Interview with the Honorable Robert E. Hunter , 2011
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Library of Congress Interview with The Honorable Robert E. Hunter , 2011 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR ROBERT E. HUNTER Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: August 10, 2004 Copyright 2010 ADST Q: Today is the 10th of August, 2004. This is an interview with Robert Hunter, middle initial? HUNTER: E. Q: What does that stand for? HUNTER: Edwards Q: And I'm Charles Stuart Kennedy and this is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. To begin, when and where were you born? HUNTER: The first of May, 1940 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Q: Can you tell me something about the Hunter family; let's start with the father's side. HUNTER: My father was in business, the family was from Quincy, Massachusetts. He was the first person in the family on that side to go to college, he went to Boston University. Graduated the year the Great Depression began. Of course, that was a generation that was very much affected by the Depression and what happened afterwards. Interview with The Honorable Robert E. Hunter , 2011 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001708 Library of Congress Q: Where did the Hunters come from? HUNTER: Mostly Scotland, through Nova Scotia. Some Irish, some English, some French, way back. The first ones that show up, on Ancestry.com, I learned only recently, were in Charleston, Mass. in 1636, but we have no family lore on them - as Horatio said, I “do in part believe it!” I know we had some come from Ireland to Massachusetts in the 1740s, and then the next generation left between 1774 and '81 to go to Nova Scotia, which indicates to me they were probably on the wrong side of the Revolution! About the middle of the nineteenth century, they came back to the Quincy area. Some came directly from Scotland, quarrymen. My grandmother's father was a barber. In fact, in the records it says he was a barber, a union organizer, organized the barbers for Samuel Gompers, and a bookmaker - I'm kind of proud of that! My grandfather, the first Robert Hunter, had a house painting business in Quincy, next door to a guy who was trying to make a better ice cream, Howard Johnson. Q: How about on your mother's side? HUNTER: My mother's mother was from Illinois; her people were in the US at least from the early 18th century, Tennessee, Virginia. Some came from Ireland, others most likely England. My mother's father was born in Wales, Aberystwyth, on the 16th of March, 1863. The British records were kept in a building next door to the London School of Economics, so I got a copy of his birth certificate. He came to Dakota Territory with his brother in the late 1880s and was a cowboy, later a rancher. He was a banker, founder of the Black Hills Roundup, which is still in existence, in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, on the Fourth of July every year, and he helped organize the Rodeo Association of America. He was mayor of Belle Fourche and a South Dakota state Senator, as a Republican, from 1912-1914. So my mother's parents were genuine pioneers. Ironically, both my grandfathers went bankrupt in the Great Depression, in both cases in part because they refused to collect debts owed to them by people who had run out of money. Interview with The Honorable Robert E. Hunter , 2011 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001708 Library of Congress Q: Your South Dakota grandparents were sort of the sod hut and all that? HUNTER: I don't think at that point because they had gone beyond sod huts! But Grandpa Evans did start out as a cowpuncher after he emigrated from Wales. My mother, after university at University of Nebraska, came East and did her Master's at Simmons College in Boston. That's where she met my father and they were married in 1933, Patriots' Day, in the chapel at Boston University. Q: What was her field? HUNTER: General liberal arts, also business. My father was an English major. Q: Did you grow up in the Boston area? HUNTER: No, because of the war, my father took a job in the government and that was at a munitions plant in southwestern Virginia, in Radford, Virginia, which was built out of whole cloth in 1941, and we lived there for 10 years. Q: What was Radford like? HUNTER: It was your usual rural kind of town. It was essentially farming communities around there. I've had different experiences. My first 10 years were in a rural environment and then a suburban environment, northern New Jersey, and then urban environments after that, so I've had kind of an exposure to all three main areas of American life. Q: Let's talk about the farming environment. HUNTER: We were isolated because we lived in government housing at this ordnance plant, which I think was one of the world's largest ordnance plants during the war. We were the Yankees in an area of the South in the 1940s; in that part of the country, people were still fighting the War Between the States. Interview with The Honorable Robert E. Hunter , 2011 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001708 Library of Congress Q: Absolutely. The War of Southern Secession. HUNTER: I said the War Between the States, I didn't say the Civil War. In fact, the Stars and Bars flew side by side with the Stars and Stripes, most places, in those days. Q: What about school? Did you go to school there? HUNTER: In Blacksburg to begin with. Along with the other kids at what was called Staff Village, at the Radford Ordnance Works. My older brother, David, and I were bussed about 12 miles to Blacksburg. For me, that was through the third grade, including in the public school there. Then the government, in its wisdom, discovered that a new school had been built only four miles away in a place called Fairlawn, so we were sent there. It was a major shift. It's one of those things that is probably a positive experience, transitioning from a good solid middle class community in Blacksburg, which had Virginia Polytechnic Institute (now called Virginia Tech), which was then an all men's military school like VMI (Virginia Military Institute), to a school where people were dirt poor. Where you just wore blue jeans and some of the kids only had shoes for the winter time and took off for planting and harvesting. Of course, no blacks. It was very much segregated. Things you learn as a child. They say you learn everything you need to know in kindergarten, and these were formative experiences about what America is about and what it should have been about but wasn't then, and where we are still challenged to meet the promise of the Founding Documents. Q: How'd you find the teaching? Sounds like a very difficult place to get the kids in place to teach. HUNTER: I've been very fortunate. One of the great triumphs of this country has been the public school system, which as you may know is one of the great inventions of America, we invented it. The Land Ordinance of 1785 created the land grant for public schools. One of the few lasting achievements under the Articles of Confederation. I've had a lifelong Interview with The Honorable Robert E. Hunter , 2011 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001708 Library of Congress devotion to education, maybe because of watching its impact on various people, and one of the great tragedies of America today is that we are allowing the public school to be destroyed, I hope I'm not putting it too strongly. Q: Did you find coming from the specialized area, having a family with both of your parents were college graduates and all that, and going to this country school, was this a problem for you? HUNTER: I think so, at least on the surface. In Blacksburg, it wasn't true because, as I say, it was a town with a lot of educated people who valued education, and then to go to this other school, where I think people valued it, but it was kind of an early experience for them. These were people either doing war work and post-war work because there was the munitions plant, there was American Celanese, factories like that, with people coming from elsewhere. But mostly the local farming kids, many of whom were absolutely dirt poor. Prior to building that school, these kids went to school in a tar-paper shack. The literal one room schoolhouses. The basement of the local Baptist church was a schoolroom. I was at the Fairlawn school for two years, and I guess it's the kind of experience that sticks with you in terms of learning what in this country we've all got to get beyond for there to be a real society. Q: How'd you find the teachers? HUNTER: As I said, I was lucky I had good teachers. Q: I suppose they were all women at that point? HUNTER: My first male teacher was, I guess, in junior high, maybe even high school. In fact, I had one teacher who was wonderful at an early age. I've developed a great love of history in the course of my life, and it was fostered by my fourth grade teacher, Miss Bane. We read a book called The Story of Virginia, which was the history of the Commonwealth, and I developed a very deep admiration for Stonewall Jackson at that point.