanted to live in one of Ghandi’s ashrams. So during his junior year he applied and got accepted to one of the ashrams, but Ghandi was killed during January of his senior year. He was less interested in going to India then because he couldn’t meet Ghandi. He heard that there was an Aramco scholarship, Arabian American Oil Company scholarship, to SAIS…which he applied for and got. He came up to SAIS Easter weekend to interview with Colonel Bill Eddy, who was the first minister to Saudi Arabia and was on the board of SAIS. At that time, he says, SAIS and the Middle East industry were very closely integrated. SAIS was located at its old address on Florida Avenue and the Middle East Institute was on 16th Street. A graduate of the class of ’48, Bill Marsh (sp?), was executive secretary of the Middle East Institute. Dr. Leonard was at the Middle East Institute at SAIS and started the study of Arabic at SAIS with George Mecdesey (sp?), who was a Lebanese kid brought up in Detroit. Mecdesey’s family sent him back to Lebanon when he was 13 or 14 to be a Jesuit priest. Mecdesey was studying and was about 20 when World War II began. He signed up at the embassy and was drafted. Though he knew Arabic and French, the army sent him to the South Pacific. Mecdes]sy was so impressed by the young counsels at the embassy that he decided that that was what he wanted to do. While he was in the army, he met a good Meronite girl from Detroit and they got married. They started having children and eventually had around 11. He came to Georgetown to do the Foreign Service masters and taught at SAIS to help support his family. Mecdesey later went to Princeton where he had a fight with Hiti (sp?). Mecdesey corrected Hiti in class and Mecdesey was right so Hiti hit the ceiling. According to Dr. Leonard, Hiti by that time was a God, not just an icon. So Mecdesey went to Paris to study with Messingion (sp?) [at 3:23] and got his doctorate. When Dr. Leonard went to Harvard to finish his PhD, he studied with George Mecdessey who is the foremost expert on the Abbasid. Dr. Leonard has spent almost 40 years in the Middle East as an educator and now he has a project with the Ministry of Education trying to revive Abbasid discussion-based education in Arabic. Most of his idea’s came from Mecdessey’s books. Dr. Leonard says there were two people from Kingsport, Tennessee at SAIS in the class of ’49. The other was Genevieve Collins, the daughter of a local character and lawyer in Kingsport, IT Collins. She’d gone to Duke but she had been so cuddled by her father that Dr. Leonard had to sit next to her at SAIS and cut her meat for her! One of their professors was Dr. Paul Linebarger who was raised in China because his father was an extraterritorial judge there. Dr. Linebarger and Genevieve fell in love and got married. About a year or so later, Genevieve visited them in Beirut on her way to meet Paul in Nepal alone. Dr. Leonard says that that marriage absolutely transformed Genevieve and they remain close friends. Dr. Leonard saw her every Christmas and Easter when he was home in Tennessee. He says Dr. Linebarger, who was a stuffy professor that wrote lurid, sexy novels on the side under a pseudonym, which Genevieve continued after his death, also changed. Dr. Leonard describes Linebarger as a great scholar who would dictate to one secretary scholarly work and to another these sexy novels. In Dr. Leonard’s opinion, Linebarger started looking 20 years younger after he married Genevieve and it was an almost unbelievable love story. Dr. Leonard says there was a marvelous German chef at SAIS. The students used to go to school at the old building on 1906 Florida Avenue which used to be a Holten Arms, right across from where Reagan was nearly assassinated. What brought them together was the dining room and the library, which they were in all the time. Dr. Leonard’s roommate was Manfred Halpern, who later earned his PhD from SAIS and was one of the first students to do so. Mr. Halpern has been the Middle East Sociologist at Princeton. They’ve remained friends and Dr. Leonard was in his wedding. Halpern was married in the home of Supreme Court Justice Rutledge. Rutledge’s daughter was maid of honor and Dr. Leonard was best man. The Rutledges invited Dr. Leonard to the Truman inauguration when the Point Four was announced in January 1949. One of Dr. Leonard’s good friends went to the CIA that year. He says that almost everyone at SAIS was interviewed for the CIA but Dr. Leonard was not. He supposes he talks so much that the CIA thought he wasn’t a good candidate. Several friends of his did work for CIA, one of whom was Joe Culbertson, whose father was a farmer involved in politics in Missouri and the man that got Harry Truman into politics. Joe spent much of his career training secret intelligence people all around the world for CIA, married a Vassar graduate named Mary and had three children—two boys and a girl. Dr. Leonard lived in Beirut at the time when all airplanes had to stop to refuel in Beirut, so he saw the Culbertsons quite often. The Culbertsons worked with a family from his home in east Tennessee, a Swiss-German man married to an English woman. The husband did the same type of work that Mr. Culbertson did. (6:56 to 8:14) Lois Catarin (sp?) was one of Dr. Leonard’s dorm mates while at SAIS. Three of them lived on the second floor of the building. Dr. Leonard relates the story of how SAIS got started. As he recalls, the Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts fought with the president of Tufts and wanted to be totally independent. He managed to get Harvard on the diploma because he got permission for his students to use the Harvard library even though they didn’t have any classes there. Dr. Leonard describes the dean as a “wheeler-dealer” who had a very close friend, a mistress, who was from a wealthy Boston family. She provided most of the money for the library at Fletcher. The dean conceived the idea of leaving Fletcher and starting SAIS in DC right after the war. He would use adjuncts from the government and it was attractive because everyone wanted to be in Washington after the war. He managed to get 19 schools to sponsor the new school (SAIS). But he became difficult in terms of running the school and was replaced. It was then decided that the format with 19 colleges would not work and since Johns Hopkins was the nearest, Johns Hopkins took it over in the ‘50s. For the first 5 or so years, SAIS was sponsored by all 19 colleges. The original dean brought the library and the librarian to SAIS and was often seen in compromising positions in the stacks according to rumors. The original dean also had a secretary who was a real “crackerjack” who loved to dance according to Dr. Leonard. Four couples, including Dr. Leonard, used to meet at her house once a month and cook one of the times throughout the year. Every Thursday, there was an adult, singles place that is now an embassy somewhere on 17th or 18th street that held dances. Dr. Leonard used to take the secretary, Rosemary Woods, dancing. The chairman of the board at SAIS at that time was Christian Herter, a congressman from Massachusetts and he liked young congressman Nixon. That fall in 1948, Nixon won the Senate seat in California by vilifying Helen Gahagan Douglas, the wife of an actor, by calling her a Communist. When Nixon took office, he needed an assistant so Christian Herter got Rosemary Woods to work for him. Rosemary Woods and Dr. Leonard still dance on Thursday nights. She lived at that time on 2000 Connecticut Avenue across from what is now the Hilton, in a very nice apartment. She had two or three sisters who were nuns and was from Zanesville, Ohio, a steel town, from a very Irish family with red hair. Later on, she was at the White House with Nixon. Dr. Leonard was in Paris with UNESCO at that time and his daughter was in school at Paris. All of the children had to write to the heads of state as an exercise. So they got a letter in the White House (there are hundreds of volunteers who read the correspondences and interesting ones are sent up). The letter was from a little girl in Paris who said she was half American, half Arab and half English and studying in Paris. Rosemary said, “Is the last name Leonard?”. That’s another connection Dr. Leonard had with Rosemary. When Rosemary was with Nixon when Nixon was Vice President, Dr. Leonard was able to help arrange for a group of Arab Palestinian students to meet Nixon. Nixon’s mother was a Quaker and Dr. Leonard told Nixon that Nixon’s mother used to raise money for Quaker schools in Ramallah. He said to Nixon that Nixon knows all about the Palestine question and asked why he always votes on the side of the Zionists. Nixon’s response was that the Arabs don’t vote in America. Dr. Leonard responded questioning the morality of that position at which point Nixon turned his face on Dr. Leonard and didn’t shake Dr. Leonard’s hand when he left. Dr. Leonard had a wonderful time at SAIS and his French teacher was a young woman, Ann Sayey (sp?) who is now Ann Sele dela (sp). Her family was one of the most prominent families in Paris socially. Her mother’s family, the Devendels (sp) are the Carnegies of France. They own a home that is a whole city block, but they could not get a penny out of France in those days. Ann had gone to Columbia and did a Masters in English Literature. She was a classmate and roommate of Ann Kirkpatrick, who served as the US ambassador to the UN. There was a French ambassador, Monsieur Boneig, whose wife was a Jewish woman from Alexandria, Egypt. During the war, she had a hat shop in Manhattan that made a lot of money. In those days, ambassadors had to do a lot of entertaining on their own money. During Easter-time, Madame Boneig had as her guest Marlene Dietrich (sp). They had a dinner part in which they invited Ann because Madame Boneig was very interested in being in society in Paris. Dr. Leonard sat next to Marlene Dietrich at the dinner table and during the dinner she told a story about going into Paris the day it was liberated. She got her driver to take her to where she had a seamstress who used to make her underwear. They were shot at two or three times as the Germans were still in Paris. When they arrived, they learned the seamstress had gotten in a shipment of skin-colored Vietnamese silk just before the war began and spent the war making embroidered underwear for Marlene Dietrich. At the dinner table, Marlene Dietrich opened her dress to show them the beautifully embroidered bra that was made for her. Years later, when Dr. Leonard was at Oxford doing his post-doc work, Dietrich came and did a show. Dr. Leonard met her again, but she did not remember him. He told her the dinner party story and again she opened her dress and exclaimed that she was still wearing that underwear—she had a lifetime’s worth! He met her a few times since and the next time he saw her, she did remember him. One of the most interesting people on faculty in Dr. Leonard’s opinion was Brigadier General James Hayworth Dunn who had worked during the war in British intelligence in Egypt. Dr. Leonard describes him as a cross between