The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project DANIEL P. SULLIVAN Interviewed by: David E. Reuther Initial interview date: January 2010 Copyright 2018 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Childhood and Education Born in Shanghai, China 1929 Grew up primarily in Shanghai, China BA, Princeton University 1951 Member of Naval Reserve Officers’ Training Corps MA, Johns Hopkins University 1956 Served on a Pre-Commissioning Detail of the USS Owen 1951-1952 Combat Information Center Officers School in Glenview, Illinois 1952-1953 Served on a Pre-Commissioning Detail of the USS Norfolk 1953-1954 Joined the Foreign Service 1956 Washington, DC; Bureau of Intelligence and Research 1957-1959 Northeast Asia Branch Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia—Consular Officer 1959-1961 Economic Section Kaduna, Nigeria—Vice Consul 1961-1963 Washington, D.C.—Bureau of International Organizations, 1963-1964 Assistant Staff Assistant to the Assistant Secretary Indonesian Language Training 1964-1965 Washington, D.C.—Economic Officer for South Pacific Affairs 1965-1967 Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs Coup in Indonesia Jakarta, Indonesia—Political Officer 1967-1971 Cebu, Philippines—Consular Officer 1971-1974 Freetown, Sierra Leone—Deputy Chief of Mission 1974-1976 1 Washington, D.C.—Deputy Country Director on the Philippines Desk 1976-1977 Washington, D.C.—Deputy Country Director 1977-1979 for Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma, and Singapore Washington, D.C.—Bureau of Intelligence and Research 1979-1981 Office of the Liaison, Head of HUMINT liaison Singapore—Refugee Coordinator 1981-1984 Post Foreign Service Career Office of Refugee Admissions in Refugee Programs Bureau 1985-1987 Administration in Main State 1987-1990s When Actually Employed (WAE) in State 1985-2016 INTERVIEW Q: Good afternoon. This is an interview with Daniel Peyton Sullivan for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. I am David Reuther. Dan, you have had a very interesting life; you are one of the Foreign Service Officers who have a China-missionary background. In fact, you were born in China in July 1929. Could you give us some background on your family? SULLIVAN: My father graduated from the University of Michigan in 1922. He went out to Shanghai to teach economics at St. John’s University, the Episcopalian missionary university in China, located in Shanghai. His older sister had gone out earlier to be a secretary to the bishop, and that was the tie-in. He was there from 1922 to 1943, with some breaks where he returned to the United States. Out there, he met and married my mother, who was connected to the Southern Methodist foreign missions in China. Her mother, a widow, was Secretary for Women’s Work for the Southern Methodist Board of Missions in Nashville, Tennessee. It was located at Scarritt College. She had occasion to go out in 1922 to China for a year to see how her flock was doing. She took her youngest daughter along with her. One of the older daughters was married to a Methodist preacher already in Shanghai. He was the pastor of the large downtown Methodist church, Moore Memorial Methodist Church, right across the road from the racecourse in Shanghai. 2 They met, married, and produced three children. I am the middle one. We were connected with that church until our departures from Shanghai, the circumstances of which we will get to in a little while. They were different from my father and the rest of us. Q: You were saying that your father went to the University of Michigan. Was he a Michigan boy, raised in Michigan? SULLIVAN: Born in Ypsilanti, raised in Detroit. He was the youngest of three children and the first person in his family ever to go to college. He got his Bachelor’s, and subsequently his Master’s in Economics, at the University of Michigan. He did all the work for his doctoral dissertation and submitted it. He was back in China, and the dissertation was in Ann Arbor. The advisor died. The university came in and tore his office apart, and they lost the dissertation. He rewrote it. By the time he had finished getting it rewritten – incidentally, it was on the subject of the labor movement in China during the 1920s and 1930s, a fascinating subject to read about – it was after Pearl Harbor and the Japanese had moved in to occupy the center of Shanghai. He knew he wouldn’t be able to get it out through the Japanese. He buried it under the house. We wanted to go for years to get it. I finally went back to Shanghai in 1992, courtesy of Pam Slutz, who was the Deputy Principal Officer there then, an old friend. She put me in touch with a fellow who was a teacher at Fudan University in the Department of American Studies. His name was Edward Xu. He has his Ph.D. from Princeton. His father and grandfather were both doctors who went through the medical school at St. John’s University. Edward would have gone to St. John’s if there had been a St. John’s by the time he got to be college age. He wrote a history of it. His dissertation back at Princeton was on American missionary higher education in China, the case study of St. John’s University. When we got there, he started telling me things. He knew more about my father than I did. He knew everything that was in the university library. Q: You were looking for the copy of your father’s dissertation. SULLIVAN: Yes. Edward arranged for us to be able to go and look under the house. I can just imagine Edward going to the officials in Shanghai and saying, “I have been contacted by this American gentleman who wants to come here. He has a filial duty to perform.” I can just see him doing it. And it happened. No police interfered. The university took up the floor of the house, so I could get down underneath where the brick columns were somewhere down there. We didn’t find the dissertation. Maybe we didn’t have the right information. It was somewhere under that house, but we didn’t find it. So Dad never got the Ph.D. 3 Q: Your mother’s side of the family, where are they from? SULLIVAN: They are from the south, generally Mississippi-based. Mother was born in Winona Mississippi. Her mother and father were both born in Mississippi. He was a Methodist circuit rider preacher and died early. She was less than a year old when he died of – actually, I’m not sure which disease it was, but it was a disease that came along, something like diphtheria. She was a widow for nearly 60 years. She taught math at Whitworth College in Brookhaven, Mississippi. Then she had this job with the Southern Methodist Board of Missions in Nashville. She finally retired with another one of her daughters, who was married to a druggist in a small town in Mississippi, Lexington. Q: Your father is out in China and your mother comes out for… SULLIVAN: She comes out for the year. She had graduated from Vanderbilt and worked a year in a hospital in Nashville as a blood lab technician. In Shanghai, Margaret Williamson Hospital, the first hospital solely for the care of Chinese women had been established in 1884 and named for the American woman who donated the money to start it. They could use her services, so she went to work there for that year. At the end of the year, when it was time for my grandmother to come back, my mother said to her, “I don’t want to go back. I want to stay here.” Just before my grandmother left, my mother said, “There is someone I want you to meet.” It was the night before my grandmother was leaving. She said, “No, no, no.” She said, “Mother, you may wish later on that you had taken the time to meet him.” “Okay.” So my dad was brought in for about 15 minutes and talked with my grandmother. Then she got on the ship and came back. The next time she saw that daughter, the daughter not only had the husband, but also the first child. During that period, she must have wondered and tried to remember what that 15 minutes was like, what this guy from Michigan, this Yankee, was like. She was not a professional Southerner, however. She lived in the little town of Lexington, which was a very, very racist town. She and Hazel Brannon Smith who was the owner and editor of the local paper were the two people in town who kept telling the people of Lexington that they didn’t agree with their habits in terms of race relations. They disapproved thoroughly. Hazel Brannon Smith was a good friend of Hodding Carter, whose family in Greenville was taking the same opposition to customary white Mississippi practice. Both my grandmother and Mrs. Smith lived in Lexington. We asked my grandmother one time: “How do you manage to live here this way?” She said, “They know how I feel. There’s no sense in my banging them over the head. They just know how I feel.” Q: Meanwhile your family is growing up in China. 4 SULLIVAN: Yes. I grew up in China. I was there for the first eleven years, my older sister for fifteen, and my younger brother for eight, except for the two times we made trips to the States to go on furlough. My sister made three trips. Q: Do you recall when those two trips were? SULLIVAN: The first one was in 1933-34, and the second one was in 1939-40.