Library of Congress Interview with Ambassador Edmund James Hull The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR EDMUND JAMES HULL Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: October 10, 2005 Copyright 2009 ADST Q: Do you go by Edmund, by Ed, or what? HULL: Actually, I go by Edmund and that's for a very practical reason. For many years I was introduced to people as edul and I found that no one had a chance to grasp the names when it came that briefly. So I adopted Edmund to give people a pause, Edmund ... Hull. Q: When and where were you born? HULL: I was born February 12, 1949 in Keokuk, Iowa which is a town on the Mississippi River. My parents were actually living in Carthage, Illinois, but Carthage had no hospital. When my mother was ready to deliver they had to cross the Mississippi and so technically, I'm an Iowan. Q: You were born on Lincoln's birthday. HULL: I was born on Lincoln's birthday and grew up primarily in Springfield, Illinois which was Lincoln's home town, which meant that I never went to school on my birthday. For Interview with Ambassador Edmund James Hull http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001566 Library of Congress the first fifteen years of my life I had a chocolate cake in the shape of a log cabin every birthday. Q: Let's talk a bit about your parents? Let's take your father's side. Where did Mr. Hull come from and that side of the family? HULL: My father, Thomas F. Hull was born in Burnside, Illinois which is a very small town in West Central Illinois. He had an all-American, Tom Sawyer-type life in Burnside. He was a very gifted athlete and eventually was recruited for a high school team in Quincy and then to the University of Illinois and lettered in baseball at the University of Illinois. Q: Where did the family come from? HULL: The Hulls, we can trace back to about 1500. They came from England, the paternal line. The first Hull that was recorded in the early sixteenth century was a miller and had a mill that was taxed by the English crown. That's how they entered in the history books because of the taxation of that mill. One of the prominent ancestors Reverend Joseph Hull was born in the seventeenth century, went to Oxford, became a minister, a protestant minister, and actually led a group of Pilgrims to the United States. They left from Weymouth, county Dorset and landed on March 6, 1635 in Boston, Massachusetts. There's a lot of history for the succeeding fifteen generations. Q: Say your grandparents. Where did they appear on your father's side? Were they in Illinois? HULL: The early generations were in New England, and as best I can tell whenever a new territory was opened up for settlement some of the Hulls moved into that new territory. For example, from the Massachusetts Bay Colony there was a movement down to New Jersey when it was becoming a state. Several generations of Hulls lived in New Jersey. There was a judge, there was a sheriff and eventually, a generation moved to the Cumberland area of what was then Virginia and is now West Virginia. One generation was on the Interview with Ambassador Edmund James Hull http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001566 Library of Congress frontier there in Cumberland. I imagine the land there was rather poor and so when the further west opened uI believe it was Jacob Hull in the early nineteenth century moved out to West Central Illinois and there's actually a town in West Central Illinois called Hull. He established the family there in Illinois. My great-grandfather William Henry Hull moved to Pilot Grove, Illinois and he's buried there. Pilot Grove with the coming of the railroad shifted a few miles and became Burnside, Illinois. Burnside, Illinois is where my great- grandfather Edgar and my grandfather Fred P. Hull grew up. Q: What was your grandfather, your grandparents on your father's side. What was his business? HULL: Fred P. Hull ran the general store in Burnside, and he was also postmaster of Burnside. He also wrote a column in the local newspaper about news in Burnside and ended up writing a history of the county. He was a local figure, very well known, very opinionated and very articulate. Q: How about your father; what type of business did your father get involved in? HULL: After my father graduated from the University of Illinois he was in the army, this was during World War II. He was in Kansas, at Fort Leavenworth and technically he was in the U.S. Army Cavalry. He was a trainer, he was training people for World War II. After he left the U.S. Army he became an insurance agent for the Equitable Life Assurance Society because his brother-in-law had followed that profession and helped him get started. Q: On your mother's side? HULL: My mother was Lorene Ellen Fruin, and the Fruins emigrated from Ireland, from Tipperary, to America in the nineteenth century, I believe, as part of the immigration spurred by the potato famine. They came and settled in northern Illinois around Gilman. On one side it was Fruins, and on one side it was Brady's. The Brady's were entrepreneurial, and one of the ancestors actually went west and settled for a time in Interview with Ambassador Edmund James Hull http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001566 Library of Congress Denver, built one of the first houses ever built in Denver, Colorado, made a respectable amount of money mining gold, came back and took that gold and purchased farm land in northern Illinois. They set up the Fruins as farmers in northern Illinois. My grandfather was not only a farmer, but also one of the original agents of State Farm Insurance Society. That was Frank Fruin. Q: What was your mother's education? HULL: My mother also graduated from the University of Illinois and her father, Frank, was very much dedicated to education and made sure that all of his children received college educations. Q: What field was your mother studying, do you know? HULL: I think she was having a lot of fun. The academic portion of her studies was rather generalized. Q: How did your mother and father meet? HULL: They were both at the University of Illinois. My father was a varsity athlete and my mother was in a sorority and a very social gal, very, very good looking, both of them. I think one of their friends made the match for them. Q: They settled where? HULL: Initially, my mother followed my father out to Kansas. They weren't married at the time, but they got married very shortly thereafter. I think their entire wedding cost about $22.00. My mother kept the receipt for the wedding breakfast which was the main celebration. I think it was about six or seven dollars, so it was wartime and people made the adjustments and life went on. They spent a period of time, a couple of years, at Fort Interview with Ambassador Edmund James Hull http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001566 Library of Congress Leavenworth, and then when my father left the military they came back to Illinois, to West Central Illinois where he had grown up and established themselves there. Q: You grew up where? HULL: I grew up primarily in Springfield, Illinois. We moved there when I was about nine years old. I stayed there until I graduated from high school and went to the East Coast to university. Q: This was the mid fifties, I guess? What was Springfield like then for a boy? HULL: It was saturated with Lincoln lore. You kind of lived and breathed and just imbibed that history of the United States. We made the obligatory and sometimes not obligatory trips to the Lincoln shrines: his house in Springfield, the courthouse, his tomb. His presence of course, was also very prevalent in the schools. That I think was a dominant feature of growing up in Springfield. I think the other significant thing for me was it was an all-American town. We had very little supervision growing up. I have ten siblings and so my parents were limited in what they could do in that department. My mother assigned each of us a guardian angel and we pretty much went our own ways and lived very freely. My father with his eleven children strongly encouraged us all to work and gain an income, so all of the boys started out in paper routes from about the fifth grade when you are about ten years old. We had those paper routes, morning paper routes, that entailed getting up about 5:30 and doing our runs before school. We kept those until high school and that's how we paid for our extras and that's how we paid tuition to high school, in fact. I think that was a very good experience for me, increased my sense of independence and gave me a very keen appreciation of the value of money. Q: You were one of ten? HULL: I was one of twelve, but the last daughter, Christine died as an infant. Interview with Ambassador Edmund James Hull http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001566 Library of Congress Q: Where did you rank in this? HULL: I was the fourth from the top.