Burghardt, Raymond

The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR RAYMOND BURGHARDT Interviewed by: Mark Tauber Initial interview date: June 19, 2019 Copyright 2020 ADST INTERVIEW Q: Today is June 19th, 2019. We are beginning our interview with Ambassador Raymond Burghardt. We always begin by asking your date and place of birth. BURGHARDT: I was born on May 27th, 1945, in the Peck Memorial Hospital, which no longer exists. It was in Brooklyn. I’m proud to have been born in Brooklyn. I am a sixth- generation New Yorker. Q: Interesting. Are there other siblings in your family? BURGHARDT: I was an only child. Q: My next question, you mention you’re sixth-generation. Have you done ancestry work to see where your forebears came? BURGHARDT: My father did a lot of ancestry research. Nearly all my ancestors came from Germany, both from north Germany – Protestants – and from south Germany, the Catholics. One segment, the earliest to arrive in America came from France. They were from Alsace-Lorraine, from Nancy to be precise. Some had clearly French names; other surnames seem German. But they thought of themselves as French. They were the first who came. Q: Were they Protestant? BURGHARDT: They were Catholic. The first arrived in New York in 1822: my triple- great-grandparents and my then 10-year old double-great grandmother who went on to be a somewhat well known person at that time. She was a pastry chef, later the chief chef at the famous Delmonico’s restaurant in New York. She went on to found her own restaurant. She lived to be 90 years old, which shows you all those French sauces aren’t so bad for you. She was born in 1812 and died in 1902. Q: Are there stories passed down from her to you? 1 BURGHARDT: There are many stories passed down, family stories, although not from her. Some of them I think are relevant to my career. My forebears on my mother’s side were not very adventuresome. They all came to New York in the mid-19th century and nobody ever moved anywhere else. Even on my father’s side everyone stayed in New York City with the exception of my parents spending two years in North Carolina (as my father called it, the Bible Belt; they didn’t really like it). With that exception, my parents’ retirement in Sarasota, Florida and one great-grandfather who briefly lived in Albany for reasons we’ve never figured out, my direct ancestors on all sides never lived anywhere in the United States except New York City. But on my father’s side they were somewhat more adventurous. There was a great-uncle Will, who went to the Alaska gold rush, to the Klondike, an engraver who came back with an engraved walrus tusk that’s hanging on my wall in Honolulu – which I can’t move outside the state because it’s ivory. More important, there was a sister of my father’s paternal grandmother, Aunt Emma, who went with her husband to Shanghai for many years during the ‘20s and ‘30s. They ran a business exporting furs from Manchuria to New York. In those days among families in New York (maybe anywhere in America), people lived near each other. On both my mother’s side and father’s side, the cousins and uncles all were within a few blocks of each other. So after Aunt Emma returned to America, she lived next door to my father’s family in Queens. He was regaled by her stories of China and was all his life fascinated by Asia and China. He went on to have one of the world’s great collections of Chinese stamps. He did it twice. He collected them, including envelopes with letters and stamps and so forth, sold the whole thing, got some other kind of collection, and then did it all over again. I got one of the major dealers in the United States to take on the sale of the collection after he died. I think that had a strong influence. My father was a real internationalist before the term existed. He had a deep interest in the rest of the world and a special fascination with Asia. He was the first person in his family to graduate from college. His father had an accounting certificate that I think was less than a full college degree, from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. That grandfather was also involved in politics in New York. He was a district party leader in Queens, overlapping into part of Brooklyn, Republican Party district leader. There also was an uncle on my father’s mother’s side, Joseph Strack, who was a member of the New York City Council, and later a New York State Assembly representative. He was a Democrat. At one point he also was the city’s commissioner of markets. Q: Like fish markets? BURGHARDT: All the food markets. In the distribution of ethnic occupations in America, in New York the Germans did food. My mother’s mother’s family had a prosperous wholesale grocery business. They were pretty well off. My maternal grandfather’s family were butchers. My grandfather was a butcher, later a partner in a successful Upper East Side butchery/general food market called the Madison Market, 2 with a branch in East Hampton. But he thought of himself as a butcher, very much a blue- collar guy. My father was a chemical engineer, graduated from NYU (New York University), bachelor and masters degrees. He was in ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) to pay for getting through college. When the war came he ended up doing a lot of work in a laboratory. He almost was shipped out to fight against Rommel in North Africa but it didn’t happen. He was a lieutenant in the engineer corps but he didn’t go. He first worked on a project to design explosives, doing work that was pure chemistry, developing an explosive that embarrassingly later I read in the press was something that was used by terrorists around the world, but was invented for the U.S. Army to use during the Second World War in artillery aimed at German tanks. He held a patent for it. Then later he worked on a very special project. The U.S. decided to build the first two penicillin plants in the world -- one in California to produce for the Pacific war and one in Princeton, New Jersey for the European theater. These were projects of the U.S. government but using private American companies. My father was part of the team that designed the plant in Princeton. They had to invent the process to manufacture the drug. My father later wrote an article about that experience which was published in a chemical industry magazine. Then the war ended and he was sent to Germany to be in the occupation force, part of a team including Soviets, Brits, and French, to do an assessment of the German pharmaceutical industry and decide what to do with it. That led to a career in pharmaceuticals. He was heavily involved in the U.S. projection of manufacturing overseas. He spent his whole career designing factories overseas and eventually was the head of overseas manufacturing for the E.R. Squibb Company. Q: Why at that point in the post-war would an American company feel it needed to have overseas production? BURGHARDT: There were tariff barriers in overseas markets and the American companies were trying to get behind those barriers, to manufacture locally. Shipment costs were greater than they are now, so that was also a factor. Q: They must have been among the first large --- BURGHARDT: They were; it was revolutionary for American industry. My father took his first overseas trip to do that kind of business in 1954. Great photo of my grandmother and mother at Idlewild Airport (now JFK) to see him off, everybody all dressed up. It was on the Pan Am Clipper plane that went all around the world. He got a certificate for flying around the world because it was such a rare event. On that trip he spent a lot of time in India, particularly Calcutta. He also spent a lot of time in his career in Japan as well as in Iran, Latin America – he went everywhere. He went to more countries than maybe I did in my life. The special thing about him was that he loved it and he got deeply into the places. He was very intellectual. He’d go to India and be fascinated by Hinduism. So he’d read the Bhagavad Gita. And then he’d tell me, “You should read this, too” and I did. He had deep respect for other countries and cultures. He was interested in the art and 3 history and culture and religions and food of the world. There’s a marvelous collection of photographs of his time in Japan that my oldest daughter, who now lives in Japan, has digitized. My mother joined him for a long time in Japan. My maternal grandparents lived with us, so my grandmother took care of me during that period. Q: Oh, you stayed home? BURGHARDT: Yeah. They didn’t move there; they went for several months. I was brought up in the New York suburbs. In 1947, at the age of about two-and-a-half we moved from Rego Park, Queens, to Pearl River, New York in Rockland County. Q: How far from the city is that? BURGHARDT: Nineteen miles from the George Washington Bridge.

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