The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project
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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project RONALD J. NEITZKE Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: December 1, 2006 Copyright 2009 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background Born and raised in Minnesota St. Thomas College; University of Minnesota; Johns Hopkins University (SAIS) Entered the Foreign Service in1971 State Department; FSI; Norwegian language training 1971-1972 Oslo, Norway; Consular Officer/Staff Aide 1972-1974 Environment NATO Relations Visa cases State Department; FSI: Serbo-Croatian language study 1974-1975 Belgrade, Yugoslavia; Consular Officer 1975-1978 Politics Ethnic groups Albanian Kosovars Tito Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) meetings Orthodox Church Environment Security US Ambassadors Embassy staff Soviets Kosovo Consular reporting Government Yugoslavia’s future State Department: FSI; Pilot Threshold Training Program 1978 1 Mid-level officer training Evaluation of Program State Department; Special Assistant to Director of Policy Planning 1978-1980 Tony Lake Operations Staff Priorities Policy Group Global Policy Message Carter Policies Response to Soviets High-level policy disputes Human Rights State’s Dissent Channel Boycott of 1980 Moscow Olympics Iran Cuba Johns Hopkins University (SAIS); Soviet and East European Studies 1980-1981 State Department; Country Director, Czechoslovakia & Albania 1981-1983 Nazi-looted gold Czech negotiations Czech harassment Nazi-looted Jewish property Albania Corfu Channel Case State Department; Special Assistant to the Counselor 1983-1986 Counselor Edward Derwinski Operations Relations with Congress Eastern Europe Ceausescu Polish Church Aid to Private Agriculture Relations with geographic bureaus Cyprus Afghanistan Office murder Marriage London, England; Political Officer, American Republic Affairs 1986-1990 Deputy Political Counselor 1990 Falklands War Operations Family 2 Elections Security Environment Argentina government Margaret Thatcher Anti-American protesters Reporting Relations Reagan and Thatcher Staff Official visitors Political Parties Eastern Europe “Invitation to Dance” cable and response Iraq Naval War College 1990-1991 Vietnam War sentiment Student body State Department; FSI; Serbo-Croatian language study 1991-1992 Croatian War Instructors Family Atrocity reports Yugoslavia unraveling INR reporting of Yugoslav events European response to War Zagreb, Yugoslavia; Principal Officer/Deputy Chief of Mission 1992-1996 Environment Security Bosnian Relief Operations Bosnian Muslim refugees Relations with Embassy Belgrade Relations with government European diplomatic representation Tudjman Milosevic Congressional delegations Death camps UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) British military forces International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) US Policy US diplomatic recognition of regimes 3 US Ambassadors Serb military tactics David Owen Canton plan Change of US Administrations Ethnic cleansing Joint Chief of Staff (JCS) view on US military intervention Sanctions United Nations Organizations Stockholm syndrome Operation Provide Promise Eagleburger Debate over US military intervention NATO Special Envoy Reggie Bartholomew Military Professional Resources Inc. Washington Agreement of 1994 Iran as source of weapons Visit of Ex-President Carter UNPROFOR Arms flow issue Operation Storm Knin Croatian attacks Evacuations plans Rocket attacks Leave of Absence 1996 Senate Intelligence Committee testimony House International Relations Committee testimony Iranian ‘green light” subcommittee Senior Seminar 1996-1997 Course content State Department: Promotion Panel 1997 State Department; Personnel; Senior Assignments Officer 1997-1998 Assignment process DCM positions Promotion in the Senior Foreign Service “Up Or Out Promotion System” Young Turks Assignment controversies State Department; Office of the Historian 1998-1999 Ustashe-looted gold 4 Vatican implication Retirement 1999 INTERVIEW Q: Today is the first of December, 2006. This is an interview with Ron Neitzke. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and I am Charles Stuart Kennedy. Alright. Ron, we will start at the beginning. When and where were you born? NEITZKE: March 19, 1949, in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. It’s a town of seven or eight thousand about 200 miles northwest of the Twin Cities. Q: 1949. Okay, well let us talk about the Neitzkes. Where did the Neitzkes come from and how did they end up in the northern reaches of the United States? NEITZKE: The name is German. Family lore has it that it came from east of Berlin, in what was then, when my great-grandfather Frank Neitzke left, Prussia. Growing up, we were told that he’d left for America in the 1870s to avoid conscription into the Kaiser’s army. His wife’s family came to this country at least a generation or two