Herrick, Allison Butler
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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project Foreign Assistance Series ALLISON BUTLER HERRICK Interviewed by: W. Haven North Initial interview date: April 1, 1996 Copyright 1998 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 Graduate work in anthropology 1947 Life in London in the late 50s Return to Washington and work on the "Area Handbook" series 1961 First assignment with USAID in the Africa Bureau 1968 Move to the Latin America Bureau 1972 Working in the Latin America Bureau Heading up AID's budget office, Bureau for Program and 1975 Policy Coordination Kenya, USAID Mission Deputy and Director 1979 Deputy Assistant Administrator, Bureau for Policy and 1984 Program Coordination Mission Director for USAID / Zimbabwe 1 Observations on the effectiveness of foreign aid Personal views on the foreign assistance program as a professional career INTERVIEW Q: This is an interview with Allison Butler Herrick who served in AID for how many years? HERRICK: Twenty-one. Q: When did you retire? HERRICK: In October 1990. Early years and education Q: Let's start off by hearing a little bit about where you're from, where you grew up and anything about your early family life that you want to put on the record. Then we'll go on to your education. HERRICK: I grew up in Minnesota. Both sides of my family had university educations. They had gone East to college--my mother to Smith College and my father to Princeton and then on to Harvard Law School. I was exposed to the existence of Foreign Service as a child because my mother's older brother was a Foreign Service Officer. He served mainly in Europe, once in Tangier, and was in Bern during World War II--not in the kinds of places where one works for USAID. When I was ten years old my mother took the three children to Switzerland for the summer--her brother was then posted in Geneva. It was the time of the League of Nations--the time of Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. We had two cousins there who were about our age, and I remember as children hearing about the sessions of the League of Nations, which their father was attending, and our mother observing. That was the period when Haile Selassie made the speech that made him the "darling'' of the Western world, and of the failure of the League of Nations to prevent Italy's incursion into Ethiopia. We ended up staying for a full year. I had my first real foreign language exposure there because we went to a school in the Bernese Oberland, which was a German-speaking ``Schweitzerdeutsch'' region, but the school was French- speaking. There were a number of Americans in the school; we were given two weeks to stop speaking English. Q: That's fast. How did you find that? 2 HERRICK: We did pretty well, but I do remember my dear little brother, 5 years old, being put in the corner for hours because he had been heard in the bathroom saying something in English. Of course, when we went home he couldn't speak English. Q: So you spoke French in school? HERRICK: We spoke French in school, we did French grammar in class, we did French history. I remember being out on lounge chairs, "taking the sun'', memorizing lists and dates of the Kings of France. [laughter] Which, of course, I don't remember now. We certainly had an excellent founding in grammar, they were very strict about that. I suppose there may have been English lessons but I don't remember them. What I remember mainly is the French language lessons, the history, and some sort of sociology or civics. It was pretty much a classic French education. We would rise when the teacher came in the room, be punished for the slightest tardiness, etc. Q: This was through what year? HERRICK: That was fifth grade. Otherwise, I was in the same private school in St. Paul, Minnesota, from kindergarten through graduation. Then I went East to college, to Smith College. There, I did a good bit of language--I didn't need to take French grammar so I took courses in French literature and some beginning courses in German, but I majored in science. My major was bacteriology although there weren't enough courses in bacteriology to carry the full number of required hours, so it was bacteriology and chemistry. Q: Why that subject? HERRICK: I don't really know, and I didn't know when I had finished. At the end of senior year I saw that I had programed myself to go into, probably, a basement laboratory to wear a little white coat and deal with other people who were in that basement laboratory, the things under the microscope, and the incubators, and that was about all. I knew that I had had excellent educational training. And I did believe from the beginning, and certainly had heard around home when I was growing up, that learning how to use your brain is the best part of education. So in the long run the science courses were very helpful. I did some English literature and some history but I didn't do much in the way of philosophy, and had not one course in sociology. Anthropology was not offered at all at that time. Q: Economics? HERRICK: I had one course in international economics, the only course in which I did not receive a very high grade. I recall a devastating comment about a paper I wrote about Edouard Beneš of Czechoslovakia. I wonder, now, why I was writing about such a political figure in that course; in any case, he had become a hero to me, I think, and the 3 comment referred to the fact that I had probably not read the critical side of the story. So that is my memory of international economics from the early years. Q: What year did you graduate? Graduate work in anthropology - 1947-1950 HERRICK: In 1947. Late that spring I applied to Yale University to the Department of Anthropology. I decided that I needed to get into the study of man rather than the study of bugs, and they admitted me for the Ph.D. program; they did not admit for Masters Degrees at that stage in that department. I went into the program feeling very ignorant, very far behind. Many of my fellow students had done a summer or two of archeology and some had studied elsewhere and were part way toward a Master's thesis, however, which they later completed, so they earned both Master's and Ph.D. degrees. They were very good to me, helping me study and become familiar with the literature and the approach of anthropology. It was all new, and I enjoyed it tremendously. I was there for three full years of course work and in my last year one of my courses was dedicated to identifying a thesis subject. I never did do a thesis, never did field work, don't have "my tribe''. I met my first husband while I was at Yale and we were married in June 1950. I acquired an immediate family because he had had a war marriage, and the mother of the baby born shortly after the war had left when the baby was a year old. So that little boy became a part of our family right away. I thought I might do some field work among ethnic groups in Baltimore, as my husband got a job in Washington, but that didn't work out because the work would have had to be done mainly in the evenings. Q: Any professors or courses that you found particularly impressive during that four years? HERRICK: Yes, those of Irving Rouse on new world and old world archeology, of Wendell Bennett on Latin America, Ralph Linton on ethnology and on psychology and culture, and George Peter Murdoch on social structure. It was Pete Murdoch who published the first comprehensive book on the ethnic groups of Africa. He used his graduate students to help carry out the research. Each week we turned in a report, following his outline, on three ethnic groups. Q: Which ones did you do? HERRICK: The ones I recall mainly--and these were quick research things, relatively shallow--were in Central Africa. The groups in Zaire, Angola, and Congo are the ones that I recall. I think perhaps some East Africa. I also did a course with John Fee Embree on the ethnic groups of Southeast Asia and, since this was post war, the United States had begun to become aware of the importance of understanding other cultures around the world. Of course, at that time, Ruth Benedict was writing for the military and for the State Department as well as the academic world and the public. Publications sponsored by the State Department were continuing, so I was one Embree's co-authors, along with another 4 graduate student named Musgrave, of a publication on the ethnic groups of the northern highlands of Southeast Asia, those often referred to as the hill tribes.. Q: What was this series called? HERRICK: I don't know if I have a reference to it.