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Interview with Robert V. Keeley

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Interview with Robert V. Keeley Library of Congress Interview with Robert V. Keeley The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR ROBERT V. KEELEY Interviewed by: Thomas Stern Initial interview date: December 19, 1991 Copyright 1998 ADST Q: On behalf of the Foreign Affairs Oral History Program, let me thank you for giving us your time to record these memories of your distinguished career. Let me ask you, first of all, to give us a brief description of your background: where you grew up, your education and what led you to a career in the Foreign Service. KEELEY: I was a Foreign Service “brat,” as some have called the children of Foreign Service officers. It was a term taken from the Army, and I must say that I do not cherish it. I therefore grew up in the Foreign Service. My father was a career diplomat from 1920 to 1960. He had a forty year career, six years longer than my own. He used to call it a “forty- two” year government career, because he included his World War I service in the Army Signal Corps. He entered the Service before the Rogers Act of 1924; he was recruited in Washington for a specific position as Vice Consul in Constantinople, as Istanbul was then called. He dealt mostly with shipping and seamen and those kinds of problems. He met my mother in Constantinople; she was there working with refugees. Constantinople was then the center of many refugee movements resulting from World War I, with refugees coming from Russia, the Balkans, Armenia, the Middle East, etc. She was working for the Red Cross. They married in 1922 in Constantinople. Interview with Robert V. Keeley http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000595 Library of Congress My mother had as remarkable a background as my father. She came from Wellsville, New York, born on a farm, part of a thoroughly German community. After her death I acquired her baptismal certificate, on a Lutheran Church form, and it was all in German. Unusually for a girl from her background in that era, she was college educated, at Alfred University, near her home town, trained as an English teacher. She taught at girls' colleges, coached sports (she was a good athlete as a youngster), and obviously had no intention of becoming a farmer's wife, which otherwise would have been her destiny. So after World War I she went abroad and worked for various organizations, the YWCA, the Red Cross, refugee relief. She had an adventuresome spirit, much like my father's, and it was clear early on that she was not going to spend her life in Wellsville, New York. After her marriage she became a typical Foreign Service wife of her generation, raising her kids, looking after her husband, entertaining the visiting firemen, coping with life in often primitive circumstances—the whole bit of that era. She was marvelously uncomplaining. She predeceased my father by about eight years, and the fact that he went into a decline after her death brought home to us, their sons, how much he had depended on her. A couple of years after their marriage in Constantinople my father was transferred to Damascus; prior to that he had taken the Foreign Service exam. How he passed it was always a mystery to both him and me, because he had not then graduated from college. Later on, while assigned to Beirut, he received a B.A. in history from the American University of Beirut. His failure to go to college at a normal age resulted primarily from a break with his family. He had run away from his Washington home at the age of 12 because of a disagreement with his second step-mother; he went to live with an aunt on Capitol Hill, and later with the family of his Central High School fraternity brother, Bill Gates (I'm named after Bill Gates' father, Robert Gates; my middle name—Vossler—is my mother's maiden name). My father worked his way through Central High School and then held a variety of very strange jobs, like selling encyclopedias door-to-door in Pennsylvania, ending up enlisting in the Army during World War I. At first he mostly looked after Army mules, but then maneuvered himself into a more glamorous calling. He became a pilot Interview with Robert V. Keeley http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000595 Library of Congress during the War, in the Army Signal Corps; and after his discharge he worked as a stunt pilot with traveling circuses and at county fairs; then he became a barber and a carpenter; he owned a restaurant briefly; worked in the Texas oilfields and so on. He never had a chance to go to college although he did get to Princeton as a cadet at the Army Signal Corps flying school. He became the commandant of the cadets, and his flying skills were apparently so great that they made him an instructor, so he never got to France—much to his regret at the time. He nevertheless was a very well-read person and, after passing the written test, returned to Washington for his oral examination, which he also passed, although that was very much a mystery to him, given his lack of formal higher education. He did of course have the advantage of having had some working experience in the field—in Constantinople— and that probably helped him with the panel. After becoming a full-fledged Foreign Service officer, he was transferred to Damascus, which was considered the real “boondocks” in those days. There he found that a two man post had become a one man post because the senior officer, the Consul, had taken ill and had gone back to the States. My two brothers were born in Damascus. My dad was there during the famous Druze Rebellion and, as so many eager young Foreign Service officers will do, he jumped into his car and drove out to the Jebel Druze headquarters of the “rebels” and spoke to the leadership. He was thus able to send all sorts of first-hand despatches home, and these were warmly welcomed in Washington. However, at the time, as one might expect, the State Department had a very European orientation and did not view colonial uprisings with great enthusiasm. Dad's reports were leaked by someone in the Department to the French Embassy, which resulted in his being declared, in effect, persona non grata by the French authorities in Syria, which was a French mandate. He was not exactly declared persona non grata, but while he was on home leave the French let it be known that he was not welcome to return to Damascus. A compromise was then worked out with the French, who allowed my father to be transferred to Beirut, where they could watch him more closely. He of course did not foment the Druze Rebellion; he merely Interview with Robert V. Keeley http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000595 Library of Congress reported on it, but that is the kind of thing one can expect in the Foreign Service. The irony for the French was that the Syrian nationalist Arabs who ruled Syria after independence greeted my father as a hero when he arrived in Damascus in 1948 as the first resident Minister to the newly independent state. The French had really done him a favor back in the 1920s. I was born in Beirut. Then the family was assigned to Montreal, where I started my education in a French-Canadian school. Then from 1936 to 1939 we were in Thessaloniki, Greece. By the way, these were all “French speaking” posts. In those days, at a time when Foreign Service officers were not assigned to study the so-called “hard” languages, their assignments were based on their knowledge of “world” languages, which in my father's case was French. So all the posts to which he had been assigned were considered “French speaking”—then and later, until his last post, Palermo. It was in Thessaloniki that my close connection with Greece started. My brothers and I attended the German school, which became increasingly hazardous for us as American kids; it became a thoroughly Nazi institution—it had a branch of the Hitler Youth Movement. At the time Greece was ruled by a proto-fascist dictatorship under General Metaxas. The political situation was very uncomfortable for American students in the German school, and we were the only ones there. If we had returned to the post after 1939 as we were assigned to do, after home leave, we would have switched to some other school, although the choices were not very good. There was and still is an excellent American school in Thessaloniki—Anatolia College—but it was a high school and we were too young for that. The other foreign schools were French and Italian and primarily Catholic, and run by nuns and priests; since we were not Catholics, my parents preferred the only available Protestant foreign school, which was the German one. We could have gone to Greek schools, because by that time we spoke the language. In fact, Metaxas had decreed that all schools—regardless of nationality of school or students—would teach a minimum of two hours of Greek every day. That in a nut-shell is a summary of my early education as the son of a career Foreign Service officer. Interview with Robert V. Keeley http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000595 Library of Congress When we were back in the U.S. during home leave in 1939, war broke out in Europe.
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