Here in Arlington, Virginia—And You Are Where?
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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR DAVID L. LYON Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial Interview Date: December 9, 2010 Final Interview Date: June 30, 2011 Copyright 2018 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background 1951-1974 A-100 1974 Lagos 1974-1976 Vice Consul Recife 1976-1978 Vice Consul Accra 1978-1980 Consular Chief Manila 1980-1984 Consul AF/RA 1984-1986 acting Director National War College 1986-1987 Student Bangkok 1987-1991 Consul General Office of Transnational Affairs, Bureau of International Narcotics Matters 1991-1994 Director, INM/T Beijing 1996-1999 Consul General Melbourne 1999-2002 Principal Officer 1 Senate Confirmation 2002 Suva 2003-2005 Ambassador Post-Foreign Service 2005- INTERVIEW Q: Today is 9 December 2010. This is an interview with David L. Lyon and it is being done on behalf of the association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. It is being done by telephone and I am here in Arlington, Virginia—and you are where? LYON: Pebble Beach, California. Q: All right. Well let’s start this off: When and where were you born? LYON: I was born in June 1951 in Frankfurt, Germany. Q: Let’s take your family on your father’s side. What do you know about them? LYON: My father, Scott Lyon, was from Columbus, Ohio. He was born in 1912. His father was a fairly well known journalist/columnist in the Midwest who, among other things, accompanied Pershing in WWI as a war correspondent. Family lore has him among a small number of correspondents who slipped into Berlin just before the war ended. Q: Oh, and do you know anything about the education or upbringing of your grandfather? LYON: No, not really. My great-grandfather was a railway linesman who was killed on the job. I don’t believe my grandfather had very much university, but frankly I don’t know. My grandmother was an Oklahoma Sooner in 1889, but her family eventually had to return to Ohio. Q: What about your father? What sort of education did he have? LYON: He was interested in science and mathematics and was going off to MIT until his father invested his college fund in the stock market in 1929. So he stayed at home, attended Ohio State and got a degree in chemical engineering. He ended up getting a job with ESSO as a petroleum engineer even though it was the middle of the Depression. Q: So, how did you end up in Frankfurt in 1951? 2 LYON: Well, my father wanted to go overseas, no doubt influenced by his father’s WWI experiences in Europe. So he asked ESSO to send him overseas to the Arabian Peninsula where ESSO had a large concession. They refused telling him that he was a domestic engineer, not an international engineer. So he went and took the Foreign Service test -- this would have been in the mid-1930’s -- and passed the written test only to be told by the examiners, “Why would we want to hire a chemical engineer from Columbus, Ohio?” So he quit ESSO, obtained seaman’s papers, got a job on a freighter, and spent 18 months in Europe teaching himself French, German and Spanish. After passing the written exam again, he went into his interview and basically asked, “What language do you want to do the exam in?” So they took him. Q: Well, what sort of a career did he have? LYON: He was the epitome of a generalist. During the war he was the ambassador’s aide in Lisbon for a time before going to the Azores as a consular officer helping American sailors off of sunken ships. He then traveled overland through Portuguese West Africa and then up to Rotterdam where he followed U.S. troops as they moved east. After the war, he studied Russian at Columbia University, meeting my mother there, before being assigned to Moscow. Q: What sort of work was he doing in Moscow? This had to be in the 40’s. LYON: At this point, we are in the late 40’s. He was a political officer, probably a first secretary. He was senior enough to have met Stalin; my mother actually kept the morning coat and top hat he wore to meet Stalin in the hopes I would become an ambassador – unfortunately, in addition to the coat being a bit moth eaten, my father was taller and thinner than I was so I couldn’t use it when I presented my credentials to the King of Tonga in 2003. LYON: What I remember most about my parents’ tour in the USSR was that he was our last Consul General in Vladivostok. He and my mother were just married so essentially they spent their honeymoon on the Trans-Siberian Railroad going from Moscow to Vladivostok. Q: Yes, I have an interview I did with a man, I forget his name now, who was a consular officer in Vladivostok during the war. He talked about how awful it was there. Even though we were allies and pumping equipment into the place, still the KGB was very nasty. LYON: My father was fairly quiet, but my mother was an imaginative, story teller. I remember her telling us about how the Russians had torn down all the buildings around the Consulate General in order to better watch its staff of my father and mother, and a one vice consul by the name of Bill Warwick. (My mother used to introduce Bill as the man she had spent her honeymoon with as they had been trapped together by a dock strike in Stockholm, my father having flown ahead leaving my mother to follow by ship.) The 3 Soviets shone spotlights on the compound all night long and had guards walking around 24-7 protecting the Russian people from the Americans. Lots of power outages and the like. I believe they were only there a few weeks before we closed the Soviet Consulate General in New York, they closed our Consulate General in Vladivostok, and my parents returned to Moscow by train. Q: How did your mother and father meet? LYON: They met at Columbia University. They were both living at the international house which was for students who had an interest in foreign affairs. My mother was getting a master’s degree in occupational therapy. Q: What is the background of her family? LYON: Her maiden name was Nancy Otis Wilson. She was a distant cousin of Woodrow Wilson and was related to the Otis elevator family and William Gibbs McAdoo. Her grandfather was one of the Midwest’s leading bankers, but lost everything during the bank crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, though family connections kept her father employed and she had a comfortable middle class upbringing. Q: Well then I take it after Moscow your parents ended up in Frankfurt? LYON: Yes. They spent five years in Germany in Frankfurt and Munich. My brothers were both born in Munich and I was born in Frankfurt. Q: 97th General hospital? LYON: Yes Sir. Q: My eldest daughter was born in the 97th General. LYON: It was a popular place for Foreign Service families, nothing like free obstetrical care. Q: I understand that is now our Consulate General. LYON: I didn’t know that. I went by and visited the hospital on a visit to Frankfurt just to see where I was born, but that was a long time ago. Q: That was my first post in ’55 to ’58. LYON: Well again I was born in ’51 so my parents were in Germany from ’50 to ‘55. Q: How aware were you of your surroundings? 4 LYON: I was only four when we actually left Germany so all I remember are bits and pieces. I remember I spoke German almost as well as I did English. This was back when Foreign Service families had German nannies. We actually brought her back to the States with us. I remember one of the big houses we lived in just because it was apparently owned by a Nazi general during the War. But just fragments like that, nothing terribly coherent. Q: Well then, where did you go? LYON: We came back to Washington for four years. I don’t recall what my father’s job would have been at that point, though I remember his office in the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House. We lived in Chevy Chase. Q: I suppose by that time you were pretty much aware, how was it being a kid in Chevy Chase in those days? LYON: I would think it was as close to idyllic as you could get. I mean, we lived in a nice house on a nice quiet street. I remember lots of kids, lots of dogs, days spent outside playing football, playing baseball and generally rough housing, good memories. Q: Well then after four years there, where did you go? LYON: We moved to Sao Paulo, Brazil. My father started out as the economics chief at the Consulate General, then became the political chief and deputy consul general, before being acting consul general for the last year of his five year tour. Q: Well, you were there from when to when now? LYON: From ’59 to ’64. Q: What were you up to? LYON: I was having a great time. Brazil was a lot of fun, I very much enjoyed the school that was there. Sao Paulo was a big cosmopolitan city lots of things to do for a ten-year- old.