Interview with Edmund Mcwilliams

Library of Congress Interview with Edmund McWilliams The Association of Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project EDMUND McWILLIAMS Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: December 1, 2005 Copyright 2007 ADST Q: Today is December 1, 2005. This is an interview with Edward McWilliams. MCWILLIAMS: Edmund, actually. Q: Edmund. Edmund McWilliams. M-C-W-I-L-L-I-A-M-S. And you go by Ed or? MCWILLIAMS: Ed's fine. Q: Ed. And this is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies. And I'm Charles Stuart Kennedy. Ed, let's start at the beginning. When and where were you born? MCWILLIAMS: I was born February 18, 1947 in Providence, Rhode Island. Q: Okay. Now, tell me something about, let's talk about your family on your, let's do the father's side. MCWILLIAMS: My father- Interview with Edmund McWilliams http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001497 Library of Congress Q: And back as far as, you know, give an idea where they all came from. MCWILLIAMS: Alright. Old Irish immigrant stock. Came over in the late 1800s. My dad had been a mill worker all his life and at the age- Q: How about your grandfather? Do you know? MCWILLIAMS: My grandfather was a mill worker also, textile mills in New England. Q: And both were textiles? MCWILLIAMS: That's right. My grandfather died quite early of a heart attack. I never met him, died in the '30s. My father had a heart attack at the age of 47 and was what they call a heart cripple for the rest of his life, so. Q: Would you put this to mill work in the-? MCWILLIAMS: Well, it was, I think to some extent mill work. And we were not wealthy. He worked very hard, worked double jobs and so on to keep us going. And in those days diet was not very good but also genetics on his side were not good; his father had died at 54 of a heart condition. But as a result my mother had to go back to work in her middle 50s. And so it was a very good family. I had a twin brother and we're both fairly academically oriented, principally because of my father, who although he only went as far as the eighth grade was very well read and very interested in public affairs and current affairs. He had volunteered to serve in World War II quite late in life (he was 33) and I think that gave him a great interest in the world and he tried to convey that to us, both my brother and I, and I think as a consequence I became very interested in international affairs. Q: Well, where did your father serve, do you know? MCWILLIAMS: He was in what they called the China-Burma-India Theatre. Interview with Edmund McWilliams http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001497 Library of Congress Q: Oh yes. MCWILLIAMS: And spent a lot of time in India but also was in bombing missions into China, over Burma and so on. Came back with a Silver Star and Distinguished Flying Cross. Q: Oh boy. That was a very difficult thing, flying over the hump. MCWILLIAMS: Exactly, flying the hump, that's right. Q: Oh yes, very much so, that was- What about your mother and her side of the family? MCWILLIAMS: She was old Yankee stock. The family actually, on her side, goes back to Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims through several lines. But basically what they used to call Swamp Yankee, which is the old New England Yankee farmers and it was an unusual arrangement because my father's side, of course, is very Catholic, being Irish, and my mother's side is very Protestant and in neither family had ever, there had never been an inter-religious marriage so that was a bit of a problem because there was a question as to whether my brother would be raised Catholic or Protestant and it created some family tensions but. Q: Well, you were twins, couldn't they compromise? MCWILLIAMS: Well, that would have been one way to approach it, I suppose, but in any event that was- it was interesting because I grew up in a, very much a Catholic neighborhood, a French Catholic, again, the old mill towns, textile mills. I worked in the textile mills myself between college, in my high school summers and then early college years. Q: It's hard to think of doing work in textile mills in the modern context because- Interview with Edmund McWilliams http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001497 Library of Congress MCWILLIAMS: Yes, it's all gone, it's all gone. Q: They've all moved south. MCWILLIAMS: That's right. Or to China. Q: Or to China or stuff like that. Well, what, you were born and where did you live? MCWILLIAMS: I lived in rural Rhode Island, up in the, as they used to say, the sticks, up in the corner of Rhode Island between Connecticut and Massachusetts on essentially old farmland but, as I say, most of the village had become, this is the village of Mohegan, had become a textile village and in the late 19th, early 20th centuries a lot of the French Canadians had moved into that area, it had previously been Yankee predominantly but it was a very French Canadian neighborhood to the extent that some of the older people could not speak English and you'd go down the sidewalks and so on and people would be speaking French, not English. It was quite interesting. Q: Did you grow up there? MCWILLIAMS: I grew up there and then went off to school. And then once I had gone to school I continued to consider that my home. Indeed, I still vote back in Rhode Island but basically only visits and holidays and so on. Q: Well, let's talk about the town. What was it like growing up as a kid, this being the '40s and '50s? MCWILLIAMS: Well, it was something of a rural town. The mills were dying and it was essentially a country town. Most of my classmates in high school and of course in grammar school came very much from the same background I came from. Their parents would have worked in the mills and indeed in the '50s were still working in the mills. Every Interview with Edmund McWilliams http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001497 Library of Congress single village in the town had a major mill in it; indeed the villages were built around these mills and that was the culture, really, it was very much a mill culture. Q: How about as a kid? Particularly interested as a small kid; what was it like? MCWILLIAMS: It was a good childhood. The school was just about a mile from the house. We had to walk to school in those days. There was a lot of open land around the house. We used to play out in the woods quite a bit. Because it was a fairly sparsely populated area you never really got into the team sports, baseball and football, because you never could get enough kids together although in school I did play, in grammar school and in latter years I did play some football. But I just kind of enjoyed the woods and with playmates and so on. Q: How about school? How did you find school? MCWILLIAMS: I went to a very old-fashioned primary school. We had three grades per room and then finally two grades per room. Strict old teachers. In my last two years of grammar school I had a Greek fellow who was extremely interested in international affairs and philosophy and history and he showed a lot of interest in both my brother and I because of our own interest in international affairs and I think he, a fellow named Mr. Steve, and my father were great influences on both of us, my brother and I, in terms of developing our interest in politics and international affairs. Q: How did three classes in a room work? MCWILLIAMS: I marvel at the teachers of those days because this entailed teaching probably 50 or 60 students and three different grades. Basically if you, for example, in the first, second or third grade, the teacher would be, would give a project to the first grade, start working with the second grade and shift to the third grade but basically would have to keep all three grades working at the same time while she was actually giving her Interview with Edmund McWilliams http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001497 Library of Congress focus only to one. And when you think about it in retrospect that was quite a task, keeping discipline and, of course, advancing us as both individuals and as classes. Q: You mentioned your father was very interesting. Where did your family fall politically at that time? MCWILLIAMS: My father, interestingly, my father was very much a Franklin D. Roosevelt Democrat. My mother tended to be more Republican and indeed her stock, the Yankee family, was very much Republican, but over the years I think she began to move towards my father's thinking on a lot of issues. I say unfortunately, I tended to go in the opposite direction. I tended to go in the opposite direction. I became sort of a Goldwater conservative, I think much to his regret, and we had quite a few discussions that were not, were not as I would like to have had them in retrospect.

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