Lila Johnson EA: Eugenie Anderson JM: Jan Musty

Eugenie Anderson Narrator

Lila Johnson Interviewer

May 28, 1971

LJ: Lila Johnson EA: Eugenie Anderson JM: Jan Musty

EA: Where did we leave off? I think I was in the midst of leaving Denmark and talking about the crisis in 1950, wasn't I?

LJ: The next activity that I have listed was when you were chairman of the Fair Employment Practices Commission, but that was several years after.

EA: Yes. Shall we just leave off with Denmark and start on the next?

LJ: Okay.

EA: I returned home from Denmark about six months after my resignation. My husband and I and our son, Hans, had spent several months in Europe traveling and resting up from the strenuous last period in Denmark. Hans and I arrived home in June 1953. I remember we were greeted at the Red Wing Milwaukee [Road Railroad] Station by the mayor, who was Harry Reardon at that time, and a little musical band, and a large group of friends to welcome us home. My husband had returned to Denmark to attend our daughter's graduation from the gymnasium, so he and Johanna didn't arrive home until July.

During that first year that I was at home I was really, I guess you would say, becoming reacclimated to private life. In many ways it was a welcome period and in other ways it was difficult to find myself suddenly without responsibility and without involvement in public life. The first winter, I believe, I went on a lecture tour, mostly on the West Coast but some in other parts of the country, too.

LJ: What were you lecturing about?

EA: I had signed a lecture tour contract with the Colston Leigh lecture agency in New York. I was lecturing mostly about my assignment during those years in Denmark, about diplomacy, about my ideas of diplomacy, and about the North Atlantic Treaty problems and other diplomatic and foreign policy questions.

In the fall of 1954 I was ill. I was ill in bed for almost three months with some rather mysterious ailment. At first the doctors thought perhaps I had rheumatoid arthritis or rheumatic fever. They decided that it was not rheumatoid arthritis and probably not rheumatic fever but something like rheumatic fever, so that I had to be flat on my back in bed for those months and I was not strong for several months after that. At first I was dismayed at this period of complete inactivity but when I realized that it had to be I actually enjoyed the chance to do a great deal of reading that I hadn't been able to do for several years. I concentrated on works of two great men that I had always admired. One was Abraham Lincoln. I think I mentioned that my father was a special admirer and student of Lincoln's and I had always felt the same but hadn't ever read very much. I began reading everything that I could, acquiring quite a little Lincoln shelf or shelves in my library. I read mostly about Abraham Lincoln that fall and winter. I also read quite a bit about Sigmund Freud, who had always interested me, also. I recovered in the spring of 1955.

I might say that I had been fairly active politically in the campaign of 1954 helping to elect Governor Orville Freeman. I was active in the spring and summer before I became ill. Of course, after I became ill I couldn't do anything, but I did play a role in the early part of that year.

LJ: You mentioned before that I hadn't asked you your impressions of Freeman. Maybe this would be a good time to do that.

EA: Yes, I had always liked both Orville and Jane Freeman, admired their vigor and their enthusiasm and Orville's uncompromising courage and honesty, integrity. I got to know them as far back as 1946 when Orv had just been released from the service. And he, I think I mentioned, was elected secretary of the DFL party that same year when I was elected the vice-chairwoman. It was Orv Freeman and I who carried the burden of the DFL anti-Communist struggle within the party executive committee meetings. Orv and I and one or two others always had strategy meetings, always caucused before the DFL executive committee would meet, so that I really got to know Orv very well that time.

I found that he was not only very vigorous in his approach toward everything, but he was also very astute and willing to devote himself wholeheartedly to what he was committed to. I felt that he would make an excellent governor when 1954 came, although frankly I hadn't thought that he would have too good a chance to be elected. I simply felt he would be our best candidate. I can remember that I urged him to run simply as a matter of duty because he was the best candidate and would be the best governor, but I told him frankly that I didn't think he had much of a chance to be elected. He's often teased me about this because of course he was elected.

And he certainly lived up to my expectations of him as governor. I think he was one of the best governors Minnesota has ever had primarily because he had a program and he was vigorous and energetic in carrying it out. He had a wide circle already built up of friends in many different walks of life. While he was very loyal to the DFL party, he also had many friends in the Republican party and many independent friends. I think he was really more concerned with

issues. He was not a personally ambitious person. He had enormous drive but yet you never felt that it was for reasons of personal ambition. And I think that this was true of his wife, Jane, also, who was a tremendous help to him. She was a very sophisticated person and at the same time very sensitive and very sweet, always very sympathetic and very concerned with other people, really interested in other people. I think that Orv had the same capacity. He asked people's opinions. He listened. He was open and his office became a center for new ideas, and new people were brought in to the government at high circles.

Not long after he was elected Governor in 1955 the legislature passed the first Minnesota Fair Employment Practices Act. This had been attempted for several years but not until Governor Freeman was elected and through his whole-hearted support behind the passage of this act did it become law. Orv very soon thereafter asked me if I would serve as the chairman of the Minnesota State Employment Practices Commission. I agreed to do so because this was an area, an issue, in which I had always been very much concerned and which I had believed. In fact, this was one of the reasons that I had first become active in politics was because of this, as well as my concern with international affairs. So I was glad to have an opportunity to have this responsibility.

This was not a full time job of course; this was not a paid job. We had regular monthly meetings and sometimes ad hoc meetings on special issues. He had a full time executive secretary and one or two assistants. We had an excellent state board, or commission, that was all appointed by Governor Freeman from the various districts. I served in this capacity until 1960 when Governor Freeman was defeated in 1960 election, and I resigned at that time.

LJ: What were some of the things that this commission dealt with?

EA: Mostly complaints of discrimination in employment, mostly on the basis of race. Most of the complaints which came to us came from Negroes, from blacks, who felt that they had been discriminated against on this basis. We had, perhaps, a few complaints on the basis of religion. Maybe, oh, a very small percentage on the basis of religion. Most of them were on the basis of race.

LJ: And this would come up to a hearing then?

EA: Then we would conduct an investigation and we would hold hearings. We had I would say quite a success in being able to work out most of these complaints, adjust these complaints before it reached the state of litigation. The commission had the power to bring action, legal action, against the party if it was found to be discriminating. But in most cases by talking things over with the employer and the employee we were able to work out the complaint and bring satisfaction without doing that. I think only in a very small number of cases did we ever have to bring legal action against the employer.

I think one of our most important cases was against Northwest Airlines, which at that time had never had any black stewardesses, and we had a complaint from a young lady who felt that she had been discriminated against because of her race. This went on for many months. In the end, we finally were able to get an agreement from Northwest Airlines that the first Negro who applied and had the qualifications would be employed by Northwest. I think we were not able to get them to hire this one young lady who had brought the complaint because Northwest felt first, that she was not qualified, and secondly, they did not want to have their right of deciding whom they should employ infringed upon. This was a rather important issue with them. But in any case, this was the case that occupied us a great deal of the time.

There were other cases involving restaurant owners and miscellaneous cases. At that time there was such a small number of Negroes in Minnesota, I think less than two percent at that time of our population, that we naturally did not have very many complaints, but still there were enough to keep the commission occupied. We also had one or two members who were quite vigorous in pressing us to make investigations even where we hadn't had any complaints, because we had this power to do so and we gradually did.

I felt, however, that my perhaps most important responsibility as chairman of the commission was, since this was a new commission, a new area, and since there had been quite a lot of opposition in the legislature the law had barely passed the legislature, and there were still many people in the state that didn't understand it and didn't necessarily think it was a good thing. I felt that it was very important to avoid any real trouble, you might say, to avoid making any mistakes that would turn the population against the commission and against what we were trying to do. So we tried hard just to do an educational job.

One of the things that we did was to ask the Governor to appoint a citizens' advisory council to the commission. This consisted of leading citizens all around the state who we knew to be interested in these problems. And Governor Freeman did this. I think the commission consisted of at least twenty or more citizens from around the state. We met with them several times. We had educational conferences once or twice and we made a few publications, some work with the press, but an important part of our work in these years I think was educational.

LJ: Were there many cases brought by Indians at that time?

EA: There were a few cases brought by Indians, very few, but there were some. There would be far more today, I feel sure, because at that time, the Indian community was only beginning to be articulate and to be aware of its rights. We were aware that there were serious, really severe problems among the Indians, especially living in the cities, but we had very few complaints. I remember that we did have some during that period. Did you have any other questions about the Commission and its work?

