The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project RUST DEMING Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: December 8, 2004 Copyright 2014 ADST INTERVIEW Q: Today is the 8th of December 2004. This is an interview with what is it Rust? DEMING: Rust, R-U-S-T. Q: R-U-S-T. Any middle initial? DEMING: M. Q: M. Deming. D-E-M-I-N-G. What does the Rust stand for? I haven’t seen that. DEMING: It’s a family name. It was my grandmother’s paternal name, and my parents decided to inflict it on me. Q: Did you immediately become Rusty? DEMING: Yes, I’m one of those people whose nickname is longer than his given name. Q: I know. For example, I’ve been interviewing Rand Beers and of course you can imagine that ends up as Randy. DEMING: A lot of confusion. I was Russ, Russell. Q: Yes. Let’s start at the beginning. Can you tell me when and where you were born? DEMING: I was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, on October 11, 1941. Q: Oh, just prior to the war. DEMING: Yes, but I’m not responsible for the war. Q: I was born just before the stock market crash. Let’s talk a little bit about your family, first on your father’s side. Do you know where the Demings come from? 1 DEMING: Yes, they come from England, from Bath, England in fact. They go back, Julian Deming was the first governor of Connecticut and on my father’s maternal side, he’s the great grandson of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Q: He was a consular officer. DEMING: He was consul in Liverpool and so we had that in the family. We are of course steeped in the Hawthorne history since it is such a prominent history. Q: Well, then, how about let’s sort of go for your grandfather. What was your grandfather up to? DEMING: My father’s father was a doctor in New York and Connecticut, a country doctor. Q: Where in New York and Connecticut? DEMING: In Westchester, NY and then in Redding, Connecticut. He served in the Army medical corps in the First World War, and one of the pieces of family lore is that he was called down to New York to treat Titanic survivors after the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. He married my grandmother who was about 30 years younger than him. My grandfather lived into his 90s. I remember him quite well. Q: What do you know about your grandmother? DEMING: My grandmother was the granddaughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Her father was Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s son. He had eight kids. I remember about seven of them, my great aunts and uncles. She was a beautiful red headed woman who died quite young at 67. I remember her from when I was a young kid. Her husband who was 30 years older outlived her. Q: Well, then your father, where was he? DEMING: My father was born in Westchester, New York in 1909. He’s still alive. He’s almost 96. He’ll be 96 next February. He became very enamored of the New Deal. He went off to work for TVA and then he joined the State Department. He became a Foreign Service Officer at the age of thirty-nine under the Wriston program after the end of the War when the State Department civil service was integrated with the Foreign Service. In 1948, he was sent to Bangkok as first secretary and PAO, head of USIS. I was seven, eight, nine years old in Bangkok, and I remember that period extremely well. Q: Where did your father go to college? DEMING: He went to Rollins College in Florida, which is a very progressive school. Q: How did he get down there? 2 DEMING: He went to boarding school in New England, Loomis, which is now Loomis-Chaffee, where I went as well. He became intrigued by a man named Hamilton Holt, who was president of Rollins and one of the foremost educators and progressive thinkers in the 1930s. My father went down there. After graduation, a family friend offered him a job at the Tennessee Valley Authority in Knoxville. Q: on your mother’s side, where did her family come from? DEMING: They came from Michigan. My mother’s maiden name is Macpherson. Her family came from Scotland via London, Ontario. My great grandfather moved from Ontario to Michigan and became a Michigan lumberman. He and colleagues helped cut down the white pines of Michigan, and they settled in Saginaw. My great grandfather and my great grandmother’s families built summer homes on a lake in northern Michigan which we still have in the family. It’s been there 120 years, along with summer homes of other family members in a beautiful virgin forest along a lake shore. Q: They save some trees. DEMING: Yes, they saved some for the family summer resort. So, my mother grew up in that environment. Her father went into the lumber business as well, and after the pines in Michigan were gone, he moved to Florida for the cypress. She went to Florida and became interested in Rollins College and that’s where she went and she met my father there. That’s the origin of that marriage. Q: Why were you up in Connecticut, well, you were born in Connecticut. DEMING: I was born in Connecticut, and we still have family in Redding, Connecticut. My father at the time was teaching at Fairfield Country Day School in Greenwich, Connecticut where he went in 1940 after leaving TVA. He later moved to Washington to work for the government. Q: Did you have brothers and sisters? DEMING: One of each, I’m the oldest. I have a brother who is three years younger and a sister who is five years younger. Q: Was it by Thailand that you sort of remember family life or before that? DEMING: Oh, before that. I remember going back to when I was two or three years old. We lived in Rockville, Maryland in a house that still exists on South Adams Street. Rockville was real country then. There was an airport between Rockville and Bethesda. I have very vivid memories of our trip to Bangkok in 1948 on KLM. Q: You started elementary school in Maryland? 3 DEMING: Yes, I went to a nursery school. I went to Green Acres Nursery School, which still exists. It had just been started by very progressive Jewish educators, and my parents were very much into this approach to life. I just felt a little like a guinea pig being sent to this school, but it was a lot of fun. Indeed, it was one of the schools that still try to get me to contribute to the alumni fund, although I only went there for only two years. By the time I was in third grade, I was in Bangkok. Q: You were in Bangkok from ’48 to when? DEMING: ’51. Q: What was it like? DEMING: I loved it. It was a very charming, very colonial kind of city. Bangkok was still a rural city. The “klongs,” canals, were still there. The canals were later filled in to widen roads, and Bangkok lost much of its charm. I just had tremendous freedom there, either because my parents had great confidence in me and our household staff, or because they were completely irresponsible. Perhaps it was a combination of both. I rode my bike everywhere, and I enjoyed horse riding lessons every day after school which often took me all over the countryside. One of my fondest memories was my father’s driver who would take me on weekends to his home in the country, often unbeknownst to my parents. They didn’t know I was out riding water buffalo in the Thai fields and just having a wonderful time. It was an ideal childhood. Q: How was the school? DEMING: I went to a school at the Anglican Church in Bangkok. One of the things that turned me off mathematics was I had to learn addition and subtraction in pounds and pence before it was decimalized. That was pretty discouraging. Every morning we had to go to chapel, so I learned all my Anglican hymns at an early age, but it was a very international school. I was one of the few Americans there amongst Europeans. Q: Did you pick up any Thai? DEMING: I did. I had kitchen Thai. I spoke it quite well. I can get around very well with my kitchen Thai when I go back there. Q: Then after you left there in ’48. DEMING: ’51. Q: ’51. DEMING: We went back to Washington for four months and then we headed to Tokyo. We arrived in Tokyo in the fall of ’51 and we were there until the end of ’53. It was a very interesting period because there was a transition between the Occupation and the 4 return of Japanese sovereignty. The peace treaty went into effect in April of ’52. I remember General Douglas MacArthur. My father took me down to the Daiichi Building where the General worked. I remember the chrome helmets of his honor guard lined up as MacArthur would pull up in his big Packard and stroll out of his car, with Japanese all lining the sidewalk, bowing to him. Then I remember the shock when he was fired by Truman in 1951 and then unceremoniously departed Japan.