Junior, Lewis D.Toc.Pdf

The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project LEWIS D. JUNIOR Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: May 21, 1991 Copyright 1998 A ST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background Born in Kansas aised in Mid-West and Texas U.S. Air Force, World War II University of Kentucky Joined the Foreign Service in 1,5. /agos, Nigeria 1,51-1,51 2ice Consul 0igeria in transition Palermo, Italy 1,51-1,54 efugee elief Act 2isas The Mafia Scott Mc/eod Hamburg, 6ermany 1,54-1,5, Administrative work Hungarian refugees Bonn, 6ermany 1,5,-1,4. Staff aide to Ambassador Bruce Dealing with the ussians Adenauer Eleanor Dulles 0ATO Affairs 1,4.-1,41 9Infrastructure: problems Defense Department shenanigans De 6aulle pulls out of NATO 1 Addis Abba, Ethiopia 1,41-1,47 Organization of African Unity Soviet influence Ambassador Korry Haile Selassie African problems Political/Military Bureau 1,47-1,4, Operations Dealing with the Pentagon Military aid and sales programs Personnel 1,4,-1,71 Personnel policies Computers Senior Seminar /ubumbashi, Zaire 1,72-1,74 Consular Officer Belgium influence and dominance Sheba invasions Corruption American missionaries ome, Italy 1,74-1,77 Political Officer Ambassador 2olpe ItalyAs Foreign Ministry Africa BureauB Central Africa 1,77-1,7, Director Mobutu Angola Andrew Coung and his U0 Staff 9Secret Mission: to Angola /iberals in African Bureau Zaire MobutuAs visit to U.S. Personnel 1,8.-1,82 Senior officer placement Problems in placement Time-in-class problems otterdam, The Netherlands 1,82-1,84 2 Consul 6eneral Closing of Consulate 6eneral Ambassador Paul Bremer INTERVIEW E0ote: This transcript was not edited by Mr. Junior.G ": on, I wonder if you could give me a little about your background: where you were born, where you grew up, and where you went to school. JU0IO : Briefly speaking, I was born in a small town in Kansas, Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1,25. My father, shortly after that, joined the federal government in a series of jobs which essentially were with the Department of Justice and the Department of Health. Interestingly enough, two of those jobs were the first federal national efforts to deal with narcotic addiction, in a combined Justice/Health Department effort which in effect established two prison farms, one in Washington, Kentucky, and the second, later on, in Fort Worth. And my father, in effect, was the chief custodial officer in both of those. So I moved with him from /eavenworth, Kansas, where he had begun his service with the Department of Justice, to Springfield, where there was this psychiatric prison hospital for the criminally insane, to the farm in /exington, and then on to Fort Worth, at which time I was eighteen and went on into what was then the Army Air Corps. I had one year of studies at the University of Kentucky before I joined the military. ": (here did you have your military service) JU0IO : 2arious training sites in the States, but I ended up in the back of a B-24, flying out of southern Italy. And our targets were southern 6ermany, Austria, Cugoslavia, and occasionally some targets in the Po 2alley in northern Italy. ": You worked out of the Foggia airfields) JU0IO : Ces, very close by. Do you know thatH ": ,h, that was my old consular district, Naples, yes. (ell, after the war, what happened) You got out when, and what did you do) JU0IO : My one year of undergraduate work had been with the idea of going on to medical school eventually, but the experience abroad told me that there were things beyond those horizons that were of interest to me. So I, at least, shelved the idea of going to medical school and went into a holding pattern at Texas Christian University, because thatIs where my family was, in Fort Worth, at the time, and double-majored in French and Spanish while I was trying to figure out how I could find some kind of valid employment 3 in the international-theaters field. And it was there I first heard about the career of Foreign Service, and, eventually, after many efforts, passed the exam and joined. ": (hen did you join the Foreign Service) JU0IO : I joined as a staff officer in 1,5., if I recall correctly. I had almost, at the time, been selected to become a Kreis officer in 6ermany, but that was when... ": Kreis being a county-type officer we were using as a transition from the American military occupation to turning it over to the 0ermans. The State Department took that over. JU0IO : ThatIs right. And it was at that point in the transition when they decided that they wouldnIt need any more Kreis officers. But