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 STEPHEN K. KEAT Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: September 12, 2012 Copyright 2017 ADST [Note: Mr. Keat is still editing the remainder of his full interview which will be added at a later date.] Q: Okay, today is the 12th of September 2012. This is an interview with Stephen K. Keat. This is being done on behalf of the Association of Diplomatic Studies and Training and I am Charles Stuart Kennedy. You go by Steve? KEAT: People always ask me that; you can call me anything you want, but technically Stephen is spelled with a ‘ph’ can’t be shortened to Steve. But people have been calling me Steve since I’ve been a little boy and that’s fine. Q: Well you can say Steph. KEAT: That would sound a little bit odd. Q: Okay, well when and where were you born? KEAT: I was born in Englewood Hospital, Englewood, New Jersey, March 9th, 1956. Q: Let’s take on your father’s side. Where did the Keats come from, what do you know about them? KEAT: The name was not Keat when he was born. He was Franz Kohn in German and František Kohn in Czech. He was born in what is today the Czech Republic and was at that time Austria-Hungary. His family was Jewish as you can tell from the name Kohn. He was born at the start of World War I. His father, Willibald Kohn, fought for Austria- Hungary and died in that war. The Czech’s were not very enthused about the Austria- Hungarian Empire. My grandfather got very sick and the military didn’t believe that he was really sick; they thought he was faking it. When he died of the illness they realized that it was true. When my father grew up, it was him, his older brother Paul and their mother Laura. My father’s name was Frank Keat, or at that time, Frank Kohn; my uncle was Paul.) My father lived in a fairly prosperous family; they were industrialists, with one-third ownership of a factory that produced uniforms, for example, ones that a nurse would wear. With the death of Willibald Kohn, his Laura Kohn became more active at the factory. When my father and my uncle were getting older, the two of them took increasing roles in the business. I don’t know a lot about the partner, but I do know that 1 he didn’t have any children. Apparently he liked my father and was grooming my father to take over. But when the Nazis invaded my family had to flee. My father was Jewish, but he was also active in anti-Nazi movement in his Gymnasium, German for high school. Q: Was this Sudetenland? KEAT: This was Sudetenland, yes, a town called Ústí nad Labem. When the Germans invaded Sudetenland they were looking for my father both because of his anti-Nazi activities and because of his Jewish background. But by this time my family had moved to Prague. My uncle was able to get to China. He was one of the Shanghai Jews and he knew for example, W. Michael Blumenthal, Carter’s Treasury Secretary.. Q: The Secretary of Defense was… KEAT: Was there a secretary of defense also? William Cohen? Q: No, no he was under Clinton. Any way… KEAT: My father was able to first get to the UK and then get a visa to come to the United States. His mother was not able to get a visa to come to the United States. She could have gone to Shanghai, but they thought that in Shanghai the climate would be unhealthy for her and they figured they would eventually be able to get her into the States. They were wrong and she ended up dying in a concentration camp. My father settled in New York City like so many immigrants. The first thing he did to survive was to sell postage stamps. My uncle was a stamp collector. When you were leaving Czechoslovakia at that time, you were not allowed to take currency with you. My uncle bought valuable stamps and he gave them to my father. So when my father was in New York, one of the first things he did to survive was to sell those stamps. I’m telling you this was because later in life… Q: That is very interesting in how one survived. KEAT: Yes. He got a number of jobs in New York, various manual labor jobs and things of that sort. Then World War II came along. By this time his brother had been able to come to the United States. His brother, my uncle Paul, was sent off to fight in the European Theater. My father was sent off to fight in Asia which he was very upset about. Of course in the military that’s the way it is. But he wanted to fight in Europe since that’s where he felt he had an axe to grind. I know his experiences in World War II were very difficult ones for him. He spoke about being in Guadalcanal and the Japanese bombing them every night at exactly the same time, at 9:00 p.m. He said that even though that might not have been very good in terms of military effectiveness because you knew that they were coming, it was very effective in psychological terms, undermining the morale of the troops. 2 Q: The bomber was called bed check Charlie by our troops. KEAT: You know more than I do. Q: It was a very difficult time at Guadalcanal and the battles. KEAT: Yes. My father got shot at, bombed, he himself wasn’t injured, but he did catch malaria. Like everyone else in the military, he was going through a hard time. The one thing he did particularly like about the military, when he was first drafted, when he was still in the United States, was that they would get three square meals a day. The soldiers who had grown up in the United States were always complaining about how bad the Army’s food was; his attitude was it was food. Having struggled as an immigrant in New York he didn’t complain about the SOS (shit on a shingle) and all the other things everyone else thought was terrible. Toward the end of the War there was a stage when we were still fighting in both theaters but he was sent back to the United States and he volunteered to go to Europe and to fight there. Q: I assume he spoke languages too. KEAT: My father spoke English, German, Czech, a smattering of Russian, some Latin, very good Latin. One time we were lost in Italy in 1967. He was trying to get directions. He was speaking to someone and trying everything to communicate. It turned out that person had studied Latin in school just as my father had. So they communicated in Latin. Since I didn’t have the foggiest idea what they were talking about, I can’t say how good a job they did, but we got where we wanted to go so I guess he did a good enough job. So yes, he spoke a number of languages. My uncle had been involved with intelligence in the European Theater and I think he had been fighting in Italy among other places. My father really wanted to do this too, but I guess it’s a classic law of how government works. When he volunteered to do it they said, “No, we think you should stay in the U.S.” They did take advantage of his language skills. He was sent to a prisoner of war camp in Upstate New York dealing with German inmates. The military did toward the end of his time in the Army make use of his language skills but they didn’t at an earlier stage. My uncle wanted to have an American name; they ended up with Keat because they had looked in the New York phone directory for names. These two young Czech men didn’t really have the foggiest idea of what they were doing and they came up with the name MacGillicuddy. While it is a perfectly fine name and there is nothing wrong with it, but it probably wasn’t what they were really trying for. My father must have given my uncle power of attorney. Paul went to change the name. They were both working at the same time at the same factory. My father was talking with one of the co-workers and the co- worker said, “Frank, where is Paul today?” He said, “Oh he’s going to change our name, we want a real American name so we will fit in.” He said, “What are you changing it to?” He said, “MacGillicuddy.” The coworker explained to him that this was probably not 3 what he was looking for. My father caught a taxi to city hall and apparently literally stopped them at the point where the judge was going to sign the papers to make them MacGillicuddy. They opened the New York phone book and they put their finger down and said, “Keat! How is that?” The judge said, “Yes, that’s good.” They said, “All right we’ll take that one.” So that’s how we became Keat. Q: Yeah. So then what did your father do? KEAT: My father and my uncle both settled back in New York City after World War II.