Berg, Robert J

The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project ROBERT J. BERG Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: August 15th, 2012 Copyright 2014 ADST Robert Berg was founding director of evaluation at USAID and founding chair of evaluation for the OECD Development Assistant Committee. With private sector, non- profit sector and think tank experience, he also became senior advisor to four different parts of the United Nations. He worked on legislative and institutional reform in USAID in an unusual sequence of positions running the gamut of USAID’s main work. (Personal Note: I am grateful to Ambassador Kenneth Brown, President of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training who suggested I be interviewed for his excellent series of oral histories. And I am grateful to Stu Kennedy, Director of the Association’s Oral History Project, for his patient questions over long hours of taping, and to Marilyn Bentley for her outstanding transcriptions of the interviews. The last several hours of the oral history were given at a time when I was undergoing radiation therapy and upon reading them I felt they needed a major re-do, so those parts are not in oral history Q & A form, but do draw upon those interviews. The presentation is in five Parts: I. Early Years II. First Years at USAID III. Establishing USAID’s Office of Evaluation and the OECD Donors’ Group on Evaluation IV. Some Reflections on AID V. Careers after USAID Comments are welcome and can reach me at [email protected]. ) Q: Today is the 15th of August, 2012. This is an interview with Robert J. Berg, Bob. Bob, let’s start at the beginning. When and where were you born? BERG: I was born August 24th, 1940 in Los Angeles, California. Q: All right. Let’s talk about the Berg side of the family and then we’ll come to your mother’s side. But what do you know? Go back a ways and where do they come from and all that? 1 BERG: My father’s family came from what was then Russia and is now Ukraine, from the town of Kremenchuk. His father was an engineer for the family granary business. He had been sent from the family headquarters, as it were, in Poltava, to Kremenchuk to convert their granary from water power to diesel power and then to operate it. And so my father was born there and raised in Kremenchuk, a kind of transport hub for trains and ships on the Dnieper River. There he went through about six years of schooling and was apprenticed to a hides dealer where he kept the books and learned how to deal with customers. When he had just turned 17 in mid-1917 the Russian Revolution came. Their first, but short-lived, Prime Minister was Kerensky. At that time the new government was looking for officials and the pool was shallow. Because my father was well liked by laborers -- he always palled around with them -- and could do accounts, the new government made him their commissar of wheat for a large area of the Ukraine, which was a breadbasket for the whole of Russia. He was clever and popular. And he was successful, always underestimating production so when even a normal year of production took place he was a hero. During these post World War I years there was considerable public disorder from militia (Cossacks) and a war of Red versus White Russians. Food was often in short supply in large parts of Russia. Some parts of my Dad’s family that had already come to the States and they worried that my Dad and the other family left in Russia were starving. On the contrary, my Dad was highly favored and even had a private train at his disposal. The family in Kremenchuk lived well. Dad had liked Kerensky and considered him a Russian FDR. But what he saw of Lenin was less likable. One evening in about 1922 he was at a cocktail party where he expressed the view that he didn’t understand Lenin’s policies, because Lenin was supposed to be for the worker, but my Dad was constantly getting orders to divert grain from the workers to the Red Army. For that remark, he was arrested for treason, tried and sentenced to death. Clearly the sentence wasn’t carried out, because otherwise I wouldn’t be here (laughs). Q: No. BERG: Dad was being marched off to be shot when the local Commissar of Labor happened to see him and asked the nature of the trip Dad was on. Hearing the explanation, the Commissar wanted to know what court had sentenced my Dad to death. When told that it was a military court, the Commissar raised a loud objection, because if my Dad was talking about workers and their right to food, then his own Labor Court should have had the honor to sentence him to death, not the military court! In a rage, the Commissar ordered the soldiers to take my Dad back to prison and while the relevant political leaders were working out the jurisdictional issues, my Father’s parents sold every one of their positions, except for a nickel-plated samovar and some few other little trinkets and with the proceeds bribed my Dad out of jail. Then Dad and his family quickly decamped leaving on a train in the winter. In a scene from “Dr. Zhivago” my father was on the outside of the train, because he was a wanted 2 fugitive, and the rest of his family were nervously inside. The train took a great northern circle route, going through Moscow (where a great uncle of mine was in a leading orchestra) and continuing northward through St. Petersburg/Leningrad. Finally they reached Antwerp, Belgium. There they waited in an atelier while relatives who were already in California worked very hard to get them visas to come to the United States. They tried everywhere, particularly with the Jewish organizations in their area. Finally they went to the Pasadena California Chapter of the Salvation Army, who asked the Antwerp Salvation Army to help. My Father, his parents, a brother and a sister, learned about this one day when a Salvation Army brass band came down their little street playing their drums and cymbals to rescue them! Q: Oh my God. BERG: So, after finally getting their visas, in September 1924 they were able to take a ship to New York, arriving in October, 1924, where on Ellis Island one “Markus” Feinberg was listed as arrived with his family. His actual Russian name was Mutia, but Markus it was at Ellis. And so they arrived and immediately traveled to join the four brothers of my Dad who were already in Southern California. Q: Pasadena, or? BERG: Yes in a small house Dad’s brothers had bought and furnished for their arriving parents, two brothers (Dad and his younger brother) and one sister. Two months later (December 1924) my Dad applied for citizenship and at the same time formally requested that his name be changed to Mark Fein Berg. This was part of a family decision to Americanize, and it was part of my dad’s Decision to leave behind everything Russian he could. He never wanted to speak Russian or discuss his experiences there. In Los Angeles he joined his older brothers, who had already established a then modest (what we would now call) recycling business focused on scrap steel, newspapers and glass. Because there wasn’t much else an uneducated person who didn’t speak English could do, his first job was to sort used bottles by color. Within about, oh, a dozen years, he was the manager of a much larger business, Berg Metals Corporation, which had steel mill and a very large scrap steel business. He later established other businesses for the family. By the time his career ended he was finding new uses for jet engines and led sophisticated businesses, one of which involved carrying an inventory to supply over150,000 separate types of airplane parts. And while his ownership shares of these businesses were modest, he made his family and himself quite a bit of money. He did not believe is showing off his wealth, but in so many other ways, he truly lived the American dream. Q: While, he was in the Ukraine, were there any stories that came down about life in the Ukraine? Because one thinks of pogroms and all this sort of stuff. And then you had the Red and White Armies. 3 BERG: Yes. Although my Father didn’t really like to talk about those years very much, he did say that when he was five years old, the abortive 1905 revolution was going on and suspicion fell on his family, not without good reason. My Dad’s oldest two brothers, who were teenagers then, were active in that revolt and in the end, they threw their guns down a water well and escaped the country to come to America. In those years, when pogroms were going on, my Dad’s family fortunately always got advance warnings of these awful organized riots so that there was time to hide between 200- 300 girls in their silos to keep them from being ravaged by the Cossacks or the Chekka, which was the old name for the Russian secret police. My Father, then five years old, was sort of the front man for the family as he spoke an unaccented Russian. When the Cossacks came knocking, he would go out and meet with them and they would ask him certain questions that would indicate whether he spoke with a guttural (Jewish) accent or not.

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