they did need consular officers (they didnIt have enough FSOs who would go to nasty places), so they invited me to take one of those jobs, and I did. ": How did one get into the staff corps back in 1920) JU0IO : It was not a competitive processB it was application, some interviews, the security check, and then a yes or a no. So it was a staff vice consul position. ": (here were you assigned first) JU0IO : /agos. ": (as it called Nigeria then) JU0IO : It was the Colony of Nigeria. It was on its way toward independence, under British tuition. But the consulate general in /agos was different, although certainly not uniLue, in that we reported directly to Washington. We had no embassy, as such, to report to, so it gave it a somewhat different coloration. 0ot that anybody in Washington cared about that part of the world at the time. ": (hat was the situation in Lagos and Nigeria at that time) JU0IO : The British were making what then seemed to be, and in retrospect certainly was, a major, valid, honest effort to get out of Nigeria without leaving total chaos behind. The tribal tensions were something that they had to deal with most carefully, and they were trying to develop a governmental structure which would give them some flex and which would absorb a lot of that stress. And of course later on we saw that it didnIt Luite work, but it almost did, and the structure is still essentially there, accommodating the needs of the north, east and the west. ": It was a consulate general) 4 JU0IO : A consulate general, yes. ": (hat was the staffing like) (ho was in charge) How did it operate) JU0IO : We had a staff of five or six Americans, two of whom were secretaries, one an administrative type, two vice consuls, and a consul general. The consul general was named Archie Childs, and he was one of those, happily few, persons who have been brought into the Foreign Service under the so-called Manpower Act. Other than being a nice man, he was totally unLualified for the job, and was succeeded later by another officer, by the name of Keeler, who was a professional, but not a nice man. However, he was certainly more competent than his predecessor, and the consulate general worked better under him. ": (hat were you doing, you and the consulate) JU0IO : As the junior consular officer, the vice consul, I did almost exclusively consular work: visas, immigrant, non-immigrant, and passports, and other kinds of citizen services. /ater on, I did some economic reporting and some political reporting. There was what we now call a USIS post there, with two officers, the second of whom was udy Aggrey. ": ,h, yes. JU0IO : udy was, for a good part of our tour there, my roommate, so we worked a lot together, and I benefitted when I did political reporting from the fact that he was certainly a persona grata among practically all of the Nigerians in the political world. I think itIs worth noting as a sidelight here that Aggrey, the American-born son of the Aggrey of West Africa, a well-known educator here and in West Africa, was assumed by the major politicians, and minor politicians, to be loyal to West Africa and to Nigeria because his name was Aggrey, and they had a long, hard battle to take on board the fact that his primary loyalties were to the United States. So my recollection is that he spent a good part of his time peddling backwards, trying to get out of their clutches lest he be co- opted into their political schemes. ": (as there much consular work there, Americans) Because there wasn6t the Nigerian immigration that later developed, was there) JU0IO : There was a substantial volume of consular work. IIm sure that we didnIt do it very efficiently, because these were the times when the Merox machine didnIt exist (there was some kind of a copier), and documentation was difficultB there was a certain amount of fraud that had to be checked out. Communications in the country were very slow, things got lost in the mail and so forth. So it took a number of man-hours just to process a 5 non-immigrant visa. An immigrant visa, of which there were relatively few, took some days, man-hourwise. ": (hat was the atmosphere like) Here was a country that was getting ready to become independent7 and particularly in the earlier days, in interviews I6ve had with people who served in Africa, they found that they really had very little contact with the black population, and this sort of thing was frowned upon often by the head of the post and certainly by the British colonial authorities. How about this in Nigeria at the time) JU0IO : ItIs a mixed bag.

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