Bremer, L. Paul “Jerry”

The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR L. PAUL “JERRY” BREMER, III Interviewed By: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: June 16, 2008 Copyright ADST 2015 TABLE OF CONTENTS Background Born in Hartford, CT Raised in New Canaan, CT Yale University – undergraduate, 1963 Harvard University – MBA, 1966 Paris Institute of Political Studies, Paris, France Entered Foreign Service 1966 Kabul, Afghanistan 1966-1968 General Services Officer Blantyre, Malawi 1968-1971 Deputy Chief of Mission Washington, DC 1971-1976 Operations Center (several weeks) National Military Command Center (NMCC) (4-5 months) Assistant to Secretary of State Bill Rogers (1.5 years) Assistant to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, October 1973-February 1976 Oslo, Sweden 1976-1979 Deputy Chief of Mission Washington, DC 1979-1981 Deputy Executive Secretary of the Department of State Washington, DC 1981-1983 Executive Secretary and Special Assistant to Secretary of State Alexander Haig The Netherlands 1983-1986 Ambassador 1 Washington, DC 1986 Ambassador-at-Large for Counterterrorism and Coordinator of Counterterrorism Retired from the Foreign Service 1989 Washington, DC, 1989 (3 months) Director, Foreign Service Personnel System Task Force Private Industry: Kissinger Associates 1989-2003 Washington, DC 1999 Appointed Chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism by Congressional House Speaker Dennis Hastert Washington, DC 2003 Presidential Envoy to Iraq Bagdad, Iraq 2003-2004 Director of the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (became Coalition Provisional Authority) Coalition Provisional Authority, Chief Executive Officer INTERVIEW Q: What is your full, official name? BREMER: L. Paul Bremer, III. Q: How did Jerry come out of Bremer? BREMER: I was named after my grandfather who was alive when I was born. He was L. Paul Bremer, Sr. and my father was L. Paul Bremer, Jr. They wanted to honor my grandfather but my father was called Paul, and they didn’t want to have two “Pauls” running around the house. So they named me after my grandfather. Jerry was my name for my saint day. I was born on St. Jerome’s Day so I was Jerry from the day I was born. Q: What does ‘L’ stand for? BREMER: Lewis. Q: When and where were you born? 2 BREMER: I was born just outside of Hartford, Connecticut in September 1941. Q: Where outside? BREMER: Simsbury. My father was a teacher at the Westminster Boys’ School at that time, just before Pearl Harbor. He and my mother, who was a young bride, were living at the Westminster School. Q: Let’s start on your father’s side; what do you know about your father’s side? BREMER: Not an awful lot. They were originally from Northern Germany, presumably at some point from Bremen because Bremer means citizen of Bremen. They seem to have come to the United States when the German migrations came in the middle of the 19th century, roughly a hundred and fifty years ago. Q: They were what we call the ‘48ers’. BREMER: Yes, in that same period when many Irish and Germans came. I don’t know very much about it. My grandfather and grandmother on that side lived in a small town outside of New York in New Jersey. They were not well off. I don’t think they were poor, but neither were they well off. Q: Do you know what he was doing? BREMER: He was a college-trained engineer. He died some years after the birth of our first child, Paul. Q: Your father. What sort of upbringing BREMER: He attended public schools in New Jersey and then went to Hamilton. He went rather young and graduated at the age of 20. He had a significant language capability which eventually became important to my career and he was an excellent athlete. He was an alternate in the Olympic Games in 1936 in fencing after he graduated from Hamilton which was in 1935. He went on to get a Masters Degree from Hamilton the next year. Q: Hamilton being a college in upstate New York. BREMER: He became a teacher of French, Italian and Latin and that’s what took him to Westminster. He taught languages there until the war broke out. Q: On your mother’s side; where did they come from? BREMER: My mother’s side was more mixed. Her father’s family was Scottish and came to the United States a long time ago, in the early 19th century. They seem to have been quite well off as early as the late 19th century. They were involved in financial 3 business, both insurance and stock brokering. Her mother’s side was German. Her maiden name was Grundner. I don’t know much about my mother’s mother’s side; but my mother grew up with her parents and family in Rye, New York, outside of New York City. My grandfather, her father, by the 1920s was involved in the stock market and seems to have very cleverly gotten out of the market before the crash, so he was able to preserve his assets. She had certainly a privileged childhood. Q: Did she go to college? BREMER: She did. She started Sarah Lawrence before the war but then got married and dropped out. She had finished two years. But she went back to Sarah Lawrence some 30 years later. She wound up graduating the same year her daughter, my sister Lyn, graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 1967. My mother then went on to become a teacher. Q: How did your mother and father meet, do you know? BREMER: They met in Vero Beach Florida where her parents had a house. My father was in Florida as a tutor for another family. Q: Were you the only child? BREMER: No, I was the oldest of five. Q: Good Heavens. So I won’t ask what your mother was doing for many of those years. BREMER: Well, she raised the first three during the war. My father was in the navy and subsequently they had two more children. After the war, she taught herself photography and became a very successful professional photographer which career she pursued for more than 20 years -- until she went back to college. There she studied art history and subsequently became a college level teacher of that subject. Q: Do you know much about your father’s naval experience? BREMER: Again it was somewhat relevant to my decision to go into public service. After Pearl Harbor, when he was still teaching, my father decided he needed to get into the navy. He was tall and very thin and was in fact under the weight limit, whatever it was in those days, to get into the navy. So when he went to the recruiting office, he bent his knees, hoping to take a couple of inches off his height so that he would fall within the weight. He was accepted and commissioned as a Lieutenant. I am sure that the recruiting officer knew exactly what he was doing. It’s hard to imagine that any recruiting officers were being very fastidious about metrics in the wake of the attack. So he went into the navy. He served on convoys doing escort duty and they protected our shipping against to attack U-boats between the Gulf of Mexico and the East Coast and eventually also convoys crossing the Atlantic. Q: Did sort of the navy experience sort of permeate the family? 4 BREMER: No, the navy itself was not a big thing. But what was certainly important in my decision subsequently to join the Foreign Service was my father’s very strong belief, which he often repeated around the dinner table to the children, that we had been lucky to have been born in the greatest country and at a wonderful time; so every citizen owed some public service back to his country if he could do it. It was a very important concept to me. Q: Toward the end of the war was when you come into remembrance. What was your father doing? BREMER: At the end of the war he went into business, international business, which again had some eventual influence on me. He was initially working for a couple of German companies involved in the clothing industry, yarn and clothing industry. He stayed in international business for the rest of his life. Q: Where did you grow up then? BREMER: During the war, we lived in Rye, New York. My mother and three oldest children lived with her family during the war since my father was on navy duty and away most of the time. We lived in Rye for a couple of years after the war and then we moved to New Canaan, Connecticut in 1947, which is where I grew up. Q: Early post-war New Canaan, what was it like? BREMER: Well, it was not as fancy as it subsequently became. It was a pretty quiet place. It was literally at the end of a railroad line, which it still is. I would have to check what the population was but it was maybe 10 or 12,000. It was a small place. My father was working in New York so it was a long commute for him; but to me it was a very happy place to grow up. It was suburban, not quite countryside, but it was a very happy place. Q: Did you have a town green and all that? BREMER: We had a God ’s acre town green with three churches on it. Q: Let’s talk a bit about family life. You mentioned talking around the table.

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