The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project
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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project JOSEPH D. O’CONNELL, JR. Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial Interview Date: December 1, 2011 Copyright 2017 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Origins and Beginnings Formal Education Early Travels: Paris and Spain Early Political Awareness – Vietnam Penn State – Protest and Failure Peace Corps 1967-1969 Meeting Stella – Heading to Junin Vietnam Again First Try at Graduate School USIA – Introduction to the Foreign Service 1970 Sao Paulo 1971-1972 Tradicao, Familia e Propriedade (TFP) Passing Mengele? Everyday Life and Work in Brazil Fortaleza – On My Own 1972-1973 Return to Sao Paulo – Repression Up Close 1973-1975 Mr. O’Connell Goes to Washington 1975-1979 OJT Magazine Editor Working for Patt Derian at State Back to School Rookie Desk Officer and Inspector Leaving the Foreign Service 1979 OJT Speechwriter Eight Years with Charles Z. Wick 1980-1988 1 Voice of America Days 1989 The Hartman Gender Discrimination Case Monica Lewinsky’s Mother Cuban Enclaves: Radio and TV Marti VOA and Tiananmen Square Meeting the Dalai Lama INTERVIEW Q: Today is the first of December 2011. This is an interview with Joseph D. O’Connell, Jr. Let’s start at the beginning. When and where were you born? O’CONNELL: I was born in Washington, DC, on November 15, 1943, in the old Georgetown Hospital, which later became the building where Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service was housed. My father was a native Washingtonian, and I lived in Washington (in my paternal grandparents’ row house on Neal Street, Northeast, near Gallaudet University) for the first few years of my life. I was the third child of Joseph and Irene O’Connell, and the family’s first male. Family lore says that, at the time of my birth, my father rushed to buy sports equipment for me and also that another name my parents were considering for me was Robert. Q: Let’s talk about your father. What do you know of the O’Connell family? Where do they come from? O’CONNELL: My father was the son of an Irish immigrant named Daniel O’Connell and a German immigrant named Mary Anna Droll. My father was born on April 20, 1914, in Southwest Washington, in a now-demolished row house located at 902 Sixth Street, SW, not far from the Voice of America, where I would work seventy-five years later. Q: Your grandfather was from where? O’CONNELL: My paternal grandfather was born on Sept. 5, 1877 -- probably on a farm -- near the hamlet of Tournafulla, not far from the village of Mount Collins, in County Cork, on the banks of the River Feale in the west of Ireland, the starting point for so many of the Irish when they left for America. The river marks the dividing line between County Kerry to the west and County Cork to the east, just downstream from the Cork town of Abbeyfeale, which was, coincidentally, the birth place of my maternal grandfather, Patrick Kelly. My grandfather O’Connell always said that he was a Kerry man, but when I first traveled to Mount Collins years later, I learned that Tournafulla is actually located on the Cork side of the stream, up a hill from Mount Collins, so I guess he was tossing some of the famous Irish blarney. 2 By 1898, two of my grandfather’s sisters had already immigrated to the United States, and it was in that year, at age 21, that he, too, left Ireland, in the company of two cousins (Ellen (Nelly) O’Connell and Hannah O’Connell Aherne). Like most Irish immigrants of that time, they had embarked from the southern Ireland port city then known as Queenstown, the name that the British had given to the city (today known as Cobh). In all likelihood, they traveled in the ship’s steerage section. From a search of 1900 census data, including a copy of the ship’s hand-written manifest, we know that my grandfather O’Connell and his cousins arrived in Boston on the Cunard ship, the S.S. Pavonia, on April 20, 1898. Also according to the manifest, the address that they gave as their destination was 817 Somerville Street, in Cambridge, MA, where the cousins had relatives, but we believe that my grandfather soon made his way to Baltimore, where he worked for some nuns and also tended bar for a time. He later moved to Washington, where, in 1905, he became an American citizen. Although he later (possibly in 1913) married a German woman named Mary Anna Droll (my paternal grandmother), he had initially married a 24-year-old fellow Irish immigrant named Johanna Harrington, in Washington on April 29, 1908, according to