The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project
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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project WILLIAM FREDERICK ROPE Interviewed by: David Reuther Initial Interview Date: March 9, 2016 Copyright 2018 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background Born in New York City Yale, Georgetown US Navy Joined Foreign Service; October 1966 FSI, Chinese Language Student Jan-June 1967 American Consulate General Hong Kong 1967-1969 Vice Consul FSI Taichung, Taiwan, Chinese Language Student 1969-1971 American Consulate General, Hong Kong 1971-1973 Political Officer US Liaison Office, Beijing, China 1973-1975 First Secretary, Economic-Commercial Officer Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Department of State (DOS) 1975-1977 Chief, Northeast Asia Division National Defense University, Washington, DC 1977-1978 Student, National War College, State Department Operations Center (S/S-O), DOS 1978-1980 Director Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, DOS 1980-1981 Director, Office of International Security Policy (PM/ISP) Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs (EAP), DOS 1981-1981 Director, Office of Regional Security Policy (EAP/RSP) 1 Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs (EAP), DOS 1981-1983 Director, Office of People's Republic of China and Mongolia Affairs (EAP/PRCM) Senior Seminar, FSI 1983-1984 Member Bureau of European Affairs, DOS 1984-1986 Director, Office of Southern Europe Affairs (EUR/SE) FSI, French Language Student 1986-1987 FSI, Turkish Language Student May-June '87 FSI, Deputy Chief of Missions Course June 1987 Member American Embassy, Ankara Turkey 1987-1989 Deputy Chief of Mission Political Military Bureau, DOS 1989-1992 Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary FSI, Chinese Language Student 1992-1993 Policy Planning Staff (S/P), DOS 1993-1993 Senior Advisor American Embassy Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei 1993-1993 Chargé d'Affaires Policy Planning Staff (S/P), DOS 1993-1994 Member American Embassy Suva, Fiji 1994-1994 Chargé d'Affaires US Mission to the UN 1994-1994 Senior Advisor for East Asia Retired from the Foreign Service; March 31, 1995 The Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies, Nanjing, China; American Co-Director, September 1995-June 1996 2 Center for Business Skills Development, American Graduate School of International Management (Thunderbird), Shanghai, China; President, June 1997-August 1998 Elementary School Teacher, DC Public Schools (DCPS) 1999-2011 Substitute Teacher, DCPS Oct 2011-Pres. INTERVIEW Q: This is March 9, 2016. An interview for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training with Bill Rope. I am David Reuther. Bill, let’s start at the start. You were born in 1940. Where were you born, and can you tell us something about your family background? ROPE: I was born on August 27 in New York City’s Roosevelt Hospital, today the Weill Cornell Medical Center on the East Side of Manhattan. My father, Frederick T. Rope, was finishing his doctorate at Teacher’s College, Columbia, and my first residence was Bancroft Hall, a graduate residence building that still exists at Teacher’s College. My mother, Irene King Rope, was a librarian at the time, and my parents did my birth announcement in the form of a library card for a book, i.e., me, listing them as authors and stating that I had a fine frontispiece, etc. My dad was from upstate New York and a second generation graduate of Cornell University. His father, originally from Brooklyn, had graduated Phi Beta Kappa, after which he went into the insurance business in the Buffalo area. After graduating from Cornell in 1932, my father had trouble getting the kind of job he wanted. I guess he didn’t want to sell insurance, and in the Depression time I don’t think that business was thriving, because my grandfather did not leave a lot of money when he died of Leukemia before I was born. In any case, my dad did land a job in the town where he’d grown up, a suburb of Buffalo named East Aurora, where the Buffalo Bills now have a stadium. He blamed Cornell for not helping him get a job, and he never gave any money to Cornell as an alum. So my father was originally a high school Social Studies teacher. And he first knew my mother -- a year his senior -- when she moved from New York to East Aurora and took a job as librarian in the school. They didn’t marry there, but struck up a romance; and when my mom moved back to the New York area to be a librarian at Sewanhaka High School in Floral Park Long Island, he followed her, taking a job teaching Civics in Westfield, New Jersey. My mother had a very different