Camp, Beatrice
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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project BEATRICE CAMP Interviewed by: Mark Tauber Initial interview date: April 8, 2016 Copyright 2017 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background Alabama; Texas; Washington, DC, Bangkok; Bethesda-Chevy Chase HS Oberlin College 1968-1972 Chiang Mai, Thailand 1973-1976 Chiang Mai University; 1973 student protests; East Asia travels Returned fellow at Oberlin 1976-1977 Washington jobs 1977-1980 Dow Jones news service 1980-1981 FSI Mandarin training 1981-1983 USIA Junior Officer Training 1983 Beijing Junior Officer Trainee 1984-1985 Reagan visit JOT rotation Shanxi trip FSI Thai training 1985-1986 Bangkok, Assistant Cultural Affairs Officer 1986-1988 Burma WorldNet Preservation Hall Jazz Band Eagle and the Elephant Swedish training 1988-1989 Stockholm, Information Officer 1989-1993 1 Chuck Redman Vernon Walters NATO tour Baltic state independence Swedish American of the Year John Nordstrom Southeast Asia desk officer in Washington 1993-1995 State-USIA comparison National Endowment for Democracy/VOA USIS films POW/MIA issues Hungarian assignment, training 1995-1996 USIS/State dispute government/snow shutdown Budapest, Cultural Affairs Officer 1996-1999 Donald Blinken Tom Lantos Ron Lauder ’56 revolution anniversary NATO enlargement Peter Tufo IFOR/SFOR Crown of St Stephen Betty Friedan Educational Advising branch chief in Washington 1999-2002 Merger with State Gilman program Study abroad issues Open Doors NAFSA, student visa issues Education USA brand 9/11 SEVIS IIP/G/EUR in Washington 2002-2004 Content Management System Russian translators Chiang Mai; Consul General 2004-2007 Tammy Duckworth Darryl Johnson Skip Boyce 2004 tsunami 2 2006 coup American Threads in the Lanna Fabric Burmese issues Chinese language refresher in Washington, Expo prep meetings 2007-2008 Shanghai; Consul General 2008-2011 2008 financial crash Melamine-in-milk Lincoln birthday Outreach Unit Shanghai Expo Obama visit John Leighton Stuart H1N1 Jon Huntsman Smithsonian Senior Advisor 2011-2013 Mobile app Poster show International Jazz Day Ai Weiwei Roads of Arabia American Spaces ICE training Giant Magellan Telescope Thai Elephant Day Office of the Inspector General 2013-2014 Bahrain UAE Kabul inspections Milan Expo Coordinator 2014-2015 Exhibits Fundraising Website Social media Commissioner General Vetting donors Project closeout Future expos Final thoughts 3 INTERVIEW Q: Let’s begin with where you were born and where you were raised. CAMP: I was born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1950; my father was a civilian working for the Air Force. After a few years in Alabama we moved to San Antonio, then to the Washington area. Both my parents were in the military in World War II; my father was from California and my mother Illinois. They met after the war in New York while both were studying at Columbia and living in the same building on West 116th. The story is they met while hanging out laundry on the roof. Q: There are plays that begin this way. CAMP: They communicated between apartments by knocking on the radiators; the landlord was on the verge of ripping out the pipes to find out what was wrong. One of my mother’s roommates married one of my father’s roommates as well. Q: Amazing CAMP: My mother got a Master’s from Columbia Teachers College and my father studied sociology; he began working for the early Gallup Poll company and for CBS News, doing survey research. My brother was born at New York Presbyterian Hospital; another family story relates how my mom took the subway to the hospital in a December snowstorm. Q: Where were their families from? CAMP: My mother came from a German farming family in central Illinois. When I interviewed her for a high school assignment on the Depression she told me that the farming economy was always depressed, which didn’t give me much to report for class. My father was born in Utah and grew up in Berkeley, California, just up from the university campus. Visiting my Berkeley grandmother during the 1960s provided a glimpse of some of the radical ferment of the times, like the Free Speech Movement. Grandma Camp gave us our first Tom Lehrer album. Visiting our farm cousins in Illinois was more about swimming in mucky ponds and riding along with the hay bailer. Q: So your parents moved to Alabama. CAMP: My father had begun working for the military, as a civilian, doing survey research at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery and then Randolph in San Antonio, Texas. Along with some of the colleagues from those projects, he then joined the research unit at the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). This was at USIA headquarters in 4 Washington, which had the fabulous address of 1776 Pennsylvania Ave. For