The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR EDWARD M. ROWELL Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: September 19, 1995 Copyright 2016 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background Born and raised in California Son of State Department officer Yale University US Army - Germany Entered Foreign Service 1956 State Department 1956 Manpower Utilization staff 1956-1957 Budget office 1956 Recife, Brazil - Vice Consul 1957-1959 Environment Consulate staff and duties Political situation Clare Boothe Luce Curitiba, Brazil - Principal officer 1959-1962 Commodities - coffee and sugar Relations with embassy Bay of Pigs State Department - ARA 1962-1964 Honduran affairs Alliance for Progress AID integrated into State US interests in Honduras Coup d’état in Honduras Kennedy White House staff Stanford University - Latin American studies 1964-1965 Buenos Aires, Argentina - Political officer 1965-1968 1 Military coup Peronistas US refuses military assistance Ambassador Ed Martin Arab-Israel War reaction Falklands/Malvinas issue Tegucigalpa, Honduras - Political officer 1968-1970 "Freebooters" Peace Corps Political situation AID program US interests Honduras - El Salvador "soccer" war Anti-US sentiment Security problems Stanford University - Sloan Executive fellow 1970-1971 Program description Computer programs in Foreign Service State Department - Office of Inspector General 1971-1974 Preparation phase of inspections Purpose of inspections Political reporting evaluation State Department - European Bureau - Iberian Affairs 1974-1978 Portugal revolution - 1974 Dealing with Kissinger African colonies NATO Ambassador Frank Carlucci Communists and the military Carlucci's TV appearance Spanish base negotiations Franco King Juan Carlos France and Italy political situations Lisbon, Portugal - DCM 1978-1983 Political and economic situation Lajes Air Base Ambassador Bloomfield NATO and Portugal CIA problems AID Relations with government African colonies Communists EC and Portugal US commercial interests State Department - Deputy Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs 1983-1985 Assistant Secretary Joan Clark Computers in passport issuance Computer management in State Consular "cone" Problem visa cases Protection and Welfare problems Citizens Service office Secretary of State George Shultz La Paz, Bolivia - Ambassador 1985-1988 Appointment process President Paz Estenssoro Relations with government Professor Jeffrey Sachs, consultant Miners and Food for Peace Drug problem - cocaine Anti-drug programs Intelligence Fusion Unit Operation Blast Furnace Corruption Personal security AID programs Food for Peace Lisbon, Portugal - Ambassador 1988-1990 Lajes Base renewal (negotiations) US-Portuguese relations European Community (EC) Apparent changes since 1983 Portuguese military responsibilities F-16s US military assistance Embassy staff US commercial interests Luso-American Development Foundation Gulbenkian Foundation 3 President Mario Soares French influence Immigration from colonies Portugal and NATO Luxembourg - Ambassador 1990-1994 US relations AWACS registration issue Iraqi invasion of Kuwait Government Personalities NATO US military facilities Agriculture WWII remembered Views on Yugoslavia breakup Maastricht Treaty Drug trafficking Money laundering BCCI Financial role COCOM traffic Banking Retirement August 1994 Comments on embassy function and organization INTERVIEW Q: Today is September 19, 1995. This is an interview with Ambassador Edward M. Rowell. It is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies, and I am Charles Stuart Kennedy. Ed, the best way to start is at the beginning. Can you tell me when and where you were born, as well as something about your family? ROWELL: I was born in Oakland, California, on October 13, 1931. My father was a Ph. D. candidate at the time at the University of California in Berkeley. He had been born in San Francisco, California. My grandfather had been born in San Francisco. My great grandfather had arrived in San Francisco in 1857, as a missionary. Q: Good God! There weren't many of them there. ROWELL: That's right. So I come from a missionary family. Q: What was your father's field of study? ROWELL: Labor economics. In fact, he was on the staff of someone who dealt with the west coast longshoremen's strike in the mid-1930s --1935 or 1936. Q: Harry Bridges and company. ROWELL: Right. One of my father's first real jobs was with the US Department of Agriculture in the Farm Security Administration. He traveled often to the migratory labor camps, and as a child I remember spending endless days at the railroad station watching the trains come and go. Trains fascinated me. One time my father took me to a couple of the