I did want to ask you if you felt that there was a great deal of need in the state, a lot of problems in the state before the commission and if the commission solved these problems. Perhaps you've answered that in saying that there were very few minority groups.

EA: I think there were some but I wouldn't say that there were a great many, partly because there simply proportionately were not that many minorities. Of course there were patterns of employment that one could call discriminatory patterns, there's no doubt of that. But the approach, since it was based on two aspects, educational and on trying to solve or handle the complaints that came to us, we actually didn't get as many complaints as I thought we would. 1 think one reason why was because the minorities just weren't aware that the commission existed. It took some time for them to become aware of us.

Is there a board now that functions in its place?

EA: Oh yes, there is a much broader one, not only guarding against discrimination in employment but in many other fields including housing. At about the time that I resigned from the commission in 1960 it was beginning to be felt that one of the biggest issues was in discrimination in housing. But the legislature did not include that in the act until several years later. I'm not sure quite what year; I think I was not here at that time. It now includes education and housing, and the bill today also includes discrimination on the grounds of age and sex, so that it's a much broader bill and the commission today I think is called the Human Rights Commission.

During this period from 1955 to 1960, when I was serving as the chairman of the Fair Employment Practices Commission, I want to say that Governor Freeman always supported the commission vigorously. He supported our request for an increased budget in the second year of our operation. He upheld our various rulings. Once or twice I remember when they could have been rather controversial and put him in a position of having to support our ruling against some significant business interest. But he was very loyal to the commission and to the work that we were trying to do. He was an excellent person to work under.

It was also during this period that Minnesota celebrated its 100th anniversary, its centennial anniversary, in 1958. Governor Freeman asked me to be the chairman of the activities connected with the commemoration of the foreign guests; I guess you would say the international guests whom we would invite to attend our centennial celebration. And this proved to be quite a big project, much bigger than I had first anticipated when I agreed to do it. This was in the early part of -- well, it was probably late 1957 when I began working on it and it extended of course all the way through May.

Partly because of my diplomatic background and because I was fairly well known in official circles both in Europe and in this country, we had an unexpectedly large number of international representatives who came to the Minnesota centennial. I think the most prominent and top- ranking one was the Crown Prince of Sweden. We also had the Norwegian Crown Princess. We

5 had, I think, official representatives from forty different countries. This was quite a big week that we had. It wasn't only just the one day's activities and one night's, but most of them were here for several days. This, protocol-wise, was such an operation that I called upon my former Public Affairs Officer, who had been with me in Denmark, William Roll, Bill Roll, to come and be the protocol assistant for this Minnesota centennial, which he was pleased to do. He served without any salary, which I also was non-salary of course.

I remember that the two of us together met a number of the top-ranking guests at the airport in New York when they arrived. These were the royalty, the Swedish and Norwegian royalty. I must say that without Bill Roll's assistance, I'm sure there would have been some sensibilities among the diplomatic and official groups that would have not been properly recognized. I think also that some of the Minnesota sensibilities were a little bit offended because they didn't fully understand the diplomatic protocol involved in some of these seating arrangements and so on.

This culminated in a great centennial celebration dinner at the Leamington Hotel, I believe it was, as the big highlight of the event, although I just remember that among the special projects that we carried out --- we thought that our guests shouldn't see only Minneapolis and St. Paul so we organized trips for them around the state. Every one of the top-ranking guests was given an opportunity to visit the particular area of the state which had a large settlement, you might say, of natives from their state. For instance, the Danish Prime Minister came, H.C. Hansen was his name, and we flew him out to Tyler, Minnesota, where the people there had a big celebration for him. And we did this with all the foreign guests that wanted to visit other parts of the state so we had quite a fleet of airplanes and quite a lot of smaller celebrations going on around the state, which added to the interest and I think the significance of the visit so far as the centennial was concerned. I also invited the Danish Prime Minister to visit us here in Red Wing at Tower View and we had the privilege and pleasure of having Prime Minister H.C. Hansen and his wife and several members of his staff for lunch, I believe it must have been a day or so after the big celebration in Minneapolis.

I should go back a year or so and say that in 1956 I had been very active in the national campaign of Adlai Stevenson. I had gotten to know Adlai in 1952. I was home on leave from Denmark in the summer of 1952. I had been invited to address the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. This was the first and I believe only time which I had addressed the Democratic National Convention as one of its main speakers. This was very exciting. I remember that I had written a speech in Copenhagen before I came home and it was an important occasion so far as my participation in politics was concerned and it gave me the experience of what a national convention was like if you are not a delegate. I was not a delegate that year, but a speaker. I must say it's a most harrowing ordeal to address a national political convention and I don't wish to ever do it again.

JM: Did you write your entire speech by yourself?

EA: I wrote it entirely by myself and I remember I thought it was a good speech and had things in it that I really wanted to say about the European relationship to the United States. Early in the summer I had visited Berlin and I had met Mayor Ernst Reuter. I had met him once or twice before, but I had visited him that summer in Berlin. Berlin was still a very important center so far as our presence in Europe was concerned and I particularly wanted to talk about this in my speech. I remember that Ernst Reuter, who was a wonderful man, a very strong representative of the democratic forces in Western Europe and particularly in West Germany and Berlin, had said some - such unforgettable things to me that I quoted these in my speech. They were a very good sort of theme, you might say, to build the speech around.

The difficulty was of being heard in the national convention when everybody is politicking on the floor of the convention. Nobody really wants to listen to the speakers and unless you have a good strong chairman who gavels them down before you begin to speak, you hardly have a chance. I had seen this happening with the other speakers, that nobody could hear them, and I must say when I began to speak I had exactly the same experience that I felt that nobody was listening, nobody could hear me. Those that appeared to be trying to hear me obviously couldn't and it was just an intolerable situation.

I kept wanting to break off and pound the gavel and say something myself to the effect that, "Look! I came a long way to make this speech and if you don't want to listen to it, thank you very much!" But I remember I kept telling myself, "The people that are hearing me are those out across the country who are watching on television (this was televised, of course) and these few that are gathered here don't really count, so just address yourself to the television audience." And I especially remembered that my son was listening and my family here in Minnesota and I didn't want them to see their mother put on an angry act. So I persisted. And I'm glad I did because I was told later by my family and friends who had heard me around the country that they were completely unaware that there was any confusion in the hall. But this was an ordeal. And I remember that the next evening, I guess, when Mrs. India Edwards spoke, she's a very forthright woman, and when she started out with the same experience, she did gavel them down. She pounded that gavel and she told them that they had behaved in a most insulting way towards other speakers during the day and she was not going to have it. She really let them have a piece of her mine, which I am sure made her feel good, but I don't think it changed the delegates at all.

In any case, Adlai had, of course, been nominated at that convention and he had asked me to come back that fall and do some speaking for him, which I had done, made a few speeches in 1952. When he was nominated again in 1956 he again asked me to work with him during his campaign and I was with him on the campaign plane and train (occasionally it was a train, mostly the plane) for a period of almost six weeks in the fall of 1956. I served ostensibly, or my title was, as foreign policy advisor. I felt that this was an educational experience that I wouldn't have missed to participate in a national presidential campaign. I learned a great deal about our country. It's really an awesome experience to be right there with the presidential campaign and not only to realize firsthand the diversity of this country and the vigor of our political system, but 7

also it is awesome to see the pressures that are brought to bear on the candidate and the almost unbearable pace and rigor of the campaign that the candidate must endure.

I felt that I didn't really contribute much. I frequently was in a quandary as to whether even to stay on the plane simply because I felt that my advice, the views that I held about how Adlai should be dealing with foreign policy, I felt that I was not effective; I was not able to really convince him or get to him. It was very difficult even to get to him. Of course there's always this contest going on around every presidential candidate or indeed almost any candidate between differing forces who want to get him to do what they think is right. There was a very powerful group around Adlai of so-called "pros" who had convinced him that the kind of a campaign that he waged in '52 was the reason that he lost the election in '52 and therefore he should not conduct the high level issue-oriented campaign in '56 that he had in '52, and that above all he shouldn't talk about foreign policy because nobody was interested in it. He should only talk about the "bread and butter" issues, the "porkchops," so to speak. This, of course, I absolutely disagreed with. I felt that the foreign policy issues were of very great significance and I felt that these people, these "bread and butter" people, were underestimating the seriousness and the intelligence of the American electorate. I felt that the peace issue was important and I felt that he should be talking about these issues instead of just concentrating on the "bread and butter" issues.