years this little group of researchers, family friends, stayed together; some were still around when I joined USIA in 1983. In 1961 my father got an opportunity to go to Bangkok in a civil service position, conducting research throughout Indochina. Public opinion research was a big part of USIA in those days, winning hearts and minds, surveying people’s thoughts about the United States, assessing and advising on the impact of American foreign policy decisions on worldwide public opinion. There was a research unit at USIS Bangkok during those early days of the Vietnam War. When we moved to Thailand in 1961 I didn’t want to go, I didn’t want to leave my friends, the usual pre-teen lament. That started to change as we took an ocean liner across the Pacific, stopped in Japan and Hong Kong, and finally ended up in exotic Bangkok, with its khlongs and cute chingjok lizards and a queen who was one of the world’s most beautiful women. We returned to Washington in 1963; I graduated from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School (BCC) in 1968 and went to Oberlin College. Q: What was it like to go to school in the Washington suburbs in the mid-60s? CAMP: Those years spanned earth-shattering events, including the assassinations of John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, civil rights issues, Vietnam protests, and riots in DC. It was also the era of the Beatles, drugs and long hair. And the first computers. By 1967-1968, my high school was in proud possession of a remote terminal linked to a computer at a government facility. It was accessible to those of us in Mrs. Tubbs’ Advanced Algebra/Trig class, which consisted of two girls and 14 boys, geeky slide rule guys. We were given to understand that it was a rare opportunity to have this access, which made it especially shocking when Mrs. Tubbs came into class extremely upset because somebody had programmed obscenities on the terminal. I’ll never forget how distraught she was and the horror over who would do this kind of thing – it had to be someone in that class abusing this great privilege that had been given to us. Q: While you were in high school had you begun to think about an international career for yourself? CAMP: I was editor of the high school paper and saw myself as a future journalist. The BCC Tattler was an award-winning paper managed by a really fabulous teacher, Benjamin Allnutt, who was responsible for a number of careers in journalism. Although protests against the war in Vietnam were heating up, I was slow to join in. My mindset was shaped by living in Southeast Asia, the domino theory, ideas about the need to protect the Vietnamese people and our close ally Thailand and so on. I can’t remember 5 exactly what my tipping point was into opposing the war, except that I was impressed when my college-age brother joined the protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. A few months later, as a freshman at Oberlin College in Ohio, I was riding to Washington in the back of a U-Haul truck for an anti-war demonstration. Q: While you were in high school did you take advantage of opportunities that Washington offers? CAMP: My family attended Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration, on a bitterly cold day after a snowstorm nearly paralyzed the city the night before. The Democrats’ victory – my liberal California father hated Nixon – and my brother’s role as a Boy Scout usher at the event combined to propel our family downtown in such terrible conditions. My mother, who taught business subjects, shorthand and typing, at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, insisted we dress up to go downtown. In those days anyone could wander around Capitol Hill, eat bean soup in the Senate cafeteria, and ride the underground tram to the Senate office buildings. The Smithsonian was another draw, although there were fewer museums than now. American History, originally called the National Museum of History and Technology, opened in 1964; it was the first new Smithsonian museum since the Freer in 1923. Air and Space came 12 years later. As a kid, one of my gruesome favorites was the Medical Museum, now in Silver Spring, with artifacts from Lincoln’s assassination and other gory items. I also have strong memories of the old Arts and Industries Building, a gorgeous setting for boring exhibits featuring machinery and button collections. It was only years later, after I got involved with the 2010 and 2015 world’s fairs, that I appreciated how many of the Arts and Industries exhibits were from the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, in which the Smithsonian played a major role. Editing the high school paper offered opportunities for encounters with the grittier parts of DC. The B-CC Tattler was printed in Baltimore and sent back to us on a Greyhound bus for proofreading.