Library of Congress Interview with Talcott W. Seelye The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR TALCOTT W. SEELYE Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: September 15, 1993 Copyright 1998 ADST Q: Today is September 15, 1993. This is an interview with Ambassador Talcott W. Seelye which is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies. I'm Charles Stuart Kennedy. To start off, I would like to get something about your background, a bit about your family, where you grew up and went to school, etc. SEELYE: I was born in 1922 in Beirut, Lebanon where my father was a professor. I was born as a fourth generation of my family to live in the Middle East. It was my mother's family which first started the process. Q: What was your mother's family name? SEELYE: It was Chambers, but the first member of my family who went to the Middle East had the name of Frederick Williams. He went out there around 1840 as a Congregational missionary to Mosul in Turkey. You can imagine what the conditions were like in Mosul, Turkey in the middle of the nineteenth century. In his efforts to get established he lost his first three wives successively to disease, pestilence and the usual hygienic conditions that existed there. The first wife was the mother of my mother's mother, that is the daughter of Frederick Williams. She married a Canadian Congregational minister and induced him to go out to the Middle East. That was my grandmother, and she had come back here to go Interview with Talcott W. Seelye http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001040 Library of Congress to college, etc. So he goes out as a missionary, as a second generation of the Williams clan, although his name is Chambers, to be a missionary in the Ottoman Empire. He happened to be in what became Turkey proper. My mother was born in Turkey and sent to the States to go to college where she met my father. Q: Where did they go to college? SEELYE: He went to Amherst and she went to Bryn Mawr. She did her Ph.D. dissertation on Islam at Columbia. After he finished Amherst he went to the Divinity School at Columbia to become a minister. For three years he was a minister in New Jersey. Then the beck and call of the Middle East that was there in my mother's mind-set got him to go out to the Middle East to follow suit. Q: Seems like it was dangerous for a male to marry one of your family. SEELYE: That's right. So he goes out there in 1919 as a professor, not as a missionary, to the University of Beirut. So those were the three generations that started in the Middle East, and I was born there as a fourth. Then, of course, I served in the Middle East while in the Foreign Service. One of my four children who carried on the tradition, the youngest daughter, Kate, who studied Arabic at Amherst, spent two years abroad at the American University in Cairo, and then went out to live in Jordan for three years where she taught English at a secondary school and worked with Queen Noor. So she became a fifth generation to go out there. The family has had these connections for all that time. Q: Do you have any recollections of the Middle East as a young lad? SEELYE: Sure I do. I left at the age of eleven and remember, of course, growing up in Beirut. One of the unfortunate aspects of my youth in Beirut was that I became 1000 Interview with Talcott W. Seelye http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001040 Library of Congress percent American and resisted learning Arabic. We had an American community school where in those days and Arabic was not taught. At home, we happened to have Armenian servants because there were so many Armenian orphans and refugees who fled Turkey after the massacres. My grandparents lived with us, above us, and they and we hired Armenian orphans as servants; so I did not have an opportunity to learn Arabic from the servants. The result was that my parents decided at one point, when I was nine or ten, to bring in an Arabic tutor to teach me and one of my sisters. I apparently resisted that and the result was that when I left Beirut at the age of eleven, I am ashamed to say, I knew only a half a dozen Arabic expressions. This came home to roost at one point later on when I was in the U.S. Army. After basic training at Camp Walters, Texas, my record card popped up, “Oh, Seelye has spent 10 years in the Middle East.” So they pulled me out and sent me to the intelligence training center at Camp Ritchie, Maryland where I was interviewed by an Arab-American to see how fluent my Arabic was. He noted that my Arabic was virtually non-existent. Anyway, that was the beginning of my awareness that having lived that long in Beirut, people would assume that I knew Arabic. Later on in the Foreign Service, when I spent all the hours of drudgery and blood, sweat and tears learning Arabic and reaching a modest degree of efficiency, people would say, “Oh, yeah, Talcott knew Arabic as a boy.” That used to bother me because this did not take into account all the effort I had put into learning Arabic as an adult. Q: When you came back, where did you go to school? SEELYE: We came back in 1933 when my father was on a sabbatical. During this time he taught at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, so I went to the Smith College Day School. That was during the depression. The President of the American University of Beirut, Boyard, asked my father to extend for a year because the university was having financial problems. So the second year my father taught at Bennington College, Interview with Talcott W. Seelye http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001040 Library of Congress commuting from Northampton. While he was there he was offered the presidency of St. Lawrence University and we moved to Canton, New York—never going back to Beirut. I went to high school in Canton, New York and then to Prep School for two years at Deerfield Academy and on to Amherst. I went to Amherst automatically because of my family connections with Amherst going back generations. Q: Were you pointing towards anything when you were in Amherst? SEELYE: Absolutely not. I was a history major. When I left Amherst to go into the Service in March, 1943, I had no particular career in mind. I was beginning my senior year at that point and still didn't know what I wanted to do after graduation. After three and a half years in the Service I came back to Amherst to finish out. Q: Could you give me an idea where you served? SEELYE: Yes. After Camp Ritchie, believe it or not, I was sent to Iran. The Middle East must have had a subconscious magnetic attraction. At that point we had a large contingent of American troops in Iran in what was called the Persian Gulf Command. This was one of our principal military supply lines to the Soviet Union. Additionally, there was the Murmansk route by sea. The Murmansk route was very insecure because half of our ships were being sunk. So, we needed a more secure route and in late 1942 started to bring stuff up through the Persian Gulf. The Persian Gulf Command was running trains and trucks from Khorramshahr up to the Soviet sector of Iran. The Soviets had occupied the northern part of Iran just beyond Tehran and as far as the Caspian Sea and the Soviets took over the shipments in their zone. The reason I went out there was because the morale of the troops of this command was at rock bottom. They didn't feel they were in the war since they weren't being shot at. Most of these guys came from trucking or railroad families and had had limited military training. So I was part of an Information and Education program designed to tell the troops why they Interview with Talcott W. Seelye http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001040 Library of Congress were there and to keep them informed of what was going on in the war. This entailed much lecturing. Then VE Day came but we stayed on. Then V-J Day came and we still stayed on to protect the various military installations we had there. Since there was no need for an international education program anymore, I was sent down to what had once been a large military installation. It was just a ghost camp of about 50 GIs in a place called Khorramabad, which was halfway between Tehran and the Gulf. You may recall that at that point the Soviets established an Azerbaijani Republic. Azerbaijan straddles the Iranian-Soviet border. There has always been a degree of Azerbaijani nationalism, which the Soviets took advantage of. Iran, of course, wasn't happy about this nor were we. Finally, President Truman added a sweetener to the Soviets: “We will pull our troops out of Iran if you do the same.” The Soviets agreed and suddenly in October (1946), I guess it was, we got orders to prepare to pull out within a week.