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Interview with L. Bruce Laingen

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Interview with L. Bruce Laingen Library of Congress Interview with L. Bruce Laingen The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR L. BRUCE LAINGEN Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: January 9, 1993 Copyright 1998 ADST Q: Today is January 9, 1992. This is an interview with Ambassador Bruce Laingen on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and I am Charles Stuart Kennedy. Bruce, I wonder if you could give me a little about your background — where you came from, your education, etc. LAINGEN: I was a farm boy from Minnesota growing up on a farm in southern Minnesota. I am often asked why I joined the Foreign Service and I give the answer that we couldn't all be farmers. I had some brothers and I began to look beyond that. I went to school at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. It was a liberal arts school in that part of the country. I served in the Navy in World War II and then took a Masters degree in International Relations at the University of Minnesota in 1949. Q: What did you do in the Navy? Where did you serve? LAINGEN: I was a V-12 Apprentice Seaman at the University of Dubuque, Iowa, in 1943. Q: V-12 meaning a reserve program for 12 weeks which turned you into an officer, or something like that? Interview with L. Bruce Laingen http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000651 Library of Congress LAINGEN: Not quite. It was a program that picked up people at mid-term in their college career and sent them off to another college for six months. In my case it was to the University of Dubuque and from there I went to Wellesley College in Massachusetts. I am one of the early male graduates from Wellesley College. The Supply Corps in the United States Navy had a branch of the Harvard Business School there and that was why I was at Wellesley. I spent another six months there as a Midshipman and then was commissioned as an officer in the Naval Supply Corps. I served in the Pacific in World War II with amphibious forces in the Philippine campaigns. Q: After the end of World War II, what attracted you towards foreign affairs? LAINGEN: Like I said, I decided we couldn't all be farmers so I had to look beyond the farm. My real attraction, I suppose, to the outside world started with the United States Navy in World War II in the Philippines. I came back from the Philippines and left the Navy in 1946. I did a Masters degree at the University of Minnesota in International Relations and during that time spent a summer in Sweden as a student in a student summer program at the University. During the process of looking beyond the farm, joining the Navy and serving in the Philippines and that session in Sweden, I thought the Foreign Service looked rather attractive. The outside world looked very attractive. Indeed, I took my first Foreign Service exam while I was a student in Sweden in 1947. I took it in Helsinki, repeating it later a second time in St. Paul. Q: Was it the good old three and a half day exam? LAINGEN: Three and a half days, yes. I failed the language (Spanish) three times before I joined the Foreign Service. I had to take the Foreign Service exam twice. Q: You joined the State Department first before joining the Foreign Service, didn't you? Interview with L. Bruce Laingen http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000651 Library of Congress LAINGEN: When I came to town in 1949 from Minnesota, half way through my Foreign Service exam process, waiting to complete it and looking for a job in Washington, I found a job in INR as a research analyst for Scandinavia for the better part of a year, before the exam process was completed. I joined the Foreign Service in late 1950. Q: Looking at INR in those days. The Cold War was just really beginning to crank up. There was the 1948 Czechoslovak business, the Korean War started in 1950. What was our interest in Scandinavia? Did you feel that Scandinavia was sort of a backwater? LAINGEN: Oh, it certainly was a backwater, and yet it was one of those areas that the government felt, given our experience in World War II, that we got into that affair without adequate knowledge, background information and data about the world out there. So they began these complicated and very extensive research projects of every country on earth. I was working in that program in INR. I forget now exactly what the name of it was. Q: National Intelligence Studies. LAINGEN: Yes, NIS. So I wrote extensively for the better part of a year on Scandinavia...the Swedish judicial system, the Danish judicial system, etc...contributing to what was destined to become a very massive program. Volume after volume of National Intelligence Studies which presumably would equip us better as a country were we ever to get involved again in a major fracas. As you said, that always loomed on the horizon, increasingly so as we got into the Korean affair. Q: You came into the Foreign Service when? LAINGEN: I came into the Foreign Service in November, 1950. At that time the military government program in Germany was still in existence, run largely in terms of out reach in the districts... Q: We had the Kreis Officers Program then. Interview with L. Bruce Laingen http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000651 Library of Congress LAINGEN: Yes, the Kreis Officer Program. The State Department was taking over some of the responsibilities of local government in Germany from the Army and I was a member of the Kreis Resident Officer class that began in November, 1950. Therefore I didn't take whatever the basic course was at the time...perhaps it was called the A-100 course even then. I took instead a somewhat modified course because it was destined to lead us to become Kreis Resident Officers ...KROs. We were a class, I think, of 32. We went through the course which was an intense program of German language study and to some degree a look at German culture, etc. I went off to Germany in the spring of 1951. The entire class bundled aboard the former French and now defunct French liner Decross. This class of 32 officers, most of whom were married, I was not, occupied most of the first class quarters on that ship. It was nine days, nine leisurely days to party, to prepare, if you will. I had on board my green Chevrolet convertible, as did others. We got to Le Havre, off loaded and drove to our posts, beginning with a program in Frankfurt, Germany, at the headquarters of the military government. What was it called, I have forgotten? Q: HICOM. LAINGEN: Yes, the High Commission in Frankfurt. From there we were farmed out to our assignments for the next two years. At that point, for reasons that I suppose I will never fully understand, some of us were diverted to other programs...I never became a KRO. I think I would have made a rather lousy Gauleiter. Most of my colleagues did become what we joking called Gauleiters; i.e. the Nazi term for those district governors. Q: Gauleiter being district leaders under the Third Reich. LAINGEN: Exactly, that is what they were called then. Gau was a local district and the leiter was leader in that area. Interview with L. Bruce Laingen http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000651 Library of Congress I was diverted from the program to the Displaced Persons Program and went off to Hamburg, Germany and served two years operating out of the Consulate General there in the British zone, not the American zone. I spent the first year issuing visas virtually non stop to the end of the Displaced Persons Program. Q: I wonder if you could give a little picture of the Displaced Persons Program? How you operated, your decisions, what were the...? LAINGEN: The Displaced Persons Program was a special program designed to facilitate entry into the United States of those qualified peoples displaced in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as a consequence of the war and particularly as a consequence of the Soviet advance across eastern European countries and into Germany. I forget the numbers but it was a very large program. It included people from places like the Ukraine, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. A lot of them came from the Baltic states. I have often thought, as I watched in the past 18 months here in Washington, D.C. the demonstrations by Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians demanding that the Soviets get out of their countries, that among those people were some I probably gave visas to. Or, if not to them, I gave visas to their parents. It was a very liberal program in the sense that the requirements were not all that stringent. There was a screening process, particularly effecting their political orientation, health and other considerations. We operated out of Hamburg in what were called displaced persons camps — many of them being former German military barracks, which was the case for us outside of Hamburg in a place called Wentorf. It was a half hour drive east of Hamburg. We issued visas almost around the clock. The last day of the program which was December 31, 1952 we issued visas until midnight. Interview with L. Bruce Laingen http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000651 Library of Congress I enjoyed the work.
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