Baroody, Judith
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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project JUDITH BAROODY Interviewed by: Charles Stewart Kennedy Initial interview date: May 4, 2016 Copyright 2019 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Growing up in Richmond and Northern Virginia, 1953-1972 College of William and Mary, 1972-1975 Backpacking through Europe, 1976-1977 Broadcast Journalist, ABC-TV Affiliate 1977-1983 Graduate School at the University of Virginia, 1983-1985 Junior Officer Trainee (JOT) at USIA 1984 Damascus, Syria 1985-1986 Assistant Information Officer Tel Aviv, Israel 1986-1988 Assistant Information Officer Doctoral Program, American University 1989-1992 Office of North African, Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs 1990-1992 Deputy Policy Officer Casablanca, Morocco 1993-1995 Branch Public Affairs Officer Nicosia Cyprus 1996-1999 Public Affairs Officer National War College 1999-2000 Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs 2000-2002 Deputy Director and Director of the Office of Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor 2002-2004 Director of Strategic Planning and External Affairs 1 Santiago Chile 2004-2007 Public Affairs Officer National War College 2007-2008 Professor of National Security Strategy U.S. Embassy Baghdad 2008-2009 Senior Advisor, Rule of Law Office U.S. Embassy Paris 2009-2011 Minister-Counselor for Public Affairs German Marshall Fund of the U.S. Think Tank 2011-2012 Senior Fellow Board of Examiners 2012-2013 Assessor Defense Logistics Agency 2013-2015 Foreign Policy Advisor Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training 2015-2017 Executive Director Words of Advice for New Foreign Service Officers INTERVIEW Q: All right, so this is May 4th and we are beginning our first interview with Judith Baroody. We always begin with where were you born and raised. Growing up in Richmond and Northern Virginia, 1953-1972 BAROODY: I was born in Richmond Virginia, the fourth of five children. All of us currently live in Virginia and we’re a close family. I went to Ginter Park Elementary School, which is still actively teaching kids fifty years later, and had the kind of education that sets you up to pursue a lot of different options when you grow up. In the fourth grade, we had to choose between studying French and Spanish. I chose French, and can still remember the teacher pulling down what looked like a map. It was a picture of a farm with all the animals, and we identified them in French one by one. I remember my fifth-grade teacher, Miss Rose Smith, telling us about her travels in Europe and my sixth-grade teacher, Miss Eleanor DeMerritt, teaching us about the ancient Middle East. I also had the opportunity to learn to play the string bass and was the 2 president of the orchestra. I hope that kids in public schools are still getting those opportunities – they open up so many new worlds. For all our differences, my husband and I had similar experiences growing up. We both grew up as the fourth child of the family, studied French and played the string bass beginning in elementary school, and became Middle East specialists working for the federal government. There was a cultural divide between my mother’s family and my father’s family and that’s among the reasons I had joined the Foreign Service. My father is of Lebanese origin. His father, my grandfather, emigrated from Lebanon in 1895 at the age of 15. Grandpa passed away when I was 12 years old. I didn’t realize that he spoke English, because whenever he was in the house he spoke Arabic with my grandmother. My father said later Grandpa was fluent in English, which makes sense since he immigrated at an early age. My grandfather, Assad Maury Baroody – later Americanized to “Arthur” - had a typical early-20th century immigrant’s life, not an easy life. He took whatever job he could. He had a series of little restaurants. He had an ice-cream stand on the sidewalk in Lake City, South Carolina. He did whatever he had to do to survive and put food on the table for his four children and his wife. I remember him sitting in the living room in his chair in the corner, quietly smoking a cigar. My grandmother was the talker. By the time I came along, they were relatively prosperous, with a restaurant on Lombardy Street in Richmond and a three-story home in the West End filled with carpets from the old country. They sent three sons to college, all to become engineers. Many years after my grandfather died, my sister-in-law came across the fact that, as a young man, a new immigrant to the United States, he had been awarded patents for a mechanized system of putting bottle caps on milk jars. The patent applications were beautifully drafted. Q: Just a quick question here: what would make a fifteen-year-old in Lebanon want to go to the United States? BAROODY: His family was from a part of Lebanon above Beirut in the mountains, a village called Souk el-Gharb, which means “western market” in Arabic. There was conflict in the area. Lebanon, as you know, has a long history of violence, and at that time there was a Christian conflict with Druze community. That was one of the reasons why a lot of people emigrated. Economic opportunity was another reason. My understanding is that many left Lebanon because of the end of wild silk production. Someone came up with a way of cultivating silkworms, so traditional methods of getting the raw material from trees became obsolete. Silk production had been a source of local employment, and when it ended, young people left in search of jobs. 3 My grandfather came over with a group of cousins, as immigrants tended to do. We have copies of the entry at Ellis Island when he came over. He went back to Lebanon 20 years later and found a bride, my grandmother Adele Thome. Across the cultural divide, my mother's side of the family was very different. Mother was a blue-eyed blonde, Elizabeth May Irwin, and her background was English-German. The family Bible with the names and dates of family members - when they were born and when they died - was published in 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was President. But they were not one of the first families of Virginia, also known as FFVs. They were carpetbaggers. They came to Virginia from Pennsylvania after the Civil War and built an estate on the James River called “Blythewood” which still exists, in a town called Irwin-on-the-James. They were wealthy enough to have their portraits painted and their silver engraved. So my last name is Baroody – a recognizably Middle Eastern name – and my first name is Judith – pretty much all-American and popular at the time I was born. My middle name is Raine, a name from my mother’s side. I was named for my great-great uncle, Friedrich Raine. He was German, and he immigrated in the early 1800s to Baltimore. He established and published the longest- lasting German language newspaper in the United States, “Der Deutsche Correspondent.” He was a wealthy philanthropist. He helped a lot of Germans immigrate to the Baltimore area by publishing job announcements at no cost - free help-wanted ads in German - that attracted a lot of German people to the area. Almost all of the German-language newspapers in the U.S. went out of business after World War I. I'm the last one in my immediate family with his name, Raine. The Irwins had been wealthy but lost their fortune at the end of the 1920s. So there’s this cultural divide between the Middle Eastern part of the family – the Baroodys - and the Irwins. It made me interested in going to the Middle East and bridging cultures. There was another kind of divide between my parents. My father is an engineer and a great chess player. My mother was a writer, great with words, the author of seven novels and a couple of hundred magazine articles. Q: Did your grandmother on your father's side talk a lot about recollections of Lebanon? BAROODY: My grandmother was the warmest, funniest lady - full of adventure. She did go back to Lebanon two or three times to see her sisters, and she loved to talk. Her family was from Latakia, now part of Syria. She talked about riding a camel north to Aleppo when the region fell into chaos at the end of World War I and hiding in a basement there waiting for her brother to rescue her. 4 Her English was never perfect. It was a pity because, as she grew older, she never really perfected her English and her Arabic became more and more antiquated. She'd go back to Lebanon to see her sisters and she said that the taxi drivers would laugh at her Arabic because she used old-fashioned expressions that people didn't say anymore. So she always had one foot in one country and one foot in the other but was not firmly at home in either one. Q: Neither she nor your grandfather convinced any other members of their family to come to the U.S.? BAROODY: There were some cousins who came over in the original migration in 1895 and through them I'm distantly related to a large Washington family, most of whom are Melkite Catholics. William Baroody Senior, for example, was the founder of the American Enterprise Institute, and William Jr. was the Chief of Public Affairs for the Nixon White House.