District of Columbia marriage records. She was apparently from County Kerry, Ireland, and had died early in the marriage. They had no children. One day late in my grandfather’s life, my two older sisters and I were speaking with him. In passing, he casually mentioned his first marriage. We were shocked and asked him why he had not told us about it before then. “It was a long time ago,” he said, “and I never thought it was important.” My paternal grandmother Droll’s family had immigrated from Baden-Baden, Germany, to Mankato, Minnesota via New York, sometime in the late 19th century. She had been brought to the U.S. as an infant. My great-grandfather, whose name was Adolf Droll, tried farming near Mankato. He apparently decided after a while that the Minnesota weather was too harsh, and he left for a more temperate climate. My father always told us that his grandfather put lock, stock (including his livestock), and barrel into a freight car, and with the family headed for the Eastern Shore of Maryland, near Rock Hall and Chestertown, to a place called Secretary, Maryland. He had heard that there were opportunities for farming there. It was on my great grandfather Droll’s farm that my father used to spend many of his boyhood summers. My father always spoke fondly of those times, especially since they were a chance to escape the heat and humidity of un-air conditioned Washington and to cross the Chesapeake Bay on a side-wheeler steamboat. The boat he recalled most fondly was the “Emma Giles,” which would land at Chestertown, Maryland, after crossing the Bay from Baltimore. According to my father, his grandfather -- with whom my father was close -- was initially successful at farming, but a severe drop in crop prices later put him out of business, and the family moved to Baltimore, where my grandmother Droll’s brothers worked in the Mt. Clare shops of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. 3 It’s unclear where and how my paternal grandparents met or even where they got married, but Baltimore is a reasonable guess. They settled in Washington after their marriage. My grandfather O’Connell had not received much formal education back in Ireland. He used to say that he had gone through the sixth grade. Once in Washington, he either worked for and/or co-owned a saloon, apparently located in Southwest Washington (we have a photo of him standing, with an apron around his waist, in a pair of half- opened swinging doors). My father used to say that my grandfather and his partner drank up the establishment’s profits. My grandfather later found a job in the Government Printing Office (GPO), near Union Station. Later in life, and when I knew him as a youngster, he would apparently collect typed material in the Senate office building (there was only one of them back then) and take it to the GPO, where it would be put into the Congressional Record. He was there for a number of years, and I recall that he received a gold pocket watch and fob when he retired in the early1950s. Sometime between my father’s birth in 1914, and 1916, according to the few documents that we have, my father’s family moved from their row house in Southwest to a house at 103 H Street, Northwest in Washington. Although I knew my paternal grandfather fairly well -- I was a 16-year-old high school freshman when he died in 1959 -- I have only vague memories of my paternal grandmother, as I was five years old when she died relatively young, in 1948. About the only memory that I have is of a woman speaking on the phone in a language which I could not understand (German). My father was baptized at St. Dominic’s Catholic Church in Southwest and attended to Catholic schools in Washington, including the parish school at St. Aloysius and later the Jesuit-run boys’ school, Gonzaga College High School, both located on North Capitol Street, at Eye Street. Q: Do you know the background of your mother’s family? O’CONNELL: Both of my mother’s parents were Irish immigrants. Ironically, and as often happened among Irish immigrants, my maternal grandmother and grandfather, Patrick Roche and Margaret Kelly, were born within a few miles of each other, in adjacent counties in the west of Ireland. Margaret Kelly was born on Aug. 11, 1879, near the County Kerry town of Listowel, at the crossroads of a hamlet known as Coolnaleen. Patrick Roche was born in the nearby Cork town of Abbeyfeale, both of which were near Tournafulla, my grandfather O’Connell’s birthplace. Margaret Kelly and Patrick Roche met years later in Pittsburgh. My grandmother came to the U.S. late in the 19th century, around the same time as my paternal grandfather, Daniel O’Connell.