John D. Caswell
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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project JOHN D. CASWELL Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: August 4, 2000 Copyright 2004 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background Born in assachusetts; raised in assachusetts and Connecticut Franklin and arshall College; Fletcher School (Tufts) U.S. Navy National )ar College - Staff Officer 19,0-19,. Fletcher School (Tufts) - Student 19,.-19,4 0ntered Foreign Service 19,4 1io de 2aneiro, Bra4il - Political Officer 19,4-19,5 6overnment ilitary Human rights Argentina 0nvironment Foreign policy State Department - Operations Center 19,5-19,, Operations State Department - International Organi4ations Bureau 19,,-19,9 0conomic policy Code of conduct 6roup of ,, Technology transfer Bribery State Department - Foreign Service Institute 19,9-1980 Bulgaria Language Training 1 Sofia, Bulgaria - Political 0conomic Section - Chief 1980-1982 6overnment 0nvironment Drugs 1elations Terrorists USIS Students Security 0conomy Soviets Lima, Peru - Narcotics Control - Deputy Director 1982-1984 6overnment Narcotics Sendero Luminoso Confederation AID Police University of California at Los Angeles and 1and Corporation < Studies 1984-1985 Soviet and 0astern Bloc State Department - Office of 0astern and Yugoslav Affairs 1985-198, Albania Kosovo Bulgaria Turks 1eciprocity program State Department - 0uropean Affairs - Portugal Desk Officer 198,-1989 NATO 1elations 0conomic Support Funds ilitary sales Lisbon, Portugal - Political/ ilitary Affairs 1989-1991 ilitary sales NATO Spain Illness USAID - 1egional ission for 0urope 1991-199. Central and 0astern 0urope problems 2 0A-Yugoslavia nations UN operations Organi4ation Democracy building ilosevic 6reeks Bulgaria Albania AID projects Personnel problems Congressional interest State Department - Latin American Affairs - Office of Bra4il and Southern Cone 199.-1995 0conomy Inflation Banking Debt 1eal Plan Argentina NAFTA Nuclear safeguards NASA U.S. relations Border disputes 0cuador ilitary Observer ission 0cuador Peru B O 0PC Chile Pinochet Brasilia, Bra4il - Political Section - Deputy Chief 1995-1998 6overnment Ama4on Surveillance Project BSIDA C Drug traffickers 0nvironment Politics utual Legal Assistance Agreement edia ilitary 1etirement 1998 2ohns Hopkins University INTERVIEW . : Today is the fourth of August 2000. This is with John D. Caswell. This is being done for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, and I&m Charles Stuart Kennedy. Let&s start at the beginning. Tell me when and where you were born. CAS)0LLE I was born on August 15th 194, in Attleboro, assachusetts, which is a suburb of Providence, 1hode Island. : Tell me something about your family. (hat was the date again) CAS)0LLE August 15th 194,. : Almost *happy birthday&. CAS)0LLE Thank you very much. )ell, my father was a salesman for his working career with a company called Burroughs, which made office eGuipment. They eventually merged into and became Unisys. He graduated from Brown University in Providence. He was born in New Bedford, assachusetts, and essentially my fatherHs side of the family came from southeastern assachusetts, Cape Cod area. His father had also attended Brown and was briefly in the Coast 6uard. y father was also in the Coast 6uard during the war and, listening to my father tell his stories over and over and over again, I think he probably should have stayed in the Coast 6uard when the war ended. He developed a great affection for the Coast 6uard and it seems as though those were the brightest moments of his life even though it was wartime. In his stories about the Coast 6uard, he always relishes the stories, and the stories that talked about his business career were many times bittersweet. y mother was born in Boston, and her father had been a haberdasher and essentially she moved around an awful lot throughout New 0ngland. She seemed to have lived in just about every substantial city in eastern assachusetts and aine at one time or another when she was growing up. She earned a secretarial degree from a junior college in )orcester, assachusetts. : How big was your family) CAS)0LLE It was just my sister and I and my parents, a relatively small family. I had an aunt and uncle that lived in Cape Cod and a couple of cousins, but it was a fairly small family. : (here did you grow up) CAS)0LLE For the most part I grew up in Connecticut. )hen I was about four the family moved, because my father was transferred from the Providence office down to New Haven, Connecticut, so we moved and we lived in a place called ilford, Connecticut, which is between New Haven and Bridgeport on Long Island Sound. 