Winston Churchill and King Farouk of Egypt, but with the worst qualities of both—a heavy drinker and fat man with lots of energy who slept only two or three hours a day and was into everything. He had become a Muslim in order become an advisor to Hassan al Benna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Dr. Leonard never knew if he should believe him or not because the stories were out of this world. After he converted, Brigadier General James Hayworth Dunn married one of the most famous Egyptian actresses in the Muslim world and then he married a very rich Egyptian cotton heiress. When SAIS hired him, they said they’d pay his transport from England to America. He came on the Normandy in a suite with two servants and his own car, but only stayed at SAIS one year. Hassan al Benna was killed Thanksgiving weekend of 1948 in Egypt probably by the British intelligence. Within a month or so, al Bennah’s son-in-law and heir came to see Heritha (sp? 19:42) and Dr. Leonard met him. The son-in-law was a drinker, gambler and womanizer and destroyed the puritan reputation of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hassan al Benna had founded the Muslim Brotherhood on the same basis as the YMCA—self-help, keep yourself clean, clean your mind, clean your body, clean your soul. It’s the only organization in the history of Egypt that started in the villages and went up to the capital. Another professor of Dr. Leonard’s was the Middle East expert at the Agriculture Department who had attended the American University in Beirut. That October was the year Truman was running for president on his own and no one in the country thought he could be elected. Bob Hall, later the first full-time Alumni Secretary of SAIS and another person boarded in a house on Florida Avenue. The woman that owned it was the daughter of an American admiral. She was an astrologist and did the charts for Truman and Dewey. She predicted early in October that Truman was going to win, which at the time they thought was very funny. Dr. Leonard had a friend who was assistant Navy attaché to Truman in the White House who used take Margaret as an escort. This friend went with Margaret to the astrologist and told reporters about the prediction but after Truman won, the astrologist got quite a reputation in town. When Dr. Leonard graduated from SAIS, Aramco did not choose him from the pool of people to work for them. He’s ultimately glad he didn’t get that position because he wouldn’t want to buy goodies for the Saudi royal family and provide other favors, which Aramco did. He ending up getting a job with Union Carbide to go to India but before he was sent out, he worked in his area in the southeast and decided that was not for him. While Dr. Leonard was at SAIS there was no auditorium in the building. They had lectures in the dining room but used the Quaker Meeting on Florida Avenue for big lectures and Dr. Leonard started going there. The secretary to the leader of the Quaker Meeting had been a teacher in Ramallah. He learned that the Quakers started girls’ schools in Ramallah in 1866 and boys’ schools later on which became the best schools in Palestine. They also started one around the same time in Lebanon. In 1888, the British took the ones in Lebanon and the Americans took the ones in Palestine. Dr. Leonard found out that they had a fellowship for someone to teach science for a year and applied in 1950 but did not get it. But they did offer him $800 plus board and room for the year to teach English, which Dr. Leonard accepted. Friends of his were traveling through Europe that summer and Dr. Leonard decided to go with them as far as Venice. He decided he would go from Paris to Jerusalem overland. He thinks he was probably the first person to do this after World War II because when he was in Paris he could not get a visa to Yugoslavia, but when he got to Rome, he could. The Yugoslavs showed him how to follow chalk lines to get through mine fields to the Greek border. He made it overland all the way to Ramallah where he would be teaching. He taught that year in Ramallah and then came back. The Korean War began when he was in Paris that summer. Because Dr. Leonard had not served for two years in World War II, he was drafted...He was planning on teaching another year in Ramallah, then travel to Kashmir to teach a year in India and then travel to Japan to again teach at a Quaker School there. He loved to travel and this was the way he could afford to see the world deeply and not flip through, like a tourist. But he had to go back because of his draft case in 1951. In Easter time in 1951 in Ramallah, he had gone to Amman and bought a small motorcycle and drove it to Petra, which he then drove to Haifa and had shipped back to America when he had to return home to fight the draft case. After three years, he finally won conscientious objector status. He spent a short time in jail because of mistakes in his case but was studying Arabic and Islam at the Kennedy School Hartford Seminary. He then applied to go back and teach in Ramallah but was instead put in charge of Quaker work in Ramallah. By that time, he spoke the colloquial language quite well and in ’57 he met and married a Palestinian woman living in Beirut and brought her back to the States. They then went to Harvard so Dr. Leonard could work on his PhD. Because Dr. Leonard was a teacher, he never made money. He did work for UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees as the Assistant to the Director of Education. After he finished his doctorate, he worked as an advisor for UNRWA from ’82 to ’86 and spent one year with the UNDP in Jerusalem. After that, he stayed on in Ramallah and started a program to teach teachers how to teach discussion-based education partly funded by a Fulbright and partly from other sources. When he finally spent all of his money, he quit and came home in 1996. He has a program now with the Ministry of Education in Jordan and has helped institute one hour of open-ended discussion in all the schools in Jordan from the 6th to the 10th grade which is a project he’s still working on. Dr. Leonard’s daughter convinced him to come back to the States in 1996 because she and her husband were moving to England with his grandson and she wanted him to look after her house in Cleveland Park. Dr. Leonard then decided to study Shakespearean acting with the Washington Shakespeare Theater but he’s not good at remembering the exact words. He did that for a few years. He was staying with a friend in New York in 2004 when the US got into the Iraq War. Dr. Leonard was angry and decided to run for Congress. His district in east Tennessee has voted Republican since the Civil War. He won the democratic nomination, receiving more votes than all other democrats on the ticket combined. He also got a higher percentage of votes than any democrat had gotten in 100 years—30%. When he went to run, the National Guard in east Tennessee just received orders to go to Iraq. As a conscientious objector in a state that is known for volunteering for wars, Dr. Leonard was in deep trouble with the veterans. He called the Executive Officer of the National Guard and offered his services to provide background information to those going to Iraq. He gave three two-hour lectures to each of 8 units in east Tennessee. In spring 2005, Dr. Leonard went to Iraq for three weeks with a Christian peace maker team without guard or armor. He was then embedded as a journalist with the Tennessee National Guard in Iraq. At that time, his unit was the only one that had recruited, trained and left Iraqis in their place because they knew how to deal with Iraqis and because the average age was 42 and not 22 like the soldiers. Dr. Leonard believes that going into Iraq was one of the biggest mistakes that America ever made, but even when we went in, we weren’t very smart. He says we only had 12 people in the army who knew Arabic, we’ve used 6,500 Kurds as interpreters, and of the 45 interpreters in his unit 35/40 didn’t have better than third grade English. He was surprised that more people weren’t killed. He says that the British had ruled Iraq from the air, with bribes to the Sunni sheiks and with intelligence and he wonders why America didn’t do that too. He says that the reason we stopped fighting so much during the surge, when we added extra troops, wasn’t because of the 35,000 troops but because we finally starting bribing the sheiks. He says we would have saved thousands of lives if we had been smart enough to use “subsidies” or bribes since the beginning. He says that anybody with a SAIS intelligence could have told you that. Now, Dr. Leonard continues to travel to Jordan to promote discussion-based education. He suffered for a year from pain in his leg and hip, but a Lebanese shi’ah surgeon operated on him at Johns Hopkins on January 21 and he feels absolutely no pain. He’s going back around the world now like he’s always done. Dr. Leonard would advise current students at SAIS that learning a language and becoming an expert on a country is not enough—they need to have a specialty. There are many, many people in these countries that know the language and culture, so it’s not enough. He’d also advise not to just learn the language but to learn the culture as well. Afief Tenous (sp?) taught him the culture of the Middle East when he was at SAIS. He took them to a Middle East restaurant near Foggy Bottom, taught them the different foods and how they were made. He was a Cornell PhD. Dr. Leonard’s Hartford degree was a joint degree with Syracuse in Literacy Journalism because he was interested in doing literacy work with the Arabs at that time. At Syracuse, he met people who had known Afief at Cornell. In Beirut, he met Afief’s sister who was married to an Iraqi who wrote the first book on Arab education. American University Beirut (AUB) was started by idealist New Englanders who gave their lives to teach the very best liberal arts education to empower people to think. Dr. Leonard says this education transformed the Middle East. All outstanding leaders up until the ‘70s and ‘80s were AUB graduates. In addition to learning the language, students need to learn the culture. And when you go there, Dr. Leonard suggests not associating with the rich diplomats but getting to know people in the youth, labor and women’s movements. This is the problem in Egypt and Libya according to Dr. Leonard. Nobody knows what the youth are thinking even though they are a majority of the population and nobody predicted what would happen in Egypt. Dr. Leonard believes it’s wonderful provided they can follow through but so far we have not seen much leadership. One of the big differences that Dr. Leonard thinks people at SAIS should know is that for 300 years we’ve been part of the Western emphasis on individualism, individual identity but the rest of the world, especially the Middle East, values group identity more than individual identity. That’s how people can become suicide bombers because it’s about your family’s honor and prestige. Dr. Leonard says that the most interesting thing happening in Egypt now is that it wasn’t the Muslim