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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR AVIS THAYER BOHLEN Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: February 28, 2003 Copyright 2015 ADST [Note: This interview was not edited by Ambassador Bohlen.] Q: This is a Foreign Affairs Oral History Program interview with Ambassador Avis Bohlen . Today is the 28th of February, 2003. This interview is being conducted under the auspices of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. I am Charles Stuart Kennedy. Avis, could you tell me when and where you were born, and then let’s talk a bit about your family. BOHLEN: I was born on April 20, 1940, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. I was born there because my father was stationed in the Embassy in Tokyo at that time, and dependants were not permitted for obvious reasons at that particular moment. So my mother went to stay with her mother who lived near Philadelphia, and I was born in the Bryn Mawr Hospital. I lived there until I was about two years old. Q: Your first name, Avis, what’s its origin.? BOHLEN: It was my mother’s name. In her case it was a family name. She was the youngest of six children, and I think her parents were tired of calling them Mary and Elizabeth and conventional names, so they went back in the family tree, and they found the name Avis. And she named me Avis as well. Q: Your father was a very distinguished Foreign Service Officer, but for this interview could you describe his background, family background, and your mother’s background. BOHLEN: My father came from a family that had its roots in Philadelphia. His mother had roots in Louisiana, and her father had been Ambassador to France under President Cleveland, as a political appointee. When I subsequently served in the embassy in Paris, one of the people there produced the portrait of my great-grandfather which was in my office. The granddaughter of the artist called me one day and said, “Do you by any chance know where the portrait of James B. Eustis is?” I said, “Well, I’m looking at it right now.” So she came by and found it. So that was my sort of father’s side of the family. And his father basically never worked in his life. He was an extremely intelligent man, but he was what was known as a gentleman of leisure, and they traveled a great deal. They lived in Boston. They lived in Aiken, South Carolina. They spent a lot of time in France which was a lifelong love for my father and my grandmother and my aunt, for 1 that matter. He went to St. Paul’s school up in New Hampshire, and from there he went to Harvard where he graduated in 1927. Q: The name Bohlen I always think of one of the Krupps and of the Ruhr gun barons. Is it any relation? BOHLEN: It’s the same family. There were two brothers in the late 18th Century who came to America, and one of them stayed and, I regret to say, made a great deal of money off the slave trade. The other went back to Germany, and his descendent eventually married Bertha von Krupp. He was a diplomat in the Court of William II, I believe, named Taffy Bohlen, and he met Bertha von Krupp on the Kaiser’s orders. That branch of the family is related but not closely to us. Q: I hesitate to go too far into this, but you say your grandfather was a gentleman of leisure. Where did the money come from? BOHLEN: From the slave trade. I assume not only, but that was the foundation of their fortune, and then they were involved in various businesses in Philadelphia as well. That’s where the money came from. Q: Where did your father meet your mother? BOHLEN: My father met my mother, who was also from Philadelphia, in Moscow when he was serving in the embassy there under Ambassador Bill Bullitt. Ambassador Bullitt’s aide was my uncle Charles Thayer who also joined the Foreign Service eventually. My mother and my grandmother and my aunt went to stay with my uncle and there met my father, although I think they had met before because another uncle was at school with my father, but they hadn’t really known each other, and so that’s where they met, and then he came back to the States not too long after that, and they saw a lot of each other and eventually were married in 1935. Q: What’s the background of your mother and her family? BOHLEN: My mother’s family also came from Philadelphia, and they had been there I think since the early 19th century. My grandmother’s mother was a Quaker who left the meeting to marry an Episcopalian, my great-grandfather. My great grandmother’s family had made a lot of money in textiles, and he was a businessman. Interestingly, my grandfather worked in a company called Cramp’s Shipyard which was owned by Averell Harriman with whom my father was later to work a great deal, and for whom my uncle worked. My grandfather went to Russia a great deal before the revolution, and at one point he brought back a large series of engravings from 17th Century Russia which hung in my grandmother’s house before I had ever set foot in Russia. I had these images of the Patriarch and the Czar and things like that. So there were various connections with Russia that crept on in early. Q: Did your mother go to college? 2 BOHLEN: She went to Bryn Mawr for, I think, two years, but she didn’t finish. Q: Assigned to the Embassy in Tokyo, your father must have worked under Ambassador Grew? BOHLEN: Yes, he was with Grew in Japan, and after Pearl Harbor they were interned for six months before they could be exchanged. He often described that Ambassador Grew loved to play poker, and so they played poker all day, every day. He loved to play poker, but Dad said after those six months he was ready for a little break. Q: I understand they put in a little golf course there, too. BOHLEN: Yes, I think that’s right! Q: You said you were in Philadelphia at the age of two. When did you begin to know where you were? Where did you go? BOHLEN: We came back to Washington, and my father at that point was working as Roosevelt’s interpreter and continued to do that throughout the war, so he was off to Tehran and Yalta and then Potsdam with Truman. My mother stayed there. She worked at the OSS (Office of Strategic Service), the only time she ever really had a job in her married life. We lived in Washington until about 1949, which would make me nine years old. My first memory is of watching Roosevelt’s funeral in April 1945 out of the window of my father’s office which was in the old executive office building. Q: Let’s pick it up until you got to be nine. Here you have your father who on the right hand of power and your mother was working at the OSS. Did this result in interesting table conversation? Were you observing? BOHLEN: I think I was. I’d be hard pressed to say on what day it began to sink in, but we always had and, of course, in the wartime period there were some really extraordinary people who were in Washington and who worked with my father. Talented Isaiah Berlin was in the British Embassy at the time. [Ed: Sir Isaiah Berlin is described as a Russian- born British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas. He worked for British Information Services in New York from 1940 to 1942, and for the British embassies in Washington, DC, and Moscow from then until 1946.] He and my father developed an instant rapport with each other because they had the common love of Russia, and they both had a wonderful sense of humor. So he was a very early visitor, and then after the war I remember he used to come back, and he was very much the unkempt professor at that point before he married, but he used to stay with us. Another person who was sort of in and out was Nicolas Nabokov, the composer who was the cousin of the writer. He and my uncle later were very much involved in starting the Voice of America. I’m not sure of the details of that, but I know they were a part of that. Various British diplomats I remember and then, of course, many Washington people and 3 especially in the early post-war period. Frank Wisner from the CIA was a very close friend of my parents. Journalist Joe Alsop lived just down the street from us and was in and out of the house. We lived on Dumbarton Avenue in Georgetown. There was really a wonderful world then. I think it was a much smaller world. Joe Olson and Stuart Olson. Q: Where were you going to school? BOHLEN: I went to Beauvoir School which is up on Woodley Road which is part of the National Cathedral, St. Alban’s complex of schools. I went there to nursery school and then kindergarten. I skipped the first grade and went to second and third grade there, and then from there I sent to Potomac School which was then still on California Street and eventually moved out to McLean.