background. Her father, William Cyrus King, had been an oil prospecting engineer working for the Standard Oil Company of Ohio, SOHIO before it merged with ESSO, now Exxon. She was born in Harvey, Illinois, outside Chicago. Her parents came from Findlay, Ohio, where I think they married and where I still have 3 relatives. I’m not sure of my maternal grandmother’s heritage, but my grandfather King traced his roots on at least one side to early settlers who were in Windsor and then Simsbury, Connecticut, as early as 1632. I’ve been able to take my daughter to a cemetery in Simsbury and shown her her great great great great great great great grandfather, Deacon John Humphrey’s grave. In the early 19th Century, a group of Humphreys struck out for Ohio, which is how my Granddad ended up in Findlay. But once he joined Ohio Oil he moved all around the Middle West and South; and the family moved with him. Among the places where my mother lived were St. Louis and Florida where my grandfather bought land in some kind of pioneering farming venture. My maternal grandmother, Nellie Parker, a strong woman by all accounts, ran the operation and home schooled my mother and her three siblings. By high school, Mother was living in Oklahoma City. She went on to the University of Oklahoma, where she majored in English but was a serious drama student. After college, my mother lived in Shreveport, Louisiana where she appeared in local area theater productions before going to New York to try to make it on the Broadway stage. There she lived at a place called the rehearsal club about which there is a play called Stage Door. To support herself as she sought acting jobs, she worked at the New York Public Library. Although she never made it on Broadway, she got far enough to understudy a part opposite Pat O’Brien. Ultimately, she gave it up and went to library school at Columbia, which in time led her to my dad She stayed active as an amateur actress, and a librarian, throughout her working life. My father never fully approved of the acting, a result, I guess, of his somewhat conservative and Victorian upstate New York upbringing. So my parents had different backgrounds. Both were Protestants though not particularly religious. At least as I was growing up after the war, in Chappaqua, New York, they went regularly to church. After they married, in 1936, they traveled twice to Europe, touring at least once by motorcycle. By the time I was born, in ’40, my dad had decided to leave the classroom and get a PhD in education. When he finished, we moved to Albany, New York, where he joined the New York State Department of Education as a roving inspector of public schools. Ultimately, this led us to Chappaqua, in the New York suburbs, where I grew up after World War II. Dad had concluded that the best suburban schools were in Westchester County, in Scarsdale and Chappaqua. So when, after the war, my parents wanted to locate in New York, they settled on Chappaqua, where President Clinton lives today. They couldn’t afford Scarsdale. So my earliest, vaguest, most distant memories are in Albany, where my sister, Sandra Justine Rope, was born in 1942. We lived there until 1943. The war was on, but my father was exempt from service until that year because he had a wife and two children. Even though my sister had been born after Pearl Harbor, my mother said they could establish conception before December 7, 1941, and that was good enough for the Selective Service. But it wasn’t by 1943, when the need for men his age was greater. He went to Navy Officer Candidate School at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, and upon commissioning as an officer was assigned to a training command at Millington Naval Air Station outside 4 of Memphis, Tennessee. This because of his background in education. In 1964, when I was in the Navy, I flew in a P-3 Orion into Millington, by then a Naval Air Reserve base. It’s still a Navy facility today. I remember going by train, with mother and sister, from Albany, via Cincinnati, to Memphis, to join my father; and we first lived in an apartment hotel in Memphis. My memories of this time are quite vivid, partly because of the war and partly because of trauma in my family life; and I date them to the early days in that hotel. Decades later, when I was Chargé d’Affaires in Ankara, Turkey, I told the visiting mayor of Memphis that I remembered the view from that hotel, looking out to where the “Fox” River flowed into the Mississippi. The mayor looked at me and said, “It was the Wolf River.” So I remembered the name wrong, but the exchange told me that my memory was essentially accurate. The mayor also gave me a mini-key to the city, which I thought was pretty cool, 45 years after I’d lived there.