Brotherhood or any right-wing fanatical group that initiated the events in Tahrir Square. Dr. Leonard says what was happening in Egypt was fascinating but also frightening because it was composed of sound bites. Egypt has 3 times the population they can afford and 1/5 the jobs they need and that cannot be solved by one leader. Dr. Leonard has a hard time keeping out of politics and keeping out of analyzing because of his years at SAIS. He says Washington is an amazing place for students and he says the Friday evening get-togethers in the summertime are a very important part of SAIS. Students will run into SAIS people wherever they go. Even Dr. Leonard, who was just in the fifth class, was running into people all the time who had been to SAIS or who had studied Arabic with him at Harvard and Oxford. He also says that language is a tool but also the way in. And you have to be the type of person who is willing to try to understand other people. In fall of 2009, Dr. Leonard was in the Middle East and he stayed in 10 different homes with 7 different religious groups and in every one of those homes he was “Uncle Gra’ham”. Being accepted enough to be criticized is one of his greatest accomplishments. He learned by being part of the community. The Quakers had been in Ramallah for nearly 100 years but he was first one to break convention of being addressed by his full name and was just called by his first name. Dr. Leonard also suggests that if students are going to work anywhere that was formally part of the Ottoman Empire, they need to understand the Millet System. He explains that the Turks took over from the Ottomans a system that allowed each religious community to have its own laws and court for marriage, inheritance and divorce and any other crime committed within the community. In the former Ottoman Empire, these communities have remained separated. When asked the main difference between Sunnis and Shi’ites, Dr. Leonard says theologically there is very little difference but the communities have 500 years of history hating each other and killing each other. It’s important, says Dr. Leonard, to understand history. He also says that in the Arab world, Arabic has no past, present or future—just completed action or uncompleted action. He explains that all the past is rumpled up together—people are still worried about the Crusades. So when Bush made a remark about the US crusade in Iraq, the Middle East was ignited with hatred for him. Dr. Leonard focused a few days on history in his training with trainers in Jordan. He teaches them how to do a timeline because they have no timeline in their head and don’t know if Mohammad or Napoleon came first. He says it’s crucial to understand the different way people look at things. Dr. Leonard married a Palestinian who was a superb cook. Dr. Leonard also found that his Southern mentality translated well in the Middle East in that he was taught to understand people based on their relationships to other people (knowing who married whom and who was related to whom). Dr. Leonard now knows the people and the clans in Ramallah. Dr. Leonard knows Hannah Ashwari, the Palestinian spokesperson. She had a cousin who came from America to get married. At the reception the night before the wedding, the cousin said this woman kept calling her auntie and asked Hannah what the relationship was. Hannah did not know but said to ask Gra’ham (Dr. Leonard) and he did in fact figure out the relationship which is evidence of how well he knows some of the families in Ramallah. Dr. Leonard kept up with Ann SeeleDelaselatr (sp). She became undersecretary of the OECD. Dr. Leonard says she’s a very brilliant economist. She had the idea of the Club of the Sahel in which she coordinated across all sectors. She is now retired and lives in Paris. She has three happily married daughters and lots of grandchildren. She lives in a chateau now and has given over her big home. Paula Pepke (sp), Nitze’s niece who was named for him, was one of Dr. Leonard’s classmates in 1949. Her father founded the Aspen Institute in Colorado and was a University of Chicago graduate like Nitze. Nitze is Paula’s father’s brother-in-law. There were only six girls in his class. He ran into Marianne Smith in Belgrade when getting a visa in Yugoslavia. Many SAIS alumni work for the CIA, he says. The CIA began in the fall ’48 or spring of ’49, so there were many SAIS graduates in the agency. Dr. Leonard also recalls a fellow from the Philippines who was very interested in Genevieve Collins but she was not interested in him. One of their classmates graduated from Harvard from a well-to-do Boston family and he was the socialist in residence. The classmate then went on to start a newspaper in Dartmouth, married a Swiss socialite, got divorced, married one of the daughters of Sir Harry Oakes in the Bahamas and became a rich banker in the Bahamas. One of Dr. Leonard’s most interesting classmates, Rosenhower, teaches at George Washington and had written a book about Eleanor Roosevelt before he came to SAIS. He also describes a classmate, Barrel, who is now a bureaucrat but in Dr. Leonard’s opinion, had a very bureaucratic mind. Dr. Leonard remembers his filing system and being awed by it. Dr. Leonard also remembers a brilliant classmate from California who eventually burned out. Dr. Leonard suspects that Brigadier General James Hayworth Dunn really did work for British intelligence but got kicked out and that’s why he went into academia. Hayworth Dunn’s son spoke about four languages and Hayworth Dunn told them it’s very easy for a child to learn many languages provided each person who speaks to the child only speaks that language. Dr. Leonard did his PhD on applied linguistics at Harvard and this one of the things he emphasized. He raised his children to speak only in Arabic and it wasn’t until after his divorce when he moved to England, that his children learned English. He was intent that they learn proper English and not American hillbilly English. When Dr. Leonard ran for Congress in east Tennessee, he was afraid people would consider him a “carpetbagger”, but his family was pioneers and he’s related to a lot of people there and they accepted the fact that he spoke standard American English. They also did not consider him snobbish. Before coming to SAIS, Dr. Leonard was a self-proclaimed east Tennessee hillbilly from Kingsport, Tennessee going to the University of Tennessee. During that time, he says the most important person was Ghandi and he wanted to live in one of Ghandi’s ashrams. So during his junior year he applied and got accepted to one of the ashrams, but Ghandi was killed during January of his senior year. He was less interested in going to India then because he couldn’t meet Ghandi. He heard that there was an Aramco scholarship, Arabian American Oil Company scholarship, to SAIS…which he applied for and got. He came up to SAIS Easter weekend to interview with Colonel Bill Eddy, who was the first minister to Saudi Arabia and was on the board of SAIS. At that time, he says, SAIS and the Middle East industry were very closely integrated. SAIS was located at its old address on Florida Avenue and the Middle East Institute was on 16th Street. A graduate of the class of ’48, Bill Marsh (sp?), was executive secretary of the Middle East Institute. Dr. Leonard was at the Middle East Institute at SAIS and started the study of Arabic at SAIS with George Mecdesey (sp?), who was a Lebanese kid brought up in Detroit. Mecdesey’s family sent him back to Lebanon when he was 13 or 14 to be a Jesuit priest. Mecdesey was studying and was about 20 when World War II began. He signed up at the embassy and was drafted. Though he knew Arabic and French, the army sent him to the South Pacific. Mecdes]sy was so impressed by the young counsels at the embassy that he decided that that was what he wanted to do. While he was in the army, he met a good Meronite girl from Detroit and they got married. They started having children and eventually had around 11. He came to Georgetown to do the Foreign Service masters and taught at SAIS to help support his family. Mecdesey later went to Princeton where he had a fight with Hiti (sp?). Mecdesey corrected Hiti in class and Mecdesey was right so Hiti hit the ceiling. According to Dr. Leonard, Hiti by that time was a God, not just an icon. So Mecdesey went to Paris to study with Messingion (sp?) [at 3:23] and got his doctorate. When Dr. Leonard went to Harvard to finish his PhD, he studied with George Mecdessey who is the foremost expert on the Abbasid. Dr. Leonard has spent almost 40 years in the Middle East as an educator and now he has a project with the Ministry of Education trying to revive Abbasid discussion-based education in Arabic. Most of his idea’s came from Mecdessey’s books. Dr. Leonard says there were two people from Kingsport, Tennessee at SAIS in the class of ’49. The other was Genevieve Collins, the daughter of a local character and lawyer in Kingsport, IT Collins. She’d gone to Duke but she had been so cuddled by her father that Dr. Leonard had to sit next to her at SAIS and cut her meat for her! One of their professors was Dr. Paul Linebarger who was raised in China because his father was an extraterritorial judge there. Dr. Linebarger and Genevieve fell in love and got married. About a year or so later, Genevieve visited them in Beirut on her way to meet Paul in Nepal alone. Dr. Leonard says that that marriage absolutely transformed Genevieve and they remain close friends. Dr. Leonard saw her every Christmas and Easter when he was home in Tennessee. He says Dr. Linebarger, who was a stuffy professor that wrote lurid, sexy novels on the side under a pseudonym, which Genevieve continued after his death, also changed. Dr. Leonard describes Linebarger as a great scholar who would dictate to one secretary scholarly work and to another these sexy novels. In Dr. Leonard’s opinion, Linebarger started looking 20 years younger after he married Genevieve and it was an almost unbelievable love story. Dr. Leonard says there was a marvelous German chef at SAIS. The students used to go to school at the old building on 1906 Florida Avenue which used to be a Holten Arms, right across from where Reagan was nearly assassinated. What brought them together was the dining room and the library, which they were in all the time. Dr. Leonard’s roommate was Manfred Halpern, who later earned his PhD from SAIS and was one of the first students to do so. Mr. Halpern has been the Middle East Sociologist at Princeton. They’ve remained friends and Dr. Leonard was in his wedding. Halpern was married in the home of Supreme Court Justice Rutledge. Rutledge’s daughter was maid of honor and Dr. Leonard was best man. The Rutledges invited Dr. Leonard to the Truman inauguration when the Point Four was announced in January 1949. One of Dr. Leonard’s good friends went to the CIA that year. He says that almost everyone at SAIS was interviewed for the CIA but Dr. Leonard was not. He supposes he talks so much that the CIA thought he wasn’t a good candidate. Several friends of his did work for CIA, one of whom was Joe Culbertson, whose father was a