Interview with Robert Theodore Curran
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Library of Congress Interview with Robert Theodore Curran The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project Information Series ROBERT THEODORE CURRAN Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: November 6, 1998 Copyright 2000 ADST INTRODUCTION It was a privilege to be asked to take part in the ADST Oral History Project. I am particularly grateful to Charles Stuart (”Stu”) Kennedy for his patience and attention to our interviews. The history is divided into several sections beginning with my childhood and education/ work experience before joining the Foreign Service. In the first section, the influences of growing up in a rather parochial environment with religious parents and the uncertainties of a World War in the background seemed to have produced a sense of mission in me and many of my contemporaries. We really believed that we as Americans could change the world for the better and we believed that the U.S. had the human and financial resources to back up this crusade. As I reread what Stu Kennedy led me to relate, there seems to be a great deal of emphasis on people and surroundings rather than policy - in the official government sense of the word. Therefore at the beginning of each segment, I have added a few lines of Interview with Robert Theodore Curran http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000257 Library of Congress introduction so that readers may acquire some background on the circumstances that led to a U.S. presence and policies in the areas to which I was assigned. R.T. CurraFrankfort, Michigan June, 2000Q: Today is the 6th of November 1998. This is an interview with Robert Theodore Curran, and you're known as Ted. Well, to begin with, could you tell me when and where you were born, something about your family and early years? CURRAN: Thank you. I'm very pleased to do this, and I appreciate your courtesy. I was born in 1931 in Brooklyn, New York. My mother and father were missionaries in China before I was born. They spent eight years there and came back, I think, for two reasons: one, the situation in China was so unsettled in the '20s, it was hard to raise a family there; my father did finish his term of service, but also, I think, he wanted to move on professionally. He was a doctor, physician, and he felt a great call for service and wanted to come back to the States and do some medicine here. Q: What denomination? CURRAN: He went to China under the Congregational Board, and he was basically a Protestant. His own father was a revivalist minister in the '80s and '90s. Both his mother and father died when my father was very young, and my father survived with a very strong spiritual component which I think he passed on to me and my brothers. I grew up in what I think we would call a Victorian house in Brooklyn. It was five stories high, one room wide: two rooms deep per level. Even though my father was receiving very modest compensation - my father went into medical education, and he once told me he never made more than $15,000 a year, which doesn't sound like much now but in the '30s and in the midst of the Depression it was certainly a comfortable income. Interview with Robert Theodore Curran http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000257 Library of Congress Q: I have to say that when I graduated from college in 1950 I waasked what I hoped I would be receiving, and I said $10,000. CURRAN: Big difference in people's perspectives. And the things that I remember most about that era in Brooklyn were, first of all, that it was very clearly a white world. People of color, people of other ethnic backgrounds were hardly visible except for Italian immigrants, who used to pick up bananas from the docks in Manhattan and put them in pushcarts and push them over the Brooklyn or the Manhattan Bridge and go through our neighborhoods, and I can still hear them yelling, “Banan, Banan.” And my mother, and we had a full-time maid, would run out and buy bananas. And speaking of the maid, current households would be terribly envious to know that we had a Finnish lady who could speak pretty good English, but it was I would say on an FSI standard of about a 3/3. She worked six and a half days a week. She did all the cooking, all the cleaning, all the laundry and all the baby- sitting and, of course, lived in the house. I think she was paid $60 a month. So that was a pretty good deal for my mother. Also the thing that, I think, surprises certainly my children and many people now is that in the 1930s in Brooklyn horses were still very much in evidence, delivering milk and ice, for example. In our house we had an old icebox, and a man would come in through the back yard and push a block of ice into the old wooden icebox. Of course, frozen food was unheard of, let alone television, or some of the things that we're all so used to now. I also remember the electric cars that used to do a lot of deliveries, and the sound of them, still, when I occasionally drive an electric golf cart, that sound is still the same, and it really brings me back. Our family - and many families - had a very settled routine in those days. I went to a little Quaker school in Brooklyn called the Brooklyn Friends School. My father was a very early riser, and we had a serious family breakfast before we went off on the day's routines, and we had a very set routine for every evening. There was a regular menu every particular night of the week. Monday was, I think, hamburgers; Tuesday was hot dogs; Wednesday Interview with Robert Theodore Curran http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000257 Library of Congress was hash; Thursday was liver; Friday was fish; and Saturday and Sunday were slightly more elevated type meals - ham or roast beef. But it was, I mean - on today's standards - quite spare. My brothers and I dreaded Thursday night because we hated liver, which is a fairly common “hate” for kids. The Sunday routine also was unvaried. We went to church usually twice on Sunday, Sunday morning and then Vespers in the afternoon. Then we would come home, and from somewhere in his background, my dad used to love to have crackers and milk for a first course Sunday night, and then he would pop corn and we'd eat popcorn and maybe have some cheese with it and then a little fruit for dessert, and then everybody went to bed very early after listening to Jack Benny on the radio. Q: Oh, yes. CURRAN: The Second World War made quite a change in our family life. My brothers, who were considerably older than I was, were studying at Harvard and Princeton, and both enlisted in the war. One served with Merrill's Marauders in Burma, was seriously wounded, but fortunately survived. The second brother was in the navy in the Pacific, also survived, but had several scares, not so much with fighting, but he was on a DE (Destroyer Escort) and a couple of times got into very heavy weather. Q: Was he in that major typhoon that hit during the Philippines? CURRAN: No, he didn't get to the Philippines; he worked between Hawaii and the West Coast. But anyway, they were both very glad to get out of service. I was on the home front and still in the Friends School until 1945. I felt the burden of war very much, and there were a lot of young people's and children's radio programs then which encouraged our interest - Hop Harrigan, Jack Armstrong, and so on - and I think they created a sense in us, certainly in me, that there was right and wrong in the world and there wasn't too much gray area. And we all knew who we were for in the war and who we were against, Interview with Robert Theodore Curran http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000257 Library of Congress and people who remember the Second World War remember the propaganda was really strong against the Germans and the Japanese. Q: What about the newspapers, because many people came out of this - and I'm of the same generation - and got a great sense of geography because we followed the war in the newspapers, so we knew places like Guadalcanal and Rostov and that sort of thing. CURRAN: My father made sure - especially at our major meals together - that we followed the war closely, and yes, we had very good geography lessons. And my dad, who had served in the navy in the First World War, considered himself quite an expert on military matters, although I don't think he did very much in the navy. But yes, I would say that we had a very, very personal sense of backing “the boys” up. I mean, we collected aluminum and did savings stamps and worked very hard to support the war effort. Another thing I remember is that during the war we moved from the brownstone on Remsen Street to a tall apartment building on Henry Street in Brooklyn, and we had a warden on top of our building who was charged with watching for German planes.