I did succeed once or twice in getting a half hour or so alone with Adlai and he would say to me, "Eugenie, I agree with you. I can't tell you how much I agree with you. You know I think this way. Why don't you write a speech for me?" I would say, "Hell, Adlai, you know I'm not here as a speech writer. You have speech writers and if you really want to say these things, all you have to do is to tell them what you want to say." Well, the upshot of it was, I soon discovered I wasn't the only one in this position. There were quite a number of others. Chester Bowles was one. Dean Acheson was one. Quite a few of the leading figures in the Democratic Party international affairs-oriented had tried to get Adlai to do this and they had no more luck than I did.

Of course we felt that we were vindicated, although it didn't do any good, when the international issues exploded right in the midst of the campaign. This was at the time of the Hungarian revolution in 1956. This was early October, I guess, when that began, but it was right in the heat of the campaign. So suddenly Adlai had to talk about these issues and he hadn't been prepared for it and he hadn't been talking about them before. And then, what else happened at the same time? The Suez crisis, also. I guess it was all toward the latter part of October; yes it was, the last few days. So it was really too late for Adlai to do very much with these issues so far as his campaign was concerned. I don't think that he probably would have been able to defeat Eisenhower in any case, but I felt that the campaign would have been on a higher level, it would have been more educational for the American people, and Adlai himself would have been happier because he would have been true to himself. I felt that he was unhappy in the way that he did carry out that campaign and consequently he was not nearly as effective as he might have been. 8

LJ: Were there areas where he disagreed with Eisenhower on these international affairs, or would it have been just more educational?

EA: Yes, he did disagree with Eisenhower. He didn't agree with Eisenhower's intervention in the Suez crisis against our allies. You remember that Eisenhower really denounced the British and the French and the Israelis, blamed them for the crisis, and came down on the side of Egyptians.

LJ: Before this crisis, though, were there international affairs that Eisenhower was talking about?

EA: No, I think primarily the fact that Eisenhower talked about peace in general terms and he presented himself as the man who was able to keep the peace. He was not very specific about it and this was his main campaign theme. And, you see, by not talking about this at all in a sense Adlai simply let Eisenhower have this issue. This was the main way in which he could have found many issues to disagree with if he had dealt with them, but you see he didn't deal with them at all, that was the main problem.

It was the fall of 1957 that I served on the Zellerbach Commission for refugees from behind the Iron Curtain who still remained in refugee camps in Western Europe. The Zellerbach Commission was a private commission appointed by the International Rescue Committee to visit these camps in Western Europe and to make a report to the commission and to the public in the hopes that more public interest would be aroused about the plight of these refugees, some of whom had been in refugee camps since the war and who still were not resettled and still were unable to find a home in the West where they could go. This commission was called the Zellerbach Commission because the chairman of it, or the co-chairman of it, was Harold Zellerbach of the Crown-Zellerbach Corporation from San Francisco, California. The other co- chairman was Angier Biddle Duke, who was also the chairman of the International Rescue Committee. I had only barely known Angie Duke before that time. I had not known Harold Zellerbach before that time, but since the commission which consisted of about eleven persons, I think you would say most of them leading citizens, a bi-partisan commission, traveled together in Europe for about three weeks, visiting these refugee camps and studying the problem, we all became well acquainted and good friends. Other members of the commission whom I especially treasured my association with were Mrs. Adele Levy, Mrs. David Levy of New York City. She was a wonderful woman, well known for her philanthropy and for her work with underprivileged children, with Jewish refugees, and indeed with all kinds of refugees, and also politically she was very active, politically, on the national level.

JM: Where were your headquarters at this time?

EA: My personal headquarters? In Minnesota.

JM: You stayed here?

EA: Yes. We returned to our home in Red Wing.

JM: You must have done a lot of traveling when you were on this commission.

EA: We did. For a concentrated period of three weeks we were traveling in Europe, yes. After that, we did not travel. We had one or two meetings in New York, but we traveled together for three weeks in the fall of 1957. I remember that I hesitated to accept this assignment because I was expecting my first grandchild about that time and I didn't really like to be gone when I knew that my daughter would be having her first child. But she wanted me to go. She said, of course, she would get along all fight, and my husband, as he had done so often before, had urged me to go and said he would carry out the duties of the grandmother as well as the grandfather. So I did go and I remember that I received a telegram that I had been hoping to hear when I was in Vienna with the commission, telling me of the safe arrival of our first grandchild, a little girl named Kiren Elizabeth Ghei. My daughter had married about a year before that Dr. Som Nath Ghei from India, a psychology Fulbright scholar whom she had met at the University of Minnesota when she was studying for her Master's Degree in psychology there.

Well, to go back to the Zellerbach Commission, another extraordinary woman whose friendship I made on that trip was the famous Life photographer, Lise Larsen. She went along as the photographer for the trip and also as a member of it and she was a most remarkable person. Also Reverend James Pike, who died tragically about two years ago, lost in the desert in the Jordan Valley, in the Dead Sea Valley, was a member of the commission. And Eugene Lyons, the writer and editor of the Reader's Digest. Well, there were a number of others.

This trip was an important trip to me in that it once again gave me new insights and concern about Eastern Europe and what was going on behind the Iron Curtain, so-called Iron Curtain. We did not, at that time, visit any Communist country excepting Yugoslavia. We were not allowed to visit any other country. But our purpose was to visit in the camps of people from the Eastern European countries, but the camps were, with the exception of Yugoslavia, they were all in Western Europe.

We did visit Berlin. This was my third visit to Berlin, I believe, and we did visit camps there. There were many, many refugees from East Berlin and East Germany crowding into West Berlin at that time. This was before the building of the wall and there were literally hundreds every week that were crossing over. And this was a remarkable experience there. This was the first occasion that I had to meet Willy Brandt, at present the Chancellor of Germany, of West Germany. At that time, he had just been elected as the mayor of West Berlin as the successor of Mayor Ernst Reuter, whom I had met earlier. And I met Mayor Willy Brandt and spent one or two evenings with him and his wife on that visit. We became rather well acquainted quickly, partly because of the fact that he had spent most of the war years in Norway and we had many friends in common in the Social Democratic Party and the Labor Party in Norway. He was well acquainted with the Danish Social Democrats as well.

I'm not sure how much the Zellerbach Commission really accomplished. Perhaps we did bring some public attention; we brought some congressional attention to the plight of these refugees. I think we helped the International Rescue Committee to raise some funds to assist in resettling the refugees, but it was difficult to see that there was any immediate consequence of this trip.

LJ: What did you hope the consequences would be, fund raising or finding homes or what?

EA: We had hoped that we could get the Congress to make it possible for more of the refugees to come to this country, to increase the [immigration] quotas. And we also wanted to raise more funds so that we could help to get them here. But as I recall, I don't think that Congress did increase the quotas and I think all those camps have since been liquidated. They should have been by now. In fact, they have been. But alas, the refugee problem continues as one of the major problems of our times. I felt that this was just one aspect of it. But it certainly awakened me to the tragedy of the plight of the refugee today, and this is a continuing problem. There is hardly a year goes by but what there are not thousands of new refugees created in some part of the world.

In 1958, early in the year, friends of mine in the DFL party began to urge me to seek the nomination of the party for United States Senator. In the election of 1958 the DFL nominee would be opposing Senator Edward J. Thye. Among the people who urged me to run were Senator Humphrey, and Governor Freeman and Lieutenant Governor Rolvaag and quite a number of my friends around the state. I think they felt that I would have the best chance of defeating Senator Thye because I was perhaps best known on account of my having been in Denmark and having been in public since that time a good bit. I was a little reluctant to consider this but I did consider it and gradually I began to decide that I would do this. And a committee was formed to support my candidacy.

About that time, or soon thereafter, there was a special election in Wisconsin when Senator William Proxmire was elected, much to everybody's surprise. His election showed that this was going to be a very good Democratic year. No one had really thought the Democrats had very much chance in Minnesota before that time and indeed I think one reason that people wanted me to run was because they thought, well, probably we can't win so let's let a woman try it. This was one time when I felt that there really this let me see the problems of being a woman in politics, which I had not really felt previously. However, soon after Proxmire's election, when it was apparent that there was a Democratic trend that year, or at least it was believed that there was, others in the state of Minnesota began to be interested in the nomination. Among those others were Congressman Eugene McCarthy and Lieutenant Governor Rolvaag and I think there were one or two others whose names escape me at the moment. But in any case, suddenly it seemed as if the field was quite full of candidates.

