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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project WILLIAM SCOTT BUTCHER Interviewed by: David Reuther Initial interview date: December 23, 2010 Copyright 2015 ADST Introduction – Brief Biographic & Career History Note Scott Butcher is from Cincinnati, Ohio, where he graduated from Western Hills High School. He received a bachelor’s degree from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, in 1964 and a masters from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Washington, D.C. in 1966. He entered the State Department in 1966. His overseas Foreign Service assignments were to Rangoon, Burma (1967-69); Dhaka, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh – 1967-71); Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (1975-79 and 1990-93); and Jakarta, Indonesia (1981-84). Scott was trained at the Foreign Service Institute in Burmese, Malay and Indonesian. His assignments in Washington, D.C. were as Pakistan/Bangladesh Desk Officer in the Bureau of Near East and South Asian Affairs (NEA - 1971-73); Staff Assistant in that bureau’s front office (1973-4); Senior Watch Officer in the Operations Center of the Executive Secretariat (1979-81); Deputy Director, Office of International Security Policy, Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs (PM - 1984- 87); Deputy Director, Office of Philippine Affairs, Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs (EAP – 1987-88); Director, Office of India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Maldives Affairs, NEA (1988-1990); and Director, Office of Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore Affairs, EAP (1993-5). Scott retired in September 1995. During his career he received numerous performance awards, including the John Jacob Rogers Award for career achievement. After retirement he set up a small Maryland- registered consultancy to help American companies with their business development efforts in Asia, facilitating joint ventures between U.S. companies and Asian counterparts. He currently works part-time as a WAE shift director on the Political- Military Action Team in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. In recent years he and other retired Foreign Service colleagues have helped U.S. military commands in exercise planning and execution. He also serves on the boards of some volunteer organizations Q: Good morning. It is December 23rd, 2010. This is an Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training oral history with William Scott Butcher – who goes by W. Scott Butcher – or Scott. We are conducting this interview on a bright winter day in Washington, DC. I am David Reuther. Pre-Foreign Service Background Scott, can you tell us when and where you were born, and provide some family background? 1 BUTCHER: Very briefly, I was born in Dayton, Ohio, in December 1942. I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. I attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, about 45 minutes away from my home. Q: What did your dad do? What was your family background? BUTCHER: My dad was an accountant with Proctor and Gamble, a noted Cincinnati company. He didn’t do much traveling, but he was in charge of the accounting section of their traffic department, which took care of a lot of their logistics. I used to get a lot of interesting stamps that he would bring home from the office from mailings from various suppliers overseas. That got me interested in stamp collecting, and in turn interested as a kid in foreign countries and global affairs. Q: If you great up in the 1950s, was your mom a stay-at-home mom? BUTCHER: Yes. After the war years and immediate post-war years my maternal grandparents were my day care providers. Q: Cookies and the whole business? BUTCHER: Yes. Q: You were born during the war, so your father was not drafted? BUTCHER: My mother divorced my biological father shortly after I was born. As far as I know from family conversations he was not involved in the war. My mother remarried in 1948 and my adoptive father – who after the war and university under the GI Bill became an accountant at Proctor and Gamble - was in the Army Air Force. He was stationed on Tinian in World War II. I had known that he ran a PX (Post Exchange) on the island of Tinian, but it turns out he also was involved in some of the bomb damage assessments for General Curtis LeMay for the B-29 bombings which flew out of Tinian – including the two which dropped the nuclear bombs. It seems he had a range of activities while stationed there. He had lots of pictures of B-29s, including the Enola Gay. He talked about witnessing heavily laden B-29s failing to get airborne, crashing into the sea on takeoff, and exploding. Also shot-up planes landing. Q: You were talking about the stamps and a growing interest that stimulated. At that same time, what might you have been reading in school that interested you? BUTCHER: I read a lot. I read some war novels. I remember reading Audie Murphy’s To Hell and Back. Again, being a child coming out of the World War II era, I remember collecting a kind of bubble gum cards, but instead of having the baseball stuff, a lot of them had division insignias, pictures of medals on them, and things like that. In school, I was very interested in history and got interested in world affairs. 2 Q: You would have been about eight years old when the Korean War broke out. BUTCHER: I remember it vividly. I remember that I was walking to school, Carson Elementary School in the suburb of Price Hill which I attended through the third grade, and saw the headlines in the newsstands. As a kid, I used to enjoy doodling and drawing pictures of F-86s chasing MIG-15s. Q: As the paper came out and maps were in it, were you following those circumstances? BUTCHER: Not with a very scholarly type approach. I was just an inquisitive kid. This was very much in the news. A lot of this was during the time of the radio. We didn’t have a television until I was probably about 11 years old. It was mostly listening to the radio and following events that way. I was quite aware of that. I was aware of McArthur’s firing by Eisenhower, and there were very mixed feelings on my parents’ part, because McArthur was a World War II hero. Q: I remember when McArthur came back; they had a parade in Seattle. My mother took us down there. We were standing on the corner. BUTCHER: Old soldiers never die, they just fade away. Q: When you went to high school in 1956, was that in Cincinnati? BUTCHER: Yes, after attending elementary school from the third to sixth grade in the Cincinnati suburb of Cheviot, Ohio, I went to both junior and senior high at the same school, Western Hills High School. Both my parents went there in the 1930s. I was the classmate of one notable person, was Pete Rose. Interestingly in high school Pete was actually a better football player than baseball player – he played halfback. He was a serious athlete, and when a number of us were playing softball at a class outing Pete was the only one of us to wear cleats – the rest of us played in our bare feet! Each time he was at bat he hit the ball over the fence and then would charge around the bases. I was playing second base and when he came roaring around I made sure I got out of the way so I wouldn’t encounter his cleats! West Hi, as it was called, produced a number of professional ball players under its outstanding baseball coach at the time, who also coached American Legion ball. Additionally, the school had an active theater group, one of whose members, Harvey Hohnecker, who graduated a few years before me, went on to a successful career on Broadway, and sang and danced in both the stage and film version of West Side Story. Q: Cincinnati had its own professional team at that time, or did they? BUTCHER: Yes, the Reds are one of the oldest baseballs teams there is, from the 1870s or 1880s. I think they were originally the Cincinnati Red Stockings. My dad and I would often go to old Crosley Field to watch them play, and I became a life-long baseball fan. 3 Q: How would you describe your high school experience in terms of your future interests? Was this where you were doing a lot of reading about history and World War TWO? BUTCHER: What really got me focused on it was an American History teacher by the name of Henry Hess. He was the faculty advisor for what was called the Western Hills High School Chapter of the Junior Council on World Affairs. They had a Council on World Affairs that was subsidized by the big corporations that were present: Proctor and Gamble, GE (General Electric), and so on. GE in Evendale made a lot of jet engines. That was another thing when I was growing up. One of the kids who lived near me whose father worked at the GE engine factory would bring home pieces of turbine blades when they had a testing mishap due to flaws in the materials. Henry Hess had some physical problems – “the shakes,” purportedly from shell shock in his wartime experiences, but for me was an inspirational person. He took a lot of interest in his students. What got me interested specifically in the Foreign Service was after hearing one of the speakers at a Council on World Affairs presentation, a State Department Foreign Service Officer. I thought gee, that sounds like an interesting career.