farmer involved in politics in Missouri and the man that got Harry Truman into politics. Joe spent much of his career training secret intelligence people all around the world for CIA, married a Vassar graduate named Mary and had three children—two boys and a girl. Dr. Leonard lived in Beirut at the time when all airplanes had to stop to refuel in Beirut, so he saw the Culbertsons quite often. The Culbertsons worked with a family from his home in east Tennessee, a Swiss-German man married to an English woman. The husband did the same type of work that Mr. Culbertson did. (6:56 to 8:14) Lois Catarin (sp?) was one of Dr. Leonard’s dorm mates while at SAIS. Three of them lived on the second floor of the building. Dr. Leonard relates the story of how SAIS got started. As he recalls, the Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts fought with the president of Tufts and wanted to be totally independent. He managed to get Harvard on the diploma because he got permission for his students to use the Harvard library even though they didn’t have any classes there. Dr. Leonard describes the dean as a “wheeler-dealer” who had a very close friend, a mistress, who was from a wealthy Boston family. She provided most of the money for the library at Fletcher. The dean conceived the idea of leaving Fletcher and starting SAIS in DC right after the war. He would use adjuncts from the government and it was attractive because everyone wanted to be in Washington after the war. He managed to get 19 schools to sponsor the new school (SAIS). But he became difficult in terms of running the school and was replaced. It was then decided that the format with 19 colleges would not work and since Johns Hopkins was the nearest, Johns Hopkins took it over in the ‘50s. For the first 5 or so years, SAIS was sponsored by all 19 colleges. The original dean brought the library and the librarian to SAIS and was often seen in compromising positions in the stacks according to rumors. The original dean also had a secretary who was a real “crackerjack” who loved to dance according to Dr. Leonard. Four couples, including Dr. Leonard, used to meet at her house once a month and cook one of the times throughout the year. Every Thursday, there was an adult, singles place that is now an embassy somewhere on 17th or 18th street that held dances. Dr. Leonard used to take the secretary, Rosemary Woods, dancing. The chairman of the board at SAIS at that time was Christian Herter, a congressman from Massachusetts and he liked young congressman Nixon. That fall in 1948, Nixon won the Senate seat in California by vilifying Helen Gahagan Douglas, the wife of an actor, by calling her a Communist. When Nixon took office, he needed an assistant so Christian Herter got Rosemary Woods to work for him. Rosemary Woods and Dr. Leonard still dance on Thursday nights. She lived at that time on 2000 Connecticut Avenue across from what is now the Hilton, in a very nice apartment. She had two or three sisters who were nuns and was from Zanesville, Ohio, a steel town, from a very Irish family with red hair. Later on, she was at the White House with Nixon. Dr. Leonard was in Paris with UNESCO at that time and his daughter was in school at Paris. All of the children had to write to the heads of state as an exercise. So they got a letter in the White House (there are hundreds of volunteers who read the correspondences and interesting ones are sent up). The letter was from a little girl in Paris who said she was half American, half Arab and half English and studying in Paris. Rosemary said, “Is the last name Leonard?”. That’s another connection Dr. Leonard had with Rosemary. When Rosemary was with Nixon when Nixon was Vice President, Dr. Leonard was able to help arrange for a group of Arab Palestinian students to meet Nixon. Nixon’s mother was a Quaker and Dr. Leonard told Nixon that Nixon’s mother used to raise money for Quaker schools in Ramallah. He said to Nixon that Nixon knows all about the Palestine question and asked why he always votes on the side of the Zionists. Nixon’s response was that the Arabs don’t vote in America. Dr. Leonard responded questioning the morality of that position at which point Nixon turned his face on Dr. Leonard and didn’t shake Dr. Leonard’s hand when he left. Dr. Leonard had a wonderful time at SAIS and his French teacher was a young woman, Ann Sayey (sp?) who is now Ann Sele dela (sp). Her family was one of the most prominent families in Paris socially. Her mother’s family, the Devendels (sp) are the Carnegies of France. They own a home that is a whole city block, but they could not get a penny out of France in those days. Ann had gone to Columbia and did a Masters in English Literature. She was a classmate and roommate of Ann Kirkpatrick, who served as the US ambassador to the UN. There was a French ambassador, Monsieur Boneig, whose wife was a Jewish woman from Alexandria, Egypt. During the war, she had a hat shop in Manhattan that made a lot of money. In those days, ambassadors had to do a lot of entertaining on their own money. During Easter-time, Madame Boneig had as her guest Marlene Dietrich (sp). They had a dinner part in which they invited Ann because Madame Boneig was very interested in being in society in Paris. Dr. Leonard sat next to Marlene Dietrich at the dinner table and during the dinner she told a story about going into Paris the day it was liberated. She got her driver to take her to where she had a seamstress who used to make her underwear. They were shot at two or three times as the Germans were still in Paris. When they arrived, they learned the seamstress had gotten in a shipment of skin-colored Vietnamese silk just before the war began and spent the war making embroidered underwear for Marlene Dietrich. At the dinner table, Marlene Dietrich opened her dress to show them the beautifully embroidered bra that was made for her. Years later, when Dr. Leonard was at Oxford doing his post-doc work, Dietrich came and did a show. Dr. Leonard met her again, but she did not remember him. He told her the dinner party story and again she opened her dress and exclaimed that she was still wearing that underwear—she had a lifetime’s worth! He met her a few times since and the next time he saw her, she did remember him. One of the most interesting people on faculty in Dr. Leonard’s opinion was Brigadier General James Hayworth Dunn who had worked during the war in British intelligence in Egypt. Dr. Leonard describes him as a cross between Winston Churchill and King Farouk of Egypt, but with the worst qualities of both—a heavy drinker and fat man with lots of energy who slept only two or three hours a day and was into everything. He had become a Muslim in order become an advisor to Hassan al Benna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Dr. Leonard never knew if he should believe him or not because the stories were out of this world. After he converted, Brigadier General James Hayworth Dunn married one of the most famous Egyptian actresses in the Muslim world and then he married a very rich Egyptian cotton heiress. When SAIS hired him, they said they’d pay his transport from England to America. He came on the Normandy in a suite with two servants and his own car, but only stayed at SAIS one year. Hassan al Benna was killed Thanksgiving weekend of 1948 in Egypt probably by the British intelligence. Within a month or so, al Bennah’s son-in-law and heir came to see Heritha (sp? 19:42) and Dr. Leonard met him. The son-in-law was a drinker, gambler and womanizer and destroyed the puritan reputation of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hassan al Benna had founded the Muslim Brotherhood on the same basis as the YMCA—self-help, keep yourself clean, clean your mind, clean your body, clean your soul. It’s the only organization in the history of Egypt that started in the villages and went up to the capital. Another professor of Dr. Leonard’s was the Middle East expert at the Agriculture Department who had attended the American University in Beirut. That October was the year Truman was running for president on his own and no one in the country thought he could be elected. Bob Hall, later the first full-time Alumni Secretary of SAIS and another person boarded in a house on Florida Avenue. The woman that owned it was the daughter of an American admiral. She was an astrologist and did the charts for Truman and Dewey. She predicted early in October that Truman was going to win, which at the time they thought was very funny. Dr. Leonard had a friend who was assistant Navy attaché to Truman in the White House who used take Margaret as an escort. This friend went with Margaret to the astrologist and told reporters about the prediction but after Truman won, the astrologist got quite a reputation in town. When Dr. Leonard graduated from SAIS, Aramco did not choose him from the pool of people to work for them. He’s ultimately glad he didn’t get that position because he wouldn’t want to buy goodies for the Saudi royal family and provide other favors, which Aramco did. He ending up getting a job with Union Carbide to go to India but before he was sent out, he worked in his area in the southeast and decided that was not for him. While Dr. Leonard was at SAIS there was no auditorium in the building. They had lectures in the dining room but used the Quaker Meeting on Florida Avenue for big lectures and Dr. Leonard started going there. The secretary to the leader of the Quaker Meeting had been a teacher in Ramallah. He learned that the Quakers started girls’ schools in Ramallah in 1866 and boys’ schools later on which became the best schools in Palestine. They also started one around the same time in Lebanon. In 1888, the British took the ones in Lebanon and the Americans took the ones in Palestine. Dr. Leonard found out that they had a fellowship for someone to teach science for a year and applied in 1950 but did not get it. But they did offer him $800 plus board and room for the year to teach English, which Dr. Leonard accepted. Friends of his were traveling through Europe that summer and Dr. Leonard decided to go with them as far as Venice. He decided he would go from Paris to Jerusalem overland. He thinks he was probably the first person to do this after World War II because when he was in Paris he could not get a visa to Yugoslavia, but when he got to Rome, he could. The Yugoslavs showed him how to follow chalk lines to get through mine fields to the Greek border. He made it overland all the way to Ramallah where he would be teaching. He taught that year in Ramallah and then came back. The Korean War began when he was in Paris that summer. Because Dr. Leonard had not served for two years in World War II, he was drafted...He was planning on teaching another year in Ramallah, then travel to Kashmir to teach a year in India and then travel to Japan to again teach at a Quaker School there. He loved to travel and this was the way he could afford to see the world deeply and not flip through, like a tourist. But he had to go back because of his draft case in 1951. In Easter time in 1951 in Ramallah, he had gone to Amman and bought a