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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR RICHARD M. MOOSE Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: March 20, 1997 Copyright 2020 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, February 27, 1932 Died, September 25, 2015 BA, Columbia University 1953 (?) MA in International Relations, Columbia University 1954 U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corp 1954-1956 Entered the Foreign Service July 1956 Makeup of Entering Class Battle Field Monuments Commission assignment refused Washington, Foreign Service Institute—Staff Assistant 1956-1957 Bob Rossow, creating the mid-level career class Mexico City, Mexico—General Services Officer 1957-1959 Reflections on Mexico Reflections on American Embassy Mexico City Cold War Politics -Mikoyan visit Acting General Services Officer Ambassador Robert Hill Advocating creating Junior Officer Rotation opportunities Yaoundé, Cameroon—Administration Officer 1960-1962 Transition to independence Continuing French influence Establishing American Embassy Yaoundé Ambassador Leland Barrows VIP Visits, Assistant Secretary for Africa Soapy Williams Cold War Politics - Louis Armstrong, Peace Corps Washington, Operations Center 1962-1963 Launching the Operations Center Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis 1 Detail to National Military Command Center Washington, Secretariat 1963-1965 7th Floor - Line Bureau interaction Line Officer for Africa Bureau, International Organizations Jean Davis Staff Officer for European Affairs Deputy Director of the Secretariat of the line of the staff Washington, Congressional Fellowship 1965 A pioneering Congressional fellow Reflections on Representative Mo Udall (D, Arizona) Vietnam War, Early Congressional misgivings Reflections on Senator William Fulbright (D, Arkansas) Resignation from State Department Washington, National Security Council 1966-1968 Joining the National Security Council Assistant to National Security Advisor Walt Rostow Organization and personalities Reflections on Rostow Vietnam, Rostow and information flow to President Johnson Johnson’s December 1967 Vietnam trip Growing disillusion with Johnson Administration Vietnam policy Paris Peace Talks - Johnson Administration Transition to the Kissinger NSC Reflections on Kissinger and Eagleburger Resignation Washington, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Staff 1969-1976 Becoming a Congressional staffer, Udall or Fulbright Relations with the Kissinger NSC Overseeing State’s Budget Paris Peace Talks - Nixon Administration Vietnam Fact Finding Defeat in Cambodia and South Vietnam SFRC Chairmen William Fulbright, Frank Church Other SFRC Members Southern Africa - Clark Amendment Washington 1976-1977 On the Udall Presidential Campaign Team On the Carter State Department Transition Team Cyrus Vance Retention Politics and the African Bureau 2 Washington, Deputy Under Secretary of State for Management 1977 An Interim Appointment Promoting Diversity Washington, Assistant Sectary of State for Africa 1977-1981 Politics of Appointment Brzezinski’s NSC Angola Rhodesia Byrd Amendment Policy coordinating with UK Ian Smith Julius Nyerere Somalia — Siad Barre Liberia — Sargent Doe Transition to the Reagan Administration - Chester Crocker Private Sector 1981-1993 Shearson-Lehman Brothers International debt rescheduling International loans Senior Vice President, American Express Lobbying IT infrastructure Washington, Under Secretary of State for Management 1993-1996 Politics of Appointment - succeeding Brian Atwood Warren Christopher Anthony Lake’s NSC Range of responsibilities Budget woes - interactions with OMB Securing other departments reimbursements IT infrastructure woes Promoting diversity Opening new embassies in the Former Soviet Republics Resignation September 1996 Post retirement Center for Naval Analysis Government efficiency studies INTERVIEW 3 [Note: While Ambassador Moose was able to review this transcript, he was unable to edit it in detail before his passing on September 25, 2015.] Q: Today is March 20, 1997. This is an interview with Richard M. Moose. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. Dick, when and where you were born? Tell me something about your family. MOOSE: I was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on February 27, 1932. My family on both sides were natives of Arkansas for some generations. My father’s family had traveled around a little bit. MOOSE: The Mooses and the Stevensons were on opposite sides in the fray. [Civil War?] I was raised in Arkansas. I grew up near Little Rock, went to school in Little Rock schools. Then I went to Columbia for a year and came back to Arkansas and completed my undergraduate education at Hendricks College in Conway, Arkansas. Q: What was your father’s business? MOOSE: He was born into the Army, as my grandfather was a chaplain in the Seventh Cavalry and