Hooper, James R
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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project JAMES R. HOOPER Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: October 26, 2006 Copyright 2018 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background Born on January 9, 1947 BA in International Service, American University 1965-1969 MA in International Studies, Columbia University 1969-1971 Entered the Foreign Service 1971 Dhahran, Saudi Arabia—Vice Consul 1972-1974 Yom Kippur War Yemeni Immigrants Beirut, Lebanon—Language Student 1974-1975 Anti-Zionism vs. Arabinism Damascus, Syria—Political Officer 1975-1977 Negotiations with Israel over Golan Heights The rise of Hafez al-Assad Living with car-bombings Disagreements between Assad and the PLO Kissinger and the formation of a comprehensive Middle East Policy Washington, DC—Bureau of Intelligence and Research 1977-1978 Working with the Near Eastern Bureau The Camp David Accords The Carter Presidency Tripoli, Libya—Political Officer 1978-1980 Libya’s Threat to Cut Off Oil Attack on the U.S. Embassy London, United Kingdom—Political Officer 1980-1984 Working with the British on the Middle East Iran-Iraq War 1 Working under Secretary of State Alexander Haig The Falkland War Colorado Springs, Colorado—Diplomat in Residence 1984-1986 The Air Force Academy Discussing the Soviet Union Kuwait City, Kuwait—Deputy Chief of Mission 1986-1989 Tensions with Iraq Iraq-Iran War Continuing Reflagging Kuwait Oil Tankers Off the Record Meeting with the Defense Minister of Kuwait Kuwait Airways Flight 422 Hijacking Washington, DC—Deputy Country Directory for Eastern Europe 1989-1991 Office of Eastern European and Yugoslav Affairs Collapse of the Berlin Wall Democratization in Romania post-Ceausescu Establishing AID Missions Albanian Democracy Achieving Independence in the Baltics Serbian Nationalism in Yugoslavia Washington, DC—Senior Seminar Instructor 1991-1992 Training for Assignments Washington, DC—Director of Canadian Affairs 1992-1994 Independence Movement in Quebec Canadian-US Trade Relations Working under Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger Warsaw, Poland—Deputy Chief of Mission 1994-1997 Issues on Polish Border Security Developing Poland Retirement January 1997 Post retirement activities Balkan Institute, Executive Director 1997-2001 Writing a Newsletter on Extreme Nationalist Groups Creating the Balkan Action Council Broadcasting Board of Governors 2001-2007 Creating an Arabic Language Radio Station Managing Director of the Public International Law and Policy Group 2 Nobel Peace Prize Nominated NGO INTERVIEW Q: Jim, let’s start at the beginning. When and where were you born? HOOPER: I was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on January 9, 1947. Q: What do you know about your father’s side of the family? Where do the Hoopers come from and what were they occupied with? HOOPER: I know that my father’s side of the family came from Cornwall, England. They were tin miners in Cornwall and came to the United States in the mid-1800s. And I understand that they opened the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to mining in the 19th century. In fact, there was a family reunion about thirty years ago, I happened to be overseas at the time and I regrettably could not attend it, in Ontonagon, a town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. There weren’t any Hoopers residing there at the time of the family reunion, but the Hooper name is apparently still known in Ontonagon. The townspeople remembered the name and invited several of my relatives to stay in their homes rather than at local motels. My aunt wrote a family history in which she pulled all of this together for the reunion, had it privately printed and distributed to family members. For those who know very little about Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (I lived in the Lower Peninsula), it’s pretty sparsely populated. It is probably best known for the Sault Ste. Marie locks and the Mackinac Bridge, which I remember visiting when it was being built in the 1950s. My mother’s side, the Hoyt family, starts in Germany. There were two brothers who came to the American colonies as doctors in the 1600s, according to what my mother told us, though there is no written family history of which I am aware. My understanding is that my relatives participated in just about every major war fought by the United States, from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War through World Wars One and Two. By the Civil War they were living in Illinois. My mother was born in Decatur, Illinois. The Hoyts were involved in the railroad business, a number of them were engineers and so forth. Decatur was a center of railroad yards. In fact, one of my mother’s earliest memories—she was born in 1922—was of a funeral at age three or so that she attended for one of her uncles who was an engineer. His train had been going over one of those big, wooden, rickety trestles and the trestle collapsed; no one survived the crash. My mother was legally blind for the last fifteen years or so of her life. She had problems with eyesight all of her life which deteriorated as she grew older. 