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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project ANDREW WINTER Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: February 23, 2010 Copyright 2018 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background Born in New York City, 1946 Dartmouth College (BA 1966) Columbia University (MA 1970) Entered Foreign Service, 1970 Quito, Budget and Fiscal Officer 1971-1973 Bureau of Personnel, Systems Analysis Officer 1973-1974 Bureau of Personnel, Staff Assistant to the Director of Personnel 1974-1975 US Mission to the United Nations, New York, Administrative Officer 1975-1977 Helsinki, Administrative Officer 1977-1980 Rio de Janeiro, Administrative Officer 1980-1981 Bureau of Personnel, Director of Information Systems 1981-1983 Taipei, Administrative Officer 1984-1987 Pretoria, Counselor for Administrative Affairs 1987-1990 Bureau of African Affairs, Executive Director 1990-1993 Banjul, United States Ambassador to The Gambia 1993-1995 Executive Office of the Secretary of State, Senior Officer 1995-1996 Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, Executive Director 1996-1997 Deputy Assistant Secretary for Information Technology, 1 Bureau of Information Resource Management 1997-1998 U.S. Mission to the United Nations, New York, Minister Counselor for Administrative Affairs 1998-2000 Retirement 2000 INTERVIEW TITLE: ADMINISTRATIVE FOREIGN POLICY Q: Okay. Today is the 23rd of February 2010. This is an interview with Andrew Winter being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and I’m Charles Stuart Kennedy. And Andrew, let’s start at the beginning. When and where were you born? WINTER: I was born in New York City on May 9, 1946. Q: What about your family on your father’s side? What do you know about them? WINTER: My father was born in Vienna, Austria, to a well-to-do family that was primarily in the textile manufacturing business, not only in Austria but throughout the Austro/Hungarian Empire and in France. In Czechoslovakia they had a small factory that was the primary producer of fez for the Turkish market. Q: Who moved to the States and when? WINTER: My father was managing a factory in Nachod, Czechoslovakia, where he met my mother, who was a Czech, a Bohemian, geographically Bohemian. In 1940 they left Czechoslovakia with my older brother and slowly immigrated to the United States. Q: How the hell did they get out of Czechoslovakia in 1940? WINTER: It’s a very interesting story. Although I have no religious roots in Judaism, certainly by Hitler’s definition my mother and my father were Jews. They both came from families with many generations of non-religious Jews. My maternal grandfather was a newspaper publisher in Prague and was known for his atheistic editorials. Deeply influenced by her father, my mother believed that assimilation was the best hope for peace in the world. When my brother was born in 1936 my father had a feeling things might be going south and he had my brother baptized in the Catholic Church. A year later, in 1937, he paid a priest to baptize my mother and himself. They stayed even after German occupation. 2 They were able to escape because the Yugoslavs would accept anybody who had a passport, which they couldn’t get as Jews, or had a baptismal certificate. What a coincidence. They were able to escape, leave quasi legally through Yugoslavia and then started what was a two-year trek to get to the United States. Q: How did the trek work? It’s a fascinating slice of history. WINTER: My father’s cousin, Carlo Fischer, was a partisan in Yugoslavia, working for Tito. In fact he was the OSS, Office of Strategic Services, liaison to Tito. He helped my parents transit Yugoslavia, and they spent several months there. My brother was four years old. Fortunately, through my father’s family, they had some money on the outside; not a lot but enough to sustain them. From Yugoslavia they traveled to Greece, and to Palestine, spending several months in Jerusalem. Their plane stopped in Basra on the way to India. They went to Iraq, Iran, and India. From India they took a boat to South Africa and from there to Portugal, which was neutral. From Portugal they went to Brazil. My brother was four to six years old in this time period, quite an adventure for a little boy. From Brazil they went to Venezuela and then island hopped, ending up in Cuba. They spent nine months living in Havana waiting for visas to the United States. There was quite a large community of people who had escaped from the war and ended up in Cuba. My parents had a wonderful time there. In fact, when I was executive director of the bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, I took a trip to Cuba, and again my mother, who had a phenomenal memory, said, their house was at Calle Cinco, Numero Tres. I went there, knocked on the door, and explained to the people that my parents had lived there more than 50 years ago. They were very friendly, and let me come in and take pictures. They didn’t seem at all worried about the fact that I was an American diplomat. Q: How about the early years when you were a kid? You were born in 1946 in New York; where in New York? WINTER: They settled in Jackson Heights, Queens, which is not too far from LaGuardia Airport. Queens has always been one of the first stopping points for immigrants. I read the other day that the high school my brother went to now has 80 separate language groups and 120 nationalities. We had a three-bedroom apartment, a rent controlled apartment. In 1959 we were paying $126 a month for the apartment, which was a 15- minute subway ride from downtown Manhattan. Q: All right, let’s talk a bit about life as a kid, what was it like just before you went to school? WINTER: Growing up in New York in the late 1940s, early 1950s was a blast; it was fantastic. It was perfectly safe. At six years old I went out on my own and had an area in which I was allowed to wander within a block of the apartment. I more or less obeyed that most of the time and I had friends there and we would play stickball and gallivant around. In elementary school, I walked to school from our apartment at 83rd Street to the school on 74th. The walk gave me a great sense of freedom and independence. I could 3 wander into little shops and occasionally shoplift a candy bar or a comic book. Later it became easy after school to sneak under the turnstile and onto the subway with my friends. Q: You’d go under the turnstile. WINTER: Yes. I was expected home and couldn’t do it for long. I finished school at 3:00 and we’d go ride the subway for 45 minutes and then go back home. We’d ride it all over the city, never getting off other than to change trains. We never went above ground in those early years. But it was a wonderful place to grow up even though not much in the way of sports except stickball and basketball in the schoolyard. Q: Okay. You say your family wasn’t religious; what about political? WINTER: Extremely liberal. However because in 1949 the communists took over in Czechoslovakia and they still had family and friends there, liberal but extraordinarily anti-communist. Liberal with a very capitalist bent. Socially liberal, egalitarian and open- minded. Q: Were you aware, say at a relatively early age, of where they were getting their news, radio, TV, newspapers? WINTER: The biggest thing I remember is we never had a newspaper with comics. Q: It sounds like “The New York Times.”. WINTER: Exactly. Even to this day I don’t read comics because we never had comics when I was a kid. We didn’t have a TV for quite a while until my father finally broke down and bought a TV during the McCarthy hearings in the early 1950s. We had one of those typical tiny little black and white TVs. My parents hardly ever watched TV. Maybe half an hour of news a night or something that was news related like Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now. They made a few exceptions. For example, my father, whom I never considered to have much of a sense of silly humor, loved Jackie Gleason. “The Jackie Gleason Show” was a staple in our house. Generally we were a family that read all the time. Q: Let’s talk about reading; were you much of a reader? Do you recall some of the early books that were maybe influential or just plain fun? WINTER: I read a lot of history. I had a wonderful set of Hans Christian Anderson, which I absolutely loved. I also loved “Alice in Wonderland,” by Carroll. When I was 13 I read “Exodus” by Leon Uris, which was certainly and still is probably one of the three most influential books of my life. It was 1960 and we had moved to a house in the suburbs. My father had a study and the four of us spent most of our time there after dinner reading, and I would typically read on the floor. My father had his own special chair, which I still have today, my mother and brother on the couch. I was reading 4 “Exodus” and I looked up and I asked, “Are we Jewish?” I was 13 years old. My parents were taken aback, said yes, and explained our family history.