migratory labor camps that John Steinbeck wrote about in The Grapes of Wrath. So when I got older and read Steinbeck, there was something in it that struck me directly. Q. Well, he was in a field that was extremely important, particularly during your formative or very early years in the Depression of the 1930s. You saw the "Arkies" people from Arkansas who had migrated to California and the "Okies" similar people from Oklahoma who had migrated to California coming in. ROWELL: I remember my father telling me about people dying in public libraries -- dying of starvation. I also remember the first time I saw a paper dollar. I must have been about six years old, and my father had brought it home as a curiosity to show to the family. Till then, all dollars in my experience were silver. We assumed some "foreigner" from the eastern United States had brought it to California.. Q: California was the last state to accept... ROWELL: California and Nevada. This paper dollar was quite an item. We displayed it at the house for several weeks. [Laughter] Anyway, I guess that I must have been about eight or nine years old when my father took a job in Washington, DC. We were there for one year and went back to California. We lived in California another year, then returned to Washington for about two and one-half years. Q: World War II had started. ROWELL: The war started while we were in Washington. We went back to Berkeley, California again in 1942 at Thanksgiving time in November. In 1944 my father's name came up in the draft. He turned out to have an enlarged heart and was rejected for military service. The State Department immediately offered him a position, which he took, as one of the first three Labor Attachés the US ever had. So my family and I all went off to Brazil. I attended the American School in Rio De Janeiro from roughly June or July, 1944, till November, 1947, when I went back to California and lived with my 5 grandmother. She lived in what was then a small, rural town east of Berkeley named Lafayette. Today Lafayette is a San Francisco suburb. At the time I was there, the really big thing was for a kid was to be either on a football team or in an auto shop and to wear the "uniform" -- blue jeans and T-shirts. Nobody had any money, and nobody cared. Life was golden. I finished at the rural high school. I competed for a regional scholarship from Yale University and got it. I should say that I graduated from high school a half year early in order to be able to go with my parents to Denmark on State Department travel orders. I was in Denmark from January, 1949, till the end of August, 1949, when I went to New Haven, Connecticut, to start college at Yale. Q: What attracted you toward Yale? ROWELL: My father had always said, "The sky's the limit." He said that I should think about going to some university other than the University of California at Berkeley, which was my home. My father said, "Why don't you try Harvard?" When we were living in Brazil in the mid 1940s, I had a piano teacher, a Brazilian, who had taken his music degree at Yale. A friend of his, one of his teachers at Yale, visited him. He came around and visited us and persuaded me that I should apply to Yale, rather than to Harvard. So I did. Q: When you were in Denmark, this was still during the post-war period, wasn't it? ROWELL: It was the early post-war period. We had ration stamps for everything. You couldn't eat in a restaurant without handing over ration stamps. I went with my father when he made a field trip to Norway because he was the Regional Labor Officer for Scandinavia, or at least for Denmark and Norway. That was an interesting trip. What impressed me as much as anything in Norway was the ice cream on a stick, except that the ice cream was made from whale oil. My God, was that awful! [Laughter] Even the Danes had decent margarine, as well as some butter. Norway was still suffering deeply from the results of World War II. However, even in Denmark we had to be resupplied via the US military supply service. We could get meat once a month. We had a kind of half refrigerator, which wouldn't hold a month's supply of meat. We rigged a platform outside the window of our apartment on the shady side of the building and put the meat on it. We prayed that the meat would keep for a month that far north of the equator. However, we learned that in the second half of the month, it was a prudent idea to use it only in highly spiced stews! Q: You were essentially living off the fat of the land, compared to the Danes at that time. ROWELL: We were living without any real concern. The Danes weren't living badly, but they worried a little more about it than we did. For example, I went to stay with a Danish family on their farm in Jutland.