3 Neither my father nor my mother had been to college. It had always been her dream however to attend college, and in her early 60s she finally decided to get her bachelor’s degree. Once she decided to do something, she was very determined to reach her goal, and though it took her about ten years, since her blindness limited the number of classes she could take at any one time, she obtained her degree around the age of 70. She received a standing ovation at graduation, a nice spread in the Grand Rapids Press, and significant coverage on local television. She was extraordinarily proud of the effort that she had made and her accomplishment. She died of rectal cancer in Grand Rapids, Michigan at age 74. My father was in World War II, having enlisted in 1942 after Pearl Harbor. He was enormously proud of having been part of George Patton’s Third Army. He landed at Normandy twice, not on D-Day but a few days later the first time to pick up some equipment and bring it to England, and then he went back a few days after that. He was in transportation units that initially had to take some captured German weaponry back to England, as I recall him telling us. After I had joined the Foreign Service he told me that, in 1938 at age 16, he did not know where Czechoslovakia was when the Munich agreement was in the news. However, he added, in 1945 his Third Army unit ended the war in Czechoslovakia. I believe he felt that there was a lesson in that and that it paid to understand something about what was going on in the world. For him, when we would talk about foreign affairs on occasion, he put great stock in what our allies thought of any particular plan or initiative that the U.S. wanted to implement. That served him in good stead as a shorthand guide to looking at issues, because in 2003 he opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in view of the criticism of the policy by many U.S. allies. Q: When he got out of the military, what was he doing? HOOPER: Cars were always at the center of his career and, along with his family, at the center of his life. He was driving a truck between Grand Rapids and Lansing, Michigan in 1935 when he was 13, unbeknownst to my grandfather, who was a vice president of Michigan National Bank in Grand Rapids. The State Police pulled him over for speeding and informed my grandfather when they realized his age. He later became a service manager in Grand Rapids for several different automobile dealerships, in particular Chevrolet and Oldsmobile. He loved General Motors but saw the faults of its management approach, and noted that the Japanese firms seemed to be much more effective at understanding what customers wanted in their vehicles. He was a pretty honest man, a real straight shooter, and just knew everything about cars. He died in 2007 at age 84, having worked until 82. The Oldsmobile dealership he was with kept him on, though he wasn’t service manager, that was just too demanding and he cut back his work to two or three days a week as a consultant at the dealership. People knew he was trustworthy and would tell them the truth about their cars and wouldn’t give them any fluff or spin about what was best in terms of automotive decisions they had to make. He wouldn’t try any shady repair deals. Though he was not in sales and had never wanted to be, he developed a wide circle of people who believed in him and who would buy a new car because he was there to oversee its servicing. Every dealership he was with 4 valued him for the business that his integrity brought to the dealerships. They kept him on twenty years after people normally stop this kind of work. Q: Where did you grow up? HOOPER: Grand Rapids, Michigan. Q: What was the neighborhood you grew up in like? HOOPER: Middle class, near Alger Elementary School. I look back on it as what was for many white middle class Americans in the 1950s probably considered a traditional upbringing. We lived in the same neighborhood for years, got to know all the kids, playing softball in vacant lots and being chased by a neighbor when we would hit the ball into his yard. I have kept in touch with one of my best friends from those years, who lived next store and now still lives just a few blocks from there, a very decent man who adopted two kids from Romania and Latin America some years after marriage and has raised them well.