Library of Congress Interview with Mr. Dennis G. Harter , 2011 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project DENNIS G. HARTER Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: March 17, 2004 Copyright 2011 ADST Q: This is a Foreign Affairs Oral History Program interview with Dennis Harter. Today is March 17, 2004. This interview is being conducted under the auspices of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. I am Stuart Kennedy. Dennis can we start by asking where were you born and gather some of your personal background? HARTER: I was born on February 4, 1941, in Newark, New Jersey. Q: Tell me about your family, first on the Harter's side and then your mother's side. HARTER: My father's parents were German and Irish. My father's grandfather left Germany because of the Franco Prussian War. My father's mother's family left Ireland because of the famines. My mother's parents were earlier settlers; they were English and settled in the South. My mother's great grandfather was a General in the Civil War on the Southern side. Q: What was his name? Interview with Mr. Dennis G. Harter , 2011 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001704 Library of Congress HARTER: Alford. He fought in Mississippi and Alabama. My parents were both residents of Newark, New Jersey. They went to West Side High School. They were high school sweethearts. My father went off to Rutgers University to study engineering, but his father died in the mid-1930s and there was not enough money for him to continue going to school. He dropped out after two or maybe three years and found employment with Public Service Electric and Gas Company in New Jersey. He ended up working for them for more than 40 years. He progressed from working in the underground, which was basically laying the pipes for the gas lines under Newark. Over those forty years he reached the highest ranked position in the company for anyone who never earned a college degree. Just before he retired he was working on the design and planning for what was to be New Jersey's first nuclear power plant. In the 1960's, the project ran afoul of environmental objections and my father said, “This project is never going to get built so I'm going to retire,” and he did. At that point both my sister and I were out of school and working and he had paid off his mortgage and had enough money invested to be comfortable in his home. And, that particular plant never did get built in New Jersey. Q: Your mother, did she go to college? HARTER: No, she did not. I believe she worked for a couple of years and then married my father around 1936, just before she turned twenty-one. They were married for almost 60 years and they both passed away about a year apart, 1994 for my father and 1995 for my mother. Q: Where did you grow up? HARTER: I grew up initially in Irvington, New Jersey. I did my first eight years of grammar school and the first year of high school there and then we moved to Mountainside, New Jersey, a small suburban community which pooled its students at a regional high school. I went to Jonathan Dayton Regional High School in Springfield, New Jersey for the last three years of high school. Interview with Mr. Dennis G. Harter , 2011 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001704 Library of Congress Q: Irvington. What was that like when you grew up as a kid? HARTER: I remember people saying it was a town of about 100,000 people, which would have been a pretty good sized town for the state at the time. But I'm not sure how accurate that estimate was. In the towns, there were no school buses and everyone went to school based on their neighborhood locations. My school was only “around the corner” so I could easily walk to school from the place my parents rented. It was Florence Avenue School. School crossing guards and policemen were on the major street crossings to enable children to get to and from school safely. Students could be crossing guards and I was one of the only two seventh graders permitted to be a crossing guard when I reached that grade. Because I lived so close to school, my sister and I also walked home for lunch. The town had only one high school which took students from all of the elementary schools in Irvington. The high school was known for its marching band and twirlers and dancers, though we were certainly not up to the standards of today's high school and college performers. I played in the concert band, the orchestra and the marching band as a freshman. That year we were invited to New York City to perform in the Polo Grounds for the half-time show at a New York Giants football game. That year we also marched in the New York City Columbus Day parade, so the school's musical and performance reputation was pretty good at that time. Q: Let's talk about elementary school first. What were your interests in school as you begin to grow up? HARTER: I was interested in history and I liked to read and I collected just about anything and everything - from stamps and coins to rocks and shells and comic books. I played Little League baseball which was just getting started in the state - around 1949 and l950. I was a pitcher, but I wasn't really very athletic. When I was in the eighth grade, I was about 5'4” tall and weighed about 150 lbs so I didn't move very quickly. Conversely at the end of my junior year in high school, I was 6'1'' and still weighed 150 lbs. Interview with Mr. Dennis G. Harter , 2011 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001704 Library of Congress It was in seventh grade that I first learned about the Foreign Service. We had a Social Studies teacher who was describing the role of an embassy and consulate abroad. And I said, “That's for me, that's a great way to improve my stamp collection, by living and working abroad.” So, that was my initial thought about the State Department and Foreign Service. My interests expanded when I went into high school and started debating and public speaking in the National Forensic League as part of my after-school activities. In addition to continuing with music, I got more and more interested in international issues, some of which were national debate topics for high school debaters. By the time I was in my junior and senior year of high school, I was convinced that I wanted to go to Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, because that to me was the only place to go to prepare for a Foreign Service career. I was a freshman at the school in the fall of 1958. Q: As you were going to, still in High School, you were involved mainly in band? HARTER: Yes, all of the various band groups, the concert band and the marching band in particular, and then the debate and public speaking clubs that were part of the National Forensic League - the original NFL. Those were my two primary activities. I was also in a small jazz group after school as well as the school's dance band. Q: What did you play? HARTER: I played saxophone. I started on alto saxophone but also played tenor saxophone some of the time. Occasionally I would play baritone saxophone if they needed one in the marching band and on a few occasions I played the drums or cymbals to help out with making more noise when it was needed at football games. I made the New Jersey All-State band in my junior and senior years in high school playing the saxophone. Q: In reading, what sort of books did you like? HARTER: I was basically classically oriented. I read Robert Louis Stephenson and James Fennimore Cooper and Charles Dickens. Sir Walter Scott's adventure stories were also Interview with Mr. Dennis G. Harter , 2011 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001704 Library of Congress favorites along with the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. I also liked the aviation novels that were written for boys during World War II about the war in Europe and the Pacific. After that I got into a little bit of science fiction, Robert Heinlein. Q: Did you find yourself reading much about foreign countries and all that? HARTER: Not a lot outside of classroom requirements when I was in high school. But, I got into more when I was in college and graduate school. In these later years, fiction reading was mostly mystery and espionage novels in addition to international politics issues and all kinds of books written about Asia in particular. Q: The New Jersey school system you were at, was this a school system where there were a lot of people coming from diverse areas or were you coming from more or less a cohesive neighborhood? HARTER: Certainly in Irvington, there was a broader ethnic mix to the town population, but there was no broad racial mix like you have in today's society and schools. I remember when I was in grammar school, because one of my friends was Chinese, there was just one Chinese family's kids that went to the school. Now today, that would be what you'd find on most every block, but here it was just one family that had kids in the neighborhood school.