The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project

The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR ROBERT JACKSON Interviewed by: Mark Tauber Initial interview date: February 21, 2019 Copyright 2020 ADST INTERVIEW Q: Today is May 21st and we are concluding our interview with Robert Jackson by reviewing his early life. Robert, where and when were you born? JACKSON: I was born in Paris, Tennessee, one of the 37 Parises in the United States, on October 17, 1956. Q: Was that where you also grew up? JACKSON: Yes and no. I spent the first few years of my life there and then my family moved to Auburn, Maine, where my mother's family was living and where she was born. I attended elementary school, middle school, and my first semester of high school in Auburn; then I transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy, a boarding school in Exeter, New Hampshire. Q: Now before we go further, a number of people these days are tracing their roots. Have you done any ancestry investigation? JACKSON: In fact, I have been very engaged in genealogy since I retired and have had a great time. I've identified all of my great; great, great; and great, great, great grandparents -- some with the help of DNA analyzed by ancestry.com. I knew about most of those ancestors, and the DNA test showed what I had always been told. i.e., that most of the family hailed from the British Isles. In fact, five of my ancestors arrived on the Mayflower. However, there are branches of my father's family who emigrated from northern France and northern Germany to the United States in the early 1700s. There are also some Cherokee ancestors. I was surprised to discover that the Jacksons were Quakers who came to the colonies from England and settled first in Pennsylvania and then North Carolina before ultimately establishing themselves in Tennessee prior to Tennessee becoming a state; so in the space of three generations, there was migration from England to Ireland to Pennsylvania and finally to Tennessee. Q: How did your parents meet? JACKSON: My father, Francis Jackson, worked for a chain of independent hotels owned 1 by the Lambkin family. One of his jobs was to take a hotel that was having financial challenges and get it back on its feet. That took him from the Southeast to New York and New England. Initially, he moved from Tennessee to Maine in the 1930s, when he was in his twenties. He met my mother in Rumford, Maine, on a blind date that had been arranged by one of her friends. By the 1960s, these hotels, which were primarily in city centers were losing popularity, and during the Johnson Administration, Urban Renewal saw the destruction of many of those old hotels; so my father began to work in motels and resorts. Q: You mentioned that you had most of your education in Maine, but then went to a private boarding school. How would you compare the public and private schools? JACKSON: The schools in Maine where we're quite good. However, they were not diverse. I remember there was one African American student in my class and I think at that time his was the only African American family in Auburn; so they stood out. There were many people of French Canadian descent in the Lewiston-Auburn area, but I grew up in a very white setting. Q: What about curriculum and extracurricular activities? JACKSON: My mother, Barbara Jackson, was always very interested in the world and she shared that interest with me. When I was in elementary school, we used to go to Greene, Maine, a neighboring town, each week to see a film or slides about some foreign country. I remember presentations on European countries, India, Thailand, and South American countries. Those films certainly nurtured my interest in international travel. As for school, in Auburn, I was always at the top of my class -- often with straight As, with the occasional B in biology or geometry. The important thing at public school was that I read The Ugly American in my 8th grade history class, and I decided then that I wanted to serve in our Foreign Service -- convinced that I could do a better job than the American diplomats portrayed in the book. My parents wanted me to go to Exeter because they thought I would be more academically challenged. Nevertheless, I was very resistant to the idea because I was happy in public school. I had lots of friends. I was on the debating team, and I was very content. Anyway, I applied to Exeter and was accepted, and my parents and I agreed that if after a semester I didn't like it, I could return to Edward Little High School, from which my mother, sister, and brother had graduated. Of course, after a semester at Exeter I had made friends and settled into a routine. Exeter was far more challenging academically. I pursued my interest in English, French and history. Outside the classroom, I represented my dormitory on the student council. I played chess and learned to play bridge and became very good at it. I was on the junior varsity track team, and I played soccer, squash and tennis; so it was a stimulating environment with a lot of good friends. Exeter was diverse too. In my dorm there were students from Canada, Nepal, and Switzerland, and my classes included students from France, Norway, and the Philippines. 2 The foreign language departments were very strong, with junior year abroad programs in France and Spain. I started to study Spanish, which came easily after French. The grammar is very similar, and there is some overlap in the vocabulary. In fact, my teachers used to get mad at me for trying to use French words in my Spanish. I joined the Spanish Club to practice regularly. Q: You had mentioned that there were people who had studied abroad. Were there any opportunities, or were you chomping at the bit for your own opportunity to go abroad? Even in high school? JACKSON: I was interested in traveling overseas. While I had traveled in the eastern United States, the only foreign country I had visited was Canada. I did not travel abroad at all while I was in high school. I was comfortable conversing in French by the time I graduated from high school though and my Spanish was okay. Q: As you're going through high school with these interests, you were developing your interest in international affairs. What were you thinking of in terms of college? JACKSON: I visited and applied to a number of Ivy League schools. I really found Princeton, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Wesleyan, and the University of Virginia very appealing and was accepted at the last three. I wanted to move out of northern New England. However, my brother had gone to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and when Bowdoin offered me a year of credit for my advanced placement courses, that was impossible to refuse. Like Exeter, Bowdoin was in the early years of coeducation. One of the most difficult adjustments for me at boarding school had been the imbalance between boys and girls. It was awkward socially, and coming from a public school that was 50/50, I had hoped to attend a college that was truly co-ed. Q: Is it true that boys learn by being competitive, and girls learn by being cooperative? JACKSON: I don't know if that is true, and I know some very competitive women; so there are always exceptions. I did find that there was a lot of competition at Exeter but I experienced less at Bowdoin. Q: Having very bright people to compete with kept you on your toes. Now, you already have a year basically; so did you have to declare a major? JACKSON: I had to declare a major within my first year, but I had pretty much decided on government and legal studies from the outset. My brother was in law school at the University of Maine at that point; my brother-in-law was also a lawyer. Some of my fraternity brothers and sisters were "pre-law" and I thought law school might be a route to a career in government. However, in addition to taking political science and constitutional law classes, I also experimented. I started taking sociology classes, which absolutely fascinated me. Had I been at Bowdoin longer, I might have majored in 3 government and sociology. Q: What was it about sociology that captured your attention? JACKSON: The study of how people and societies interact enthralled me and complemented my interest in history and foreign cultures; so it was a natural attraction. I also took anthropology, economics, and environmental studies to experiment and continued to study history, French, and political science. Bowdoin had a strong faculty with interesting backgrounds. For example, the chairman of the French department had received one of France's highest literary honors. Matilda Riley, the chairperson of the sociology department, was a very respected sociologist. The government and legal studies department had several stars, but Professor Donovan, who was my favorite political science teacher had worked for the Department of Labor in addition to authoring a book about the evolution of American democracy. Thus, these were people who had not only succeeded academically but had also pursued professions outside of academia. Q: You mentioned your own fraternity. Did that turn out to be a useful network for you later on? JACKSON: It was certainly a useful network for me during college, and I have kept in touch with many of my fraternity brothers and sisters.

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