Library of Congress Interview with Chas W. Freeman Jr. The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR CHAS W. FREEMAN, JR. Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: April 14, 1995 Copyright 1998 ADST Q: Can you tell me a bit about your background, when and where you were born and then something about your family. FREEMAN: Sure. I go by Chas W. Freeman, Jr. And the reason for that is, first of all, Chas is an old abbreviation for Charles in my family. But George Bush, when he sent me to Saudi Arabia as ambassador, knew me as Chas, and somehow that ended up on the commissioning certificate. So, since I've never been called Charles, I simply decided that that was a better solution. Legally, I'm still Charles, but for all other purposes, I'm Chas. My background. I'm a typical product of centuries of American miscegenation. The Freemans came to this country in 1621. And there is a family tradition (which may or may not be correct) that the reason for this is recorded in a famous English law case called Freeman vs. Freeman, in which, as I recall, my putative ancestor was a rake and a ne'er- do-well in London (the family was originally from Devon), and was persuaded by a wealthy uncle, having lost all his own money in gambling and drinking, that he should marry a very ugly, overage young lady who was the ward of this uncle. Being a scoundrel, he naturally insisted on a written contract. In return for marrying this girl, he got an annual income and a lump sum. The uncle made it clear to him, orally, that the contract was dependent on his Interview with Chas W. Freeman Jr. http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000394 Library of Congress refraining from drink and gambling, and his behaving like a gentleman. He didn't live up to the terms of the contract, needless to say. And this resulted in a lawsuit, in which he tried to enforce the contract against his uncle. He lost. When he lost, he abandoned his wife, went to Holland and became a Puritan, repented of his sins, I reckon, and then moved to the Plymouth Colony. One brother went to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and remarried, bigamously. So that's the start of the line. The family has been around in the United States long enough so that I can count thirteen European nationalities and one American Indian tribe in my background, and some illustrious ancestors — John Adams and John Quincy Adams among them, and Governor John Winthrop, in an earlier period. My great grandfathers were eminent men. John Ripley Freeman was the leading hydraulic engineer of his time, at the end of the nineteenth century. He was the only man, in history, I believe, to be president of both the American Society of Civil Engineers and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He was a successful entrepreneur in addition to his engineering prowess, which lives on hydraulic tables that are still used. It also lives on in China, where he taught (he taught also in Tokyo), in the Three Gorges Project, the flood control project on the Yangtze, which he essentially designed. This is alluded to briefly in a book by Jonathan Spence called To Change China. My other great grandfather, whose name was Charles Wellman, after whom I'm named, was apparently one of the inventors or perfecters of the open-hearth steel process, he was a wealthy businessman in Cleveland who was killed at an early age in the wreck of the Twentieth Century Limited. My mother's grandfather, my great grandfather on that side, was Robert Ezra Park, who was one of the founders of sociology in the United States. He took a doctorate at Heidelberg and was instrumental in starting the University of Chicago's social science program. His book with Burgess was the classic sociology text for much of the early part of Interview with Chas W. Freeman Jr. http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000394 Library of Congress the twentieth century. And his writings on race are still referred to in the literature. He was, among other distinctions, Booker T. Washington's private secretary, and ghost-wrote a lot of Washington's books. He was the companion of Washington on a visit to the Belgian Congo to investigate atrocities that King Leopold of Belgium had carried out in his private fiefdom. The other great grandfather was from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and struggled all his life to hold together a plantation, which he ultimately failed to do. Turning to subsequent generations, my grandfather Hovey Thomas Freeman succeeded his father as president of the Manufacturers Mutual Insurance System, now known as the Allendale System, and lived in Rhode Island. My grandfather on my mother's side was Edward Cahill Park, who was a well-regarded attorney in Boston for many years, and had a role in the defense of Alger Hiss, not the principal role, but participation in his defense, among other distinctions. So that's that generation. My father, Charles Wellman Freeman, was a graduate of MIT, served in the Navy in World War II, and following that, declined to join the family business and struck out on his own, with a G.I. loan, and did exceedingly well at business. My mother was an artist and architect from Boston, Carla Elizabeth Park. The two of them ended up in Nassau, the Bahamas, initially running and then later buying a hotel of some antiquity and distinction called the Royal Victoria, which had been built during the Civil War for the gun and cotton runners of the South. Q: Oh, yes, for their R & R. FREEMAN: For their R & R. So I grew up in the Bahamas. Interview with Chas W. Freeman Jr. http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000394 Library of Congress Q: But your parents were American citizens. FREEMAN: Yes, of course. My mother died when I was nine, and my father remarried. Q: You were born in 1943. FREEMAN: I was born March 2, 1943, in Washington, a few blocks from here on Woodley Avenue. At any rate, I went to a school in the Bahamas that was an experimental Presbyterian school, and I was in the class that set the bow wave for the school; we were the oldest. Because there was no curriculum, and because the teachers were drawn from eclectic backgrounds (I'll discuss that in a minute), it was a superb educational experience. When I was thirteen, however, my father thought that I should be re-Americanized, because I spoke with a British accent in school and a Bahamian accent on the street. He insisted on an American accent at home. So I was sent to Milton Academy. Q: That's outside of Boston. FREEMAN: Yes, Milton, Massachusetts, where my mother had gone to school. I passed the secondary education boards for the 12th grade, which was a testimony not to me but to the quality of the education. The teachers at that school in the Bahamas included, as I say, quite an eclectic lot, many of whose backgrounds I didn't know at the time. A history teacher was arrested, in the course of one of my classes, as a war criminal by the British authorities, and returned to Germany for trial. I never knew quite what happened to him. The Latin and Greek teacher, who was an RAF ace, turned out to have been drummed out of the RAF for egregious homosexual behavior. The geography teacher was a South African Communist in exile. My scripture teacher later defected to a job at BOAC as a stewardess, which probably Interview with Chas W. Freeman Jr. http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000394 Library of Congress lowered the standards of beauty in that organization, but certainly improved our scripture teaching. Q: Sounds like the Bahamas after the war was Tangier II or something like that. FREEMAN: It wasn't quite that exotic. The only connection to Tangier was the presence of Ambassador Villard as consul general. Of course, he had had a very distinguished career in North Africa. Q: You graduated really at a very early age from Milton, did you? FREEMAN: Well, I dropped back to the 9th grade, which was emotionally the right thing to have done, but intellectually rather boring. It led me into quite eclectic reading — a great deal of science fiction and French novels of one sort or another that were lying around my grandparents' house. I should say that there is a family tradition, on my mother's side, going back at least to the time of my great grandfather, which would be the late nineteenth century, of conversation twice a week at the dinner table in a foreign language. And each generation chose its language. For my grandfather's generation, it was German, although my grandfather was also bilingual in French, having lived in Strasbourg for a while. For my mother's generation, it was French, although she also knew Spanish. Having Robert Redfield, who was an anthropologist, as an uncle, she had spent a year with the Redfields in Guatemala while they were doing field research. For my generation, the language was French, again. And for my children, it was Chinese. In any event, Milton was boring. I was certainly a student who did very little work and got good grades, and was regarded as a troublemaker and a bender of the rules, which led to my graduation with distinction rather than cum laude.