The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project ANNIE PFORZHEIMER Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: May 29, 2019 Copyright 2020 ADST INTERVIEW Q: Today is May 29, 2019, and this is an interview with Annie Pforzheimer? PFORZHEIMER: Pforzheimer. Q: Would you spell that? PFORZHEIMER: P-F-O-R-Z-H-E-I-M-E-R. Q: What’s the Pforz? It’s- something from what would be your hometown or-? PFORZHEIMER: Oh. The Pforz part of Pforzheimer? Q: Yes. PFORZHEIMER: Nobody knows. The theories are maybe a little bit Latin of door, or “Port”. Q: Yes. PFORZHEIMER: But it’s a mystery. And there’s a city called Pforzheim. Q: Okay, well, that’s probably- Pforzheimer would probably mean you’re from Pforzheim, yes. PFORZHEIMER: Oh, yes. Q: Okay. Well, to begin with, let’s start off when and where were you born? PFORZHEIMER: September 8, 1964, in New York City. Q: In what city? 1 PFORZHEIMER: New York. Q: New York. PFORZHEIMER: New York, New York. Q: Yes. Alright. Let’s first get a little about your parents. What’s the background of your father and his family? PFORZHEIMER: My family has been in New York for a number of generations, and they came to the United States in the mid-1840s on my father’s side, and somewhat later that century on my mother’s. And they’re part of the kind of German-Jewish establishment, with ties to Wall Street. So, my dad was raised in Purchase, New York, and spent a few years in Washington when his father was working as a civilian at the Pentagon during World War II. And otherwise, he’s a New Yorker. And my mother was raised in Manhattan as well. Q: Alright. Where did your mother’s family come from? PFORZHEIMER: They also come from Germany originally and less clear on exactly when they arrived. Her father’s family settled in Ohio and her father went to Princeton and stayed in the East Coast after he graduated. Q: And how your father, where did he go to- did he go to college? PFORZHEIMER: My father went to Harvard. We have a fairly significant family tie to Harvard, and he went there. Q: What was his major, do you know? PFORZHEIMER: Yes, he was an English major. Q: And your mother went to- did she go to-? PFORZHEIMER: She went to Wellesley, and she studied economics. Q: So, you’re very much from the Eastern establishment. PFORZHEIMER: I am very Eastern establishment. Q: I went to a boys’ school in Connecticut, Kent, and then I went to Williams, so we talk the same language. PFORZHEIMER: Yes, very Eastern establishment. 2 Q: Well, let’s talk about growing up in New York. PFORZHEIMER: I didn’t grow up in New York City; I grew up in Scarsdale, which is sort of a bedroom community about 20 miles north from New York City. Q: What was it like there for a kid? PFORZHEIMER: Dull. Safe. Conformist. Very pretty. Very leafy. Q: Let’s talk about early schooling first; what was that like? PFORZHEIMER: Not remarkable. It was a very- it’s a very wealthy suburb. Somebody asked once did I go to- was it a private school? And the answer is no; it’s a private town—and a public school. So, it’s a very nice place to grow up, first-rate education. They really put a lot into it. Early school years were nothing that remarkable, but in high school we had a couple of really significant and gifted teachers who, I think, were really helpful to me, putting me in a direction. Q: Who were they? I want to give their names and also what they were teaching. PFORZHEIMER: Sure. We had a man named Eric Rothschild, who taught advanced placement American history, and he just died actually, a couple of years ago, but he was one of the greatest teachers I or a lot of other people had ever had. And then, another teacher, a team teaching was a man named Warner Feig, who had been a World War II refugee and his counterpart was a woman named Judith Oxner, and they would teach European history and a couple of other classes, but they did it in a way that demanded the students really argue for what they believed in. They would challenge you to not just take a safe point of view. Q: Well, let me move back to the family. Is your family Jewish? PFORZHEIMER: Yes. Q: Was it- how important was religion for you? PFORZHEIMER: I think it was moderately important. There were some aspects of it that seemed to not have great meaning for modern life, but there are other aspects, and this is Reform Judaism, which tries to adapt itself to modern ways, there are ways in which I admire the principles and the values of Judaism. My own rabbi had been active in the civil rights movement and it felt meaningful in that sense, the social justice side of it. Q: Well in school, when were you in high school? PFORZHEIMER: I was in high school from ’78 to ’82. 3 Q: At home were you much of a reader? PFORZHEIMER: Yes. Yes. Q: Can you think of any books that left an impression on you? PFORZHEIMER: I was pretty omnivorous, and I read a lot of junk as well as good stuff. I remember trying to read “All the King's Men” when I was too young for it. I read just, I don’t know, a lot of everything; “The Color Purple” and other books that were popular then. If I came across a lot of titles, I might be able to say which one is important, but actually for me, I remember a lot of what I read, and it sinks in. And I sometimes don’t even know why I think about something a certain way until I read a certain book again. Q: Well, how important, sort of the Jewish experiences in Europe during the Hitler time, I mean, in your family; was this talked about a lot? PFORZHEIMER: It wasn’t talked about a lot in my family because in part it wasn’t of primary impact to my family. There were no family members affected. But it was talked about a lot in my synagogue, a lot, and kind of became, I would say, the recurring theme about assimilation, that we shouldn’t become assimilated in the United States with Christian culture, that we shouldn’t trust it because that’s what happened in Germany. Q: Well, I mean, it’s a horrific experience. Were there people in your class who were the children of escapees? PFORZHEIMER: No, actually, not. Q: Well, in high school, what were you, was sort of your major? PFORZHEIMER: Academically I was most interested in the history and political science areas and English, and then what I did with my time was theater. I did tech, backstage, scenery, painting, construction. Q: You did what? PFORZHEIMER: The technical side, like the scenery and the backstage and all that. Q: Did you put on any productions, were you involved in any productions in high school? PFORZHEIMER: Oh, yes, lots. Plays, nothing you may have heard of. But I was backstage, I was helping to run the show and do the painting. I did a lot of art in those days, so it was also just the design. Q: Well then, I take it you’d say you were a bright kid? 4 PFORZHEIMER: Yes. I was a bright kid. Q: Did that cause problems or not? PFORZHEIMER: No. It was a pretty academically focused high school and being bright and being on the route to a good college was a very happy thing. It was a well-accepted thing. You know, I wasn’t gorgeous, and I wasn’t particularly sophisticated, so I probably wasn’t as popular as I might have been, but I definitely didn’t feel out of step. Q: Well, you say you were on the college track. I mean, I take it that an awful lot of the Scarsdale High kids were on the college track. PFORZHEIMER: It’s 95 percent or something, go to college. So, it’s accepted as what you do. Q: Did you know where you wanted to go? PFORZHEIMER: Well, I knew I didn’t want to go to Harvard -- and that’s where I ended up going. Q: Why didn’t you want to go to Harvard? PFORZHEIMER: Because I didn’t want to follow the rest of my family, which is something of a lifelong theme for me, but that was the best school that I got into and it was, I thought, a way for me to be around a lot of opportunities to figure out what I wanted to study and what I wanted to do. Q: Well, you were in- what years were you at Harvard? PFORZHEIMER: ’82 to ’86. Q: By the time, this is going back to high school, Vietnam, did this play much of a role or was it pretty well over or-? PFORZHEIMER: It felt pretty well over. I think the conflicts that caught my attention growing up were the beginnings of the Central America conflict, Cold War and what happened in Chile, Argentina, with U.S. intervention. You know, the shameful role of the United States, as I saw it. And one of my earliest influences was Jimmy Carter and his emphasis on human rights, and that seemed to be the way that it should work, that you should use this considerable power of the United States for something good.