A number of people then began to urge me instead of running for the Senate to run for Congress in the first congressional district. I considered this but I decided against it for several reasons. One was that I felt that my primary interest in the area in which I would be able to make a

11 contribution was in the international affairs field. This had been my primary concern since I had gone into politics and I felt as a Congressman for the first district that I wouldn't have much opportunity to be involved in international questions, mostly I would be involved in questions relating to agriculture and local interests. So I wasn't very much interested in running for Congress. Also I frankly did not want to campaign every two years. I felt I would always be campaigning. I didn't think that I would have much time with my family, much time at all for private life. I was willing to devote myself wholeheartedly to the office, but I didn't want to entirely give up my family. My husband also agreed with me. He did not want me to run for Congress, but he was willing for me to seek the nomination for the Senate.

So I made it clear that I would not run for the Congress but I intended to try to get the nomination of the DFL party for the Senate. I also made it clear that if I didn't get the party's endorsement that I would not run in the primary. Quite a vigorous campaign developed and the contest rather quickly became one between me and Eugene McCarthy because Rolvaag dropped out at a fairly early stage, decided against pursuing it.

LJ: May I just back up a little bit?

EA: Yes.

LJ: About when were these things developing?

EA: Early in '58, the spring, or in '57? Well, I began to think about it early in '58. And I believe that the Wisconsin election which started everybody thinking about it must have been in about February or March, perhaps. Up until that time, I was the only one, I think. After that was when others entered the field.

The state DFL convention at which the endorsement was to be made was held in June, I believe, in Rochester, Minnesota, that year. This experience of campaigning around the state, and I campaigned as vigorously as if I were already a candidate, was a wonderful experience. It's one that I have never regretted, even though I did not win the endorsement. I got to know the whole state of Minnesota better than I ever could have in any other way. I developed an even greater fondness and respect for the people of this state even though it was a very rigorous campaign. I had to drive my own car much of the time I went alone around the state, although gradually I had one friend, a woman by the name of Mrs. Ruth Bye from Litchfield, who was so enthusiastic about my candidacy that she volunteered to drive with me. She did drive with me I think for several of my big trips.

I had also the support of a very vigorous volunteer committee and my campaign manager was Mr. Phil Duff, who is the publisher and editor…

JM: I remember that.

EA: …of the Red Wing Daily Republican Eagle. At that time Phil was a Democrat or at least an independent. Since that time he has become a Republican. But he was my enthusiastic campaign manager and he was a very good one, very able and enormously helpful. I also had one or two full-time paid assistants and a very good volunteer committee of women that I think Mrs. Geri Joseph, now the Democratic National Committeewoman, headed. My family, Mrs. Hedin and Mrs. Chesley, both helped a great deal. All my friends were enormously helpful and so by the time June convention came I really had quite a formidable organization.

I also felt that I learned a good bit that could have been disillusioning to me about politics because a number of the people that I would have thought would be supporting me did not do so because they didn't wish to take sides in this contest between me and McCarthy. I was disillusioned -- I think I was more realistic after that about politics and political leaders. I accepted this as the reality and I didn't certainly become bitter about it. The Governor, of course, was not able to take a position. Neither Governor Freeman nor Senator Humphrey took a position in favor of either one of us. I think, however, that because their staff members were divided -- I mean most of Governor Freeman's top staff people were supporting me, Mrs. Dorothy Jacobson, in particular, and there were others who supported me; on the other hand, most of Senator Humphrey's top staff associates supported McCarthy. So people in the state got the impression, whether it was true or not, I don't know, but I think McCarthy did his best to make people believe that it was true, that Senator Humphrey was supporting him and not me. And on the other hand some of Governor Freeman's friends were trying to give people the impression that I was supported by the Governor.

I felt that McCarthy was unfair in his accusations against me. He, of course, campaigned on the fact that he had been in Congress for twelve years and he really deserved the support of the party and also he would be experienced and would know how to serve, whereas I had never served in any public office except appointive positions. He also claimed, which was not true and this I did not appreciate, he claimed that my supporters were raising the issue against his Catholicism, and actually I had been scrupulous in not only avoiding this issue myself, not making it an issue, but with all my followers I was very insistent that this not be an issue, because it was not, in my mind, it shouldn't have been. But McCarthy did insinuate and indeed said openly that we were against him because he was a Catholic. This was before, you see, John Kennedy had been elected and there was still quite a bit of this feeling, I think, which McCarthy capitalized on, that a Catholic would always be discriminated against. Actually I had as many Catholics on my committee as McCarthy did.

McCarthy also claimed that I was not supported by labor and he was. Well, this was again only a half-truth. I had considerable labor support. I'd say the labor organizations were divided between us, but McCarthy certainly had the big guns, you might say, in St. Paul, which was one of the strong holds of the labor movement.

But in any case, McCarthy won the endorsement of the party at Rochester. I made what you would call a good showing. I think that we came within, well, what was the vote? I can't remember the exact vote, but his victory was not overwhelming.

LJ: Was this one of those that went several ballots in order to decide?

EA: Yes, it went several ballots. Maybe about three. In the end, of course, he won and I made almost immediately a -- what do you call it concession speech which was one of the more difficult speeches in my life because all my supporters were backstage crying. And I had to comfort them and tell them not to feel so badly and assure them that I didn't feel so badly. In fact, I don't think I did feel as badly as they did.

LJ: Why do you think you lost?

EA: I think I lost in part because I was a woman. This was one of the arguments that the McCarthy people had used, that a woman could not be elected in Minnesota. I think myself that a woman could have been elected, but I think this was one of the reasons why I lost. I believe also that the arguments that McCarthy had about his having been in Congress for twelve years and that he deserved to be promoted to the Senate; so to speak, I think that this was very appealing to many people.

And then I think that I lost because I did not have the support of my natural allies and friends at the top levels in the party. This is a realistic way of looking at politics but it is true. And I decided from that time forward one should never engage in a political contest or nomination unless you know in advance that you're going to have the support of those really influential people because lots of people look to the top leaders of the party wanting to know what they wanted. This is the nature of a political party. And when they found that the leadership of the party -- which I had always supported and which I had thought would be my best support -- when I found that they were unable, I understood why they weren't but nevertheless they were unable to support me, then I simply didn't have enough top support and I wasn't able to get the grass roots support or enough delegate support because there were enough people that didn't want to take a position.

Also, I believe that there were some of the labor delegates didn't support me because they thought I would be more independent than McCarthy in the sense that they could always be sure that McCarthy would be taking the position that they wanted and they weren't sure whether I would or not. I think it was an interesting to me in 1968, just ten years later, when McCarthy opposed Humphrey in the presidential election. Many of the people who had supported McCarthy back in '58 came to me and said, "If only we had supported you in 1958, we wouldn't have had this awful situation." But that's history. I don't regret that effort on my part, but I did decide that I wouldn't seek public office again. I felt that I had learned a great deal, maybe made some small contribution to our political process in the state, but I didn't wish to try again.

LJ: The DFL at that time didn't have the factions that it did before, or would you say this was a factional split within the party?

EA: No, I would not say that it was a factional split. I would say that the DFL party has -- had at that time at least -- certain well identified groups. I had, for example, many more of the University people. I had more of the party's what you might call intellectuals. McCarthy had more of the labor people. I had more of the farm people. I had, I believe, more of the active women. So I think we had these different groups. I think McCarthy had more strength on the Iron Range than I did, which is a significant group in the DFL party. There were not factions but there were these different groups, and I suppose the one group in which I was the weakest was the labor group and St. Paul. Ramsey County has a large delegation. I had a majority, I believe, in Hennepin County. Of course, McCarthy was from Ramsey County and because I was from the outstate region, the first district, of course, was solidly behind me, but that wasn't in votes in the convention anything like what McCarthy had with Ramsey County.

LJ: Compared to '68, this is quite reversed. McCarthy's position seems to be quite different in '58 than in '68.

EA: Yes, the situation had changed a great deal by 1968. And historically it is a rather interesting development to consider what happened to the party in those years between '58 and '68. I suppose the Vietnam War had a good bit to do with it. I would say, however, that personalities have always played maybe almost too great a role in every political party, and in the DFL party, and I believe that our personalities played a role in that campaign. I think that McCarthy has an appealing personality. I think I also had a good bit of attractiveness to the voters of Minnesota, especially the independent voters. I believe actually if I could have gotten the party's endorsement, I believe that I would have won.

