Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project THOMAS L. HUGHES Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: July 7, 1999 Copyright 2011 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background Born and raised in Minnesota arleton ollege; Oxford University; Yale Law School US Air Force Political Science Professor Democratic politics ongressional assignments Eisenhower Doctrine Jack Kennedy Hu,ert Humphrey Assistant to hester Bowles Election of 19.0 Adlai Stevenson State Department; Administrative Asst. to the Under Secretary 19.1 hester Bowles Am,assador appointments Kennedy Administration appointments 1hodes Scholar group Laos23ietnam Eisenhower influence Averell Harriman ourtesy Diplomatic Passports 4Kennedy5 Asserting am,assadorial authority Alliance for Progress Bay of Pigs Kennedy relations with State Department State Department; Deputy Director, Intelligence 8 1esearch 19.1919.3 Director, Intelligence 8 1esearch 19.3919.9 Briefing the Secretary Organization of the bureau 1o,ert McNamara 1 >No 1esearch Without 1ecommendations“ 1elations with IA United States Intelligence Board National Intelligence Estimates 4NIE5 Inter9Agency ommittees >Plausi,le Denia,ility“ IAAs successes and failures oordinating intelligence Defense Intelligence Agency 4DIA5 Berman9American relations Kennedy in Berlin Eleanor Dulles Kennedy staff The >Baullist Temptation“ Berlin crisis The Hallstein Doctrine President Johnson and the State Department Multilateral Force 4MLF5 IsraelAs nuclear program 4Dimona5 American Jewish community National Intelligence Survey 4NIS5 Approaches to 19.C Ara,9Israeli War US9Egypt relations Jerusalem 3ietnam Kennedy and Laos IN1As 3ietnam expertise Kennedy and the press 3ietnam Buddhist crisis Diem Henry a,ot Lodge Johnson and 3ietnam Briefing Hu,ert Humphrey Bulf of Tonkin Secretary Dean 1usk Johnson2Bo,,y Kennedy rivalry HumphreyAs assessment of 3ietnam 3ietnam escalation de,ate IN1As 3ietnam estimates hinese intervention prospects 43ietnam5 3ietnam as political issue President JohnsonAs wiretaps Tet offensive Student protests 1ogers 2 Kissinger relations hinaAs ultural 1evolution 2 hina D India relations Leonid Brezhnev Prague Spring u,a hile Project amelot Prolificacy of covert operations Pu,lications London, England; Deputy hief of Mission 19.9919C0 Am,assador Annen,erg Environment 1hodesia Heath D Nixon back channel Anti D US demonstrations Bill linton State Department; Policy Planning 19C0 arnegie Endowment for Peace 19C091993 History of the organization Alger Hiss Foreign Policy magazine Operations Staff 1ecruitment Post arnegie associations 19939 Non Bovernment Organizations 4NBOAs5 INTERVIEW Q: When and where were you born% HUBHESE I was born in Decem,er, 1925, and grew up in Mankato, a small town in southern Minnesota. Q: Can you tell me a little about your parents and your family% HUBHESE My grandfather Thomas Hughes was a successful lawyer, judge, and civic leader. He was also a prominent local historian. We lived with him in his house until his death in 1934 when I was eight. He wrote several well9regarded booksHon the Welsh in Minnesota, on Blue Earth ounty history, and on Minnesota Indian themes. He was in fact the major frontier historian of Southern Minnesota. For instance, he interviewed 3 Indian chiefs after they lost what we used to call the >Sioux Uprising“ of 1I.2. So I grew up in a house full of his li,rary books and local historical o,jects. Many years later I edited the second editions of two of his Indian books. Dr. Thomas Lowe, my other grandfather, was a well9known prairie physician in Pipestone, an even smaller town located in southwestern Minnesota. He also served as the town mayor, and in his last years he was elected to the state legislature in St. Paul. I spent some memora,le times with both grandfathers in my youth, and I suppose my interest in history, international affairs, and pu,lic service derives from both of them. My parents also played active roles in our small town community life. I had one sister, five years younger than I. Q: When you say a small town in Minnesota% HUBHESE Mankato was a then a town of some 15,000, located sixty miles south of the Twin ities. Mankato meant >Blue Earth“ in Sioux for the local blue clay deposits. Q: What was life li)e growing up in Man)ato% HUBHESE I had all my early schooling there, through pu,lic high school. It was a privileged, middle9class, atmosphere. I was surrounded by encouraging parents, teachers, and friends. Even though these were the years of the Breat Depression, my youth was more or less pro,lem freeHlots of good schooling, lots of devoted attention, and lots of opportunity. In the fourth grade my teacher said, >YouAre wasting your time taking an hour at lunch. Bive it a half hour, come back here, and IAll teach you Norwegian for the rest of the lunch period.