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Here Were You Born

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Here Were You Born The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR PHILIP S. KAPLAN Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: March 20th, 2014 Copyright 2014 ADST Q: OK, well today is the 20th of March, 2014, interview with Philip, middle initial -- KAPLAN: S. Q: S., Kaplan, K-A-P-L-A-N. It’s being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and I’m Charles Stuart Kennedy. And you go by Phil, or? KAPLAN: It’s fine. Q: Let’s start at when and where were you born. KAPLAN: I was born in Connecticut in a city called New Britain. Q: Oh yes. So can -- just to get some background. What was your -- first on your father’s side -- what do you know about your father’s side? KAPLAN: My father was born in Texas and eventually turned up in Connecticut. He was a shoe salesman. My mother was born in Connecticut. She was a housewife. She was a saleswoman from time to time in a large department store in New Britain. Q: Let’s stick to your father’s side, we’ll move to your mothers’ side. Where do the Kaplans come from? KAPLAN: Well, I’d say originally that the family emigrated, at least on my mother’s side, from Eastern Europe and probably somewhere near the current Belarus and Ukraine. As I said, my father was born in Texas, in San Antonio. How the two of them eventually got together is something I don’t know (laughs). Q: (laughs) Did either go to college, or? KAPLAN: No, neither one of them did go to college. Q: Yeah, that’s been the basic pattern. Neither of my parents did either. I mean it’s our generation. The next generation practically all, they’re -- of the Foreign Service officers coming in. Well, did you grow up in New Britain? 1 KAPLAN: I did. Q: What was it like? KAPLAN: It was a very ethnic city. It’s one of the most densely Polish cities in the United States. There were a lot of Italians, there were some Germans, and it was a city of about 80,000 people. They call themselves the Hardware City of the World. There were a lot of factories there. I worked at a couple of factories over summer vacations from time to time when I was growing up. But it was really a melting pot with the émigrés coming almost entirely from Europe and mainly from central and Eastern Europe. Q: The -- how did the city handle this? Were they divided up into certain blocks were Polish, other blocks were something else and all that? KAPLAN: Something like that. Remember, I was a young fellow in those days. But I remember that there were judges and mayors that came from different ethnic communities. The Poles were very strong because there were so many of them. Q: Mm-hmm. Why would Poles come -- I always think of Poles going towards a mining community. KAPLAN: Well, there were a lot of -- as you know, the second biggest Polish city in the world is Chicago. And there were a lot around Cleveland and in the Middle West. But for some reason some of them congregated along the East Coast and for some reason this particularly community, where there was a lot of factory work, seemed to attract a great many. But the population was substantial; and there also were Italians, but not as many. Q: Well now, what about -- how did your family fit politically there? KAPLAN: Well, we were Jewish and there was a synagogue in the town. We went there, but not with great regularity. We were not very religious. My parents took it seriously but didn’t go frequently. Q: Mm-hmm. KAPLAN: I stayed in the formal training of the synagogue until I concluded my bar mitzvah at the age of 13. Then the rabbi and I had a little discussion (laughs) and we reached a -- it was my first negotiation and we reached the conclusion that I would stay in the Sunday classes that discuss the history and traditions of the religion. I no longer went often for religious services. Q: Was it orthodox, liberal or -- KAPLAN: It was conservative, which means sort of in the middle, centrist. Q: Yeah. How did -- in this -- did you go to public schools there? 2 KAPLAN: I did. Q: How did it fit being Jewish and with a big Polish community. The Poles are not the most (laughs) you might say tolerant or liberal or whatever. KAPLAN: Well, the Poles were never a problem for me. As a matter of fact, the most beautiful girl friend I had in high school was a Polish girl. Absolutely stunning. There was one incident that I remember from my childhood. Must have been just after World War II. I was still a little kid. I was coming home one day and there was a young fellow named Albert Warnock. For some reason I still remember that name all these years later. Well, I came around the same corner I always came around to go back to my house. Albert and a couple of his friends jumped out and beat the hell out of me. Q: (laughs) KAPLAN: That was my first experience with how ethnic rivalries can cause damage. I changed my route, just as I did as a diplomat many years later (laughs). Q: Oh yeah. A lot of us went through that. There are certain no-go areas that kids understand -- KAPLAN: I have no idea why this happened. I never had any particular relationship with him. I didn’t even know the fellow. Q: Yeah. I -- today the paper was an obituary of Robert Strauss that I -- when I was interviewing him he -- one time said when he was very young his mother said, ‘You come from a very proud ancestry. The Jews are almost smarter than everyone else and all that. But don’t let on.’ And he said he used to go around thinking, ‘Gee, I’m a lot smarter than these people, but I have to be careful.’ KAPLAN: That’s right. There are a lot of other communities, African-Americans, for example. I’m sure their parents have told them that more than once. Q: Yeah. Well, were you much of a reader? KAPLAN: I was really keen on American history as a young fellow, as a matter fact, through college. And I remember that I had a junior high school teacher by the name of Marion Hoar, but it was H-O-A-R, thank goodness. She was a rather stout lady in her advanced years. We had this circular classroom, and I would – she sat up at the top like the chairman of the board, and I was on the other side facing her. On one occasion she distributed a map with the various discoveries of the United States by the explorers. We came to the Gadsden Purchase and I sketched that in. Then you’d either pass your paper up around the circle until it reached her, or if you really wanted to make a point of it you’d walk it up. On one occasion, after I had erased it and fixed it repeatedly, I brought 3 it up to her. By the time I got back to my chair it was back in front of me with another X on it (laughs). Q: (laughs) KAPLAN: Still, American history really mattered to me in those days. I studied it intensively and with great pleasure. Q: Do you recall any books, particularly early on, that particularly influenced you? KAPLAN: Well, I was a young man and I don’t have that in my memory right now. When I got to college I started -- it was an American history teacher as well, we can go into that later if you’d like, who encouraged me in this direction. And you know, our family did not own lots of books so I would often go to the library and take things out. Once I discovered the library I was a frequent visitor there. We weren’t in a position to just go out and buy big bundles of books. Q: Yeah. Well, of course when you think about it probably one of the most influential persons in education in the United States was Carnegie and his libraries. KAPLAN: Yes. Q: Which he -- KAPLAN: Tremendously important. Q: Both in England and -- well, Great Britain -- and the United States. Was your family one that sort of listened to the news and discussed it, or? KAPLAN: We listened to it and I was born in 1937, so when World War II ended I was, what? Eight-years-old or so. My parents were very dedicated to President Franklin Roosevelt. He was almost like a godlike figure, the person who was saving the country in the face of all the terrible things that were happening in Europe. And I remember once, the day that Roosevelt died, I was with my mother and I heard the newscast and we were downtown in our town and my mother started crying. And I looked around and everybody else started crying. It was -- I can’t imagine anything like that happening in present circumstances. Q: Yeah. Well, it -- I remember I was at a prep school in Kent and I was 10 years older and Roosevelt was a god in our family. But an awful lot of the kids there came from Republican families.
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