[End of side 1; beginning of side 2]

LJ: One thing I did want to ask you about was Humphrey's running for the presidency, which he did in 1960. He must have been thinking about it earlier, in the late '50s.

EA: Yes, he was, and I was one of his close advisors in the period leading up to 1960 primary when he sought the nomination and was running against John F. Kennedy. He entered these primaries, of course, early in the year and had decided in late '59, I believe, to do so. Although I was one who did not think that he should go into the primaries. I thought that there would be too many obstacles that he simply couldn't overcome. One of them being money.

I also felt, perhaps because I had been sensitized about the Catholic issue in my own little campaign in '58, I felt that this would almost inevitably become an issue. I didn't think it would be good for Humphrey to be even accused of being anti-Catholic. Humphrey was one of the most unprejudiced people that I have ever known. He was a vigorous supporter of religious freedom and he was not opposing Kennedy on any such grounds. But of course this was and did become

an issue, both in Wisconsin and in West Virginia. It was a sub rosa issue, it never really got out into the open, but nevertheless, I'm sure that it did play a part.

There were other reasons too, why Humphrey lost the struggle in 1960, but I thought it was unwise for him to have gone into the contest at that time. However he did so, and I helped as much as I could up to the time that there was no further opportunity for him.

In 1960, of course, after Kennedy got the nomination it was rather difficult for the Minnesota Humphrey supporters, of whom I was one, to transfer our allegiance to the Kennedy candidacy. However, formally we do so. I did not, however, attend the Democratic National Convention in 1960, although I had been elected as a delegate-at-large for Minnesota. One reason why I didn't attend was because my son was getting married just at that time here in Minnesota and I naturally wanted to be here for his wedding. That was a very important personal consideration. But even if it hadn't been for that, I had decided that I really didn't think I wanted to go through the kind of contest that I believed would take place in San Francisco and was sure of the outcome of it. A group of us had tried to get Adlai either to make up his mind early in the summer of 1960 to go in or else to stay out, but Adlai didn't make up his mind until very late, of course, and his effort was doomed to failure, a last minute decision on his part.

In 1960 after Kennedy was nominated I was asked to make a few speeches, one or two outside the state for Kennedy, which I did. But I did not play a very active role in the 1960 campaign. My reserve about Kennedy was more on the basis of my having seen the way the Kennedy forces operated in the primary campaigns in Wisconsin and West Virginia. I felt that this was a kind of very ruthless machine operation that was quite different than Minnesota politics and I wasn't sure if I really wanted to be involved in it.

My husband and I began planning in the summer of 1960 that right after the election that we would visit our daughter, who was by that time living in India with her husband. They had been there for about two and a half years. We wanted to visit them and also I had never been to India, nor to the Far East. So we planned a trip through the Far East, the long way to India. We left, I think, the day after the election. In fact, we left Minnesota in the morning when we didn't even know whether Kennedy had been elected or not. It was not until later that day that it became fairly clear and actually it wasn't until several weeks later when we were on a ship at sea that we got the final news of his election. But we believed by the end of the day -- I remember we changed trains in Chicago, we took a train to Chicago and then a train out to the West Coast -- we got the papers very excitedly in Chicago and learned that it seemed assured, Kennedy's election seemed assured.

We went by Danish freighter; the Hulda Maersk was the name of this freighter, a Danish ship of the A. P. Moller line. This line was the largest Danish shipping line, mostly freighters. I had christened one of the Maersk ships when I was in Denmark as ambassador, and according to the Danish custom the person who christens the ship is supposed to take a voyage on the ship. I

16 wasn't able to do it at that time, but I was invited to go with the ship, the Hulda Maersk in 1960. We started out from Los Angeles in November, early November just a few days after the election, and we sailed on the ship all the way to Singapore with stops at first in Japan, Yokohama and Tokyo, and then we went to Manila, to Hong Kong, to Saigon, to Djakarta, to Bangkok, and to Singapore. That took almost six weeks. We had stops of a number of days and in one or two places a week of ten days.

This Danish freighter was a delightful experience and certainly one of my favorite ways of traveling, although I hadn't ever traveled by this kind of freighter before. There were about twelve passengers on the ship and in addition to my husband and myself, my brother, Dr. William J. Moore, at that time of Grant's Pass, Oregon, and his wife were fellow passengers. The four of us had happy times together and wonderfully not only restful journey but you see the life of those cities in Asia from quite a different viewpoint than if you were traveling on a luxury liner or by air. We enjoyed this very much. Oftentimes our ship would be anchored out in the harbor so we'd have to alight from the ship, sometimes going down a ladder into a small boat to get into shore. I could see why there is actually a ruling which is supposed to be observed by the shipping lines that no person over fifty years old is allowed to take these voyages.

Maybe because you really have to be something of an athlete in order to negotiate this and also there usually are not medical doctors on these ships. Of course my brother was a medical doctor so we weren't concerned about that, but we did find that this was a rigorous way to travel and also fascinating.

I felt that I learned a good bit and that visit meant, of course, in every place where we were I had the opportunity to meet and be briefed by American officials so that I was able to get a little idea of what was going on in that part of the world. I especially remember two of the visits which I had or -- well, more than two actually, when I start to think about it. It seemed as if the ferment which later erupted more violently, of course, in Southeast Asia was very apparent to us at that time and we became much concerned with it. We met also some very fascinating people from the mainland of China through our consular officials in Hong Kong, one of whom, Dr. Joseph Anderson Shi, we have kept in touch with since that time. He was the head of a research institute about what was really going on in mainland China. The astonishing thing was that here was this Chinese scholar - he had spent a number of years then, of course, in Hong Kong as a refugee but here was this man who had been educated in China, he had been educated, I should say, in missionary schools. He had had a teacher whose name was Joseph Anderson and that was why his name was Joseph Anderson Shi because he admired this American teacher so much that he'd adopted his name when he left the school. But in any case, the communication that we were able to have and very congenial spirit that we felt and the understanding that we had in just that one evening that we spent together at dinner was astonishing, because I had always thought, you know, "East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,” but this evening and indeed all the conversations that I had on that trip in that part of the world made me realize the

old "East is East and West is West” dictum didn’t hold any more because we did feel that we were able to communicate with these people.

LJ: You were just as a tourist?

EA: Yes, I was just as a tourist. But, of course, whenever you travel even as a tourist and if you have been an official of the United States government as an ambassador, the American officials everywhere are really very courteous and very helpful in arranging meetings for me. Without their help I wouldn1t have been able to meet these people. But with the help of the embassies in most places I did have many valuable meetings. We spent more than a week in Indonesia and we met some very interesting people in Indonesia and learned a good bit about what was going on there at that time.

I was very disappointed not to have more time in Saigon because we had been reading just a little bit here and there about the infiltration from the North, from North Vietnam, and about the beginnings of the terrorist activity of the Viet Cong. And I wanted so much to get a better picture of it. The people there in the embassy, some friends of friends -- friends of Arthur Naftalin's who had been there for several years -- were especially anxious to talk to me because they wanted me to carry back home the story of what was going on. They felt that the American people just didn't have any idea of what was happening in Vietnam. And they didn’t. We didn’t. I can remember what you could read in the newspapers was just a little line here and there. No one paid any attention to it or was even remotely interested in it. So I had been especially looking forward to this stay in Saigon. But unfortunately our ship’s schedule changed so that we had only a couple of days there. And worst of all I became ill with some very badly abscessed teeth en route from Hong Kong to Saigon. I was so ill that I had a high fever and my brother was giving me antibiotics. We cabled ahead to make arrangements for me to see a dentist immediately on my arrival in Saigon, and I was so ill that I was unable to attend the dinner that evening that had been arranged by these friends in Saigon. They met us at the ship and they took us to the dentist and while we sat in the dentist's office, this desperate American was telling me, talking to me all the time about how serious the situation was, pleading with me when I got back home to go to all the high level officials that I knew and tell them to pay attention to what was going on in Saigon. It really was an alarming situation. And I must say that I felt very disappointed that I was so ill that I just couldn't go to the dinner, I couldn't meet the people that he had wanted me to meet, the Vietnamese people. It was interesting -- the dentist who extracted my teeth was an American- trained dentist, a very good dentist, and his wife was in the Senate, a member of the Senate in Saigon, and he himself later was a member of one of the cabinets. His name was Dr. Philip Van Toh. I incidentally met him again when I visited Saigon and visited Vietnam in late 1967. But this was an interesting coincidence that I met him at that time. He also was very disappointed that I wasn't able to stay for that evening. But that was my first visit to Saigon. I wasn't able to follow up on it when I got back home because actually by the time I got home, it was a good bit later and the situation had changed in Washington.

