Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project
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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project DONALD MICHAEL BISHOP Interviewed by: Charles Stewart Kennedy Initial interview date: September 14, 2010 Copyright 2014 ASDT TABLE OF CONTENTS Background Trinity College Wall Street Georgetown University McGuire Air Force Base Phu Cat Air Base, Vietnam Maxwell Air Force Base Kwang Ju Air Base, Korea Ohio State University U.S. Air Force Academy Entered Foreign Service 1979 Hong Kong; Assistant Information Officer 1981-1983 Taegu, Korea; Branch Public Affairs Officer 1985-1987 Taipei, Taiwan; Information Officer and Spokesman 1987-1991 House of Representatives, Capitol Hill; Congressional Fellow 1991-1992 Training Division, U.S. Information Agency 1992-1994 Course Director for Incoming Foreign Service Officers Dhaka, Bangladesh; Country Public Affairs Officer 1994-1997 Beijing, China; Deputy Public Affairs Officer 1997-2000 Lagos, Nigeria; Country Public Affairs Officer 2000-2001 Abuja, Nigeria; Country Public Affairs Officer 2001-2002 Beijing, China; Deputy Public Affairs Officer 2002-2006 1 Headquarters, United States Marine Corps, The Pentagon 2006-2008 Foreign Policy Advisor to the Commandant The Air Staff, The Pentagon 2008-209 Foreign Policy Advisor to the USAF Chief of Staff Kabul, Afghanistan 2009-2010 Acting Director of Communication and Public Diplomacy Country Public Affairs Officer INTERVIEW Q: Don, let’s start at the beginning. Where and when were you born? BISHOP: I was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 2, 1945. You can tell by my accent that I didn’t spend much time in Tennessee. My father, Robert Milton Bishop, was an aviation cadet from upstate New York sent to Nashville for classification in 1943, and he and hundreds of other cadets were parked at George Peabody College for Teachers, across the street from Vanderbilt, for some weeks. He was smitten by a Peabody coed from Nashville, Anne Selene Rowan, when they met at a USO dance at Father Ryan High School. They were married at Maxwell Army Air Field in Montgomery in 1943. During the war, whenever my father moved to a new phase of pilot training, or to a new assignment, my mother packed up and followed her man -- Florida, Alabama, Mississippi. My mother went home to Nashville to have the baby, me, just as the war in the Pacific was ending. The atomic bombs fell in August, the war ended in September, I was born in October, my father was separated from the Army Air Forces in November, and we moved to upstate New York. I grew up in the northeast -- New York, Connecticut, New Jersey. Eleven months before I was born, my father's first cousin, Donald Michael Sullivan, who had also been his roommate at Union College and the Best Man at his wedding, was killed in the Hürtgen Forest of Germany, an infantryman in the 28th Infantry Division. When I was born, I was given his names. Since I was born just a few weeks after the war ended, I always thought I was one of the very first members of the “Baby Boom,” but I gather those who study American demography call those of us born in 1944 and 1945 the “Victory babies.” Q: Where did the Bishops come from? What do you know about them? BISHOP: I'd call my father's family Yankee. His home town was Elmira, New York. What I know of the family history is that the Bishops came into western New York from New England early in the nineteenth century, part of the internal migration that followed 2 the opening of the new land after the defeat of the Iroquois during the Revolution and the land grants to veterans. My father's family were pretty much upstate New York and northern Pennsylvania people, whose roots were in New England. My father's father, Milton Wilcox Bishop, was born in 1900. He had gone to France in World War I and served with the American Expeditionary Forces in Lorraine, under General Pershing. His unit at the front was the Air Service's 10th Balloon Company, commanded by Captain Dale Mabry. They were in action at Saint-Mihiel. Have you been to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa? The highway that leads to the base from the city is Dale Mabry Highway, named for my grandfather's company commander. After the war -- he was good with figures, and he was a good organizer, so he became a bookkeeper and office manager, and in retirement a public bookkeeper. He worked for a lot of different companies in upstate New York, for Armour and then later for Moore Business Forms. This was in Elmira and a lot of other towns. In his late fifties he was President of the Rediform Federal Credit Union. He and my grandmother retired to Avon Park, Florida. For many