The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR MYLES R. R. FRECHETTE Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: September 4, 2001 Copyright 2015 ADST [Note: This interview was not edited by Ambassador Frechette.] Q: Today is September 4, 2001. This is an interview with Myles Frechette. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and I’m Charles Stuart Kennedy. Myles, what’s your middle initial? FRECHETTE: I have two of them, R, R. Q: R, R, okay. Okay, well, let’s start at the beginning. Can you tell me when and where you were born and something about your parents? FRECHETTE: I was born on the 25th of April, 1936 in Chile. My mother was Chilean and she is still alive and is now an American citizen. My father was an American who got out of college in the Depression as an engineer from the University of Vermont and couldn’t get a job in the States as an engineer except as a night clerk since it was the Depression. So, he took a job with United Fruit and went to work in Colombia and worked there on a two-year contract from ‘30 to ‘32 in Santa Marta. Then he got a contract with an American mining company in Chile and he remained in Chile from 1932 to 1951 working either for the Kennecott Copper Corporation or Anaconda Copper. I was born in San Diego. I have many cousins in Chile. I was partially educated in San Diego, partially educated in little company schools up in mining camps at different altitudes in the Andes. My early life was basically mining camps, small groups of Americans. We never played baseball. Usually it was too steep to have a baseball diamond, football or anything like that. So, we did Thanksgiving and that sort of stuff. My mother made a great Thanksgiving dinner with mincemeat. She first traveled to the United States in 1939. What was it the World’s Fair in New York? That was her first visit to the States. Then we came again after the war in ‘47 and then in ‘51 my dad decided contrary to his original plans to leave Chile and he finally concluded that while it would be a comfortable life for him, he wanted something better for my brother and me. So, we moved to Canada and I lived in Canada for seven years in Vancouver. I am the only graduate of the University of British Columbia who ever entered the Foreign Service to the best of my knowledge. Q: I’ve got to go back. FRECHETTE: Sure. 1 Q: What is your father's family, where did they come from, do you know? FRECHETTE: Well, his great grandfather was a carriage maker in Quebec. The name Frechette is a very common French Canadian name. You’ll find it all over the northeast. Even in Washington when I first moved here I was the only Frechette, my wife and I. Now, you look in the phone book and there’s a whole pot full not related to me except my brother and my son and my daughter. Anyway, he moved to a little place called Richmond, Vermont where he married an Irish girl. A first generation American Irish girl. Q: Where is Richmond, Vermont? FRECHETTE: Richmond, Vermont is north of Burlington. It’s a very small town, very charming. It’s got some of these sort of octagonal churches in it. Of course there were mainly Protestants, but there were a lot of Catholics, too. If you go to the cemetery in Richmond, it’s mainly Irish. In fact, my great grandfather whose name was Frechette, my son Steven has a picture taken by the gravestone. These Irish guys sort of Anglicized it. It’s not “ch” it’s “sh”, Frechette. If you look around, the Frechettes were the only non- Irish, non-Anglo Saxons in that town, and the living live cheap with the dead. There are three or four small cemeteries throughout Richmond and houses all around. It’s a great place. I took my kids there because I wanted them to understand a little bit better where we came from. So, we’re sort of half French Canadian, half Irish and then of course, I’m half Chilean, educated in Chile, educated in Canada. I got a masters degree later in the Foreign Service, but basically except for a three-month stint in a Catholic high school in Burlington, Vermont, I never studied in the States. Q: Now, your father, what was your grandfather on your father's side? FRECHETTE: My grandfather did very well in the insurance business, but he got some illnesses from the Spanish American War. He picked up malaria and something else in Panama City and he never made it to Cuba he was so ill. He died when my father was 14. It was a successful insurance business. There were two brothers, fortunately there was a little bit there so that my grandmother could bring up my father and his two sisters. My father had to work from the day he was 14, usually tending the furnaces in some of the homes. It was cold there. Q: Was this in Richmond still? FRECHETTE: No, this was in Burlington. They moved, they lived in two or three places, but Burlington was where this happened. Then he got a scholarship to the University of Vermont and did very well and graduated as a civil and a mining engineer, and of course there was no work in America. Q: What is your mother’s background? 2 FRECHETTE: Well, the name Reyes, which was my mother’s name, was originally Delos Reyes which indicated the original people, it means of the kings. Obviously they had been in Chile for centuries; they probably were attached as clerks or bureaucrats to the office of the captain general. Delos Reyes implies that they had some relation to the king not in terms of lineage, but in terms of support. Q: Courtiers. FRECHETTE: Yes, well not even courtiers, just clerks. Typical family. During the colony they had a lot of land, but you know how it is in these Latin American families. They start dividing the land, so when my grandfather came around he had gone to the naval academy. He never worked a day in his life. He quit the navy and sort of lived off his land, which consisted of a little teeny plot in a town, and it if hadn’t been for my grandmother, who was a poor, ignorant peasant girl from a little town not far from there who took in washing, it was my grandmother who made the family because they were very, very poor. She made sure that every one of her 11 children went to the university. Q: My God, that’s really remarkable. FRECHETTE: Of course, the university is free in Chile. Q: Yes, but still it’s remarkable. FRECHETTE: Yes. When you consider her background, she could read and write. She was from a little, teeny place, literally a village, maybe 10 or 12 houses. So, she made the family. Now, all of my cousins are professionals, doctors or lawyers. One of my uncles became commander of the national police, others were army officers, others pharmacists, that sort of stuff, you know, professionals. In other words they took their college education and did something with it. If it hadn’t been for my grandmother I’m quite certain that all of my cousins would now be somewhere working on a vineyard. Q: Did you know your grandmother? FRECHETTE: Yes. Q: Did she have much of an influence on your life or was she too old? FRECHETTE: Not much because I didn’t live with her much. We lived in these mining camps. I used to see her every once in a while. You have to understand in societies such as that the grandmother or the oldest person has a lot of influence, and she still tells her sons and daughters, be they in their sixties, what the hell to do. You know, she was a sort of an august figure and sort of a distant figure. She was nice to me, but I don’t recall particularly having a great deal to do with her. I had more to do with my grandfather. Unfortunately, Chile is a cold and rainy place, and my grandfather died of tuberculosis. One of my uncles, for whom I am named, died of tuberculosis and I had tuberculosis as a boy. But I remember my grandfather picking me up. You know, it’s hard to know, is this 3 really a memory of mine or is it something my mother told me it used to happen. I don’t know. I recall somebody who used to pick me up and complain that I was always going to the bathroom in my diapers. Q: Well, then you as a kid, young kid you sort of lived in these mining camps. What are your memories of the society there? FRECHETTE: Well, actually, because my father was an American we lived in special camps called for the gold, the gold payroll that means the Americans. There were no Chileans living in those. They were usually Americans, but I think there were a few Brits, a few Knuts, usually the engineers. Today it’s all different. Chilean mining engineers are among the very best in the world, and people are hiring them all the time.