We proceeded from Singapore to Delhi by air, partly because the ship was going to be quite a bit slower from then on and we wanted to get to Delhi, where we arrived in January of 1961. Our daughter and her family were living in Defense Colony, which is sort of not exactly a suburb but an outlying area of New Delhi. They had rented a house for us just about two blocks from their house so we kept house for those six months that we lived in New Delhi, which was quite an experience because this is different to keep house in India than it is anyplace else in the world, I am sure. We had a household staff of six or seven people because there's a different person to do every job in India. And we also, of course, had the problems of marketing and all those things that I wouldn't have been able to do.

I had a lecture tour, which had been arranged by the Indian Council of World Affairs and the Asian Foundation, so that my lectures took me all around the country. I don't remember exactly how many lectures I made, but we visited almost every important city in India, well, not every one, but very many, at least a dozen. We also visited Nepal. We were there for about one week. We also spent three weeks in Kashmir on a houseboat, which was indeed the nearest thing to Heaven that I expect to find on this earth, excepting the utter poverty of the people in Kashmir. It's beyond belief. Yet they seem so peaceful and I suppose resigned; not content but resigned. However, this was indeed a little Shangri-la. And in June of 1961 we returned home via Europe.

LJ: Did your brother and his wife stay with you all through this period?

EA: Yes, my brother and his wife stayed with us nearly all that time while we were in India. They didn't travel around the country with us all the time. They went once or twice with us on my lecture trips, but mostly they did their own traveling within the country and we traveled mostly by plane. Once or twice on nearby visits from Delhi, such as to Agra, to the Taj Mahal, which was just a sightseeing trip, we went by car. My daughter and her husband had a car so we were able to make a few trips by car, but mostly we traveled by plane.

I met many of the Indian officials at that time including Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi and I made a number of I think important contacts with Indian officials, some of whom I met later at the United Nations. But I didn't actually go to India with the idea of -- well, I went partly, I suppose, in the first place to see our daughter -- but I also, of course, wanted to learn as much as I could about the country. I didn't go with the idea of any particular political mission or role. I did feel that because I was there at the beginning of the Kennedy administration, it was a good time to be talking to the Indian people because they were all extremely curious and seriously concerned about the new administration and how the Kennedy administration would differ from the previous one.

I found myself as an unofficial interpreter or representative, you might say, of the Kennedy administration, even though I was not a member of it. I did receive a letter from Sargent Shriver during that time asking me if I were interested in a diplomatic post with the administration. And I don't quite understand why, but I don't think I answered the letter. This was not like me to not

answer letters because I always have believed one should always answer every letter. Perhaps it was because we were traveling and it was difficult, but also because I was undecided. I wasn't sure if I wished to again have a diplomatic post. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, really, so I didn't answer it. When I came home, Senator Humphrey contacted me about this. Apparently Sargent Shriver, who had been sort of the one that Kennedy had asked to find people to serve in important positions in the administration, had contacted Humphrey. At that time I told Senator Humphrey that if a suitable post was available that I would be glad to consider it. But I think nothing much happened about this until 1962.

I think it was fairly early in 1962 I was asked to come to Washington to meet with advisors of President Kennedy, the people on the White House staff who were in charge of selecting diplomatic appointees. Senator Humphrey took me to the White House for a breakfast, I remember. It must have been in the spring, probably early spring of 1962. The subject of my serving in an Eastern European country was one which was discussed.

President Kennedy did have as a goal opening up relations with Eastern Europe. He felt that perhaps one of the things that would help would be to send a different kind of diplomat to an Eastern European country. He felt that our career diplomats had been maybe overly cautious and hadn't made enough efforts to improve relations with the people and with the governments of Eastern Europe and felt that this was something that we should try. And I think that it was because of this that I was interested in considering a post in Eastern Europe, having always been involved with the question or concerned with the question of relations with Communist nations. I felt this would be really quite a challenge.

I was told that there were two posts in Eastern Europe which were unfilled. One was Romania and the other was Bulgaria. I didn't know too much about life in either one of those countries. I think I felt the Romania would have been perhaps more interesting than Bulgaria and I believe that I conveyed this to President Kennedy, or someone on his staff, but almost by the time that I conveyed this a career diplomat was appointed to Romania. So that left Bulgaria. So I really didn't have much choice. I was assigned to Bulgaria.

Bulgaria was one of the two remaining countries (Romania was the other one) which were at that time still legations and were still represented by the United States as ministers rather than ambassadors. I should say the United States representatives were not ambassadors, because our missions there were legations. There was also, I believe, one country in the Middle East, one or two countries in the Middle East, which we had not yet raised our missions to the status of embassy. So I was finally appointed in May, in early May, I don't remember the exact date, as the United States Minister to Bulgaria.

LJ: This was May of '62?

EA: Yes, May of '62.

LJ: Unless you want to talk about the appointment, before we get to Bulgaria, I have a few other questions.

EA: Yes.

LJ: One is that you talked about your lack of initial enthusiasm for Kennedy. I would like to ask you about that. Also about Freeman when he lost the election that year and then appointed Secretary of Agriculture. You were out of the country when all this was going on, I suppose.

EA: Yes, because you see we left Minnesota the day after the election in 1960. So I didn't know that Freeman was defeated until I guess the same day that I left. I was far away when I began to hear these reports that Freeman was appointed as Secretary of Agriculture. I later heard something about the inside story of how this came about, but I wasn't in the country at that time.

I'm sure that one of the reasons for my really lack of enthusiasm for the Kennedy administration, especially at first, was because the loyalties of all of us here in Minnesota, especially my own involvement had been so strongly in support of Humphrey that it was very hard for us suddenly to transfer our enthusiasm to the man who had defeated Humphrey. This was part of it, no doubt, but also as I mentioned previously, the Kennedy operation was very different kind of political organization than we had here in Minnesota. I felt that it was more ruthless and more interested in political power than in issues.

LJ: Were you still concerned about this when you were approached for becoming a minister?

EA: Yes, really I'm sure that one of the reasons I hadn't answered Sargent Shriver's letter was because I just really wasn't that interested. And it wasn't until I got back home and I began to see some of the things that Kennedy was doing that I felt were in the right direction and I felt, well, this is foolish for me to continue to stay out of any involvement on the basis of my former loyalties or my feelings of doubt about whether or not Kennedy was going to be a good President. I began to see that a man does change with the office. I think Kennedy did. I also felt that so far as his policies toward Eastern Europe were concerned, I felt that they were in the right direction and that it would be an opportunity for me perhaps to make some small contribution. So I was interested in trying.

JM: Did you ever get to know Sargent Shriver and what type of a person he was?

EA: I didn't get to know him. I did meet him. He came to Minnesota once or twice. I didn't get to know Kennedy very well. I do remember that soon after I was appointed as minister to Bulgaria I was invited to a big dinner, a white-tie dinner, at the White House. And President Kennedy himself came to the door to greet me. I came to the dinner with Secretary Freeman.

He was then Secretary of Agriculture and he and Mrs. Freeman were invited to that dinner. I remember that they had come by my hotel and I came with them. And I remember the cordiality with which President Kennedy greeted me. I hadn't yet paid my farewell call on him, or paid the

sort of official formal call that I would make before I left for Bulgaria. This must have been in late May or early June when I was invited to this dinner, but in any case, he greeted me very cordially as if I were someone he had been waiting to see and said, "It's a sin to send you to Bulgaria." I suppressed my natural reaction which was to say, "Well, you're the one that's doing it, Mr. President." But in any case, when I did meet him, he obviously had been well briefed on Bulgaria and he seemed to be really interested in what I could do there. And he said that he would be very anxious for me to come and see him on my first return and he hoped that I would have the same success in getting through to people there that I had in Denmark. And he, I believe, really did want to open up our relations with the Eastern European countries. And this was what especially interested me. Did you have any other questions?

JM: Well, just coming back to India, when Johanna was there, was she teaching school and did she find living quite difficult with the family?

