Ambassador Thomas Graham, Jr
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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR THOMAS GRAHAM, JR. Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: May 15, 2001 Copyright 2014 ADST Q: Today is May 15, 2001. This is an interview with Ambassador Thomas Graham, Jr. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. I’m Charles Stuart Kennedy. Do you go by Tom? GRAHAM: Yes. Q: Let’s start at the beginning. When and where were you born and tell me something about your family. GRAHAM: I was born on October 9, 1933, in Louisville, Kentucky. I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, which in those days was a charmed community, at least in today’s terms. I grew up in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Drugs were unknown. Divorce was virtually unknown. Everybody knew everybody. My father was active in politics. He was an investment banker, but politics was his real love and was kind of his second profession. My mother was from Yonkers, New York, just outside of New York City. She married my father in 1931 and moved to Louisville. He was the son of a Presbyterian minister, the grandson of a Civil War officer and prominent businessman in Kentucky. Q: I have to ask which side. GRAHAM: Northern side. Going back one more generation, my father’s great grandfather came from near Edinburgh, Scotland—for reasons unknown to me—to Madison, Indiana. But I’m told that he was drawn by some kind of community in Madison, perhaps Presbyterian or something like that. Hanover College in Madison, Indiana, was a prominent Presbyterian school in the 19th century and to some extent still is, but in those days perhaps more so. My great grandfather was with the First Indiana volunteers and was elected a major at the age of 19. He fought for three years with the North in the Civil War, was with Sherman in Atlanta and left the Army at Savannah after the march through Georgia. Q: My grandfather was an officer with the 26th Wisconsin with Sherman. GRAHAM: Isn’t that interesting? A remarkable period of history. We have his diary of the first six months that he spent in the military, which included a major battle in Tennessee and then pages and pages of description of the vagaries of camp life and how everybody had dysentery or influenza or whatever. It did not paint a flattering or 1 romantic view of military service. In any case, my father was more or less from southern Indiana, although my grandfather, being a Presbyterian minister, had churches around the Middle West. My father was actually born on an Indian reservation in Iowa, spent some years in Fargo, North Dakota, and then Richmond, Indiana. In 1920 my grandfather took over the 2nd Presbyterian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, a prominent church. My grandmother’s, and to some extent my grandfather’s, side of the family were deeply Republican but progressive Republican. Her uncle was Governor La Follette’s lieutenant governor and was chairman of the Republican Party in Wisconsin for 20 years. I remember once asking her, when she was about 90 and I was in some sort of temporary mental fog, how was she registered: Democrat or Republican? She told me with disdain that she was 40 before she saw a Democrat. But my father, in spite of coming from such a background, was very taken with Woodrow Wilson and decided to become a Democrat. In 1920 my grandfather took over the 2nd Presbyterian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, a prominent church. My father was a very prominent Democrat in Louisville for many years. He was treasurer of the Party for 30 of those years. He was a candidate for mayor at one point in 1948 when the mayor died in office after a year’s service and the board of aldermen elected his successor. My father lost that vote 6 to 5. My mother was violently against my father’s becoming mayor, so she wasn’t unhappy, but my father always regretted the loss. The outcome was truly a chance thing in that normally, the chairman of the board of aldermen, a neighbor of ours, wouldn’t vote, but did since one of my father’s supporters was sick. So it was a 5 to 5 tie and the chairman broke the tie against my father even though he lived two blocks away—maybe because he lived two blocks away. He lost the vote to a man named Charles Farnsley, who went on to serve 7 years as mayor and several terms in the Congress. My father was also chairman of the Sinking Fund— Louisville’s oddly named fiscal organization. The Fund held the bonds that guaranteed city obligations and so forth. It was a political position, but part-time, which my father chaired for 15 years. I went to four Democratic National Conventions. Our family lawyer, Wilson Wyatt, was Adlai Stevenson’s campaign manager in 1952 and later lieutenant governor of Kentucky. I worked for his law firm for a summer. I was brought up in an atmosphere of neighborliness during peaceful times. Politics was fun, but there was in the atmosphere the notions that you were supposed to make something of yourself and do something with your life and contribute to the community and you were supposed to have certain principles that guided you. Such expectations permeated our society. I might mention a couple of other things about my father just to give a little more background. He was very involved with Churchill Downs and the Kentucky Derby. He was on the board of directors there for 30 years. We had a very good box at the Derby, and still do. I’ve been to 41 Derbies myself. His cousin was chairman of the board, so he was very interested in Churchill Downs and the Derby. We never owned horses or 2 anything like that, but Churchill Downs was an institution that was important to my father. He was an investment banker who was very committed to local companies, local investments. He turned down a chance to have a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. He was very Kentucky/Midwest oriented. That was very good in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s; a lot less good in the 1960s. Q: Where did he get his schooling? GRAHAM: He went to Andover and to Princeton, but had to leave after two years because of family financial circumstances. Then he finished up at the University of Kentucky. He was always very hopeful that I would go to Princeton although he never said so. He just had Princeton memorabilia all over the house and you would have to be really stupid not to get the hint. When I was about to graduate from high school, I was accepted at both Princeton and Yale. Although all my friends were going to Yale and my father never said anything, I felt I just couldn’t not go to Princeton. Q: If you went to Princeton, it seemed to demand much more loyalty than Yale, which was a place you went to get educated. At Princeton, you got educated, but it was a club. GRAHAM: It was very much a club and to a degree a southern-oriented club. Q: Very much so. Of course, Kentucky was kind of South, wasn't it? GRAHAM: We like to regard ourselves as the Switzerland of America, southern in culture but northern in politics. Q: What about the background of your mother? GRAHAM: My mother was from Yonkers, New York. Her distant relative several generations back was James Lawrence of “Don’t-give-up-the-ship” fame during the battle of Lake Erie. Q: The Chesapeake was attacked by the Shannon. GRAHAM: That’s right. Q: I lived in Annapolis and one learns these things. This was during the War of 1812. GRAHAM: Her grandmother was E.D.E.N. Southworth – Elizabeth D. E. Nevitt Southworth. I can't remember what all the initials represented. She was an interesting person. She lived here in Washington and was born just before the War of 1812 into good circumstances, but her father—in the shipping business—lost his money during the war of 1812. She grew up on Capitol Hill and married a man who took her to Wisconsin—in those years, it was a pretty wild place—and then disappeared leaving her with two small children in the late 1830s/early 1840s. She came back to Washington and got a job as a schoolteacher. To add to her family income, she wrote novels. She published 88 novels. 3 Several of them sold over a million copies. She became a friend of Whittier and several others. Ph.D. theses have been written about her. She was sort of a Danielle Steele of the 19th century. I have 40 of her books. They’re all romances of sort: the bride’s revenge, the mother-in-law’s gambit, and things like that. She is buried in Georgetown Cemetery. Her daughter, Charlotte, married a man name Lawrence from Yonkers then named their daughter Valentine after her birth on St. Valentine’s Day. Valentine married a naval officer named James Henniques, a career naval officer who saw service in the First World War and later retired as a captain. My mother is named Charlotte after her grandmother, the novelist’s daughter. Q: Where did she go to school? GRAHAM: She went to what was then known as “finishing school” in the New York City area.