The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project RUTH VAN HEUVEN Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial Interview Date: February 2, 2006 Copyright 2015 ADST FOREIGN SERVICE POSTS Rome, Italy 1962-1964 Resignation due to marriage 1964 Berlin, Germany (spouse) 1964- 1967 Brussels, Belgium (spouse) 1967-1970 Washington, DC (spouse) 1970-1974 Princeton University (spouse) 1974-1975 The Hague, Netherlands (spouse) 1975-1978 Bonn, Germany – Consular Officer 1978-1981 Washington, DC, Consular Affairs 1981-1982 Geneva, Switzerland – Information Officer 1982-1984 State Department – Bureau of Consular Affairs 1984 State Department – Operations Center 1985-1986 State Department – Office Director, 1986-1988 Office of Public Affairs, Consular Affairs National War College 1988-1989 Zurich – Consul General 1989-1992 State Department – OIG 1992-1994 1 Suriname DCM 1994-1996 State Department – Office director for Austria, Germany and Switzerland 1996-1998 Milan 1998-2001 Retired 2001 OIG 2002 INTERVIEW [Note: this interview was not edited by Ms. Van Heuven.] Q: Today is the 2nd of February, 2006. This is an interview with Ruth van Heuven. We will start, as usual, when and where were you born? VAN HEUVEN: I was born on Long Island, New York. Actually I was born in New York City as far as the hospital goes but my family lived on Long Island in 1936. Q: Where on Long Island? VAN HEUVEN: A little town called Floral Park, which is smack dab in the middle of Nassau County. Q: Let’s do a bit, on your father’s side, what was the family name and where did they? VAN HEUVEN: My parents were both from Switzerland. They both, in fact, emigrated to the United States separately and met each other and got married in the United States. So I’m a second generation American. Or first. I always thought first was the people who came, but whatever. My father’s last name was Held. He was from the canton of Bern and there are a lot of Helds in Bern. My mother’s maiden name was Hausheer and she was from Zurich and there are a lot of Hausheers up that way and in the central part of Switzerland. They were both originally, as most people were, from agricultural backgrounds. My mother actually grew up on a farm. Her parents and her brother went on to farm and her nephew went on to farm. So there’s still farmers in the Swiss family. My father’s antecedents, his family had all been landowners and farmers but about I guess two generations before him they started becoming academics. My grandfather was a Protestant minister in Bern. Actually one of the jokes in the family is that he ended up being retired and collecting a pension longer than he served as a minister, ‘cause he lived to 94. Q: What was your father doing? 2 VAN HEUVEN: My father was, with that background, considered the black sheep in the family because he did not go to university. He got a commercial sort of apprenticeship. One of his brothers was a dentist and the other was a history professor. I guess his mother really wanted him to go into a profession as well but he ended up coming to the United States in his twenties and went to work for a business and made his fortune and ended up being the rich uncle in America. Q: What sort of business did he get into? VAN HEUVEN: He ended up representing a Swiss company, a textile company, that had developed a lot of finishing processes. They bought, they didn’t really make the raw goods any more, they bought the raw goods from elsewhere and then did all of the finishing. They established a company in the United States essentially to protect their patents. That’s what it was called, the Haberlein Patent Corporation and he became the president of that and worked with them until he retired. Q: And on your mother’s side. You say she grew up on a farm. What brought her to the United States? VAN HEUVEN: She had a sister who married a Frenchman who came to New York City to work. He was also a businessman and she came to visit her sister and she liked it and she decided to come back. So she had to go back to Switzerland to get an immigrant visa and by the time her immigrant visa came through the Depression had hit. So she almost didn’t come but in the end she decided, “Well, I’ll go and see. If I find a job in six months I’ll stay. If I don’t I’ll go back.” I don’t think she ever found a job but she met my father and stayed and got married. Q: Well now, did you grow up in Floral Park? VAN HEUVEN: Through grade school and the very beginning of high school. Just as I was starting high school my parents bought a house up on the north shore in Nassau Community, in a community called Roslyn. So we moved there and I went to Roslyn High School. Q: What was Floral Park like, as a kid? VAN HEUVEN: Floral Park, actually Nassau County, during those years was changing enormously. It had been the truck gardens of New York City. You could still see the vestiges, when I was growing up on the north shore, of all of the millionaires who worked in New York City. In fact there was a Vanderbilt highway that they built for themselves. It was like a little toll road that my brother and I used to bike on. There were vestiges of it. You wouldn’t recognize any of that today. It’s all huge apartment houses and skyscrapers but back then it was all semi-agrarian. Floral Park got its name because of a gentleman named John Lewis Chiles who started a huge nursery. When he sold the nursery and it began to be developed, all the streets had names, like Tulip Avenue. Tulip Avenue happened to be a main thoroughfare. They all had names of flowers or plants. 3 My parents were the first people to move into their house in this little development that was on the absolute end of Floral Park. We had one of the longest walks to school, about a mile to our school, which was called, appropriately, John Lewis Chiles School. It was a small community with little shops and mainly commuters to New York City. Q: I take it as a kid biking was, you could go everywhere, nice and flat. In you family, how many children were there? VAN HEUVEN: I had one brother. I have one brother. Q: Older, younger? VAN HEUVEN: Younger, two years younger. Q: Family life at home, was this centered around, you sit around the table at dinnertime, that sort of thing, where you discussed the day’s events or not? VAN HEUVEN: Yes. I was born in 1936. My first memories really are about when the Second World war started. You always listened to the news. I remember wondering out loud what will they ever talk about on the news when the war’s over because that’s all the news that there was, that I remember, anyway. So, yes, you’d listen to the news and then you’d have dinner and you’d talk about that or whatever else. Q: Your father being a businessman, where did he fall politically? Was he a Republican? VAN HEUVEN: He was a Republican. Q: I would imagine so. This was pretty much standard. VAN HEUVEN: And I never knew what my mother was. In other words, we didn’t really talk that much about politics per se. Q: Were you much of a reader or not? VAN HEUVEN: Yeah, I was a voracious reader. Q: You recall any of the early books you loved or liked? VAN HEUVEN: I used to go to library and just bring home books and read and read. A friend of my parents was the executive assistant to someone who ran the Junior Literary Guild for Doubleday. So I used to get four, five, six books from her every year as well. Then I had a godmother who always gave me the biographies of composers. I still have this collection of juvenile books that are essentially the history of practically every big composer. I remember one of the books from the Junior Literary Guild was on Eleanor Roosevelt and another one was on the UN, which was brand new of course at that time. 4 Q: Wasn’t actually in the neighborhood but it was in Flushing Meadows, not that far away. VAN HEUVEN: We lived on a street where two people worked for the telephone company. Apparently in the very early days of television there was some question about whether telephone and television would compete. As an experiment these two families had television sets when television was practically new. We were among the first people to see television in this period when they were trying to figure out if it worked. Back then from six to eight at night was all the television there was. There were maybe three programs. Then very rapidly it exploded. I remember watching the UN debates in those early years. It was very close to home. They did it live, the way you would only find it now on C-Span, and you followed every one of the Russian translations. Q: How was elementary school? What sort of things did you like and not like about school, subjects? VAN HEUVEN: I liked school a lot, and I was the valedictorian of my eighth grade graduating class.