EA: Yes. After they were there for about a year, I believe, Johanna started to teach in the American school in New Delhi. This was a school which was started by the American Embassy and was essentially started for the children of the American Embassy and other American missions like our AID mission. But it very quickly was opened to Indian children. In fact, I believe this was established from the beginning that a certain percentage of the children should be Indian children so that it wouldn't be just a school for foreigners. Johanna had never been trained as a teacher. She had taken her master’s degree in child development at the University of Minnesota and in psychology, child psychology. She didn't have a teacher’s certificate. But it was not easy to get teachers for this school who were living right there in Delhi, and so they were very happy to give her a position. She taught mathematics, which was something that she hadn't been trained for, but she'd always been good at math and liked math. And she enjoyed this very much and she did teach at this school for, I believe, about two years.

I think the most difficult thing for Johanna, which was something I understood even better after we were there, was the really unspeakable poverty. When you first go to India, any person from this country who is at all sensitive is going to have a terrible culture shock. It is unbelievable. When Johanna wrote to us after maybe a few months that she was feeling better now, but the first month that she was there, she had gone around with a lump in her throat nearly all the time. I think this was the most difficult thing for her. So far as the family living was concerned, she didn't have the same adjustment that some girls might have had because she and her husband lived in their own home. Her husband’s mother lived with them and it wasn't the other way around. It is traditional in many Indian families, for it's a matriarchal system, you might say, that the son goes to live in his mother's home and brings his wife there.

This I think would have been very difficult. Johanna would have been in a different position then than she was with the fact that it was their home and the mother lived with them. And they got along very well. The mother didn't speak English so the communication was difficult. I think this was one of the reasons that Johanna decided after the first year that she wanted to teach was

because to be in the same house with your mother-in-law and not be able to talk, even though Johanna was trying to learn Hindi, was difficult, I am sure, although she never complained about it and they got along very amicably. Nevertheless Kiren, her little daughter, was in nursery school and there just simply wasn't enough for her to do, also, because there was a cook and there were other servants in the house. There wasn't enough housework for her to do. So she was very happy when she had this opportunity to teach in the American school.

JM: Well, I thought so many of the Indian boys came over here and were trained and then went back to their own country to teach. And this is what I thought Som was going to do.

EA: No. He was employed in the Indian Ministry of Defense when he came to this country. He was a psychologist for the Indian Ministry of Defense. He was in the personnel division in testing people to make the proper assignment for them then in the defense forces. First he came with the object of just getting another masters degree. He had one master’s degree from an Indian university. I should say that his family was from what is now Pakistan. They were refugees in India at first but they rather quickly became settled. He had come to this country on a Fulbright [scholarship], intending to go back after just one or two years, but he was able to continue his scholarship and worked for his Ph.D., and actually he was the first Indian student to get a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Minnesota. He was in this country about four years all together. And about two of those years he and Johanna were married.

When he went back to India, he went back to the Indian Ministry of Defense to the same position which he had had previously. I think this was a source of dissatisfaction and frustration for him because he had learned so much in this country and wanted to see changes and wanted to help make changes in the Indian bureaucracy and he found that almost everything was conspiring, you might say, to keep things the way they were. I think this same kind of frustration has been experienced by so many foreign students not only from India but from other countries in Asia, too, who go back to their own country with the idea that they will be able to contribute something. Many of them do become hopelessly disillusioned and so they come back to the United States.

We were very happy that our son-in-law and Johanna decided to return to the United States. One of the reasons that we had wanted to visit with them was to sort of see how they were getting along and what their prospects were there and if we felt that they wouldn't have the opportunity to progress in his work, that if they were going to return to this country, they should come soon, before he was too old. I think we did discuss this with them a number of times and then later that year they decided to come back to the United States and they did come. And our son-in-law became an American citizen.

JM: Do the Indian people object to their race marrying whites?

EA: Yes, I think that there is some feeling of prejudice against marriage of foreigners, especially of white foreigners, but I don't think that Johanna, herself, experienced this. I think his family

accepted her very warmly and wholeheartedly, but I think there is that kind of prejudice. There is a good bit of color prejudice in India.

LJ: Where are they living now?

EA: They're living now in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. When they first returned in December of 1961, it was in the middle of the academic year, of course, but they were fortunate they were able to get a position almost immediately at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point. At that time it was a state college and since then it's now become a university system. They stayed at Stevens Point only for about six months when they got a position at the University of Vermont, when Som got a position there. They went to Burlington, Vermont. They lived there for four years and then they moved to New Hampshire, to the University of New Hampshire, where Som taught at the University there for two years. They were beginning to feel that they preferred to live in the Middle West and so they were glad when this opening occurred at Oshkosh, at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. They have now been there for almost three years and I believe that our son-in-law has tenure there now and probably will be there for some time at least.

LJ: While we are on the subject of your children, what is your son doing now?

EA: Our son is a psychiatrist. He attended the University of Minnesota. He also attended the University of Minnesota Medical School. He graduated from the medical school in 1963. I came back from Bulgaria that summer to attend his graduation. I was also invited to come for consultations in the Department of State that same time, and also that same time I was awarded an honorary degree, a Doctor of Laws degree at Carleton College in June of 1963. So I was able to be here for several weeks and attend our son's graduation. He interned at the University of Vermont in the Mary Fletcher Hospital at Burlington, Vermont. It was a coincidence that our daughter and son were both in Burlington, Vermont, for that year. I visited them once or twice when I was home on leave from Bulgaria.

I might say, skipping ahead a bit, that in a Communist post, it seems to be not only customary but I think it's really almost essential that everyone, not only the chief of mission but everyone, get away from the country for a little break every few months because the strains of living in a Communist country and serving in a post in this part of the world are really very intense and you must have a little break from it now and then. So I had consultations in Washington almost every six months, I believe, which brought me back to the country a couple of times a year for rather short periods, but nevertheless it was important, which I will go into more later.

After our son completed his internship at the Mary Fletcher Hospital, he had decided before the completion of that year that he wished to specialize in psychiatry. He received a residency at the University of Rochester, New York, and he went to the University of Rochester, New York, in the summer of 1964. He spent the next three years there as a resident in psychiatry.

At the end of that time he entered the Navy, in which he had enlisted in 1964, under the Berry Plan at that time, the so-called Berry Plan. A doctor in certain specialties could enlist in the Navy and then could continue his specialized training until it was completed and then do his military service in the Navy. So as soon as our son completed his residency he was then assigned by the Navy to the Chicago Great Lakes Naval Hospital, which is one of the large base hospitals of the Navy. And he spent the next two years there as a Navy psychiatrist. By that time, he and his wife had three children, all little girls. I should have said at the time of our son's marriage in August of 1960, that he married a Red Wing girl, who had been his high school sweetheart, Margaret Kaehler, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Kaehler of Red Wing. He and Margaret were married before our son was finished with his medical school. Of course in 1960 he still had several years left, more than two years. Margaret taught school for those years that they stayed while he finished his medical training.

After he left the Navy in June of 1969, he received a position at the University of Rochester, New York, and he is on the staff of the University there as an assistant professor and does some teaching. He's also the clinical director of the in-patient service of the Rochester Community Mental Health Center, which is one of the new community mental health centers that has been established around the country. So that he combines teaching with some administrative work and also clinical work. He has about thirty people on his staff, residents, nurses, nursing assistants, and he has some private patients, which I think is a very heavy load for so young a man. But this is where he is at the present time.*

LJ: Well, shall we move on into Bulgaria? Do you have more time this morning?

[Tape recorder temporarily turned off.]

LJ: You were a delegate to the Atlantic Congress in London?

EA: Yes. This was a meeting of private citizens from all of the North Atlantic Treaty countries. This organization was I believe instigated by a number of leaders in the United States who felt that the sort of broader purposes and non-military purposes of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance were beginning to be lost sight of and one of the things that might be done to increase this understanding and support for NATO was to have a citizens' congress to discuss these questions and to try to revive the citizens' support and interest in the North Atlantic Treaty. I was asked to be a member of this organization and to be a delegate to this first Atlantic Congress, which was held in London in the summer of 1959. I don't remember all the American delegates, but I do remember several of them whom I had not met before and whom I enjoyed getting to know during that week or ten day period that we were in London. One of them was Mrs. Mary Pillsbury Lord; she was very active in the organization. Another one of the members was Mr.

