URUGUAY COUNTRY READER TABLE OF CONTENTS John T. Fishburn 1944-1945 Labor Attaché, Montevideo C. Conrad Manley 1955-1958 Information Officer, USIA, Montevideo George W. Landau 1957-1962 Commercial Attaché, Economic Section Chief, Montevideo Robert F. Woodward 1958-1961 Ambassador, Uruguay Samuel F. Hart 1959-1961 Vice Consul, Montevideo Robert H. Nooter 1962-1964 Mission Director, USAID, Montevideo John Edgar Williams 1963-1966 Deputy Chief, Economic/ Commercial Section, Montevideo Horace Y. Edwards 1964-1967 Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Montevideo Jacob Gillespie 1967-1969 Assistant Cultural Affairs Officer, USIS, Montevideo Charles H. Thomas 1967-1969 Peace Corps Director, Uruguay Robert M. Sayre 1968-1969 Ambassador, Uruguay Harry A. Cahill 1968-1971 Commercial Attaché, Montevideo James L. Tull 1969-1973 Political Officer, Montevideo Ernest V. Siracusa 1973-1977 Ambassador, Uruguay Barbara H. Nielsen 1977-1978 Rotation Officer, Montevideo Park D. Massey 1977-1979 Mission Director, USAID, Montevideo Lawrence A. Pezzulo 1977-1979 Ambassador, Uruguay Dale V. Slaght 1977-1980 Commercial Attaché, Montevideo James C. Cason 1981-1982 Political Counselor, Montevideo 1 Richard H. Melton 1982-1985 Deputy Chief of Mission, Montevideo John E. Graves 1982-1986 Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Montevideo Thomas Parker, Jr. 1984-1987 Economic Counselor, Montevideo John P. Leonard 1985-1986 Political Officer, Montevideo Thomas J. Dodd 1993-1997 Ambassador, Uruguay Luke Kay 2002-2003 Public Affairs Officer, Montevideo JOHN T. FISHBURN Labor Attaché Montevideo (1944-1945) As one of the Foreign Service’s first labor attachés, Mr. John T. Fishburn assumed posts in Argentina and Brazil. Prior to his retirement in 1970, Mr. Fishburn additionally served in various administrative roles within the Department of State related to international labor policies and organizations. Mr. Fishburn was interviewed by James Shea in 1991. FISHBURN: I continued in that task in Buenos Aires until the former government of Argentina had been overthrown by a military junta and a new administration established to replace the former government. There was, for a space of a very few months, a labor minister who was very friendly and pro-United States-whose name I haven't yet been able to remember-under the Government which overthrew in turn the Castillo Government which had existed previously. At any rate after a few months of having this friendly labor minister, Juan Domingo Peron decided that this was the field that he was going to utilize. He had been so closely tied to the Germans rather than the United States during the war and so unfriendly to the United States, that it didn't seem likely that we would serve any useful purpose at all trying to work with Peron in the labor field. As a result I asked if I could be transferred across the river to Montevideo as our Labor Attaché to Uruguay. That was approved in Washington and after a year and a half in Argentina I transferred about the middle of 1944 to Montevideo where I served as Labor Attaché for approximately a year. I then returned to the United States to end that first temporary activity of mine as part of the labor function in what was then the Foreign Service Auxiliary and of which I was a member during that short period of the war. Almost immediately I came back into the labor field in the Department of State working on Latin America under Otis Mulliken. After several years during which I served as Labor Advisor to the Inter-American Section of the State Department. In October 1957, I returned as a member of the full Foreign Service as Labor Attaché in Rio de Janeiro for a period of six years, departing on home leave in October 1963. 2 Q: John, at the time you were in Buenos Aires and Montevideo what was the dominant political persuasion of most of the labor leaders? FISHBURN: In Buenos Aires at that time the C.G.T. in Buenos Aires and Argentina was controlled by a combination of the Communists and non-Communists many of whom were socialists. The Communists did have sort of the upper hand in a formal sense at the central headquarters. However, almost from the time I began operating there, I found separate and anti- Communist labor groups, the most notable of which was the Union of Municipal Workers in Buenos Aires under Francisco Perez Leiros. Although Francisco had been a member of the central C.G.T. while a Communist had been President, he was himself clearly inclined toward the anti-Communist approach. I found working with him pleasant, in fact Mrs. Fishburn and I spent ten days at the vacation colony of the Municipal Workers Union in Sal se Puedes, Argentina, during 1944; this was a very pleasant vacation, and