“ Such attention is rare these days. In school in the eighth grade we all composed auto,iographies. Mine touches all my then interestsHfamily trips with my parents and sister to anada and Mexico, school sports, youthful neigh,orhood clu,s, foreign correspondence, stamp collecting, piano lessons, the family genealogy, and already the writing of small historical sketches. Q: How about at home - the dinner table conversation, that sort of thing% HUBHESE My fore,ears were very much interested in their own family connections who happened to include several luminaries from early in the century. Brandfather was a cousin of harles Evans Hughes. Brandmother was related to Brover leveland and more distantly to Elihu 1oot and William Howard Taft. That meant that history and politics had a family setting. My Hughes grandparents were stalwart 1epu,licans while my Lowe grandparents were Democrats. So that spurred lively discussions and gave me some early lessons in diversity and relativism. Q: Was the grange movement established by the time you came along% HUBHESE The grange flourished in the previous century. By the time I was growing up, the plight of Minnesota farmers was a serious one and the Farm Bureau and the FarmersA Union were contesting for political strength. In the middle 1930s MinnesotaAs Farmer9 4 La,or Party was in power and the flam,oyant Floyd B. Olson was governor. By the time I graduated from high school in 1943, Hu,ert Humphrey had just arrived on the scene and was busy merging the Farmer9La,or party with the Democrats. By then, of course, we were in World War II. It had a major effect on politics. Minnesota had been one of the most isolationist of states with its heavy Scandinavian9Berman9Irish population. The war transformed state politics, with internationalist 1epu,licans like Harold Stassen and Joseph Ball competing with internationalist Democrats like Hu,ert Humphrey and Orville Freeman. The owles newspapers also played a big role in the isolationist9to9internationalist conversion in Minnesota. In 1942 the issue of postwar world organization was of growing national interest. By then I was already deeply involved in high school de,ating circles, and world federal government was one of the national de,ate topics. This prepared me for an early interest in the Student Federalist movement. One thing led to another and, at age 1C, I organized the second Student Federalist chapter in the nation. Mankato high school followed right after Scarsdale, New York, high school, where Harris Wofford, also then 1C, started the movement. He became the first national president of SF 419439445 and I became the second 419449455. 4NoteE Wofford later was president of Bryn Mawr ollege and then US senator from Pennsylvania. We have been lifelong friends.5 The consequent coast9to9coast travel, pu,lic appearances, contacts and networks gave me unusual national opportunities before I was twenty. In that sense I left Minnesota by exposure and experience much earlier than I actually left it physically. For some reason even as a child in Mankato I had always been very much on pu,lic display. I played the piano when I was very young and frequently performed in pu,lic recitals. As a high school de,ater I traveled widely on weekends to de,ate tournaments all over the Midwest, and we won a lot of trophies including the state high school championship. I placed second in the national oratorical contest. Then at age 1I I became the national president of the Student Federalists, and that meant speaking tours all over the US and anada, testifying at both national political conventions in 1944, broadcasting on national radio programs, and attending the United Nations founding conference in San Francisco in 1945. All of this gave me a big jump9start for a career. Q: Well who were the Student Federalists% What was their outloo)% HUBHESE We started in 1943 as the high school offshoot of larence StreitAs >Union Now“ organization which worked for a postwar federal government of western democracies. At the time this was a proposition that was taken quite seriously by a good many prominent people, not only by students. Within a year or two, Student Federalist groups had sprung up at many high schools and colleges across the country. The movement eventually was a casualty of the old War, and by the late 1940s my own interest in federalism had also dwindled. The experience had been stimulating, however. It is hard now to recreate the atmosphere of those years. Students were idealistic, and many of the adult generation, feeling guilty 5 in retrospect a,out their inactivity between the world wars, were supportive. Indeed we were almost mainstream at the time. Federalism, after all, was an American idea. Former isolationists and nationalists were a,le to make an easy transfer to internationalism partly ,ecause federalism was a kind of bridge. In 1944945 everything seemed possi,le. In retrospect it is easy to dismiss the Student Federalists as hopelessly naKve. But it was a different world then. The atom bom, and the old War were yet to come.