Interview with Samuel W. Lewis
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Library of Congress Interview with Samuel W. Lewis The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR SAMUEL W. LEWIS Interviewed by: Peter Jessup Initial interview date: August 9, 1998 Copyright 1998 ADST Q: Good afternoon, Ambassador Lewis. It's very nice of you to consent to an interview on your career for the Association of Diplomatic Studies. As we discussed before, you were going to cover your career up to the major achievement, your long term in Israel. You were born in Houston, weren't you? LEWIS: That's right. Q: Your middle name is Winfield. Are you a descendent of Winfield Scott? LEWIS: No, I wish I were. That's a family name, though, and it's been in the Lewis family since that period, so it may be that one of my ancestors was named for him. Q: You went to Yale and were the class of '52. I'm just wondering, before we ask the standard question, “How did you get into the Foreign Service?” was there any particularly influence in New Haven that led you in that direction? LEWIS: Very much so. Being born in Houston and going through public high school, I don't think I had much knowledge at all about the Foreign Service before I went to Yale. Actually, there was one early influence. A very good friend of my father was a lady who Interview with Samuel W. Lewis http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000687 Library of Congress was then the librarian at Rice Institute, now Rice University, a single lady, and one of her closest family friends was a longtime career Foreign Service officer, who was ambassador in the latter part of his career in Turkey and two or three other places. Throughout her life, she had traveled around and spent vacations at various embassies, visiting her friends, and she used to come back and tell stories to our family about her trips. I heard first about the diplomatic service, really, through these recountings of her exposure to Foreign Service life back in the Thirties and Forties. Q: Do you care to name the lady? LEWIS: The lady's name was Sarah Lane. Q: Was that Arthur C. Lane's... LEWIS: No, she was not Foreign Service family. She was from Missouri, but her friend was Ambassador Fletcher Warren. I met him once, only, but that was kind of an early exposure to the idea of the Foreign Service. It really was to Yale. I started out majoring in engineering, and decided rather soon I wasn't interested or very well equipped to be an engineer, moved over to psychology, and then ultimately I changed my major and took up the thing which I'd always been interested in since early childhood, which was history. But I never was interested in teaching or academic life, and I could never figure out any way to make a career out of history until, in my junior year at Yale, I took a course from Arnold Wolfers in international politics, and for the first time, really was exposed through that course and through that great man, Wolfers, to some dimensions of the international world. I got to hearing, while at Yale, about the Foreign Service from some of my professors, and for the first time, I figured there was a career line where I could match my interests in history and the international world with a way to make a living that wouldn't involve teaching. So I took the Foreign Service exam, actually, when I was a junior at Yale, and Interview with Samuel W. Lewis http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000687 Library of Congress passed with a very good score. I went on and finished. Of course, you get your grades many months later, so I was already a senior by that time. This was 1952. I also had some little exposure to CIA, which was recruiting rather heavily through various Yale faculty members in those days. Q: The height of the Cold War. LEWIS: This was the Korean War period, exactly. I really expected I would be going into the service when I graduated from Yale in '52, but as it turned out, I had a bad knee, and they wouldn't take me. I couldn't pass the physical. I was anxious to get into the Foreign Service as soon as possible, but that was not only the height of the Cold War, it was the height of the McCarthy period. As you probably remember, when the Eisenhower Administration came in, in the spring of '53, they undertook a lot of reassessments of the alleged “poor security” in the State Department stemming out of McCarthy's attacks of the two or three proceeding years. They stopped all recruiting until they reinvestigated every existing employee. Everybody on the rolls had to be totally reinvestigated for security clearances before they would hire anybody else. So there was a long hiatus. Those of us who had passed the exam and were on the roster, ready to be appointed, just had to find other ways to support ourselves. So from '52 until '54, I was waiting for a chance to get in the Service. Q: Was that hiatus actually 24 months of no hiring? LEWIS: Yes, it was at least 24 months. In the meantime, I went on to graduate school at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) here in Washington, and took my master's in international relations, specializing, incidentally, in the Middle East, though I never got there for many years thereafter. Eventually it came in quite handy. But I was finally offered an appointment with the very first group to be appointed after this long dry period of no appointments at all, and I got in the Service in May of 1954. I Interview with Samuel W. Lewis http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000687 Library of Congress only got in at that time because they had some extra money to hire people for visa jobs in the Refugee Relief Program. A special Refugee Relief Act was passed in 1953, with a whole lot of extra visa numbers for people with genuine refugee status or what they called internal refugees from various natural disasters, like earthquakes and floods. A whole lot of those visas were set aside for Italian refugees, as a result of the strong influence of Friends of Italy in the Congress. There were 60,000 visas a year set aside for Italian refugees. Q: What were they refugees from? LEWIS: They were almost entirely refugees from natural disasters, earthquakes in Calabria 15 years before and they'd never, allegedly, gotten fully resettled, people in that category. It was really a way of increasing the Italian quota without saying so. But the immigration visas were all issued in either Genoa or Naples or Palermo in Italy. They could not begin to handle the sudden new great load of immigration visas with some special requirements that were put on by the Refugee Act over the normal immigration requirements. So they hired a whole slew of vice consuls and sent them out to these three visa issuing posts, and some to Germany, as well. Q: Was that just a rank rating, or did that automatically shove you into the consular service? LEWIS: We were originally hired as staff officers, vice consuls, but since we were ready to be appointed as regular FSOs, within a month or two after I got to Naples, my regular appointment as an FSO Class 6 came through, and my assignment was vice consul. I never will forget our arrival in Naples, Peter, because my wife and I had been married about a year and had been so excited about going out to our first Foreign Service post. We'd been living in Washington, hand to mouth, trying to wait out until finally the Interview with Samuel W. Lewis http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000687 Library of Congress Department would get around to appointing us. I was working nights, proofreading, going to school in the daytime. My wife was sick most of the time, so she wasn't able to support us as we had anticipated. In any case, we arrived in Naples, the first time either one of us had been overseas or out of the country, so it was a very exciting moment. We went to the old Parker Hotel up on the Vomero in Naples, and the next morning, went down to Consulate General there at Mergelina on the waterfront, to report in for duty. Since there had been this great talk in Washington about this huge workload and how eager they were to get us out there, we were, of course, run through with one week's orientation in Washington, no language training, no nothing; just “get there and get to work.” We walked into the administrative officer's office, dressed to the nines, and a fellow named Bob [Robert W.] Ross was administrative officer. He looked up from his desk and said, “Oh, my God, another one!” It was a rather deflating experience, to say the least, especially for Sallie. It turned out there were 24 new vice consuls just appointed; all of us arrived in Naples within three weeks of one another. Q: To be based in Naples? LEWIS: Just for Naples. They moved the visa section to a separate building in an old abandoned apartment house. There wasn't room, obviously, in the consulate. We were up on a hill, rather second-class citizens to the rest of the consulate.