he, too, was cavalry man as well. He was educated at Mississippi State College with a degree in veterinary medicine and agronomy. He went into the cavalry and stayed until midway between the two World Wars and then, as the Army was reduced in size, he was a reserve officer. So, eventually, he got out. I don’t know whether it was by his own choice or whether they just squeezed a lot of people out—in those years the Army became quite small. He then became a vocational agriculture teacher and a farmer, but in the height of the Depression, he lost the farm just after I was born. From there, he went into the Civilian Conservation Corps [CCC] as a supervisor, and then went into the Soil Conservation Service. He worked on various kinds of what we’d call environmental problems today. Those were years in which there was a lot of work done on erosion control and crop cover and stock pond building. He worked at that until he retired. Later he was a city treasurer in a tiny little town called Heber Springs, Arkansas, in north central Arkansas, where he lived until he died. Q: What was elementary and high school like for you? MOOSE: It was uneventful. I started grammar school in 1938 in Little Rock, Arkansas, at Mitchell School and Centennial School. My family then moved to Batesville, Arkansas, during WWII, but returned to Little Rock for my last year in junior high school. Then I went to Little Rock High School, which became famous years later as Little Rock Central High School. It was a very good school, amazingly good. This enabled me to get a scholarship to Columbia. At the same time, my wife, Maggie, who also grew up near Little Rock and graduated from Little Rock High School in the same class as me, went to Barnard. Q: Were you getting anything about foreign affairs at Little Rock High School or before from friends and neighbors, and so on? 4 MOOSE: No. The first textbook that I remember in my life was my geography book in the fifth or sixth grade. It was orange. It had a kind of outline of the globe and the lines of longitude on it. I remember being very interested in that subject, probably the first subject in school I was ever interested in. I had a relative who was in the Foreign Service. He was my father’s first cousin. We knew vaguely of him, but I had no more idea about what he did than I do now about nuclear physics. Q: Was this the Moose who was a Middle East hand? MOOSE: Yes. His peers knew him as Jimmy (James S.) Moose, Jr. He was one of the Foreign Service’s first highly-trained Arabists. Quite a linguist, he served his entire career overseas, with the exception of one tour as an Inspector. This was before Wristonization. Q: Were any of your high school teachers encouraging people to get involved in international affairs? MOOSE: No, not really. My strong teachers in high school were those in math and history. I went to Columbia with the intention of becoming an architect or an engineer but I fell away from that. Colleges at that time were actively discouraging students from going into engineering and architecture. Schools like Columbia thought that they were doing you a favor to persuade you not to do that. Enough schools and universities worked hard at this so that, 10 years later, there was a great shortage of engineers in the United States, although I suspect not of architects. It was only when I went back to Hendrix to college that the dean there, William C. Buthman—who also taught English history—put the idea in my head of taking the Foreign Service exam. Another of his former students had gone into the Foreign Service after World War II, not by the examination route, but in the special programs through which the State Department took in veterans. Buthman encouraged me to take the examination for the Foreign Service. I really didn’t have much of an idea what I was doing. I had a little more idea then than I had earlier, but it was pretty vague. I took the exam after my junior year and, to everyone’s—including my own—astonishment, I passed the exam. But then when I graduated, I got a scholarship to Columbia and I decided to go to there to graduate school. Therefore, I deferred the business of going into the Foreign Service, didn’t pursue it further, and didn’t take the oral exam. I then completed graduate school at Columbia in international affairs with the probable intention of teaching. At least that’s what I told the people who gave me the scholarship. When I got out of graduate school, I had been deferred from the draft throughout my college days and during graduate school, so I owed the draft board … and so I went in the Army for two years. Q: You went into the Army when? MOOSE: In July of 1954. The Korean War was winding down. I had never been under a lot of pressure from the draft board. Our county in north Arkansas was so poor that anybody who got the opportunity to go into the Army would do so in a hurry.

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