The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR NICHOLAS PLATT Interviewed by: David E. Reuther Initial interview date: March 7, 2005 Copyright 2018 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background: Born, New York City, 1936. B.A., Harvard University, 1957 M.A, Johns Hopkins School of Advance International Affairs, 1959 Entered Foreign Service, 1959 Windsor, Canada 1959-1962 Vice Consul Taichung, Taiwan 1962-1964 Chinese Language Training-FSI Hong Kong 1964-1968 Political Office The Watching China Process Cultural Revolution Bureau of Intelligence and Research 1969-1972 Chief, Communist Areas Division Chief, North Asia Division The Office of the Secretary of State 1972-1973 Director Historic Trip to China February 1972 Becoming a “China Boy” Beijing, China 1973-1974 Chief of the Political Section Effects of the Watergate Scandal Kissinger Visits Asked to Leave China 1 Tokyo, Japan 1974-1977 Political Officer President Ford’s Visit to Tokyo National Security Council 1978-1980 Visit to China with Secretary of Defense Department of Defense 1980-1981 Office of the Secretary of Defense Responsible for East Asia policy State Department 1981-1982 Bureau of International Organizations Zambia 1982-1984 Ambassador Philippines 1987-1991 Ambassador Working with the Aquino Administration Pakistan 1991-1992 Ambassador Collapse of the Soviet Union Retired from Foreign Service 1992 President of the Asia Society INTERVIEW Q: This is a Foreign Affairs Oral History Program interview with Ambassador Nicholas Platt. It’s March 7, 2005, and we are in his office in New York City. This interview is being conducted under the auspices of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training with the support of the Luce Foundation. I’m David Reuther. Early Influences PLATT: At St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH, I learned to love history under the gruff, incisive teaching of a man named Carrol McDonald. Later on the intellectual pull of a Foreign Service career was the chance that it gave to observe and even become a part of history in the making. I met my first Asians at St. Paul’s. Reporting for practice on the lowest club football team I found myself in the middle of the line with a boy from Japan who was much older and 2 smaller than me. He introduced himself as Ben Makihara from the Seikei High School in Tokyo. “I don’t understand this game at all,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.” “Well, our job in the line is to knock people down,” I replied. “There are three ways of doing that. We can just charge straight ahead or you can lie down on the ground and I can knock someone over you or I can lie down on the ground and you can knock him over me.” “Oh,” he said. We used all three methods during the season becoming lifelong friends in the process. Ben went on to become the Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of one of the Japan’s largest conglomerates, Mitsubishi and a key figure linking the U.S. and Japan. We have joked together that this was the first example of U.S. Japan security cooperation. The year was 1949. Tatsuo Arima came a year later, a product of the Seikei Exchange, and joined my class. The closest collaboration occurred almost 30 years later as Foreign Service Officers when he was the head of the political section of the Japanese Embassy in Washington and I was in charge of the Japan desk at the State Department. We worked closely and would later boast that the class of ’53 had managed U.S. Japan relations from both sides of the Pacific. St. Paul’s involved me with the Winant Volunteers, an experience that changed the course of my life. John Winant, the much admired U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James during World War II had been a master at the school before becoming governor of New Hampshire. He committed suicide at the end of the war, as much a casualty of the conflict as a battlefield death. His friends in Britain led by an electric evangelist named Tubby Clayton organized in Winant’s memory a group of high school and college age volunteers to help during the summer months with the reconstruction of London’s war damaged East End. Clayton’s first recruiting stop was SPS in the late ‘40s. I remember sitting in the chapel, a callow choirboy mesmerized by Tubby’s descriptions of the ravages of London, Winant’s visits to the fiery scenes during the blitz (Londoners thought he was the ghost of Abraham Lincoln) and the need to rebuilt the city. I told myself I just had to join the volunteers. Several years later as a Harvard sophomore I did. I was assigned to work at the world’s oldest Orthodox Jewish boys club in the heart of Cockney London. That summer brought home the fun and interest of living abroad and of explaining the United States and its policies to contemporaries in a different culture. I returned to college firmly directed toward the Foreign Service. It was one of the forerunners of the Peace Corps, which has supplied so many future FSO. It’s still going, too. Q: Could you give a little more on your family, father’s occupation and all, how many children there were? PLATT: My father was an architect. His father was an architect. My uncle was an architect, cousins and so on and so forth. I was the only who was not. My father’s father, Charles A. Platt was distinguished and well known architect in his time. He designed the Freer Gallery, Andover and Deerfield Schools, as well as a lot of private residences in New York and the rest of the country . Originally trained as a landscape architect, he gained a nationwide reputation with a game-changing photographic study of Italian gardens. An accomplished painter and etcher. Platt came to architecture because his 3 friends kept asking him to design summer places for them. He hit the top of his stride just as the Gilded Age group of American tycoons arrived at the turn of the century. Charles A. Platt lost his fortune in the 1929 Wall Street crash. My father, Geoffrey and his partner, brother William, fended for themselves , but had vary distinguished careers as architects in their own right. Geoffrey was New York City’s first Landmarks Commissioner. My mother’s name was Helen Choate. She came from a family of lawyers. Her grandfather, Joseph H. Choate, was a major figure in New York City, instrumental in founding the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History. He became the ambassador to the Court of St. James during McKinley’s time. She and my father were devoted and produced an older sister, Penelope and a younger brother, Geoffrey Jr. I was the middle child. They were all based in New York. I was a New York kid, though not very happy about it, to begin with. Q: You were mentioning about it that your father and his brother had war service? PLATT: Very much so. My father and his brother were partners. My uncle was eight years older than my father and he served in World War I as a flyer and in World War II as a naval officer. My father served in the 8th Air Force as a photo intelligence analyst. He commanded from the American side the joint US-UK technical unit that used to look at all of the photographs of bomb damage done by the 8th Air Force to see determine the results and decide what should be done next. It was believed that architects looking through stereoscopes had an ability to envisage three dimensions better than anybody else and maybe they were right. Geoffrey Platt did performed that role for the whole war. Stationed in England, he never got leave. We did not see him for three years. His unit was the one that found the V-2 rocket launching sites. So, he had his impact on the outcome of the war, and was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his efforts. When my father came home in 1946 we moved from the city out to Mount Kisco, in Westchester County where my mother and father lived for the rest of their lives. Though I enjoyed being in the country, I found suburban life increasingly confining intellectually. Q: Please. PLATT: St. Paul’s School provided both intellectual rigor and an exhausting array of things to do. I sang, boxed, rowed, played football and was part of the student government. The impact of these activities, particularly crew, on the way I operated later in life, was huge. My management style as an ambassador and a bureaucrat which valued team work and measured progress one stroke at a time was formed in a racing shell. The graduation speaker for the form of 1953 was a distinguished corporate lawyer from New York named Grayson Murphy, the father of one of my classmates. He was flawlessly dressed in a black pinstripe suit. What he said shocked me to the core and affected the way I lived my life. He told us that his graduates of St. Paul’s had smooth and well-worn career paths open to us, mostly in finance, law and other professions. Comfortable patterns of existence and relationships laid out by the many graduates like himself which 4 came before. But if we took those paths unquestioningly without trying other things, if we simply floated ahead unquestioningly, he and his generation would never forgive us.