small motorcycle and drove it to Petra, which he then drove to Haifa and had shipped back to America when he had to return home to fight the draft case. After three years, he finally won conscientious objector status. He spent a short time in jail because of mistakes in his case but was studying Arabic and Islam at the Kennedy School Hartford Seminary. He then applied to go back and teach in Ramallah but was instead put in charge of Quaker work in Ramallah. By that time, he spoke the colloquial language quite well and in ’57 he met and married a Palestinian woman living in Beirut and brought her back to the States. They then went to Harvard so Dr. Leonard could work on his PhD. Because Dr. Leonard was a teacher, he never made money. He did work for UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees as the Assistant to the Director of Education. After he finished his doctorate, he worked as an advisor for UNRWA from ’82 to ’86 and spent one year with the UNDP in Jerusalem. After that, he stayed on in Ramallah and started a program to teach teachers how to teach discussion-based education partly funded by a Fulbright and partly from other sources. When he finally spent all of his money, he quit and came home in 1996. He has a program now with the Ministry of Education in Jordan and has helped institute one hour of open-ended discussion in all the schools in Jordan from the 6th to the 10th grade which is a project he’s still working on. Dr. Leonard’s daughter convinced him to come back to the States in 1996 because she and her husband were moving to England with his grandson and she wanted him to look after her house in Cleveland Park. Dr. Leonard then decided to study Shakespearean acting with the Washington Shakespeare Theater but he’s not good at remembering the exact words. He did that for a few years. He was staying with a friend in New York in 2004 when the US got into the Iraq War. Dr. Leonard was angry and decided to run for Congress. His district in east Tennessee has voted Republican since the Civil War. He won the democratic nomination, receiving more votes than all other democrats on the ticket combined. He also got a higher percentage of votes than any democrat had gotten in 100 years—30%. When he went to run, the National Guard in east Tennessee just received orders to go to Iraq. As a conscientious objector in a state that is known for volunteering for wars, Dr. Leonard was in deep trouble with the veterans. He called the Executive Officer of the National Guard and offered his services to provide background information to those going to Iraq. He gave three two-hour lectures to each of 8 units in east Tennessee. In spring 2005, Dr. Leonard went to Iraq for three weeks with a Christian peace maker team without guard or armor. He was then embedded as a journalist with the Tennessee National Guard in Iraq. At that time, his unit was the only one that had recruited, trained and left Iraqis in their place because they knew how to deal with Iraqis and because the average age was 42 and not 22 like the soldiers. Dr. Leonard believes that going into Iraq was one of the biggest mistakes that America ever made, but even when we went in, we weren’t very smart. He says we only had 12 people in the army who knew Arabic, we’ve used 6,500 Kurds as interpreters, and of the 45 interpreters in his unit 35/40 didn’t have better than third grade English. He was surprised that more people weren’t killed. He says that the British had ruled Iraq from the air, with bribes to the Sunni sheiks and with intelligence and he wonders why America didn’t do that too. He says that the reason we stopped fighting so much during the surge, when we added extra troops, wasn’t because of the 35,000 troops but because we finally starting bribing the sheiks. He says we would have saved thousands of lives if we had been smart enough to use “subsidies” or bribes since the beginning. He says that anybody with a SAIS intelligence could have told you that. Now, Dr. Leonard continues to travel to Jordan to promote discussion-based education. He suffered for a year from pain in his leg and hip, but a Lebanese shi’ah surgeon operated on him at Johns Hopkins on January 21 and he feels absolutely no pain. He’s going back around the world now like he’s always done. Dr. Leonard would advise current students at SAIS that learning a language and becoming an expert on a country is not enough—they need to have a specialty. There are many, many people in these countries that know the language and culture, so it’s not enough. He’d also advise not to just learn the language but to learn the culture as well. Afief Tenous (sp?) taught him the culture of the Middle East when he was at SAIS. He took them to a Middle East restaurant near Foggy Bottom, taught them the different foods and how they were made. He was a Cornell PhD. Dr. Leonard’s Hartford degree was a joint degree with Syracuse in Literacy Journalism because he was interested in doing literacy work with the Arabs at that time. At Syracuse, he met people who had known Afief at Cornell. In Beirut, he met Afief’s sister who was married to an Iraqi who wrote the first book on Arab education. American University Beirut (AUB) was started by idealist New Englanders who gave their lives to teach the very best liberal arts education to empower people to think. Dr. Leonard says this education transformed the Middle East. All outstanding leaders up until the ‘70s and ‘80s were AUB graduates. In addition to learning the language, students need to learn the culture. And when you go there, Dr. Leonard suggests not associating with the rich diplomats but getting to know people in the youth, labor and women’s movements. This is the problem in Egypt and Libya according to Dr. Leonard. Nobody knows what the youth are thinking even though they are a majority of the population and nobody predicted what would happen in Egypt. Dr. Leonard believes it’s wonderful provided they can follow through but so far we have not seen much leadership. One of the big differences that Dr. Leonard thinks people at SAIS should know is that for 300 years we’ve been part of the Western emphasis on individualism, individual identity but the rest of the world, especially the Middle East, values group identity more than individual identity. That’s how people can become suicide bombers because it’s about your family’s honor and prestige. Dr. Leonard says that the most interesting thing happening in Egypt now is that it wasn’t the Muslim Brotherhood or any right-wing fanatical group that initiated the events in Tahrir Square. Dr. Leonard says what was happening in Egypt was fascinating but also frightening because it was composed of sound bites. Egypt has 3 times the population they can afford and 1/5 the jobs they need and that cannot be solved by one leader. Dr. Leonard has a hard time keeping out of politics and keeping out of analyzing because of his years at SAIS. He says Washington is an amazing place for students and he says the Friday evening get-togethers in the summertime are a very important part of SAIS. Students will run into SAIS people wherever they go. Even Dr. Leonard, who was just in the fifth class, was running into people all the time who had been to SAIS or who had studied Arabic with him at Harvard and Oxford. He also says that language is a tool but also the way in. And you have to be the type of person who is willing to try to understand other people. In fall of 2009, Dr. Leonard was in the Middle East and he stayed in 10 different homes with 7 different religious groups and in every one of those homes he was “Uncle Gra’ham”. Being accepted enough to be criticized is one of his greatest accomplishments. He learned by being part of the community. The Quakers had been in Ramallah for nearly 100 years but he was first one to break convention of being addressed by his full name and was just called by his first name. Dr. Leonard also suggests that if students are going to work anywhere that was formally part of the Ottoman Empire, they need to understand the Millet System. He explains that the Turks took over from the Ottomans a system that allowed each religious community to have its own laws and court for marriage, inheritance and divorce and any other crime committed within the community. In the former Ottoman Empire, these communities have remained separated. When asked the main difference between Sunnis and Shi’ites, Dr. Leonard says theologically there is very little difference but the communities have 500 years of history hating each other and killing each other. It’s important, says Dr. Leonard, to understand history. He also says that in the Arab world, Arabic has no past, present or future—just completed action or uncompleted action. He explains that all the past is rumpled up together—people are still worried about the Crusades. So when Bush made a remark about the US crusade in Iraq, the Middle East was ignited with hatred for him. Dr. Leonard focused a few days on history in his training with trainers in Jordan. He teaches them how to do a timeline because they have no timeline in their head and don’t know if Mohammad or Napoleon came first. He says it’s crucial to understand the different way people look at things. Dr. Leonard married a Palestinian who was a superb cook. Dr. Leonard also found that his Southern mentality translated well in the Middle East in that he was taught to understand people based on their relationships to other people (knowing who married whom and who was related to whom). Dr. Leonard now knows the people and the clans in Ramallah. Dr. Leonard knows Hannah Ashwari, the Palestinian spokesperson. She had a cousin who came from America to get married. At the reception the night before the wedding, the cousin said this woman kept calling her auntie and asked Hannah what the relationship was. Hannah did not know but said to ask Gra’ham (Dr. Leonard) and he did in fact figure out the relationship which is evidence of how well he knows some of the families in Ramallah. Dr. Leonard kept up with Ann SeeleDelaselatr (sp). She became undersecretary of the OECD. Dr. Leonard says she’s a very brilliant economist. She had the idea of the Club of the Sahel in which she coordinated across all sectors. She is now retired and lives in Paris. She has three happily married daughters and lots of grandchildren. She lives in a chateau now and has given over her big home. Paula Pepke (sp), Nitze’s niece who was named for him, was one of Dr. Leonard’s classmates in 1949. Her father founded the Aspen Institute in Colorado and was a University of Chicago graduate like Nitze. Nitze is Paula’s father’s brother-in-law. There were only six girls in his class. He ran into Marianne Smith in Belgrade when getting a visa in Yugoslavia. Many SAIS alumni work for the CIA, he says. The CIA began in the fall ’48 or spring of ’49, so there were many SAIS graduates in the agency. Dr. Leonard also recalls a fellow from the Philippines who was very interested in Genevieve Collins but she was not interested in him. One of their classmates graduated from Harvard from a well-to-do Boston family and he was the socialist in