Interview with Grant Smith
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Library of Congress Interview with Grant Smith The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR GRANT SMITH Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: March 5, 1999 Copyright 2003 ADST [Note: This interview has not been edited by Ambassador Smith] Q: Today is March 5, 1999, and this is an interview with R. Grant Smith, and this is to be done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, and I'm Charles Stuart Kennedy. Grant, let's start kind of at the beginning. Can you tell me when and where you were born and something about your family? SMITH: I was born on Long Island in 1938. My father was then a professor out there, but he later came to Washington during the war, to the War Production Board, and then joined the State Department and was Wristonized in 1956. Q: Wristonized meaning he was - SMITH: He became an FSO. Q: Yes, a Foreign Service officer. SMITH: He went from Civil Service to FSO in 1956, and then he backed up a bit. He had already served as a reserve officer in Bangkok and in Karachi, and in 1956 he became a regular Foreign Service officer and subsequently went off to Sri Lanka and New Delhi. I Interview with Grant Smith http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001081 Library of Congress did not accompany him to Sri Lanka and New Delhi, but I did in Bangkok and Karachi. I actually went to school in India, and then I did visit him in Sri Lanka. Q: Well, let's move back a bit. In 1938, your father was a professor where? SMITH: Hofstra. Q: What was his field? SMITH: Political science. No, I'm wrong. His father's field wapolitical science. He was an economist. He was an economic officer. Q: Your family came from a professorial background, was it? SMITH: Well, those two generations. Before that there had been a businessman, and there had been a mix before that. My grandmother's family was from upstate New York. My mother's family was from banking in the Long Island area. Q: Growing up as a young lad, World War II was sort of over by the time you were becoming more or less aware of the world. Was that it, would you say? SMITH: That's right, yes. Q: Where did you go to grammar school? SMITH: Actually, I went to grammar school in the District oColumbia, various places, but I went to fourth, fifth, and sixth grade in the District of Columbia. Q: And then high school? SMITH: High school I was part of the time in India and came back anfinished at BCC - Interview with Grant Smith http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001081 Library of Congress Q: That's Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School. Well, what about whilyou going into elementary, grammar school, what were your interests? SMITH: I guess my interests were more mechanical - science anengineering. Q: And did that continue through high school? SMITH: Yes, it did. Q: What type of science or mechanical engineering were you doing? SMITH: Most everything - mathematics, science, engineering. Q: Were you into taking automobiles apart, building model airplanes,that sort of thing? SMITH: Well, given the places I was - you don't take automobiles apart in northern India. So I did finish a basement on a house, completely, so there was more carpentry and electrical, photography. Q: For the first two years of high school you went to, or the firsthree, or what? SMITH: I went half a year at BCC and then went off to India. There's an American missionary school in north India, Woodstock, and I was there, then, for two years and came back and finished at BCC. Q: What was Woodstock like? SMITH: It's up in the hills, so it's at 6,000 feet. It closes in the winter because it's too cold, lots of snow. It's a missionary school, more so then than it is now, and fairly strict, but a fascinating place, and in my class we had about 20 percent Indian students, so I got to know some Indian students very well, with whom I've maintained contact over the years. Interview with Grant Smith http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001081 Library of Congress Q: This would be sort of when? SMITH: I was there in 1953 and 1954. Q: Were there any problems that you felt as a young boy betweeIndians and Americans there? SMITH: Well, there were the problems, I guess you'd call them, of post-colonial society that the Indians were clamping down difficult restrictions on a whole variety of things, but there were also the problems that at that time were just beginning. Our relationship with Pakistan, our differences of perception over the Kashmir issue. I can remember arguing with my roommate, who was an Indian, about Kashmir. Q: Were your teachers missionaries mostly? SMITH: Mostly, yes. Q: Were you getting a sort of a straight-line missionary type education, or were you getting “whither India?” and concentrating on Indian affairs? SMITH: Woodstock is accredited in the United States, so it has very much an American curriculum and always has and still has, so we got a fairly standard American curriculum. What we got about India was culturally being there plus there was a course in Indian history which I took. I did not take a course in the language. Q: Would there have been a language you could have taken a course i- Hindi or Urdu? SMITH: They gave a course in Hindi. But the course in Hindi which they gave was really meant for their Indian students so they could be sure of passing the exam in Hindi, which they needed to do for their own advancement. Therefore, the people who were in it were Interview with Grant Smith http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001081 Library of Congress not beginners, and it was being taught as what we would call shud Hindi, which is very proper, correct, newspaper-newscast type of it. Q: Were you picking up American-Indian relations at home when yocame home? SMITH: Going home meant going to Karachi, which meant taking the train down from the hills and then flying from Delhi to Karachi. Yes, my father was economic counselor in Karachi at the time, and I heard more about U.S.-Pakistan relations and stories about that than I did about India, but just making that trip, one got a fair idea of the problems and the refugees on both sides. My roommate was from a refugee family, so one heard, certainly, about he India-Pakistan relationship and some of the things about the U.S. role, although less about U.S.-Indian relations, as I recall. Q: Well, this is quite soon after the partition in '48. We'rtalking about '53-54. SMITH: We still had war surplus peanut butter available in thbazaars. Q: How about the British? Were you getting any feel for who peoplreally looked upon the British at that time? SMITH: Some. The relationship has always been very complicated, I think, between the Indians and the British. Of course, the Indian students in our class were not studying for an Indian examination. They were studying for a Cambridge exam, and therefore they were into the British system that way. This was in the very early period. We did meet with Nehru. Our senior class met with Nehru. We made a trip to Delhi and met with Nehru. I can remember he was quite prickly that evening. Somebody asked him a question - I may have been one who asked him a question - somebody asked him a question on a political and international affairs subject, and he sort of brushed it aside. He was prickly. Q: When you went back to Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School - thiwould have been '55-56, thereabouts? Interview with Grant Smith http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001081 Library of Congress SMITH: Yes. Q: Did you find this was a different world? I mean, was it a littlhard to adjust? SMITH: It was a difficult adjustment. The number students who had been overseas was fairly small at that time. The faculty, although they gave me credit for the time at Woodstock, I can remember that they didn't want to give credit for the course in Indian history. They said, “Well, that's sort of like taking a course in the history of the state of Maryland. You don't get credit for that.” But since I actually had been ahead of myself in school, so that I'd taken a lot of the required courses already, so the last year at BCC I was able to take courses which I wouldn't have been able to take otherwise, including a course in journalism, advanced physics, advanced chemistry - which meant that I wasn't doing the same thing that everybody else was, and I think the course in journalism, for instance, really made the difference as far as I was concerned. Q: Were you on the paper and all? SMITH: Yes, I ran the school paper. Q: Well, looking at '55-56, McCarthyism was a pretty big thing. Wathat sort of a subject at the time you were there in school? SMITH: I don't remember it being a subject at school; I remember it being a subject I heard about at home. Because with a parent who'd worked in the federal government during World War II, who knew some of the players, a father who was then in the State Department, I heard a fair amount about it, concern about it.