Perez Leiros later turned out to be a stalwart supporter of the AFL-CIO in the inter-American labor field. C. CONRAD MANLEY Information Officer, USIA Montevideo (1955-1958) C. Conrad Manley was born in 1912. He began working with the U.S. Information Agency in Montevideo in 1955, followed by posts in Bogota, Miami (in a VOA operation), Mexico City, Khartoum, and Tripoli, for a total of 16 years with USIA. He was interviewed in 1988 by John Hogan. MANLEY: That is right. I had approximately three to four weeks of orientation and instruction at the Agency in Washington first and then I went to Montevideo in June of 1955. Q: Does anything stand out in your mind about your period in Montevideo? MANLEY: Uruguay, at that time, was a very peaceful country. The things that bothered the Uruguayan most, during the period that I was there, until 1958, were soccer scores and the price of wool tops. The Tupamaros and all the guerilla activity came much later. Q: Well, it sounds like a very good post with which to break into the Agency. What was your next post? GEORGE W. LANDAU Commercial Attaché, Economic Section Chief Montevideo (1957-1962) Ambassador George W. Landau was born in 1920. He graduated from Pace College 1941 and from New York University in 1942. Ambassador Landau served 3 overseas in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1947 and joined the State Department in 1957. His posts included Uruguay, Spain, Paraguay, Chile, and Venezuela. He was interviewed March 11, 1991 by Arthur Day. Q: Mr. Ambassador, we will obviously talk mainly about your posts where you were chief of mission at the latter part of your career, but if there were elements in your earlier career that were interesting we could bring them in. LANDAU: It might be a good idea Art. There is a progression in my life that goes back to even before I joined the Foreign Service. I spent, like many of my contemporaries, five years in the military. I was drafted as a private and went off to officer candidate school and wound up in military intelligence as a captain. While most of my contemporaries got out when they could, I stayed in the reserve until I retired after 32 years of service in 1975. I mention this particularly because it gave me a certain advantage in subsequent posts where I was assigned to military regimes. The fact that I was a colonel in the Army reserve, sometimes was quite helpful, although the Department in its usual mindlessness was not in favor of this. I remember when I was nominated to Paraguay a very senior officer told me, "I understand you are a reserve officer" and I said, "Yes, I am a colonel in the reserve and I might even get a promotion later on." He said, "You know, Congress takes a very dim view of that; they will think you will mix military with civilian matters." I said, "Well, I hardly think that could have been the case." But he said, "If I were you, I would resign so that if any Congressman or any Senator should ask you at the hearings you could say, `Yes I was in the reserve, but have resigned my commission.'" I did just that. I sent a letter to the Assistant Chief of Intelligence (ACSI) where I had my mobilization assignment in the Pentagon, and said that I would go off to Paraguay as chief of mission so therefore I regretfully had to resign my commission. That was in 1972. After I got to Paraguay I kept getting news bulletins from ACSI and so finally I wrote them a letter. I said, "I still get your correspondence and you know I have resigned my commission." I got a letter back saying, "No, that letter is not on record, we chose to disregard it". So I stayed in the reserve until 1975 when my mandatory time was up. It goes to show that being in the reserve can sometimes come in very handy as it turned out in my career. Really everything, as you so well know, is pure chance and not career planning. Career planning simply does not exist except in the minds of the excessive number of personnel people. What happened was that I was in Montevideo for five years first as commercial attaché and then chief of the economic section. During that time Bob Woodward was chief of mission. Q: What years were those? LANDAU: 1957-62. Bob went on; he left in 1961 to go to Chile for seven weeks and then became assistant secretary, and eventually wound up in Madrid. He liked my style and I certainly liked him very much and admired him, and his wife Virginia. So he told me one day, "If you want to come to Madrid I might have an opening." I immediately agreed and after Bob got to Madrid he dropped me a note saying that much to his surprise he thought he had an opening in the economic section but this did not turn out to be true.

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