residence. The classmate then went on to start a newspaper in Dartmouth, married a Swiss socialite, got divorced, married one of the daughters of Sir Harry Oakes in the Bahamas and became a rich banker in the Bahamas. One of Dr. Leonard’s most interesting classmates, Rosenhower, teaches at George Washington and had written a book about Eleanor Roosevelt before he came to SAIS. He also describes a classmate, Barrel, who is now a bureaucrat but in Dr. Leonard’s opinion, had a very bureaucratic mind. Dr. Leonard remembers his filing system and being awed by it. Dr. Leonard also remembers a brilliant classmate from California who eventually burned out. Dr. Leonard suspects that Brigadier General James Hayworth Dunn really did work for British intelligence but got kicked out and that’s why he went into academia. Hayworth Dunn’s son spoke about four languages and Hayworth Dunn told them it’s very easy for a child to learn many languages provided each person who speaks to the child only speaks that language. Dr. Leonard did his PhD on applied linguistics at Harvard and this one of the things he emphasized. He raised his children to speak only in Arabic and it wasn’t until after his divorce when he moved to England, that his children learned English. He was intent that they learn proper English and not American hillbilly English. When Dr. Leonard ran for Congress in east Tennessee, he was afraid people would consider him a “carpetbagger”, but his family was pioneers and he’s related to a lot of people there and they accepted the fact that he spoke standard American English. They also did not consider him snobbish.Item Guenther, Ken - Oral History Interview(2011-06-01) Guenther, KenKenneth Guenther ‘59 attended the University of Rochester and was a key student in their new Non-Western civilizations program focusing on South and Southeast Asia. Upon graduating, he attended SAIS which was very different at that time. The campus was a former girl’s school on Florida Avenue and it was small. The library was the former women’s gymnasium, and still had the aroma of sneakers. Life at SAIS consisted of lectures, research and taking tests while interacting with a diverse and fascinating faculty and student base. One of Guenther’s most significant and eccentric professors at SAIS was Paul Linebarger, the professor who taught about then Communist China, and Taiwan. Linebarger had a glass eye. Occasionally he would take it out and roll it on the table at any offending student. At that time, the Southeast Asian program was still in the formation stage. SAIS was exploring the establishment of permanent Study centers in Indonesia and Burma. They had a little center in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. In 1954 SAIS decided to establish the Rangoon Hopkins Center for Southeast Asian Studies in Rangoon, Burma. In l959 this Center was headed by a senior professor, William Johnstone. While at SAIS Washington Guenther remembers two fine economics professors Professor Phillips and Isaiah Frank. There was a small student body but already back then a very interesting international mix. His roommate was a Coptic Christian Egyptian named Samir Zoghby whose father had run the Suez Cana. There we three Italian graduate students, one Finn, one Indonesian complimenting a diverse American base. In 1955 through l957 while Guenther was at the non-Western civilizations program at the University of Rochester, he became a disciple of Harry J Benda. While Guenther was in Burma, Benda went to Yale. When Guenther returned home from Burma, he began his Ph.D. studies at Yale under Dr. Benda. Guenther then decided he wasn’t an academic and wanted to be actively engaged in more practical work. He went down the path of joining the Foreign Service and, after some way stops, ultimately did so in 1965.The Foreign Service sent him to Chile from 1966 to 1968. He next worked for a Senator Jacob K. Javits of New York. Then Guenther accepted a presidential appointment as the Alternate U.S. Executive Director of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) from 1973 to 1974. Through a series of events, Guenther then became the acting STR at the White House for six months in 1974 to 1975. Guenther left the White House later in 1975 to head up the Federal Reserve Board’s office of Congressional Relations. He served under Chairman Burns, Miller and Volcker and was instrumental in securing the passage of the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980, the first major banking deregulation law which also buttressed the Fed’s monetary powers. Then at age 44, Guenther left the government and went into banking. In the private sector, he headed up the national trade association representing community banks (the Independent Community Bankers of America, ICBA) retiring in 2004. He received The AMERICAN BANKER’S prestigious lifetime achievement award in 2005. In retirement Guenther served on corporate and non-profit boards including as chairman of the Washington Campus and as an executive volunteer of the AARP Foundation’s money management programs serving the indigent elderly. He also has written a financial blog. Guenther advises today’s SAIS students that “your life’s and career ball is going to bounce in ways you really cannot predict, but SAIS will provide you with the foundation to be able to continuing playing ever more responsible and demanding “tennis”. Be flexible. Strongly consider going to the study Centers in Bologna or Nanjing—it is a missed opportunity if you don’t."Item Hollick, Ann - Oral History Interview(2010-12-01) Hollick, AnnWhat originally brought Dr. Hollick to SAIS was the statement by John F. Kennedy, “Think what you can do for your country”. She was at Berkeley majoring in 16th century English literature planning to become a professor of English literature and she thought “Oops, I better think about what I can do for my country”. With the launch of Sputnik, there was no graduate school money available for the humanities anyway so she quickly looked about and found that she could happily switch to a career in international affairs and do something for her country. Since she had studied German as an English literature major and already had French and had Spanish as a native language, SAIS was persuaded she could handle the career shift. She was happy to choose SAIS over Columbia because she thought the two year program would be an advantage to prepare herself for a career shift of that magnitude. She was born in Panama and when came to the US, she realized there was a great deal of variety out there and it was natural for her to think in terms of international affairs. Kennedy was a great motivator for all in that era and with the Vietnam War, people were thinking more globally. She remembers the air conditioning system that didn’t quite work at SAIS. It was the new building and they were having a hard time adjusting it, but once it was adjusted, President Kennedy was assassinated. She was living at the international student house 2 blocks from SAIS and the entire country was plunged into mourning. She began to ask herself, “What am I doing here?”. It was a very shocking time. The faculty was very supportive and very diverse so finding her way through SAIS was a good experience. She was complemented regularly on the fact that she did not use jargon at SAIS. She never told the faculty that she did not know jargon. She was simply going to rely on her English. She did all of the required courses. She did one year at SAIS. She then took off to do one year in Sri Lanka with the US Educational Foundation and then came back to finish up. She took all of the required examinations during that time. SAIS had not changed too much from the time she entered in 1963 to the time she left in 1966, but the air conditioning was certainly working and that was a great plus. She was so comfortable with SAIS that she resolved when she went on with her graduate work that she would go to Homewood as an extension of SAIS because SAIS was not at that time comfortable with PhD students. It was an easy transition for her and a way to keep SAIS, in a sense, as her base. She says that it is always a vivid experience when some catastrophic event occurs. Being in Washington at the time (of Kennedy’s assassination) was particularly traumatic…She was in the student house with her other dorm mates watching when Lee Harvey Oswald committed the second assassination. That was two blocks from SAIS. Within the school itself, she and colleagues went into a state of mourning. But classes proceeded and things went on. It was Washington itself that was memorable for her. The city basically shut down and she participated in her first national funeral. Paul Linebarger was a constant delight for her. There were lots of very interesting people, including students from Bologna. She got to like just about all of her classmates and she came back to teach at SAIS. Robert Osgood was her mentor from SAIS who became her dissertation advisor. She intentionally connect the two—SAIS and Homewood. Her career has been in government, both in Congress and in the Executive Branch, as well as academia. She has basically a three-part career…In Washington, the era was such that the most interesting jobs appeared in the area of Vietnam. She was working in the Library of Congress when she was offered a position with Senator Fulbright to run the Pentagon Papers hearing. That was a very memorable opportunity for her to interview the leaders who were engaged in the Vietnam War. It took her away from her area of expertise, which at Homewood had evolved to Ocean Policy. She found that Senator Fulbright was looking for someone who was not known for their stand on the Vietnam War. Her credentials were perfect in that regard because she was an expert on ocean policy and not on the Vietnam War. She had a wonderful experience putting together the hearings with Senator Fulbright. She says that Senator Fulbright was very clear that these should be a lesson in history so that future generations could use the history and that they would not be biased in the way they approached the hearings. It was very exciting for her to interview people like Bob McNamara when she was freshly out of school. She then moved into the Executive Branch—Treasury Department and State Department. She felt very fortunate for all of the opportunities she had in both places. Having been moved from being an expert on ocean polity to an expert on Vietnam, she was moved to a position with Ambassador Tom Pickering and she ran his planning office, which was good for her as a broadening experience. The name of his bureau was Oceans, Environment and Scientific Affairs. She says they were under constant harassment from Congress at the time for their work in those areas. She learned about the culture in the Executive Branch; the culture in the State Department. One of the things that was really noticeable to her was that you have to be able to transform yourself when you move from agency to agency. In the Treasury Department, she says that George Schultz was very easy to work with. In the State Department, a much larger operation, you