The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project Foreign Assistance Series
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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project Foreign Assistance Series HARIADENE JOHNSON Interviewed by: W. Haven North Initial interview date: September 8, 1998 Copyright 2006 ADST The oral history program was made possible through support provided by the Center for Development Information and Evaluation, U.S. Agency for International Development, under terms of Cooperative Agreement No. AEP-0085-A-00-5026-00. The opinions expressed herein are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Agency for International Development or the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. TABLE OF CONTENTS Career Overview Early Years and Education—1942-1967 Beginnings at USAID —1967 Observations on the Central West African Regional Office 1965-1967 (RUA), Washington, DC First USAID assignment Assistant Desk Officer for Ghana, 1967-1972 Sierra Leone, Liberia, Zaire The Ghana program and visit to Ghana Ghana Debt Rescheduling Visit to Zaire—1968 Visit to Liberia—1969 An evaluation of the JFK Hospital Project in Liberia Assistant Director for Program for the Sahel Development 1972 Program Trip to the Sahel countries—1973 Special Assignment in Cameroon on an integrated livestock 1974 project 1 USAID Deputy Mission Director Cameroons 1974-1976 The New Directions Policy Returned to the Sahel program; then Africa Bureau Development 1976-77 Resources Office (DR) Office Director for East Africa 1977-1982 Issue of the close out of USAID in Ethiopia Somalia Djibouti Tanzania Kenya Uganda Horn of Africa Director, African Bureau Development Planning Office (DP) 1982 A leave of absence 1986 Temporary TDY in Sudan 1987 The Islands of the South Pacific for two months 1988-1989 South Pacific Islands for 6 months Grenada in the Caribbean 1989-1990 Other Agency Assignments 1990-1994 Mission Management Assessments Study on USAID Mission staffing—1990s The Asia Bureau on Private Enterprise programs—1992-1993 The Task Force for Newly Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union Worked on reorganization issues and the “No Name Task Force” The Transition Team —Clinton Administration—1993 Retirement 1994 and after The Global Bureau’s Linkage Program — an evaluation—1995 Evaluation in Madagascar—1997 Various tasks with the Global Bureau Summing up after 30 years in international development INTERVIEW 2 Q: The interview is with Hariadene Johnson who served in USAID for many years. Give us a sketch of your career in Foreign Assistance. JOHNSON: I joined the USAID in September of 1967 as a Management Intern, a category which they no longer have, but essentially it was a Junior Officer Intern System. I retired in September of 1994 after 30 years with the Federal government. All of that in USAID; most of the 20 years in the Africa Bureau; and the other ten, more or less roaming around the Agency. For awhile there I specialized in islands. I worked in the Caribbean and the South Pacific Islands; then I did some work with the Asia Bureau; then the last four years I was with the Agency, I was with the Newly Independent States, Russia and Eastern Europe; and the final six months with the Clinton transition team which was headed by Golar Butcher (former AA for the Africa Bureau), who was a long term friend and former boss. She asked me to work on the transition, and I was more than happy too. That’s somewhat of a sketch. Q: Let’s go back to where you grew up and where you went to school? JOHNSON: I was born in Waco, Texas in 1942. I grew up there, stayed there really until I was 18 and went away to college. At that time, Waco was very much of a small, southern town. It was closer to East Texas than West Texas, but technically it is Central Texas. It was primarily a marketing town to the middle of the cotton and sorghum growing area. It is located half way between Dallas and Houston. There’s a fine University in Waco, called Bailer University, which I refused to go to, and so I went to Austin to the University of Texas in Austin and got my graduate degree there. Q: What did you major in? JOHNSON: I majored in something called Plan Two. Q: What’s that? JOHNSON: For Plan One you declared a major and had so many hours required in so many subjects. Plan Two was an attempt to set up a small college within the confines of a large University so that you had a core group of subjects, called Plan Two courses, which basically were liberal arts, and then you could take the rest of your credits anywhere you wanted to. Essentially, all of your courses were taught by full professors, even as a Freshman. They tended to be 25 to 30 people as opposed to the 300 people who were in the normal big sessions. Q: You must have had some special qualifications to get into that kind of a program? JOHNSON: Essentially, it was honors, a honors graduate from High School and then application scores on the SAT exams, things like that in terms of acceptance into the University. First, you were accepted into the University of Texas and then you were accepted as a Plan Two Major within that overall curriculum. Essentially, it wound up with letting you take graduate courses at the Sophomore level. I went Freshman year and 3 went to Summer School and then my Sophomore year they started letting me take graduate courses. Q: Was there any particular theme to the core of the Plan Two program that you took? JOHNSON: Liberal arts. They had your basic courses. Essentially, you would have been required to take, English, History, Mathematics, Sciences. You just took Plan Two sections, so that instead of being in the larger classes you were in the smaller classes. Starting your Junior year, they more or less ran on a tutorial basis, like a graduate seminar. I ended up with a triple major in philosophy, government and sociology (which also qualified for Phi Beta Kappa) and graduated with honors. Considering that every course I took was a honor course, I am very proud of my accomplishment. Q: Yes, of course. Was there anything in that that was related to foreign affairs? JOHNSON: I took a lot of international courses in terms of Russian government, Latin American governments, since Texas is so close to Latin America. But, more than anything, it was just a straight Liberal Arts generalized type of program. My parents, of course, wanted me to get a teaching certificate so that I would have something to fall back on and I refused. The choice was basically, I decided that I didn’t want to go to law school, I wanted to go to graduate school and be a college professor. Of all the things that I had studied, I enjoyed government the most, comparative government more than International Relations or U.S. diplomatic history. I went to the University of Wisconsin at Madison and got a Masters Degree there and was working on my Doctorate there in Political Science, International Affairs, Comparative Government. It was right at the height, well when I was at the University of Texas, it was pretty much at the height of the Civil Rights movement. When I was at the University of Wisconsin, it was at the anti war, anti Vietnam War stage. I got very depressed, essentially that what I was doing, I was going to the Library and looking up articles so I could write papers, which I was very lucky to get published, and then somebody else would go to the Library and look at what I had written in order to publish something else. It seemed like a very closed circle in the context of the Vietnam War where there was so much activism and so much feeling that you can change the world. And, coming out of the Civil Rights Movement, so much feeling that you know, being an activist and that you could change the face of the U.S. I really got to where I felt staying in college and looking towards being a college professor was simply too passive and that I wanted to get more involved in what was happening in the world. Q: Did you write a Master’s thesis? JOHNSON: I wrote a Master’s thesis and it was a Comparison of the Role of the Military in nation building in Burma and in Indonesia. Q: Why did you pick those countries? What led you into that? 4 JOHNSON: Fascination of differences. It was fun to study the United States and see how many problems we’d managed to overcome. But, for me it was more interesting to look then at other countries and see what was happening in those countries, especially in the developing world, and compare what they went through with the U.S. as a revolutionary “young nation” with the newly emerging countries. Q: Was there some course or professor that caught your interest that got you on to that track, rather than something else? JOHNSON: Probably the most important professor was a man by the name of Henry Hart. His area was South Asia. He not only was the one that I found his courses fascinating. I used him really as my advisor for a lot of the University work. He was also the one I talked to about leaving and going to work for the government. I remember this one discussion I had with him that I hated to quit. But, I felt I should go ahead and stay at Wisconsin long enough to get my Doctorate.