Interview with the Honorable David L. Mack , 2011
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Library of Congress Interview with The Honorable David L. Mack , 2011 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR DAVID L. MACK Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: October 24, 1995 Copyright 2010 ADST Q: Today is the 24th of October 1995. This is an interview with Ambassador David L. Mack. It is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. I am Charles Stuart Kennedy. Can we start at the beginning? Can you tell when and where you were born and a bit about your family and early upbringing? MACK: I was born in Oregon to a family of farmers and school teachers. Dad taught school in order to pay taxes on the farm. He always said that some people have ranches, some people have farms, farmers make money, ranchers lose money, and we had a ranch. It was a small cattle ranch with some other livestock. My mother also taught elementary school. I grew up in rural environments and went to public schools in Oregon and Colorado. Q: In the high plains area? MACK: A rural community, actually right in the Colorado Rockies for a few years. I was born in the Willamette Valley and lived in southern Oregon from the time I was in the sixth grade through high school. I was an aggie, a 4H-er, and studied vocational agriculture Interview with The Honorable David L. Mack , 2011 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001717 Library of Congress in high school to become a farmer. The great influence on me was my grandfather, who wanted me to be a lawyer. Grandpa Mack had wanted to be lawyer himself. He was an Oregon pioneer. He read law without a salary in a law office in Portland. He left the law and got a real job to marry my grandmother and to support his family. Eventually, he had three sons. He wanted one of them to be a lawyer; but none of the three was the least bit interested. My dad just wanted to go back to being a farmer, so Grandpa settled his ambition on the grandchildren. When I got a scholarship to Harvard, he was sure that I was headed for Harvard Law School and at least the Senate of the United States if not the Supreme Court. Q: Coming from a small town, and getting a scholarship to Harvard was quite something, wasn't it? MACK: I was a beneficiary of affirmative action, which in those days for Harvard meant geographical distribution. I was what they called a diamond in the rough. I was very rough. I soon discovered that my preparation for college probably put me in the bottom five percent of the class. But I was a diligent, hard-working student. I had a full scholarship so I didn't have to work to put myself through. I started off in political science — they called it government at Harvard — with the full intention of becoming a lawyer. In my senior year, I decided I would take a course of area studies. I audited the opening lectures for Far Eastern Studies, and Russian Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies, and on the basis of those first lectures I decided the Middle East was really something I was very interested in. Sir Hamilton Alexander Gibb, a very famous British Arabist, was giving his last course on Islamic history. Gibb was very inspiring, and after a couple of months I knew I didn't want to go to law school. I had already begun to decide that law school might be a bad idea in view of the expense. I had no idea where the money would come from. You don't get a scholarship to got to law school. The year was 1961, and I would graduate in 1962. It was after Sputnik, and we were trying to catch up with the Russians. I learned of what they called the National Defense Interview with The Honorable David L. Mack , 2011 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001717 Library of Congress Language Fellowships. The Federal government granted a full scholarship to those who had good grades and were prepared to study a hard language such as Chinese, Russian or Arabic. That's how I got into Arabic studies and did a two year Master's program in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard. Q: Was there any focus, or pitch or what have you, on Middle East studies at Harvard at that point? Obviously the Arab-Israeli conflict was going as it had been going since '48, so were you absorbing this conflict there, or was this very academic? MACK: Well, no, I became aware of the very high emotional pitch on both sides. Like most Americans I was imbued with the stories of valiant Israel, and I would say pro-Israeli in my views. But my first Arabic teachers were Palestinians. From them and from my studies I developed quite rapidly a more balanced view of the conflict. I could see the rights and wrongs on both sides and the very high degree of emotions that were involved in that conflict. At that time, together with most of my fellow students, I was looking for something that had a high pitch of emotion and excitement in it. Q: This was the Kennedy era wasn't it? Of course coming from Harvard, but it really raised the hair on the back of your head. MACK: We were all turned on by that idea of going out to the corners of the world and achieving something for the United States. I think there was a very high degree of commitment and also a very great desire to somehow be of service. I think this was doubly true for me. I was getting six years of education paid for in full — the first four years by Harvard and the last two years by the Federal government. I really felt I had something to pay-back. I remember toward the end of my first year of the graduate program, I started thinking of joining the Foreign Service and taking the entry examination. Later on in my second year, I had an economics professor who took a shine to me and at one point said, “What are you planning to do when you finish here? I can get you a job in a bank or an oil company.” I said that I had taken the Foreign Service exam and was planning to go into Interview with The Honorable David L. Mack , 2011 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001717 Library of Congress the Foreign Service. I'll never forget his response. He said, with a pitying expression, “Oh, you don't have to do that.” But, in fact, I think that I and the other students wanted to do something like that. We wanted to somehow have some part in saving the world, whether it was saving it from godless communism, or saving it from hunger, but in some sense we wanted to be part of a greater mission. The idea of leaving and just going to work for money seemed unbecoming. Q: One of the things I'm trying to recreate as we do these histories...I felt the same thing. I was a slightly earlier generation but a sense of mission. The United States, warts and all, really could do something and make a difference for the betterment of people. This was an attraction which very definitely had an impulse, I think, at the time. MACK: It was, and not simply from idealists of both the left and the right in our own political system. One of my teachers at Harvard was Henry Kissinger, and he had a realpolitik perspective. He saw the United States as the last best hope of the world, even if we could use a greater dose of cynicism and reality. Yes, I think that was very much a part of what was pushing all of us. Q: Was the National Defense... MACK: A language fellowship. Q: What does that mean? Where were you taking your language? MACK: I was taking language at Harvard, starting with a summer session between my graduation in June 1962 and the beginning of the Master's degree program. It was an intensive Arabic class that summer and the first year. In the second year, the Arabic was at a more normal pace, allowing more time for other Middle East regional studies classes. Q: Did you find you had an ear for languages then? Interview with The Honorable David L. Mack , 2011 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001717 Library of Congress MACK: Not particularly, and I haven't. I had gotten into Harvard with two years of Latin and managed to just pass the language requirement. I did not take any language classes until my senior year, when I became interested in international affairs and started to study French. But I had only had a year of French. Therefore, I went through six years of university with a single year of French and two years of Arabic, and those are the only modern languages that I've had in my whole life. Maybe because I started too late in life, or maybe because I haven't got such a great ear, for me a language requires a lot of application. It doesn't come easy. By American standards, I'm now known as a linguist, but I've always felt it was an up-hill struggle, although something that I felt was very important.