earlier, probably also from Germany. My other paternal great-grandparents came from Luxembourg and the Rhineland, respectively, also around the 1870s. Frank apparently first made his way to Buffalo, New York, stayed there at least long enough to get married, and then headed west to Minnesota, to homestead. Why he chose northern Minnesota, whether he had kinship or other ties there, or whether he just fell in with the large numbers of German and Scandinavian immigrants heading to that part of the country in those years, I don’t know. Q: What did he do for a living? NEITZKE: He was a carpenter. He spent most of his life building houses in my home town. Q: Was there much discussion of family history when you were growing up? NEITZKE: Very little. Whether that’s typically Midwestern, or typically German- American – given Germany’s image from the two World Wars -- or just something about my family, I’m not sure. My sense, though, is that these original immigrants, my great- grandparents mainly, weren’t all that interested in looking back or maintaining ties with the old country. 5 Q: Well tell me about your grandparents on your father’s side. Do you know what kind of work your grandfather did? NEITZKE: Robert and Kate, Katherine, Neitzke. They had seven children, two of whom died young of the largely untreatable diseases that periodically swept through the population back then. Kate and Robert could both speak German but apparently did so only when it was necessary to keep something secret from their kids. Kate also translated letters from Germany that friends and neighbors brought to her. But my dad and his brothers spoke no German at all. For most of his adult life, my grandfather owned and ran what was called a recreation, a pool hall basically. Q: Did your father go to college? NEITZKE: My dad was the oldest of the five surviving children, all male. No Neitzke in his line had ever attended college. My dad was determined to go, and did go, but only for a year. He did well and wanted to continue but couldn’t. It was the Depression. Money was tight, and, as he told it, he got no help or encouragement, to stay in college that is, from his father. My dad also lost the on-campus job he’d had his freshman year, in part, he felt, because of his religion. He was Catholic, and there were undercurrents of anti- Catholicism in that part of the country then. So he went out to California and worked for several years to earn money for college. But when Pearl Harbor was attacked, he enlisted right away. Then later, when he got out of the Navy, he already had a wife and baby son, so going back to school would have been difficult. Q: What do you know about your mother’s background, her family? NEITZKE: Even less, unfortunately. My mom was adopted by a Danish-American couple shortly after her birth in Minneapolis in 1918. They owned a hardware store and later a grocery store in a couple of small towns in southern Minnesota. My mom later learned that her biological mother, of German extraction, had taught in the English department of the University of Minnesota. She was told that her biological father, a Norwegian-American, had been killed in France in World War I. Q: How did your mother and father meet? NEITZKE: They met early in the war, in the early 1940s. My dad was a Navy air corpsman, a radio man, ultimately spending a couple years flying in Naval surveillance planes near Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands. He was in and out of Seattle during that service, where my mom was working for Shell Oil. They met on a blind date arranged by a mutual friend from Minnesota. They were married in 1944. Q: Well then, did you grow up in Minnesota? NEITZKE: Yes. 6 Q: Talk a bit about being a kid. I mean, I am talking about a small kid there, growing up in, where was it, Detroit Lakes? What kind of place was it? NEITZKE: It was small town middle America, but to me, of course, it was the whole world. I was the third of six children – four boys and two girls. I had two older brothers. I was a fairly serious kid, always serious about school, but I also liked sports, especially hockey. This was northern Minnesota, so we were all skaters from early on. I loved being outdoors. I even did some trapping as a kid, muskrats and gophers mainly, and some fishing. My dad and brothers were avid hunters, so I hunted a bit too, mostly ducks. And there was scouting, of course. Life when I was very young was carefree. Families were much larger then. There were always lots of kids around to play with, lots of adventures to be had, and parents didn’t hover over you and worry as they do now. The lakes, and there were hundreds around where I grew up, were a focal point for activities of all kinds – summer and winter - and drew large numbers of tourists from Canada and neighboring states. The winters were harsh; we really did walk to school at times through six foot snow drifts. And we played hockey outdoors at twenty below zero. But the summers could be hot and humid, Washington-like.