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Library of Congress Library of Congress Interview with Robert McCloskey The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR ROBERT MCCLOSKEY Interviewed by: Charles S. Kennedy Initial interview date: May 8, 1989 Copyright 1998 ADST Q: Mr. Ambassador, could you give me an idea of how you got involved in the newspaper business? MCCLOSKEY: I began with a weekly newspaper in New Jersey, while I was going through undergraduate school in the early '50s. Q: Where were you going to undergraduate school? MCCLOSKEY: Temple University in Philadelphia. I had grown up in the city, spent a lot of time leaving it, but then went back to it, to go to school. After graduation, I went looking for a newspaper job in several cities, and ended up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where I worked for the Bethlehem Globe Times, and was a stringer for the Associated Press. After having done all of the beats, I was looking for a larger world. I wanted to go to Europe as a correspondent and was steered toward the Foreign Service. Q: How did you get steered in that odd direction? MCCLOSKEY: A member in Congress, who I used to cover up there in Easton, Pennsylvania, and who I was chatting with about how nice it would be to be an American Interview with Robert McCloskey http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000785 Library of Congress correspondent in Europe, said, “Why don't you think about the Foreign Service?” Then that was the start of something that lasted about 26 years. Then I got back to newspapering when I retired from the Foreign Service in 1981, by going to the Washington Post as the news critic of the paper. But I was never very far away from the newspaper business, or as news took on that awful word “media,” because for something like ten or eleven years, I served as the spokesman for the Department of State. So I have some understanding of both sides of the street. Q: What was your first assignment in the Foreign Service? MCCLOSKEY: To the American consulate general in Hong Kong, as an investigator in the old refugee relief program in 1955. Q: With Lorrie Lawrence and company? MCCLOSKEY: Lawrence and others, yes. By a funny turn of events have been associated now for the last four and a half years with an agency that used to be exclusively a refugee agency, a private American agency, Catholic Relief Services. So I have a way of returning to earlier concepts and pursuits. Q: While you were in Hong Kong, I wonder if you could just explain a little of what you all were doing — I speak as a former consular officer myself — of consular work that was unique, that Hong Kong operation? MCCLOSKEY: Yes, in 1953 the Congress passed some new refugee legislation that set quotas around the world for a period of three years. The total ran into several hundred thousand. In Western Europe, the quotas were broken up among individual countries. That's where the larger numbers were. There was one quota, however, to embrace all of the Far East, and Hong Kong had its share. It was on the order of fifteen hundred to two thousand, I believe, who were eligible for admission through the refugee relief program as part of the Hong Kong quota. These were mainly Chinese refugees from the mainland, Interview with Robert McCloskey http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000785 Library of Congress who had made their way into Hong Kong beginning in late 1949 when the communists took over. The refugee program began in 1953. The special refugee program ran until the end of 1956. Other than Chinese nationals, there were a few more of the more exotic people of the world, white Russians, and others of European origin who had made their way into and lived in mainland China up until 1949 or the early '50s. We processed the applications for visas. The regulations were that the individual or the family had to demonstrate that there was a sponsor in the United States who would look after the person or the family. I believe there had to be a certificate from the Labor Department that showed there would be work available to the individual or the family leader, mother or father. Q: What was your impression of government operations of that sort and at that level? MCCLOSKEY: I had the sense that the quotas were not very well balanced around the world on that particular program. It got me to wondering for the first time, I suppose, how much politics played in humanitarian issues. Surely, there were greater populations who were made refugees as a result of World War II in Europe than there were in the Far East, particularly with regard to China from 1949 on. I had the sense, and this is hindsight, understand, that if this is the way government is run, it's damn near as chaotic, at times, as putting a newspaper together. That specific program brought in a lot of people, who stayed for only the life of that program, and then left government. But it worked, however untidy it was at times, and again from that vantage point, that part of the world could have used many more numbers than were allotted to it. Q: I say this because I started out in 1955 as a refugee relief officer, and in Europe a significant proportion were given to refugees who, of all places, were in Italy, which was not a refugee place, and to The Netherlands, mainly because of Congressional pressures Interview with Robert McCloskey http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000785 Library of Congress from people who had relatives there. How did you end up in the press business, starting off in this other field? MCCLOSKEY: I had a desire to stay longer in Hong Kong. I arrived there in 1955, and this program expired with the legislation at the end of 1956. I had undertaken to learn Chinese. I was quite satisfied and, in fact, sought to stay on there as a USIA officer. That did not work, not because the people there didn't want it, but the people in Washington couldn't agree on it. I came back, and was assigned to the UNESCO relations staff, which made me seriously consider leaving and getting back into the newspaper business. But I stuck it out for about a year, when I was asked whether I would be interested in joining the staff of the office of news in the Department, and said, “Yes, I would.” And that's the beginning of a long association with the news operations of the State Department. Q: This would be about '57? MCCLOSKEY: This was '58. Q: What type of work were you doing, initially, in the department news, and where did the office of news fit within the departmental framework? MCCLOSKEY: It was a component of the Bureau of Public Affairs. That having been established, I believe, in the early '50s when Archibald MacLeish, the American poet, critic, and writer, I think, was the first Assistant Secretary. The office of news over the years, while it remained a part of the Bureau of Public Affairs, got to be the tail wagging the dog, because the person who served as the spokesman for the State Department was much more involved in the mainstream of departmental activity, day in and day out, than was the assistant secretary for public affairs, although he was the immediate senior officer. Interview with Robert McCloskey http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000785 Library of Congress It was like that until I proposed to then Secretary of State Rogers, in 1969, that the office of news be made an integral part of the office of the Secretary of State. That took place and remained that way until the Carter Administration, when it was deemed worth taking back and making it a component of the Bureau of Public Affairs, and I believe it is still that way today. Q: What were you doing initially? MCCLOSKEY: The office of news had a geographic breakdown among the staff. There were those who followed the Far East, European affairs, the rest of the geographic bureaus, in addition to the functional bureaus, the emphasis, however, being on the geographic bureaus, which was where the news was focused. Lincoln White was the director of the office of news, and the spokesman for the department at the time. I worked for him. My area of my watch was on Far Eastern affairs. The practice was, and, I guess, still is, that the department officially holds an open, on-the-record briefing everyday. That, however, is not the end of it for reporters, as I think you know, spend their whole days at the State Department working the same hours as you and I did when we were there. Space is provided for them. They leave their homes in the morning and go to the State Department. They don't leave their homes and go to the Washington Post or to the AP office. So that, throughout the day, those of us in the office of news were available to reporters, who were pursuing their own exclusive stories or in furtherance of something that came up at the daily on-the-record briefing. If the story needed just a little bit more background, you sat down with somebody who knew a little bit of that, which we were presumed to know. That's how it was, and I don't know how it is today.
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