had to find your way through the hierarchy and find good people to work with –some were better than others. But she says it was a very welcoming environment, in fact, for people like her who like thoughtful work. As evidenced by recent revelations of the diplomatic correspondents, she says there is an emphasis in the State Department on reporting and information sharing. She then went back into academia when the opportunity presented itself. She never became a Foreign Service Officer—she always stayed with the Civil Service which meant she was brought in as a Senior Executive Service Officer but she resolved to try to work in the State Department fashion (which was to move every 2 years), allowing her to become an expert over and over in different areas with a very steep learning curve at the beginning of the assignment…The State Department was good at accommodating her even though she wasn’t a Foreign Service Officer. One of her most rewarding experiences was working with Ambassador Pickering during the Iraq War. Ambassador Pickering was the US-UN rep and she was in charge of his Washington office. It was a constant problem and delight for her to gather information on what was going on in Iraq and to share that with her boss in New York and to manage the US-UN office in Washington and connect it, with all of the ambassadors in New York, to the Washington scene. That was a true challenge for her but she believes Pickering is always a great person to work for. She felt she chose her boss well and he was formerly briefed and formerly informed every step of the way. On the whole, she found the State Department to be a very, very good place for someone who had trained at SAIS. They accept your ability to learn quickly and that fit in well with her SAIS experience. She says it is great fun to work on Africa. She did at one point become an African specialist and as an officer who specializes in African affairs, she will tell you that it was a delightful time flying over rhinoceros, traveling to Victoria Falls and doing the things that needed to be done to help with the AID program. If you plan to work in Congress, she states that it is really important to choose your committee and senior boss. But she feels the State Department has a culture that is pretty solid and that the Treasury Department does as well. Highly qualified people are in the Department of Treasury—one will not always find that on Capitol Hill in her opinion. She also recommends that anyone who goes to SAIS know what they want and what their areas of expertise are and try to find people who are congenial to be able to make a contribution and excel. She personally finds it refreshing to move from being a practitioner to a scholar/teacher. Her friend Joe Nye, who came in to be a Deputy Secretary of State, arrived from Harvard never having worked for the government but having written many books. She remembers watching him in his first days in Washington and watching him get up to speed. She realized how much it helped her as a scholar and as a practitioner to have both experiences. She watched Secretary Nye learn very quickly what needed to be done. She encourages people who have the opportunity who are working in the government to spend some time out and for people who are working in academia to spend some time in government so that they understand both sides of the equation. She could not have had a better experience as an academic. She has published a number of books which was always rewarding because you get to go into things in great depth. She still goes to conferences with colleagues from former periods of time. She says that in academia you learn a totally different way of looking at the world than when you are in the government on the front line. She remembers sitting in a conference room where she was asked the question, “What does the State Department think about blah?”. She was coming as an academic to this meeting for this first time and she remembers evaluating that question. She was the “State Department” in the room with a bunch of scientists and what-not. She was shocked at being asked the question and asked to represent the State Department. Her first reaction was that the State Department is a large, gray building—it doesn’t think anything. She kept that to herself though, thought carefully and came forward with a position that made perfect sense. She was gratified to report that the scientists were happy to have such a reasoned position from the “State Department”. She thinks that is the hardest thing about shifting from academia into government—you are expected to think like an agency, you are expected to imagine that you are a policy position—and then it’s really fun and you can be creative and make things up, which is what you want to do and do it well. Her academic career includes publications—Princeton University Press, Hopkins Press, etc. She taught at SAIS, MIT, National Defense University and Joint Military Intelligence College. She’s been able to move around and each of these was a refreshing experience that gave her the opportunity to publish. She would recommend, if you’re going into a government career, to take sabbaticals, refresh yourself and tune yourself up. She says there used to be a great program at the State Department—she doesn’t think it exists anymore—called the Senior Seminar where you are obliged to spend a year thinking and traveling around with members from other agencies. She learned a lot about other agencies during that one year…She hopes that SAIS students will consider the culture at each agency and where they fit in best in terms of their personality and their mindset. One of her most interesting careers was to be morphed into a trade expert. The officer who was due to become the Trade officer for the State Department was suddenly reassigned overseas at the last minute because her husband was going to be the ambassador overseas so Dr. Hollick was chosen to become head of the Trade Office. She agreed and then learned about trade but basically walked into the subject cold. She says this is something that happens to most Foreign Service officers who start to read cable traffic. She had to learn in trading about exotic, esoteric things (hammered nails, water beds) because the State Department deals with everything. She remembers one meeting they had where they were trying to decide how they were going to punish the Europeans and it was insane! They were at the office of the trade representative and there was that “wonderful, little Belgium”, who is one of the least harmful countries and you’re trying to decide what retaliatory measures you’re going to levy on these countries for some particular trade infraction. She says it’s truly an exciting career to stay in international affairs and if you move, it gets even more exciting because you end up in situations that are just bizarre. The endive is the principal export of Belgium. She had not known that but she says that if you want to affect Belgium policy, you need to know things like that and what the principal exports are…All of these sorts of things become part of your portfolio as a State Department officer if you’re working in the international trade area…She cannot say enough about the diligence, intelligence and ability of the Foreign Service officer to get quickly up to speed. Dr. Hollick’s MIT students were the most challenging. They were amazing and always thought out of the box—they would ask the most probing and stimulating questions. She loved the officers who are in re-training like at the Joint Military Intelligence College because they are very diligent government officers who are trying to broaden themselves--she could do some fun things there but they are very different. She believes that where you go to school reflects where you come from. If you’re in a government re-training university, you’re in a very different situation than if you’re an undergraduate at MIT…She’s never taught at her undergraduate alma mater, Berkeley, but she bets that would be like MIT, very challenging. She mentioned a bit about her career on Capitol Hill with the time she spent on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (not recorded), which was exciting. She then had really calm work at the Library of Congress. She says there are a lot of opportunities there—it depends on your senator, your congressman, and the committee. She’s watching how these committees are changing now over time. She’s not sure that she would want to work on Capitol Hill because when she was there, there was a very strong bi-partisan effort and every committee had a clear understanding that members worked as a group…From what she gathers now, that national consciousness of the nation’s interests is not prevalent. As a SAIS student, she would recommend being very careful about whom you’re working for and what the mission is of the committee, the congressman and how comfortable you would feel with that. In general, when you work at an agency, you also want to know about your own comfort level with what they are doing, but, she says, this is especially true on the Hill. She says that the Library of Congress is a very nice place to work if you have an academic bent…They allow you to work indirectly for congressmen who need information quickly, but of a general sort. Dr. Hollick says that the students at SAIS continue to be excellent. She is happy to work with them, as she continues to do, on the SAIS Review. She thinks that the world they are moving into is very different than the world she moved into. At the point of her graduation, the United States was the pre-eminent country/power and there was a lot of reward in going into a career in government because you had influence not only in this country’s foreign policy but you had influence around the world as well. That is no longer true now and students can no longer expect to be making global policy. If students are willing to be comfortable with shaping US policy she believes that there are still a lot of rewards out there. She suggests choosing your agency carefully and knowing who the secretary at any point in time is going to be because the head of an agency makes a big difference. She would caution every student to know themselves, know where they are likely to fit. If a student is interested in business, she states there are many opportunities out there in international business, especially if they have an Asian orientation. But she also thinks it’s always good to be flexible because over a career of 40 years, you may have to shift—the economy may change, the government will change. You want to be prepared to do different things. That can be refreshing but it’s also wise to be prepared. Her memories of SAIS are excellent, fond and wonderful. She still enjoys her interactions there. She thinks the students there should make the most of Washington while at SAIS in addition to the faculty, who are very amenable to student involvement. She also recommends taking advantage of the think tanks that are all around SAIS, engaging with organizations, getting internships and creating a network.Item Rose, Charles - Oral History