* September 1974 edit: Our son is now on the staff of the Gundersen Clinic in La Crosse, Wisconsin, having been there since August 1972. 25

Henry Kissinger, who is now a special assistant to President Nixon.* At that time he was a professor at Harvard. Another one was Robert Strausz-Hupe, a professor from the University of Pennsylvania, who was well known as a foreign policy advisor to the man who was then Vice President of the United States, who's now the President, Mr. Richard Nixon. Robert Strausz- Hupe was also a distinguished author of a very prestigious and important volume on international relations which my husband and I had been reading and referring to from the years that we were in Denmark and had admired his work. Robert Strausz-Hupe is today our ambassador in Ceylon.** There were possibly ten or twelve, maybe more, American delegates to this congress in London. Oh, another one of the American delegates that I hadn't known before was General James Gavin. He was one of the leading members of our congress and I believe made one of the speeches at the congress.

The congress was somewhat disappointing to me. The American delegates, it seemed to me, lacked organization. We hadn't known each other long enough before the congress. It didn't seem to me that there were enough people on the American delegation that really had any political experience. And what political experience I had had, had certainly taught me that if you wish to accomplish anything at a congress like this, you must have objectives clearly in mind before you get there. You must have some contacts with others at the congress from other countries. The result that came out of the congress were resolutions and the adoption of position papers, which had been drawn up by others and which I felt were too general, too vague, and really not effective in terms of any action coming from the congress. I felt it was rather meaningless in the end. It was interesting to meet all these people and we had some good conversations, private conversations, with them but nothing really came out of the congress. The congress perhaps did lead to the establishment of what's called the Atlantic Institute, which is a center for students from all the North Atlantic Treaty countries to study. I believe the institute was at first in Brussels. I believe it's now in Paris. Maybe this was the most important thing that came out of the congress. But I think that the problem with which the congress was supposed to deal, namely the solution of political problems, political associations within the North Atlantic Treaty so that it wouldn't be exclusively a military alliance, this problem wasn't really dealt with. And from that point of view to me it was quite disappointing and not really important.

LJ: Shall we move on to Bulgaria and discuss when you talked to President Kennedy about what your role would be?

EA: Yes, that was encouraging that President Kennedy really seemed to want to improve relations, wanted to open up contacts with the countries in Eastern Europe. And so I felt by the time I had had my briefings in the State Department and had prepared myself to go, I really became very enthusiastic about the assignment. Although I also realized that it was going to be a very difficult assignment and one quite in contrast with the years that I had spent in Denmark.

*September 1974: now Secretary of State ** now in Sweden 26

We were looking forward to it, however, partly just because we realized that it was a rare opportunity and a rare challenge.

I must say that the more that I heard about the issues as I was being briefed, the more concerned I felt as to whether it would be possible to accomplish anything in this country. Because I soon learned, which I hadn't realized before, that Bulgaria was still the most Stalinist in its rule, of all the countries in Eastern Europe. And while [Soviet Premier Nikita] Khrushchev had visited Bulgaria in May and had indicated that there should be some liberalization, up until that time there had been almost no changes within the country from the very severe Stalinist rule that prevailed and had prevailed.

The United States had not had any diplomatic relations with Bulgaria between 1950 and 1960. We had broken relations with Bulgaria because in 1950 the Bulgarian government, the Communist government, had accused the American Minister of espionage. This was a false accusation but it led to the break in relations. And also, a number of the people, of the Bulgarians, who had been employed at the American Legation had been imprisoned at that time and we were unable to secure their release from prison. They had also been falsely accused of espionage. I was informed that one of my major first tasks would be to try to secure the release from prison of Michael Shipkov, who was one of the embassy Bulgarian employees who had been imprisoned in 1950 and sentenced to fifteen years in prison and who still was incarcerated there.

I also learned that even though we had resumed diplomatic relations with Bulgaria in 1960, there had been no progress toward the settlement of either this question of the release from prison of Michael Shipkov, but also there had been no progress in the negotiations that had been going on in Washington toward the settlement of the financial war claims that Americans had against Bulgarians and Bulgarians against the United States. You see, at the time of the war, when Bulgaria became occupied by Germany and entered the war on the German side, the United States seized all the Bulgarian property in the United States and Bulgaria seized all American property in Bulgaria. And these two claims were unequal. We had more property in Bulgaria than the Bulgarians had in the United States and the Bulgarians had refused up to that time to make a just payment or settlement for this. So that I learned that this also, as well as a number of citizenship cases – American citizens residing in Bulgaria who had not been permitted to leave the country to return to the United States – that these would be some of my most pressing diplomatic problems that I should take up after my arrival in Bulgaria.

We arrived in Bulgaria early in July of 1962, or perhaps in mid-July. It was after the Fourth of July, I do remember that. I don’t recall the exact date. We sailed via the U.S.S. Constitution, I believe, a cruise ship, via North Africa and Italy. We disembarked at Genoa – I believe we overnighted in Genoa, took a train to Venice, then we flew from Venice to Vienna and spent several days in Vienna, and then we flew by a special American military plan from Vienna to Bulgaria. I can remember the rather lonely feeling that I had as we set out from Vienna because I

was very much aware – because it was a military plane and because the trip had been made in such stages – that we were going a long way from home and that we were indeed going to a quite different part of the world than that which I had known before.

LJ: Were you a little bit nervous about being imprisoned?

EA: No, I wasn’t nervous at all. No. I wasn’t worried about being imprisoned, in fact, I wasn’t nervous – but I was perhaps a little sad because everything that I had read and learned about conditions prevailing there, I knew that I was leaving the free world and I knew that my life there would be rather cut off, which indeed it was. I also was looking forward to it just simply because I knew that it would be a challenge. I felt it was a very extraordinary opportunity. I remember one of the dinners in Vienna which I attended, I think it was a dinner given by the Ambassador, probably, but in any case, the New York Times correspondent who had been covering Eastern Europe for quite a number of years, he was a veteran correspondent, one of the very best that the New York Times had had in that part of the world, Mike Handler, was his name, M. S. Handler (I believe that he is now almost retired), but in any case, he was a very knowledgeable person and he told me a good bit about Bulgaria and that part of the world, more than I had learned, you might say, in some of my briefings. And he ended up by telling me that he really envied me, that he thought that I was going to the most interesting part of Europe. Because, he said, Bulgaria is the last unspoiled country in Europe. And I wasn't quite sure what he meant by unspoiled, but I think I came to understand it better after I had been in Bulgaria for awhile, because in a sense Bulgaria was at that time still a developing country. It was not only a poor country but it simply hadn't really emerged quite into the twentieth century. Some people told me that Sofia was like a provincial Russian capital and I suppose in a way it was. It certainly was quite different than any place that I had ever been before.

JM: Were you and John alone, or did you have any staff members with you?

EA: No, we went alone. John and I went alone. It so happened, I remember, that one of the people to see us off in Vienna was someone I had known in Minnesota. He was the agricultural attaché in Vienna at that time, Norris Ellertson was his name. He had been a member of Governor Freeman's staff and I had known him here when he was, I believe, first connected with the cooperative movement. He saw us off in Vienna. But the fact that we were going on the military plane, I suppose added to my feelings of slight mystery about the whole trip.

We arrived in Sofia, I think it must have been around noon, and the entire legation staff of Americans was at the airport to greet us. It was a small staff. I think there were only about seventeen Americans there. There were about twenty-three Bulgarians, maybe twenty-one Bulgarians on the staff at that time, but the Bulgarians were not there at the airport, excepting for the driver of my car, Stefan Bonev. The legation officials were all lined up in protocol rank. I said the other day, I think, that protocol was decided on the basis of seniority. This is true so far as ambassadors are concerned, or the chiefs-of-mission, but within an organization, within a

28 mission or within a country, rank is what determines the protocol rating. It's a person's standing in the hierarchy, their importance, so to speak, or their class within the system. It's really most undemocratic a system.

JM: How had all this staff been appointed before you came?

EA: They were mostly career people, you see. In fact, they were all career people. And it was very interesting to me, of course, having had the experience in Denmark, I was prepared better for it in Bulgaria, but once again I found that the deputy chief-of-mission had been acting as the charge d'affaires between the departure of my predecessor and my arrival. My predecessor, I might say, in Bulgaria was a man named Edward Page, everybody called him Eddy Page. He was a career minister who was rather somewhat older than I and he had been there for a number of years, apparently had been quite unhappy there. The man who was in charge during this interim period was a man named Charles Stefan. He was a career officer who had had a number of years in Latin America.

He also, I would say, was of the old school. And I felt that our ideas were not at all on the same wave-length. We had a different approach to diplomacy. I also found that he had taken the same prerogative about my husband's rank, diplomatic rank, which Mr. Sparks had assumed in Denmark. But this time I was prepared.

[End of interview]