years he did local accounting and taxes for small businesses, and he kept the books for the federal housing projects in that part of Florida. He had married my grandmother, Florence Elizabeth Crofutt, when he got back from France. She was also a bookkeeper and office manager. Her great contribution, in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s was to help organize the March of Dimes for Chemung County, New York, twenty years of work that was, I've always assumed, uncompensated -- all to help end polio. This was in addition to raising my father and his sister Mary Lou, and after her unexpected death, Mary Lou’s daughter Kathy. My sister Anne and I happened to be in Elmira when the Salk vaccine inoculations began, and my grandmother put Anne and me at the head of the line. Neither she nor my grandfather were what I would call demonstrative people, but I imagine it was the happiest day of her life, to see all those years of work bear fruit, guaranteeing her own grandchildren would be free of polio. Q: And your mother's family? BISHOP: On my mother’s side, in Tennessee -- her grandfather Joseph Deerie Rowan had emigrated from Ireland in 1895. He was an optician. He had a horse and buggy to carry his sets of lenses around town. He did house calls to give eye exams and work on your glasses. He was an immigrant, but the family became American, and there’s a whole story about that. My grandfather, John Patrick Rowan, was born in Nashville in 1898. He inherited from his father, the immigrant, a sense that the family was Irish. Think of the social circumstances of the time. The Irish immigrants in Tennessee were Catholic in a very Protestant state, and I'm sure his father had an accent. So my mother's father, John, if he were challenged by toughs in the neighborhood asking him, “What are you?” he would say, “I’m Irish.” 3 Tennessee even today doesn’t have many Catholics in its population, so my grandfather's family certainly felt that prejudice, that disposition, against immigrants, particularly the Irish and Catholics, as he was growing up. Come 1917, when America entered the First World War, he was 19. He joined the Tennessee National Guard without telling his parents. His cavalry unit was federalized in July of 1917. He went to the training camps in South Carolina in August of 1917 with the newly formed 30th Division, “Old Hickory.” The War Department waved a magic wand over his cavalry unit, and they became the 114th Machine Gun Battalion. I’ve learned subsequently that the British and the French sent teams to South Carolina to help train the Americans. Then, when they went across the Atlantic, the 30th Division, in the II Corps, was given to the British under Douglas Haig, even though the rest of the American army was gathering in Lorraine under General Pershing. This was to demonstrate allied solidarity. Two divisions were sent to the French, two to the Belgians, two to Italy, and two to the British sector. So the 30th Division, my grandfather included, went through formal phased training with the British Army in Flanders. My grandfather told me when I was young that the British officers and NCOs, in his experience, were just wonderful people. They trained them well, liked the Americans, and knew how to turn them into better soldiers. When the 30th Division went into combat, its great moment was breaking the Hindenburg line at Bellicourt in late September, 1918. My grandfather was gassed in another operation in early October of 1918. The action was formally called the Battle of La Selle River. He told me that, in order to simplify supply and logistics for an American unit in a British area of operations, they wore British-made uniforms and carried Enfield rifles, not Springfields. In that October operation, the 30th Division leapfrogged with Australian units, and many Commonwealth units, including the Dublins, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, were to the left and right of the Americans. When he was picked up, after being gassed, the stretcher bearer asked, “What are you?” He said “I’m Irish” and passed out. He woke up in a British field hospital, because the British provided all the medical infrastructure for the American divisions too. He was in a room being tended by nursing sisters -- when my grandfather told me this, it was the first time I had heard this use of “sisters” to mean nurses -- and there was a flag on every soldier’s bed, say a New Zealand flag, an Australian flag, or an English flag. There was an Irish flag on his bed, thinking he was in one of the Irish regiments of the British Army. At that moment it all snapped in his head, and he realized, “No, I’m not Irish, I’m American.” That was his Americanization moment.