0Acept for about two and a half years when we moved up to the Hartford area - my father briefly 4 got an assignment up in the Hartford office - we lived in ilford the whole time that I was growing up, from four or five until I graduated from high school. y parents still live there till this day. : (here did you go to school) Let&s tal, about elementary school first. CAS)0LLE Darious elementary schools because we moved a little bit. I started out elementary school in ilford in a place with the delightful name of Pumpkin Delight 0lementary School. The school was located on Pumpkin Delight 1oad; I think at one time there must have been a huge pumpkin patch there or something like that. )hen I was in about third grade, my father got that transfer, so we moved to Newington, Connecticut. I went to an elementary school there through fifth grade, and then we moved back to ilford again and I went to Central 6rammar School which went up through eighth grade. There was no junior high school in ilford, so I went to high school at a place called ilford High School, which now is an anneA to City Hall. In the dearth of kids in the I,0s they closed down that high school and reopened it as an anneA. I graduated from high school in 1955. : Let&s tal, about elementary school first. In elementary school was there anything that particularly interested you - reading or sports or activities or anything li,e that) CAS)0LLE )ell, I was fanatic about baseball. y grandfather introduced me to baseball when I was very small, and we played a lot of baseball in the neighborhood, so I became really interested in baseball. I played a lot of Little League baseball and organi4ed baseball. That was always sort of my biggest hobby. I did the sort of things, I think, that most boys would do, collected coins, collected stamps. I think maybe that was my first introduction to thinking about the wider world outside of my home community. I must have been in maybe first or second grade when I started collecting stamps. I inherited my grandfatherHs coin collection; he particularly had a good collection of British coins. Fairly early on I became interested in geography and maps and the broader world. y parents tell me stories about how when I was in first grade IHd be sprawled out on the living room floor thumbing through an atlas looking up maps of the countries of the world. I was always very interested in travelogs and things like this. : Did you ta,e the National /eographic) CAS)0LLE Yes. As a matter of fact, a great thing happened, for me at least, when I was about in seventh or eighth grade, when a great uncle died on my motherHs side. He had been keeping .ational /eographics dating back to about 1940 or so. So in addition to the contemporary stuff, all of a sudden I inherited boAes and boAes of .ational /eographics dating all the way back to the war years. I became increasingly interested in history, to go along with the geography, starting in maybe siAth or seventh grade, not that much before that, and had been very interested in historical recreations and living history sort of places. In New 0ngland thereHs a couple of them that are not as grand as Colonial )illiamsburg but the same sort of idea. OneHs called Sturbridge Dillage in assachusetts, 5 and another oneHs called ystic Seaport in Connecticut. I became Guite interested in those sorts of things. I think I became increasingly interested in that as I went on into high school. : (hat about reading) CAS)0LLE I certainly did reading outside of school, did some reading of fiction, the usual sort of 2ack London, (hite Fang and Call of the (ild and those sorts of things that appealed to boys that age, but I was more of a practical bent and I tended to read histories and biographies and that sort of thing. : (hile you were in high school were you getting any particular encouragement in historic or geographic fields) CAS)0LLE It would be hard to say that I particularly got encouragement other than the fact that I just enjoyed those courses. I think it was kind of self reinforcing. I enjoyed them, I did well in them. I remember in seventh grade there was kind of a theme of looking at Latin American countries and for the first time we sort of looked at countries in greater depth. )e had this teacher rs. 1eynolds. I was in what was called the accelerated group. In those days the idea was to group people in classes by their skill levels, so youHd have an accelerated group and then the B group and the C group and the D group or whatever. She would put us through our paces, and she had this one much feared project that everyone heard about in advance called Ithe 100-page reportH. Of course, for somebody in seventh grade a 100-page report sounds really daunting.