The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR WILLIAM LUERS Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: May 12th, 2011 Copyright 2018 ADST Q: Today is the 12th of May, 2011 with William, middle initial? LUERS: H. Q: H. Luers, L-U-E-R-S. And this is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, and I’m Charles Stuart Kennedy. And you go by Bill. LUERS: Yes. Q: OK. Let’s start at the beginning. Where and when were you born? LUERS: Born in Springfield, Illinois in 1929 and my father was a banker in Springfield and my mother came from a farming town nearby. Q: OK, let’s talk a little bit about the Luers. Where do they come from? It sounds German. LUERS: They came from Germany, a town just south of Hamburg. My grandfather, Henry Luers, emigrated in the 1880s and married a German lady from the same area. They emigrated to Springfield, Illinois where my grandfather started a shoe store. He had no education, my father had no university education. He had five sons and one daughter who grew up in Springfield. They became prominent citizens of the small town – capital of Illinois. It has a population of about 70,000 which has been rather stable over these many years. Central Illinois had many German speaking citizens before and even after WW1. The Luers Shoe Store was right next door to Lincoln Herndon Law Offices when my grandfather bought it. The Lincoln family had bought shoes from that store. My cousin who ran the Shoe store for years still has the record of the shoe sizes of the Lincoln family. The Luers Shoe Store was just off the corner of the Old Courthouse Square at the Center of the town. Indeed, when Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president from the steps of courthouse in Springfield Illinois, I watched the national TV coverage. The pictures taken from a helicopter showed corner near where my grandfather had the shoe store. On another corner of the same square was the building of the former Illinois National Bank where my father began as a clerk after the First World War. He went into the army, became an officer, was wounded, was decorated for bravery and returned to the 1 Bank as a clerk. 40 years later he became president of that bank. On another corner of the square was the building of the former Marine Bank where Uncle Ted, who also had started from scratch, became the Bank President. Uncle Arthur took over as head of the Luers Shoe Store, Uncle Harry become a leader in the Springfield City Council, and my Uncle George ran some farms outside of town. This German American family occupied some important pieces of Springfield. None were wealthy, they were all self-made and each of them remained in Springfield with their families for their entire life. Many of my generation of the large Luers clan left Springfield. Q: Were there any problems during World War I about being German? LUERS: Absolutely. WW1 profoundly affected the “German” culture in Central Illinois and indeed throughout the Middle West. My father was the only one of his brothers who went to war but many German Americans joined. As you recall they went to a bloody war against the Germans. My father became a Lt in the Army, fought in some of the most difficult battles and was awarded a Silver Star for bravery under fire and two Purple Hearts for injuries in combat. He returned to Springfield, where German culture and even language had played a large role, to realize that German Americans were less honored and their culture and language was not celebrated. The German language was spoken only in the family, if there, and the German language signs were taken down. I am unclear how that affected my father in the 1920’s but what I am clear on is that WW1 made him a super American patriot. He and Mother still liked Europe and during the 1930’s they took vacations in the UK, France, Italy and Germany as part of their cultural education and to have fun. Super patriot that he was, on December 8, 1941, that Monday after Pearl Harbor, he signed up again to rejoin the Army. He had no hesitation at the age of about 50. “I must go into this,” I remember him telling me, his 12 year old only son. Within a few months he received a commission as a Major in the U.S. Army Air Corps which was then part of the Army and not a separate branch of the armed forces. He was immediately assigned as Commanding CEO -- he was commanding officer of a new air base in Dyersburg, TN the Air Corps was building in the spring of 1942. He was commanding officer there for about six months, and then he, to his surprise, was relieved of his command. He was transferred to Fort Benning, GA and interrogated. He then learned that someone had written a letter to the War Department claiming that my father was a Nazi spy. My parents liked travel and they had visited England, France and indeed Germany in the 1930’s. This writer of the letter, who created a story that my father had been in Berlin when Mussolini went to visit Hitler, turned out to be a man my father fired from the bank. It was a devastating experience for him to learn that the U.S. government doubted his loyalty to the US and believed that somehow he was a Nazi spy. He had nearly lost his life fighting the Germans for his country in the First World War. The USG eventually cleared him completely. Yet this episode took a toll on his life. I never knew how deeply it affected his life after WWII. Q: Something like this can be devastating. 2 LUERS: He was a man I greatly admired. He was tall, straight, and handsome -- Rectitude was his strongest characteristic. In recent years I have looked through his papers and had a better sense of what actually happened, read the strong testimonials from friends and associates about my father’s character and loyalty. It was an upsetting thing. I often used to talk with my friend Kurt Vonnegut, from a German American family, about those troubled years for German Americans and how after two world wars of fighting Germans, the German culture, once so strong in the Middle, fell under an almost permanent shadow. Q: He wrote Slaughterhouse Five. LUERS: Yes. You don’t call yourself German-American today. You call yourself Irish- American, or Italian-American, but German-American is not description to be proud of. Q: Well, I know my mother’s family came from Chicago. And her father, named Lachner, was very, very German. Her father was in Wisconsin and was an officer with Sherman during the war. But they had rocks thrown at their house -- LUERS: There was nothing like that that I recall. I don’t know whether my grandfather’s shoe store was less frequented for example. I never have heard of any violence. Q: But one forgets these things and -- LUERS: Yes Q: And on your mother’s side, what do you know about her family? LUERS: Mother’s father and mother were a mixture of Irish, English, and Scottish. My grandfather’s family, the Lynds, trace their roots to the 17th century, maybe. The Lynds were part of a large clan called the Beggs. I have a volume, The Book of Beggs, that takes the family back several centuries and tells the genealogy of the clan, but the book was completed in 1929, the year I was born. My older sisters are in the book but not me. There was one Begg who fought the Revolutionary War. In the Book of Beggs there is one trace of a connection of one Begg to Benjamin Franklin. My Mother was raised on a farm in Pleasant Plains outside of Springfield. And her father was William Lynd, who died before I was born. Grandfather Lynd had started to build the first grain elevators in Central Illinois. He had been a successful farmer and entrepreneur but the family lore is that his partner took his money. Mother was raised on a large farm. And the family had other farming properties in Illinois. During my childhood Mother had a tenant farmer managing her property in Northern Illinois. My mother, Anna Zayne Lynd, attended a finishing school for women after graduating from high school, but she did not have a university education –nor did my father. They married after my father returned from the war. They lived in Springfield except during the Second World War. Mother did not like Springfield. She wanted to live in a larger city and they 3 loved to travel. My father, after the Second World War, had an offer from one of his colleagues in the Air Corps to join a large bank in a senior position in Chicago. He thought about it. He was a strong midwestern conservative who believed that bankers should be the most trusted leaders in the community. Everybody trusted my father in Springfield-- you couldn’t be a good banker unless you were trusted. When he was offered the Chicago job, toward the end of the war, he and Mother were living with me in Fairfield, Ohio at Wright-Patterson Air Base outside of Dayton. But my Pop, as I called him, still had set the goal of becoming the President of the bank where he had started as a clerk in the 1920’s.