Library of Congress Interview with Mark Palmer Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR MARK PALMER Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: October 30, 1997 Copyright 2000 ADST Q: Today is the 30th of October 1997. This is an interview with Mark Palmer. It is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. I'm Charles Stuart Kennedy. To start with, could you tell me when and where you were born ansomething about your family? PALMER: I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1941 just as the Second World War had started to break out. My father, a career naval officer, had started the NROTC program at the University of Michigan. However, he was immediately summoned, not long after my birth, to the Pacific to take command of a sub and go to war. We moved from Michigan right away back to New London to the naval base. That's where we spent the war. Q: Your father was a submarine commander? PALMER: Right. He was career Navy. He went to the Naval Academy. I wanted to, but unfortunately I'm color blind. So they wouldn't let me in. Interview with Mark Palmer http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000895 Library of Congress Q: My brother was Class of '40 at the Naval Academy, and I had hopeto get in but I'm short sighted. And your mother was a housewife? PALMER: Right, right. Q: What was your father's family's background? PALMER: Seagoing. They were from Maine and did the China trade as did my mother's family, actually. My mother's family were from Vermont. We were the first white, non- Indian settlers in the state of Vermont, I think. My father's family helped to settle Mount Desert Island where Bar Harbor is. So we're old New Englanders. Q: Oh, I see. Where was your mother's family from in Vermont? PALMER: Westminster, which is on the Southeast corner neaBrattleboro, that area. Q: Did you go to school in New London or you were pretty young then? PALMER: I went to school everywhere because of my father. I went to school in Boston; Newton, Massachusetts; in Alexandria, Virginia; in London, England and in Seattle, all following him around; and I ended up at Yale. Q: Your father was mainly a submarine officer? PALMER: He was in submarines and communications, those two things. Q: Where did you go to high school? PALMER: I went to school first in Seattle for two years. Then, I spent two years at Vermont Academy in Vermont, which my family had started in the 1870s. Interview with Mark Palmer http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000895 Library of Congress Q: While you were in high school, what kind of reading did you do?What were your interests? PALMER: Well, they were very diverse, as I guess you are generally in high school; but I was more and more interested in Russian literature. One of my uncle's family's forefather's middle name was Czar. We inherited his library, and it was full of books about Russia. Dostoevski was my favorite writer when I was in high school. I went on in college to major in Russian area studies, Russian literature and history, and all of that sort of thing. Q: You were at Yale for four years? PALMER: Right. Q: So you started Yale when? PALMER: In 1959. Q: So you were at Yale from '59 to '63. PALMER: Right. Q: What was the state of Russian studies in those days? PALMER: I think it was really very healthy. Yale was one of the best in the country. We had some really good professors such as Fred Barghoon and many others. We had an exchange program with the University of Kiev, so I was able to go to Russia as a student several times. It was a lively and very much an interdisciplinary approach. We studied everything from Russian and Soviet economics to central planning to history and literature. It was a very interesting, comprehensive approach to looking at another society over time, through its Interview with Mark Palmer http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000895 Library of Congress history, and through its present politics. Through political science we studied communist theory, political philosophy, all kinds of dimensions. Q: You're right on the cusp of what became known a“The '60s.” Was this hitting or affecting you all at that point or had the '60s movement, which was quite strong at Yale, gotten going at that point? PALMER: Yes, I was very involved in all of that. I was a Freedom Rider. I was in SNCC and CORE and I organized demonstrations in New Haven, Baltimore, Atlanta, and Tuskegee, Alabama and all up and down the East Coast. Q: When you say Freedom Riders, you're talking about the effort oparticularly students and others to desegregate the South. PALMER: Right. And the North, too, because New Haven was racist. We spent a lot of time with the Southern Connecticut Telephone Company trying to integrate the job situation there. We did a lot of marches to open up housing for Blacks in New Haven. I helped start a project at the Whaley Avenue Jail called “Yale In Jail,” which was an effort to try to help Black prisoners with education in the jail. Q: This was also the time that Kennedy became president. Did thahave an effect, do you think? PALMER: For me personally, no. I was very disappointed with the Kennedys. You know, they were supposedly liberal but in terms of their willingness to sacrifice for civil rights, I felt that they weren't there. I am a sort of radical libertarian in my own value system. I was simultaneously a member the Party of the Right at Yale, which was Bill Buckley's party; and I was in SNCC and CORE, which was considered far on the left. Maybe students are always this way, but I was idealistic. I didn't think that the Kennedys were sufficiently idealistic. Interview with Mark Palmer http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000895 Library of Congress Q: In a way it sounds like the liberal, not the libertarian, part of you was turned internally in the United States, but you were studying the Soviet Union. Did you get caught up in Marxism, central planning? How was it presented and how did it fit with your ideas? PALMER: Well, I think I was consistent. For example, I had 350 buttons that said “Freedom Now,” from my CORE organization. I actually took these to the Soviet Union and distributed them all in the Soviet Union. I got in trouble with the KGB as a result of that. I didn't like communism any better than I liked certain aspects of the United States. I've been, from the beginning, anti-big government and all of its aspects. Q: How did you find that your approach fit with the predominanfeeling at Yale? PALMER: Generically, my sense of students is that a small percentage of any student body are interested in causes. My sense of the student body at that time at Yale was that roughly five percent were interested. The Vietnam War cause hadn't really taken off while I was there, but the civil rights cause was definitely there. Yet, we never could turn out a very high percentage of the student body, and virtually no Blacks would ever join us in demonstrations. Q: What about the faculty? PALMER: Not tremendously strong. Even William Sloan Coffin, who was sort of famous, did some things; but not as much as some of us thought he should. Q: So you went to Kiev University. When did you go there? PALMER: In 1962 and 1963. I spent about three months in Kiev. I also spent time in other cities, but that was where the exchange relationship was. Q: What was your impression? Interview with Mark Palmer http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000895 Library of Congress PALMER: I liked the people immensely. I had a girl friend. I thought that there was really no difference between their aspirations for their lives and their families and what they wanted individually for themselves. They wanted to travel. They wanted to have a good life. They wanted to be able to read. I remember friends who wanted to learn about Freud and things like that. Those were books that were not available. I felt that they kissed the same way that we kissed; and that had a tremendously important impact on the rest of my career and my Foreign Service career. I thought that there were a lot of misunderstandings and wrong lessons being taught by professors, many of whom were of Polish and Jewish extraction and had a bias against Russia. I thought that was unfortunate based on my own experience with Russians and Ukrainians and others. Q: You came there just about after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.Were you finding any tremors after that or any concerns? PALMER: Well, I remember that in the U.S., people were hiding under desks. I think that was similar in Russia, too; that people were also concerned about that. But what I most strongly felt was the enormous affection that people in these countries have for Americans. It seemed to me right from the beginning, that there was a possibility for a profoundly different situation in those countries and in their relationship with us. One of the reasons that I wanted to join the Foreign Service was that I thought that our policy in so many areas was just wrong.