Gilbert, Frederick E
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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project Foreign Affairs Series FREDERICK E. GILBERT Interviewed by: W. Haven North Initial interview date: September 4, 1997 Copyright 2001 ADST The oral history program was made possible through support provided by the Center for Development Information and Evaluation, U.S. Agency for International Development, under terms of Cooperative Agreement No. AEP-0085-A-00-5026-00. The opinions expressed herein are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Agency for International Development or the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. TABLE OF CONTENTS Early years and education Joined USAID and first assignments 1964 Completed internship with assignment to the Nigeria Desk 1964-1966 First overseas assignment to the USAID Mission in Ghana 1966-1971 Transferred to USAID Nigeria 1971-1973 Granted a six month sabbatical to complete doctoral thesis 1973 Two assignments to the Sahel Development Program office 1974-1976 and in USAID Washington 1981-1983 Four years in USAID/ Cameroon 1976-1980 Central African Empire (CAE) Gabon Equatorial Guinea Assignment as Deputy and Acting Director, USAID/ Tanzania 1983-1986 1 Assignment as Deputy Director and Mission Director in 1986-1990 USAID/ Sudan A new role as Director of the USAID Regional Economic 1990-1993 Development Service Office (REDSO) in the Ivory Coast Ivory Coast Brief stints as Acting AID Affairs Officer in Nigeria and Acting AID Representative in Mauritania Reflections on thirty years of experience in international development Post-USAID activities 1994-1997 INTERVIEW Q: I believe you served in AID for thirty years? Starting when? GILBERT: 1964. Q: Please tell about your early life. Early years and education GILBERT: I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. My father was with the International Harvester Company. He was exempt from the draft because of a stiff leg due to a car accident. During World War II he was transferred to Birmingham, Alabama. I lived in Alabama from the age of 2 until I was almost 11, except for a year when we lived in the Chicago area due to my father's work. About half way through our years in Alabama, my father and a partner bought an International Harvester dealership in Bessemer, Alabama. The coal and iron industry strikes of that period caused his business to drop off to the point that it would no longer support two families. He and his partner sold that dealership, and we moved to Austin, Minnesota where he and a new partner bought another dealership. That business included a Packard agency that went on the rocks in 1954 when I was 15. We returned to Minneapolis where he went back to work for the International Harvester Company in their Minneapolis branch. In Minneapolis, as previously, I attended public schools. The high school I went to was Washburn. It was quite good, and I think at least 60 per cent of its graduates went on to college. I took science and math in high school. I graduated in 1957, and, at that time, it was just assumed that any serious young man with any brains at all would gravitate to engineering. In the Sputnik era, that almost seemed like a patriotic duty. 2 Q: What led to your career in USAID. GILBERT: I started out in pre-engineering, and I just scraped through with "Cs." I was bored to tears. The lectures and reading affected me like knockout drops. By a great stroke of luck, through family connections, I got a job with the Minnesota Highway Department as a summer engineering intern following my freshman year. I thought I might discover that I liked what engineers did more than I liked what they studied. If so, it might be worth seeing through. Half way through that summer I knew that I didn't care much for what engineers did either. So I spent the rest of the summer pondering what I should do about it. Since I was headed for mining engineering, I got to thinking about my reasons for selecting that. I realized they were largely pecuniary. I also realized that I would be unlikely to succeed in anything for which I felt no enthusiasm. This led me to wonder what I would do if I was independently wealthy and could simply follow my interests. It came to me that I had thought mining engineering, as opposed to other engineering fields, would lead to overseas living experiences and international work. I thought, "Wait a minute, dummy! If that's what you are interested in, why not take the direct route and actually major in International Relations?” I did and never slept in class or the library again. My grades shot up into the range of respectability. Q: Had you any exposure before that that would have pricked your interest? GILBERT: My mother never went to college. This was due to economic reasons. My grandmother, who was a career woman (a dietician trained at the Boston Cooking School), had died when my mother was 18. My grandfather's earnings as a teacher in small, residential Norwegian Lutheran secondary schools and colleges were very low. My maternal grandparents didn't live together for roughly the last ten years of my grandmother's life, reflecting something like divorce Norwegian Lutheran-style. These circumstances and my grandmother’s death about when my mother graduated from high school made my mother the breadwinner to her two younger siblings when she should have been in college. Nevertheless, she was one of the more complete intellectuals I have ever known. She read voraciously in French and English. A strikingly good-looking woman, she was also something of a walking encyclopedia. We had a lot of books around the house, either our own or on loan from various libraries. While still in grade school I was well on my way to reading everything that Kipling ever wrote. One of the first adult books I read was Jan Karski's The Secret State. Others were The Wall by John Hersey, Strange Lands and Friendly People by William O. Douglas. Yet others included a book called Coronet by a man named Komroff, one on exploring the Gobi Desert by Roy Chapman Andrews. Many were Book of the Month Club selections. Most of the books that stick in my memory were about foreign countries and other cultures. 3 Another factor was growing up in Minnesota where so many people, well represented among members of the various elites, are "hyphenated" Americans and mindful, not to say prideful, of their backgrounds. Minnesota is much more than proportionately represented among Foreign Service people. This owes a lot to the quality of the public schools and the numbers of trained people generated by the state and private university- level institutions. Another huge factor was that my Norwegian-American grandfather lived with us during much of my childhood. He had received a classical education at Decorah Luther College, which was about the "only game in town" in his Norwegian Lutheran milieu. He taught Latin and Greek and had studied Hebrew. He also spoke Norwegian and German. He was a wonderful conversationalist and intellectual mentor. It was as if I had my own Merlin (as depicted in The Once and Future King). He never pushed any information or ideas on me. Instead his approach could be likened to that of a skilled and patient fly fisherman. Whenever I bit on a lure he would reel me in toward an understanding of the background, source or foundation of some enticing remark or tidbit of information. Just to indicate how strong the Norwegian milieu was, my mother - who, like her parents, was born in Minnesota - learned her English in primary school. Yet my grandfather, and no doubt my grandmother, spoke English perfectly. When I graduated with a major in International Relations from the University of Minnesota, I got a tuition scholarship at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts. When I graduated from there, I had a two-year Master's Degree (MALD). After staying around long enough to take my Ph.D. generals, I went to work for AID in January of 1964. Q: Was there any particular concentration while you were at Tufts? GILBERT: There, as at Minnesota, I concentrated in International Economics. But, a big turning point occurred in the second semester of my first year at Fletcher. I took a course in Development Economics taught by Charles Kindleberger (of MIT) and Don Humphrey. And that set me off in a new direction. It was such a quirky application of economics and so inescapably interdisciplinary. It just fascinated me. Then, later on - during that second year that I was at Fletcher, I guess - I was amazed to learn that, wonder of wonders, there was actually an agency of the U.S. government concerned with applying the things I had been studying. Up to then I had seen myself as headed for a career in the State Department (i.e. diplomatic) Foreign Service. From then on my sights shifted to a career in AID. But we had to have both functional and area concentrations. Though my functional concentration was in international and development economics, my area concentration became Asia. Q: Asia? 4 GILBERT: And I fully expected that I would go to work for AID and focus my career on Southern Asia, probably not the Far East. Q: How did you hear about AID and the Foreign Assistance Program? GILBERT: I'm not sure I can reconstruct it exactly. But I am pretty sure I learned a lot about AID from Brad Langmaid who was a member of my class at Fletcher.