The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project

The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR STROBE TALBOTT Interviewed by: Mark Tauber Initial Interview Date: July 26, 2016 Copyright 2017 ADST Q: To begin, how were your initial views formed about the U.S. and its place in the world, in international relations? TALBOTT: Well let’s start with a kind of interesting accident of the time of my birth. I was born about nine months, pretty close to nine months, after the war in the Pacific ended with VJ Day. So I am a pluperfect baby boomer. I was kind of conceived, as you might say, under the mushroom cloud, that’s the one up over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So, when I was sentient, which is to say when I was a kid, but at least a kid who was listening to the radio and even looking at some very hazy black and white television and reading or looking at periodicals like Life magazine, I was very aware of the proximity in my lifetime to World War II. My father was in the Navy, saw combat, was at Normandy beach, also had some very dangerous assignments in the North Atlantic and a number of our relatives were killed in the war. So World War II was a big deal and I’ll come back to that, and particularly the use of nuclear weapons, ending the war. My parents were also charter members of something called the World Federalist Organization, United World Federalists, it was called. It was a highly idealistic movement, based not just in the United States but in other countries as well, to look at the possibility of, if not world government, which is, of course, was then as now a kind of a fighting phrase, more about international cooperation, particularly cooperation in keeping the peace. So my Mom and Dad were both very active in the branch of that organization in Dayton, Ohio which is where I lived in the first few years of my life. And that loomed fairly large; I was very close to my parents, and as I got older they introduced me to Toynbee as a historian and the Saturday Review, and Norman Cousins, who was an advocate of world federalism and that kind of thing. During that period, I can remember being very affected by some gruesome and poignant pictures in Life magazine that must have been when I was five or six years old. There was a cover story on the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many of them children of course. And that sort of stayed in my mind, seared in my memory. So I had some sense that there were some pretty terrible things that had happened and there were some pretty terrible things that might happen including to me, my family, and my hometown. So that was there. When I was 10, which was in 1956, the name Nikita Khrushchev became big in my vocabulary because he unleashed the Soviet Army on Budapest to crush the Hungarian Uprising. That was one of the big issues of the day. In fact, the sort of all-purpose 1 Hungarian freedom fighter was made the “Man of the Year” of Time magazine which is, of course, a periodical I worked for for 21 years in my early career. And then came Sputnik, which was not just a little thing beeping; it was also the first step of the Soviet Union’s getting intercontinental missiles and then there was the flight of Yuri Gagarin and we were behind the Soviets in space technology and all of that. So, as a child, one thing after another, either in history just before I was born, family associations, my own coming to terms with the upside and downside of the era in which we were living, all kind of pointed me in a particular direction which is world peace and the threats to world peace, the principal threat being Soviet communism. Then, let’s flash forward, and there is something pretty much anybody of my age and background would remember, certainly in Cleveland, Ohio, which is where I was living and going to elementary school, but really anywhere in the U.S. and those were the drills for a nuclear attack. We had drills for a nuclear attack on Cleveland, and even as a kid I said I’m not sure that climbing under our desks was really going to help but okay, the teacher says that’s what we’re supposed to do. But once again it kept alive the fear and the ever- present danger. After that, I went off to a prep school in northwest Connecticut called the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut. Every morning we had a chapel service, pretty much every day, certainly every weekday. And in October of 1962, they had a master, a wonderful man named Bill Olson, who told us that it was going to be a special chapel service and he was going to ask all of us to get down on our knees and pray to God, whether you believed in him or not, to save the world from the Cuban Missile Crisis which was right at the scariest part of the Cuban Missile Crisis. That made an impression on me as it did a lot of people. Also, before I left Hotchkiss, one of the very important officials in the Kennedy administration named Paul Nitze who was a graduate of Hotchkiss was honored. There was a holiday declared in his honor and he had been very much involved in what’s called NSC 68, which was kind of a blueprint for the Cold War and who was very much involved in dealing with the Soviets over the years. So more or less at that time, when I was at Hotchkiss, I developed a very deep interest in Russian literature, novels and poetry in particular, and became infatuated enough with that to study Russian. So now you had on the scary side, Khrushchev and his nuclear weapons and on the culturally-rich side, the beauty and richness of Russian culture. Q: A question here. You’re talking both about the moment in time that you lived with the scary elements of Russian expansionism and so on and the culture of Russia. Did you also find interesting or were you gripped by the history of Russia? TALBOTT: Yeah, I read a lot of history of Russia. I started reading history through novels. I mean, many of the great novels, most famously of course, War and Peace, are fictionalized history, but very good history. I also started reading some of the dissident literature that was coming out of the Soviet Union at that time. And I was interested in the poets, sculptors, and film directors who were doing stuff that was either right on the edge of permissible, or over the edge of the permissible, in which case, they were usually 2 in trouble. So, yes I was kind of straddling the pre-Soviet cultural scene or origins of Russian civilization and the Soviet period which was the dark side. By the time I left Hotchkiss I had two years of Russian language under my belt and went to Yale where I signed up for a major in what was called Russian Studies. And I also went to an immersion course in Russian language at the University of Michigan in between, I’m going to say perhaps my sophomore year and my junior year, something like that, but I was basically doing Russian 24/7 when I wasn’t doing extracurriculars. I was on the newspaper and that kind of thing, but Russia was my thing. Q: Many universities at that time had different views, or the professors had different views of Russia, was there a prevailing view at Yale that you sort of imbibed or was it much more eclectic? TALBOTT: Yale itself? Well Yale was incredibly eclectic. My education was not very eclectic; it was very focused on Russia. Q: But in terms of the view of Russia, the lens through which the professors viewed Russia/Soviet actions. TALBOTT: Good point. Most of the political ferment on the campus in those days was indirectly connected to Russia but only indirectly. By that I mean it was Vietnam. There were two big issues that energized the political consciences of my generation and it was the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. Now on the Vietnam War, of course, was a kind of offshoot of the Cold War. The presumption in this government, out of this town and a lot of others, was that it was there was a monolithic communist threat consisting of for the largest territorial state on the planet which was the USSR, still is even shorn of all of its extra 14 republics plus the most populist state, that is to say Red China and the Vietnamese communist uprising, Well the communist attempt to take over all of Vietnam was seen as a domino falling and you know what the domino theory was all about and a lot of us were highly skeptical about that as a fact and certainly skeptical about that as a basis for policy. Our leaders, our seniors, believed that it was all one big threat. Many of us, largely because of teachers, they were quite a few of them at Yale, who understood with much more subtlety and accuracy the sociology and the political culture and the history of the Indochina nations, particularly Vietnam, to say this is a nationalist revolution.

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