Interview with Philip C. Wilcox

Library of Congress Interview with Philip C. Wilcox Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project PHILIP C. WILCOX, JR. Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: April 27, 1998 Copyright 2002 ADST Q: Today is April 27, 1998, and this is an interview with Philip C. Wilcox, Jr. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, and I'm Charles Stuart Kennedy. I wonder if we could just start at the beginning. Could you tell me when and where you were born and something about your family? WILCOX: I was born in Denver, Colorado, on February 21, 1937. My father was a businessman, an employee of the Bell System, the telephone company, born in Denver and worked there. During my early years we moved to New York where my dad worked for the AT&T in New York. Then we returned back to Denver where I attended high school. My mother was born in El Paso, Texas, so our family had a strong western background. When I finished high school in Denver, I went to college at Williams College in Massachusetts, and then I went to the Stanford Law School. Q: All right, well let's go back. We'll start in Colorado. You went to grammar school there, or was that in New York? Interview with Philip C. Wilcox http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001262 Library of Congress WILCOX: I went to grammar school in Colorado, but then we moved to Maplewood, New Jersey, and I finished grammar school and went to junior high school there. We then moved back to Denver where I attended public high school. Q: Well, before you hit high school, what were your main interests? WILCOX: I was an ordinary kid who was interested in sports, and I liked to read. My parents encouraged me to read and as a very young child I remember a map of the world in our breakfast room. I had some sense of geography and of other countries at a fairly early age. My mother was from El Paso; she spoke Spanish, so there was a little bit of a Mexican dimension to our family. Q: You were a little young to be caught up in the news of WWII, weren't you? WILCOX: I remember listening to the radio and hearing the announcement of Pearl Harbor when I was four years old. I also vividly remember many years thereafter the Korean War. We were swept up in that. With the help and encouragement of my parents and teachers, I was somewhat aware of what was going on in the rest of the world, even as a child. Q: You did your high school in Colorado. Where in Colorado? WILCOX: I went to East Denver High School. Denver, although it is deep in the west, has always had kind of a cosmopolitan character and an interest in the rest of the world. As a high school student, I attended World Affairs Council meetings. I heard diplomats, including State Department officials, who visited Denver and began to be more oriented toward foreign affairs. Q: When you were in high school, what were your subjects of greatest interest? WILCOX: I read a lot, and I liked cars and skiing. Interview with Philip C. Wilcox http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001262 Library of Congress Q: What sort of things did you read? WILCOX: Oh, I liked adventure stories and historical novels, including those set in exotic foreign countries. I maintain that interest today. Q: Were you still looking at the map? WILCOX: Yes, we always had a map somewhere in our house and an atlas on our coffee table. My parents were interested and involved. We often had visitors at our home from foreign countries, including visitors who came under the U.S. Information Agency's program. A Turkish student lived with us for a year in Denver. Q: Well, then you went to Williams. You were there from when to when? WILCOX: I was there from 1954 to '58. Q: What got you to western Massachusetts? WILCOX: When I lived in New Jersey, I got to know the East Coast well, and I discovered Williams. I decided, as a Denver boy, that it would be broadening to leave Denver and go to college somewhere else, so I went to Williams. That opened up the world for me, intellectually. I studied history and political science, and got a good grounding in the history of Western Europe, the Soviet Union. There were no courses at that time on Asia, Africa, or the rest of the world. Q: Did you have Richard Newhall? WILCOX: He was my professor of philosophy. Fred Schuman was my political science professor. He had been exiled from the University of Chicago, and was a marvelous teacher and a great scholar and articulator of power politics. Interview with Philip C. Wilcox http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001262 Library of Congress Q: I was class of '50 at Williams and a history major, so these are people I know. I think a wonderful grounding. What was your impression of Williams at that time? WILCOX: It was a terrific college because of the caliber of the teachers and the students. There was an intimate relationship among students and faculty. That indeed, was the vocation of the college, to teach. The college is physically remote, in the mountains of Berkshire County, but it was not intellectually isolated. People came from Washington and around the worlGeorge Kennan, John Foster Dulles, and Henry Cabot Lodge, for example. There were a good many foreign students. The mission of the college was to provide a broad liberal education. You absorbed a lot by osmosis, by being there. Q: When I was there, the faculty was relatively liberal and the student body was relatively conservative. I don't know if that still applied. WILCOX: That was true in my era too. It was during the Eisenhower years when American students were not engaged politically, and it was a more inward looking time in our history I think. The students, as I recall, were mostly Republicans if they had given any thought to politics, and many of them hadn't. Q: While you were at Williams, you were taking history and political science. Did you have any career in mind? WILCOX: I had vague thoughts about the Foreign Service even then, but I had no career plans. I was not oriented. I visited Europe during one of my summers in college, and I also spent a summer in Venezuela working in an oil field. My uncle got me the job. He had moved to Caracas when he finished Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School, to go into business with his classmate at Dartmouth, Nelson Rockefeller. That adventure stimulated my interest in the rest of the world. Interview with Philip C. Wilcox http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001262 Library of Congress Q: Was there any effort at recruiting while you were at Williams for the foreign Service, particularly CIA, because CIA at that time, Williams was sort of a prime hunting grounds I think, particularly in my class. WILCOX: I don't remember any. I had two classmates who joined one or another branch of the Foreign Service. Warren Clark joined the State Department and Jack Platt joined the CIA. Q: When you got out, what were you doing? WILCOX: In my senior year in 1958 I was at loose ends. So, like a lot of undergraduates even then, I decided to go to law school which seemed a reasonable option to prepare me to be a lawyer or something else. I went to the Stanford Law School. I chose over Columbia because I thought it would be broadening to live in California. Q: That would be '58-'61. How did you find the law school? WILCOX: Stanford was pleasant, with a beautiful campus. The curriculum and the professors were rigorous. In some ways it was a trade school which required the digestion of masses of law, but some courses put the law in a broader context. I was not excited by the law, and began to think more about politics and foreign affairs. That was a time of great ferment in the United States as we became more deeply involved in Indochina, and of course, Kennedy was elected. In my third year at Stanford, I felt I wasn't ready to go to work as a lawyer; I wanted an adventure. One day I heard the Reverend William Sloan Coffin whom I had known slightly at Williams Q: From Yale. WILCOX: He came to Williams after Yale as chaplain for a year. He was an energetic critic of the fraternity system, which was ultimately abolished at Williams. When he spoke at Stanford, he was promoting teaching opportunities in Africa with the African-American Interview with Philip C. Wilcox http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001262 Library of Congress Institute. He had spent a summer building a schoolhouse in Guinea and was enthusiastic about Africa. At about that time, I heard President Kennedy give a speech on television at the Cow Palace in San Francisco announcing the establishment of the Peace Corps. I was inspired and excited by this. I was inspired and I applied for a teaching job in Sierra Leone and was accepted. I was grateful that my parents, who had paid my tuition for law school, encouraged me to do what I wanted to do. So, I went to Sierra Leone for three years. Q: You were in Sierra Leone from '61..

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