Kessler.-Earl.Pdf

The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project EARL KESSLER Interviewed by: David Reuther Initial interview date: February 23, 2012 Copyright 2012 ADST [Note: Mr. Kessler died before completing this interview] Q: This is a Foreign Affairs Oral History interview with Earl Kessler. Today is the 23rd of February, 2012, and we’re in the Washington, DC suburbs of Northern Virginia. This interview is being conducted under the auspice of The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. I’m David Reuther. Earl, one of the exciting things about this interview is your career spanned 11 secretaries of state. But let’s start at the start. Like myself, you’re a Pacific Northwest boy; born in Portland, I believe. KESSLER: Absolutely. Born in Portland in December 1921 and grew up there. Q: Can you give us a brief sketch of your parents, where they were from? KESSLER: Yes. My father was born in California and moved to Portland as a young man. He had a married older sister living in Portland. So that initially drew him to Portland. He had no particular training to do anything, really. In those days of course not too many people are going to college. Anyway he got a job in Portland but he didn’t like the job and he was with another fellow that came up with him and they decided they just didn’t seem to find any employment that they thought was interesting. They saw an ad in the paper saying we need two young men to learn the typewriter repair business. They thought that would be interesting so they did it. At one point the fellow that came with my father later returned to San Francisco, but my father stayed. He learned the business and later he became very active in the business and to make a long story short the owner of the business later made an arrangement, you can buy my business if you just pay me a little bit every month. A very nice man. He didn’t have any family to leave it to but he wanted to help my father so it was very lucky for my father. So that set him up in business in Portland and he later became the president of the typewriter association in Portland, Oregon. I’ve seen clippings as he was interviewed by the press several times and he was a modest businessman, not terribly wealthy but a modest businessman. I went to the public schools in Portland and later did a first term at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Q: And was your mother a Portland girl too? 1 KESSLER: No, my mother was from Minnesota. Her father was born in Minnesota and so was her mother. And she came West because both of her parents passed away and so she was virtually an orphan, you know, and so the aunt and uncle who lived in Portland took care of her and raise her from the time she was something like 10 or 12 years old, and so she was- that’s how she got to Portland and so she lived in Portland. Q: What was high school in Portland like? KESSLER: Well I went to a very large high school, Grant’s High School, Ulysses S. Grant High School. Interestingly, it was used as the backdrop for the 1995 movie Mr. Holland's Opus. That was quite a well-known movie filmed years later at my high school. Anyway, it was a large high school and I was very interested in anything to do with foreign things; I enjoyed that sort of thing. We had a teacher there that was very, very wonderful. She was a remarkable woman, and she had a Master’s degree, which was not too common in those days for a high school teacher to have a Master’s degree. She coined the phrase, “Pacific Rim” and she was- I read this in the paper several times later- that she coined the phrase “Pacific Rim” and she had a class called “The Pacific Rim” and so it was a terribly interesting class and we were assigned different countries to study all around the Pacific Rim. I got so interested that I told her I was interested in the Foreign Service; she said it’s terribly difficult to get into but you can certainly try and so forth. I remember “civics” class; they called it “civics,” now I guess I don’t know what they call it nowadays but it was called “civics” in those days, government, I suppose it’s called “government” now. Anyway, we studied the various government departments and so on; I studied all the departments and later we had to do a paper and present it in front of the class and describe the department, Department of Interior, Department of Commerce and all that sort of thing. I took the State Department and I focused on the Foreign Service, which I thought was the most interesting. So I gave a speech about the Foreign Service. To get the necessary background information my civics teacher recommended writing the Department of State, in Washington, D.C.. So I wrote to the Department of State, Washington, D.C.; it took weeks and I finally got something back though. And a lot of information and so then later, much later, I wrote another time. But anyway, I made this presentation on the Foreign Service and everyone sort of thought it was kind of interesting. I then went on to try to a major in international relations and I didn’t get too far because as I mentioned, I went to the University of Oregon and I could see the courses weren’t terribly geared to that sort of thing. In the meantime I had written again to the State Department and they sent out a booklet on the Foreign Service test. I think it was one of the very first ones that came out where they even had some sample questions. And so basically, looking at that I thought well, I’m sort of wasting my time here but I didn’t know what to do. 2 So I took a bus from Portland up to Vancouver, British Columbia, because I didn’t have very much money. Of course, my dad thought I was absolutely out of my mind. I went in and talked to the consul general stationed there. The consul general was very amused that I had come from Portland and he was a very nice man, and he said “Well listen, I’ve heard great things about the new setup they have at University of Southern California,” and he said you know a very well-known authority on international relations, Dr. Rufus B KleinSmid- who was internationally known at that time and I was told at that time, but I don’t know if that’s true or not, but he was in the “Guinness Book of Records,” that he had the most decorations of any American living or something- foreign decorations. I don’t know if that’s true or not. [Ed: USC credits itself with establishing the country’s first school of international relations in 1924, but also suggests its school is the third oldest. Nevertheless, USC materials note that “Von KleinSmid was recognized as ‘one of three of the nation's most distinguished citizens’ through the National Institute of Social Sciences Gold Medal Award. On an international level, von KleinSmid received awards from 20 national governments for his achievements.”] Anyway. He said USC was focused on international relations and it would be very good. But he also said of course the other universities are all on the East Coast, and he suggested the best would be Georgetown University. So I returned to Portland and told my dad. He said well I can’t afford to send you to Georgetown University, that’s out of the question. It would cost a fortune to do it, to get in there, if you could get in, and second the cost of travel. And my dad had never been to Washington in his life and no one that I ever knew in those days had ever been to Washington. Q: Now to what do you attribute your interest in international affairs? KESSLER: I think one aspect was my father who was always terribly interested in ships and as a young boy he frequently would be going around the area on business where the ship docks were. I, too, used to love to see the ships. And he was very interested and I was interested too and on more than one occasion we would see people getting off some ship; these were sort of a combination passenger/freighter ships And Dad would approach them and ask, “Are you trying to get into town?” “Well yes, we were told a few blocks up we could hail a taxi.” He said, “Come on, I’ll be glad to take you,” and with that I heard a lot of interesting conversations that Dad had with some of these people. And there was one shipping line that had a lovely combination cargo/passenger vessel. I doubt if it carried more than 50 passengers but it was a very nice ship and it sailed all the way from Copenhagen to Portland the last stop, and it’s amazing. So later on Dad got in contact with one of these fellows as he was driving around one time, and he said I can take you boys, show you the ship if you’d like.

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