Interview with the Honorable Chester A. Crocker , 2011
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Library of Congress Interview with The Honorable Chester A. Crocker , 2011 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project ASSISTANT SECRETARY CHESTER ARTHUR CROCKER Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial Interview date: June 5, 2006 Copyright 2011 ADST Q: Let's start at the beginning. When and where were you born? CROCKER: Born in New York City, October 29 of 1941. Q: Tell me a little bit about your family. Let's take your father's side, sort of the Crocker side, first, then we'll move to your mother's side. Where are they from and what do you know about them? CROCKER: Yeah, my father's side is from New York, also, before that, from both Albany, New York and New England. And the Crocker side primarily from Massachusetts, originally, going back to the 18th century and before. The Crockers came out of the western shires of the UK. People who were named Crocker made crockery in the old days. So that's kind of the root of the word. Q: What were the Crockers doing in Massachusetts? CROCKER: They were into finance and trade and the church, a little bit. Q: What church? Interview with The Honorable Chester A. Crocker , 2011 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001697 Library of Congress CROCKER: Baptist and then Episcopal. If you go way back you'll find lots of Old Testament names in the Crocker lineages. And then on my father's other side, the Albany types, the name up there was Masten. Arthur Masten was my father's grandfather and he was the nephew of Chester Alan Arthur, the 19th century president. So the Masten side is kind of Albany based and is important in my life because Albany was the jumping off place for the Adirondack Mountains and I spent my youth, when I could get away from school, fishing in the Adirondacks and still have property up there that I like to visit in that wonderful part of the country. So those are the roots, on that side. On my mother's side, her maiden name was Verdi, as in Giuseppe Verdi, only not directly descended. Q: Joe Green. CROCKER: Joe Green, exactly, good old Joe Green. She also was a native of New York. Her father had come over at a very young age from Italy, so, more recent arrivals in the country. But I guess you'd have to say I'm a born and bred New Yorker. Q: What line of business was your father in? CROCKER: He was an investment banker, working in a number of Wall Street firms and then retired at a fairly young age and became a fulltime environmentalist, a very, very active environmentalist in the New York area and was for some years the chairman of an upstate New York environmental activist group called the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks. He stayed active in that until his dying days, which were actually just about a year and a half ago. Q: Did you father go to college and all? CROCKER: Yes, he was a Princeton grad and Harvard Business School. Q: And your mother, was she active in affairs, or what was she? Interview with The Honorable Chester A. Crocker , 2011 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001697 Library of Congress CROCKER: I would describe her as exposed to the arts and she adored high culture. She loved travel, music and foreign languages. Her father was a great collector of operatic music and other music, had a marvelous collection of old 78s that I can still remember fiddling around with. She was an amateur singer, loved the opera and I think the arts were probably her main interest in life, apart from family. Q: She go to college? CROCKER: No, she did not. Q: Then you grew up right in New York City itself? CROCKER: Grew up in New York City and then moved to areas just outside it, in one case to a town called Suffern, New York, right on the New Jersey border, about thirty minutes or so from New York City. Today it's probably longer, then it was thirty minutes. And then we also moved out to Long Island, which is where my father had grown up, near Oyster Bay, on the north shore of Long Island. Q: Was your father, you mention Oyster Bay, at all, was there any contact of any nature between his love for the environment and Teddy Roosevelt? CROCKER: Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure. In fact, the place in the Adirondacks that was in my family, had been in my family for some generations was a staging place when Teddy Roosevelt was informed that McKinley had been shot, he came down in a series of horse- pulled relays and they stayed, they switched horses at a place that is now a clubhouse where the family spends time. So I'm sure there was a TR link — not a family link, just one talked about him reverently, at the family dinner table one talked about TR with great reverence. Q: Speaking of family, you have brothers, sisters? Interview with The Honorable Chester A. Crocker , 2011 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001697 Library of Congress CROCKER: Two older sisters, yes. Q: As a small child, were you, what was sort of the family like? You sit around the family dining table and talk about things? CROCKER: Yeah, I think the general ambience was that if children are going to be at the dinner table they better participate in the adult conversation or else shut up, because the adults were going to have a conversation. So, one learned at an early time about words and about messages and about speaking in whole sentences, maybe you could say. But the exposures I really remember are not so much early childhood, being a young adolescent and then wanting to be able to communicate with adults at the table. Q: Where did the family fall politically? CROCKER: I think it's fair to say that my father was throughout his life a New York Republican, a Rockefeller Republican, if you like, not the kind we currently enjoy the leadership of but East Coast Republican, maybe a Hank Paulsen or Chuck Hagel Republican, to be up to date. There used to be a lot of Republicans on Wall Street and there still are some. Q: One thinks about, for many years, Jake Javits and all of this CROCKER: I would add, though, that that didn't remain my dad's political orientation as the party moved to the right. Q: What about religion? Did religion play much of a role or not? CROCKER: It was part of one's experience as a child and as an adolescent, yes. My father, more than my mother, went to church on Sundays and made allusions, Biblical allusions and references were not uncommon in things that he would say, although they were very uncommon in things I might say. Brought up Episcopal and confirmed Interview with The Honorable Chester A. Crocker , 2011 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001697 Library of Congress at a tender age, but, it's derivative, I guess you could say. My religious experience is derivative of his, really and when I was at home, which was not all the time, he would go to church and he would ask if I wouldn't like to come and join him and I sometimes did out of solidarity when I was a teenager, but it was really out of solidarity. Q: Well then, where did you go to elementary school? CROCKER: While we were living in Manhattan I went to a private school on the East Side of Manhattan which was called Allen-Stevenson, which is still alive and kicking, which was in the upper Seventies, off Lexington Avenue, roughly through fifth grade and then we moved and I went to public junior high school in Suffern, New York for a year and that was an interesting change of pace. We then moved again and I went to private school for two more years on Long Island, before going away to private school at Phillips Academy Andover, which I did for about two and a half years. Q: In the private school in New York City, how would you describe it, was it a progressive school, was it a traditional school? CROCKER: I'd say it was reasonably progressive in terms of a varied student population of New Yorkers, many from different national origins, I'm sure but private schools aren't cheap, so there was that degree of selectivity. Had a very good sports program, which I liked a lot. Had a first class music program, which really turned me on. I became very into playing woodwind instruments and things like that while I was there at that school. Unfortunately I didn't sustain it but I liked music. Music was part of my life, because my mother was very musical and she had a sister and brother in law who ran a music conservatory and so I got more exposure to it through them, as well. Q: On the music side and other things, was there an Italian streak to what you were getting from the family through your mother or not? Interview with The Honorable Chester A. Crocker , 2011 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001697 Library of Congress CROCKER: Probably so, yes, in terms of some of the musical choices. When people ask me what are my roots I often say - partly in jest - that I'm one quarter Italian and it's my best quarter.