The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project
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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR RICHARD W. MURPHY Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: December 6, 2017 Copyright 2019 ADST Q: Today is the 6th of December, 2017 with Ambassador Richard Murphy; I’m Charles Stuart Kennedy, on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. Dick, let’s start at the beginning; where and when were you born? MURPHY: It was July 1929 in Boston City Hospital. My family was already based in Manchester, New Hampshire and I spent my first seven years there where my father was managing a shoe company. Q: What I’d like to do before we move on, take a dive a bit. First, what do you know about your father’s side of the family? Where do they come from and all? MURPHY: My father’s family was of Irish origin from County Kerry. His father had come to the States as a small boy and he grew up in Natick, Massachusetts. My mother was of German-Scottish background. They were living in the neighboring towns of Natick and South Natick. His family was Catholic and hers Protestant. Hers entertained some of that community’s commonly held derogatory views of the Irish. My mother’s father was U.S.-born; his father came from Germany and he established a retail lumber/coal company in Wellesley, a town neighboring to South Natick. Q: What about the education of your parents? Did they go to college or not? MURPHY: Both did. My father went to Norwich Military Academy, just before the First World War, and he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant on graduation and went straight into the regular Army. Mother was a graduate of Wellesley College, I think she was from the class of 1917. Mother was one of four girls. My father was one of three boys and three girls. Q: It’s interesting because you and I are both the same generation; I was born in 1928. Very few of the people of that generation had parents who had more than one year of college at most. MURPHY: He went the full four years of military academy. Norwich, if you were at a certain level in your class, you were automatically commissioned in the regular Army. It was not affiliated with West Point, but had a solid standing in the world of military education. 1 Q: I’m very familiar with it. What about your early years, where do the memories kick in? MURPHY: Early years kick in in Manchester, New Hampshire – mainly the miserable winters of New Hampshire, wearing those old-fashioned galoshes with metal clasps which were hell on wheels to put on when it was snowing and your fingers were freezing. We were there for my first seven years, when the depression closed down shoe manufacturing in the northern states and my father took a job with a silver manufacturing company in Attleboro, Massachusetts. My mother had been gradually drawn into the family business in Wellesley. Her father succeeded in creating a certain sense of guilt on her part for not working at the company. He had no heir and successor and she was unofficially so designated. She resisted for years but gradually put in more and more time with the company, first commuting from Manchester and later from Attleboro. After four years there we moved to Wellesley Hills, which was much more convenient for her to work full time at the company. It was about then that the Second World War broke out and my father enthusiastically went back into the service. He had stayed in touch with the military and was commander of the Massachusetts National Guard for several years in the 1930s. He always had enjoyed the military but felt, as so many did after the First War, that you had to go out and make a career in civilian life. He never really flourished in civilian life and was happy to get back to the army. He returned to Army service as Lieutenant-Colonel. In the course of the war he was promoted to Colonel, in charge of training troops down in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Q: How about your early years? Where did you first go to school? MURPHY: I was in public school through the sixth grade in Wellesley. I then was enrolled in Roxbury Latin School in Roxbury, Massachusetts. It was a day school with a long-established tough academic program. You suffered memorizing dates and all the facts and figures in its history courses. Latin was on the curriculum for six years. I was there for only two years, then joined my brother who was two years older, at Phillips Exeter in New Hampshire. With my father in the Army and my brother off at school, my mother decided it was better if I joined him up there, given her preoccupations with the family business. Q: How did you find Phillips Exeter? MURPHY: I loved it. It was a total break from the life that I had known. Exeter was a small town, the county capital. The school was a world unto itself. It was wartime, and there was no gasoline for families to visit. For Thanksgiving holiday in the fall we’d take a train to Boston and then on to Wellesley for the only visit in the fall semester. The school worked hard to keep you busy given the isolation from family and normal life. They made a point of starting classes early in the morning, breaking for lunch, then you’d go off for a sports program – they had a pretty big choice of sports- that was followed by another class in late afternoon. They filled your day. It was a great environment. 2 Q: Did you get much in the way of religion? MURPHY: No. My father’s family was Roman Catholic, and I was confirmed as a Catholic. Beyond sending me to Sunday school to get ready for confirmation, I didn’t get much in terms of a Catholic upbringing. Mother was Unitarian, and those worlds were far apart from one another. At Exeter, I went to the local Catholic church for a year or so. There was a non sectarian chapel at school and I gradually drifted away from Catholicism My father’s family wasn’t that insistent on tracking my development so I was pretty much on my own in terms of religious practice. His family were steady church attendees, one of his sisters was a Catholic nun in Regis College, Massachusetts. Q: At Exeter, were the boys given supervisory responsibilities? How did that work? I went to Kent at about the same time and the sixth-formers were in charge of making sure the younger boys did their work in the morning; we had to clean our rooms and classrooms. Of course this was the time of the war and help was harder to get, and also it was run by Episcopalian monks and they didn’t cotton to boys being waited on, so we waited on tables. The supervision was handed over sort of to the sixth-formers, the seniors. MURPHY: No, we didn’t have that practice. You had periodic assignment to the kitchen and as bus-boy, that sort of thing. I don’t recall any supervisory role over the younger kids once I became a senior. But you were expected to keep your room clean; there was a resident faculty family or teacher in every dorm who monitored (or tried to monitor) your misbehavior of the hour, enforcing lights-out and that sort of thing. Q: You were at Exeter during the war. MURPHY: Right, I went there in ’43 and graduated in ’47. Q: How did the war affect you in your learning process? MURPHY: You were frozen in a time capsule; the whole emphasis was on books, classes, sports. The war was a very distant affair. That changed only in my final year when we had some post-graduate classmates coming out of the service. They were at least two years older than the seniors and they brought some awareness of what had been going on. But the war wasn’t pressing on our consciousness during the period of actual combat. Q: What subjects did you particularly like or not like? MURPHY: I was stronger in the English classes than in math or science. I really didn’t get physics. We had visiting speakers at the school’s daily assemblies and one was Margaret Mead the anthropologist. She gave a stunning lecture (to a 17-year-old’s ears) about her work in the South Pacific islands I went to her afterwards and said, “I think I might like to be an anthropologist.” She quickly replied “Good – but don’t study it as an undergraduate in college; it’s not a discipline yet which is useful for an undergraduate”. 3 So I pressed, “What do you recommend I take?” She said, “Physics.” I was dismayed because I had had trouble understanding the principle of the lever even when shown a film in science class of people chopping trees down and making logs which amply demonstrated the principle of the lever. I asked her, “Why physics?” and she replied “Because it’s going to be very important for future anthropologists to have an understanding of isotopes.” I just memorized that and when I went to Harvard the next fall, I called on the Dean of the Anthropology Department. I said I was planning to be an anthropologist but of course I wouldn’t be studying it as an undergraduate.