Interview(2011-04-01) Rose, CharlesOriginally, Charles Rose came to SAIS because he thought he wanted to go into the State Department for which he found he was entirely unsuited, so he never went. He thought he was interested in the State Department because he was interested in history – his major as an undergraduate at Hamilton College. When he was at SAIS, he remembers it having a very run down building on Florida Avenue, in a so-so neighborhood. He recalls the back alley being swarmed with large rats. He recalls the faculty and being trained in French, which he eventually learned to speak and write. The best tutoring he received was from Madam Chabaneau who daughter had a career in journalism in Washington, D.C. The one professor he had at SAIS who he thought was extremely sophisticated was Mario Toscano. The most interesting part of his attending SAIS was his fellow students, some of whom had excellent careers in the Foreign Service. He particularly remembers David Corn who had an interesting career, but who has now retired and has written a couple of books (one on Ethiopia). He remembers having a lot of fun and not ever knowing exactly what he wanted to do then. He particularly remembers the librarian, Frank Shork, who was interesting and who invited him and his friends out to his country home – they all had a good time. He also remembers Dean Thayer who was extremely tolerant of all of Rose’s ‘vagaries’ and he remembers him fondly. He firmly believes in the concept of experience and thinks that it is a curious thing. In hind sight, he believes SAIS was a very good experience because it gave him a lot of time to read, which he always did, and mature. Also, some of his later interests started at SAIS, particularly that of Roman law….and that was because Rose studied international law at SAIS. He did take and pass the written portion of the Foreign Service exam, but never pursued it as a career. He later went to Columbia to work on his PhD, which he did receive, in history, and for a number of years, he taught history. He feels that he really started to learn the most during his experiences in teaching. He first started teaching at a school called Queens College – he taught a contemporary civilization course – and there for four or five years. He then went to teacher’s college where he volunteered doing development work, and then got his first job a year later at Finch College (and has since closed its doors). After that, he went to the New York Studio School, which was fascinating and had wonderful artists who were also teachers. That school’s existence was based entirely on fund raising. Rose later lectured part-time at NYU in their general studies department, while still doing development work for the New York Studio School. By this time, he had done a tremendous amount of reading, so he had a completely different view of history than he had while he was at SAIS. One of his lectures was picked cited as outstanding by one of the deans. Because of this, Rose was almost tenured at NYU, but he never received it as the dean who offered him the tenure died four weeks later. After this dean passed away, Rose realized he needed to find a job that allowed him to earn more of a living. He left the New York Studio School and worked right next door at a school called St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s School, doing development work and teaching. He helped this school get their first large grants. He had gone from place to place until he found himself as vice president at a social service agency, where he helped them raise a lot of money. There, he focused heavily on a project related to foster children, who he deemed who in most need of education (his passion). He still does fund raising work for this organization and helps turn up scholarships for these foster children. They have produced several college graduates and even a doctor (a woman who he met on a sidewalk of New York, had no parents and did not even have a warm coat to wear in the dead of winter). Rose recently started a new project to provide tutor / mentoring to children in his neighborhood and he raised $130K from two or three different foundations. He believes that it is not large projects, but the small, targeted projects that help the social infrastructure of our country. Overall, he is mainly interested in taking people off the streets and finding ways to elevate them into the middle class. When asked about what advice he has for current students today, his reply is: “I don’t think advice is worth anything. I think what has to happen is that people have to learn from experience. Advice is not only cheap, but it’s mostly useless. [laugh] Now, it might be very good advice, by the way,…it’s not that. It’s that you really can’t do anything with it because temperamentally, you’re not suited for that advice. It’s interesting….I think I probably work with greater concentration now at 79, than I did when I was a young person….I’m much more focused.” He also mentions having had a wonderful experienced in his year at the Bologna Center, where he met a diverse group of people. In those days, it was in a farming community. He would go out in a local church and enjoy observing the peasant community. He began to see the role of the Catholic Church historically, as the center of any given community (around which all activity happened). He also went to a house that existed on the periphery and remembers there being a dog house behind it – a model of the little villa, Casa de la Cane Lupo (where the local people suggested that a wolf would come out at night) – this began Rose’s interest in myth and all that has come with that from past historical documents. He wishes that everyone, particularly those involved in government, had a deep knowledge of the past (to help in learning from it)…as in time and in evolution, people would have a better understanding of the mentalities they are dealing with. Overall, Rose says that he enjoyed SAIS and believes that today, it offers a great deal to anyone who can benefit from it.Item Bockner, Gordon - Oral History Interview(2011-05-01) Bockner, GordonPlease view attached audio file. Thank you.Item Oglesby, Sam - Oral History Interview(2011-04-01) Oblesby, SamSitting in his kitchen in the South Bronx of New York City, Sam Oglesby explained that he had always thought about going to graduate school, ever since his undergraduate experience at the University of Virginia. As his undergraduate experience was not ideal, he wanted to go back to graduate school where he could ‘do it right’ the second time. After graduating from UVA, he was drafted into and did two years in the Army where he felt it was a wonderful experienced – it brought him into the real world and shaped him up. For those two years, he was in Libya. After the Army, though he thought graduate school would have been a good idea at the time, he opted to not do it then as he had landed himself in a job (like his father) as a diplomat in the State Department. Why, he thought, would he need to go to graduate school if he was already in the job that he wanted graduate school to help him get? So, he stayed in the State Department for some time, until he was suddenly let go (for reasons unbeknownst to him at the time – which he later heard, second hand, because he was gay). As an ex-diplomat and unemployed in Washington, D.C., he found himself in a depressed state and seeing the option to apply to graduate school, he decided to apply to SAIS, and he got in. After getting his MA, he was once again a happy camper…for that, he is thankful to SAIS. His most vivid memories of SAIS are of the Bologna. He recalls Professor Federico Mancini who taught Italian Politics. He was not only brilliant and extraordinarily articulate, he was most of all a human being who taught us to relate to Italy and get into the heart of Italy….the people, the politics, the culture. This taught him later, how to relate to different people and different cultures throughout his career. For him, SAIS was more about what was happening to him outside of the classroom than within the walls of academia. At the time, Bologna was run by the Italian Communist Party, very efficiently and rationally. He suddenly became aware as an American, who had been brought up on the platform of the evil Communists and the Cold War rhetoric, that the Italian Communists were sort of ‘Franklin Delano Roosevelt Democrats.’ The Italian Communist Party at the time was run by an Italian count and their agenda was very ‘New Deal Democrat.’ So, Oglesby went to Communist Party rallies, drank the wine, soaked up the food and the culture….and he rode his bike with one hand, while the other holding an open umbrella, with his girlfriend riding on the back. Though he continued to hold a U.S. passport, he felt that the experience in Bologna made him a citizen of the world. At the Washington, D.C. campus of SAIS, Oglesby recalls how exhilarating it was to walk out of a stimulating lecture by Professor Charlie Pearson (who is still lecturing therein international economics) or have a class with Professor Frank Tucker in international relations and then saunter over to Dupont Circle and hang out with the crowds of people. He describes that being in D.C. in the early 1970s was a special and exciting place to be. They were a time of foment and excitement in the U.S. and particularly in Washington, D.C. There was the Civil Rights Act that had just been passed, President Johnson’s Great Society program was in full swing, the protests against the Vietnam War were peaking….so, it was an edgy protesters place to be. It taught students to look at life beyond the academic shell. After his MA, Oglesby when on to get his Ph.D. at SAIS, completing all but his dissertation. In retrospect, Oglesby wishes he had completed his Ph.D. (though, more for the prestige than its practical use – once he got the UN job, it would not have made too much of a difference). He was soon thereafter recruited by the Library of Congress’ Congressional Research Services, Foreign Affairs Division where he worked for several years as a Foreign Affairs Analyst before he joined the UN Development Program, where he spent the bulk of his career (30 years). As part of this, he was assigned to developing countries to work in their technical assistance programs, almost exclusively in Asia (lived in Thailand, Burma, Indonesia, Bhutan, and Bangladesh). At the end, he came back to New York for his final assignment in the UN (for this part of his work, he went to many regions of the world with which he was not yet familiar, on various missions). He retired in the late 1990s from the UN and taught as an adjunct at Fordham University and NYU. He has since moved into the world of journalism, sometimes writing for the Washington Post and he has also written two books (the latest one being a memoir outlining my experiences over the last 30 years). In terms of advice for current students today, he strongly suggests that students hone and perfect their writing skills…this will help students advance in their jobs, no matter what it is.
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