Library of Congress Interview with Ambassador Timothy Michael Carney The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR TIMOTHY MICHAEL CARNEY Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: June 24, 2002 Copyright 2004 ADST Q: Today is June 24, 2002. This is an interview with Timothy Michael Carney. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. I'm Charles Stuart Kennedy. Let's start at the beginning. When and where were you born? Tell me a bit about your parents and family. CARNEY: I was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, July 12, 1944. My father at that time was in the Army. It was World War II. My mother was the daughter of a surgeon in St. Joe, a volatile, irascible kind of man, my grandfather. I have no memories of him. My father's family was from Omaha, Nebraska, originally, having been from Wichita, Kansas. I knew his side of the family very well. My late grandfather was with Cudahy Packing Company for years and years and years. He ultimately had a stroke and died at about age 65. The Army basically beckoned to Dad, who after he got out and was demobilized went to law school at Creighton in Omaha and then tried to make it in insurance and law and ultimately decided to go back into the Army about 1948. Q: Where did the Carneys come from? CARNEY: The Gaelic is O'Kirnaugh (phonetic) from County Donegal in Ireland. The transliteration into English produces either Carney or Kearney. The Carney clan was Interview with Ambassador Timothy Michael Carney http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001333 Library of Congress based in Randolph, Massachusetts. There are 2-3 pages of us in the Boston telephone directory. The branch that I'm a twig of moved off to Wichita. In fact, there are some famous Carneys. About 30 years ago, two of my second cousins and some of their friends were sitting around at the plant working a half day shift on Saturday and wanted to get out and go hunting in the afternoopheasants beckoneand one of them said, “It's a shame there's no place where we could just grab a hamburger and maybe get us a soft drink or a beer and get on out.” “Maybe we can do something about that.” So they started a little business they called Pizza Hut. These are the rich Carneys. Q: Did your father go to college? CARNEY: He did. He was the first one in the family actually to get a degree. It was from Creighton. My late uncle, John, also went to college but I don't believe he ever finished. My mother also was a college graduate. Q: We'll talk about her side in a minute. Had your father graduated from college by the time he went into the Army? CARNEY: That's a good question. I'm not sure I have the answer. He went into the Army in '42 and he would have been 21 or 22. So my guess is he had gotten an undergraduate degree from Creighton, from which he also got his law degree. Q: Was he an officer? CARNEY: Oh, no. In his World War II experience, he was in Ordnance and an enlisted man. Q: And then he returned to the Army in '48? CARNEY: About then, yes. Q: What did he do then? Interview with Ambassador Timothy Michael Carney http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001333 Library of Congress CARNEY: He went into the Judge Advocate Generals Corps, a far different pursuit than what one watches on TV now courtesy of the Navy. He was assigned first to Fort Myer. We lived at South post Fort Myer. Then almost immediately, in January of 1950, he went to Germany. Q: What was your mother's maiden name and what was their background? CARNEY: Their background was also Irish. Whereas the Carney clan came to the U.S. in the 1840s or '50s, I cannot tell you when the Byrne clan came, but it was equally old. Neither my father nor my mother had the right to own property in Ireland, which means their grandparents were not born in Ireland, which suggests mid-19th century arrival here. I had not tracked the migration west, but Grandfather Byrne wound up in St. Joe, Missouri, around the turn of the century and established his medical practice there. Q: Your mother went where to college? CARNEY: She went to Duchesne in Omaha, where she and my father met. Q: Where did you start going to school as a boy? CARNEY: My earliest memories of school are in Bad Tolz in Germany. Dad was with the First Infantry Division, one of the elements of the U.S. occupation of Germany, the last 3 or 4 years. I started in kindergarten and then moved through various U.S. military schools in the 3 years we were in Germany. Q: How did you find the schools? CARNEY: I don't have any memory of those schools at all except the torture of trying to learn penmanship as a left hander. Q: Were they still saying that you had to do it with the right hand? Interview with Ambassador Timothy Michael Carney http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001333 Library of Congress CARNEY: No, but they wanted us to shape letters the same way as right handers do. If you do that, you have the paper tilted the wrong way in such a fashion that you tend to smear what you've written with your left hand crossing over it. That's basically where a lot of left handers get that peculiar cramp and top down style of holding their pens or pencils. Q: I guess that's gone out the window for some time now. CARNEY: Oh, yes. In fact, it wasn't until I got to college that I actually turned the paper around the other way and began to write with a backhanded slant. Q: After the German stint, where did you go? CARNEY: Dad was assigned to Fort Bliss, Texas, so there we were in hot and dusty Fort Bliss next to El Paso. Q: How did you find Texas? CARNEY: I have very little memory of it except that it was hot and dusty. We did go off to White Sands Proving Grounds for a fire power demonstration. Q: Did you find that you were interested in sports or reading? CARNEY: It was probably at Fort Bliss where I have my most vivid memories of getting interested in reading. I was about 10 and I began reading a whole set of boyhood adventure novels written by that stable of authors, one of whom was Millicent Benson, also known as Carolyn Keene. My sister was reading her Nancy Drew adventure stories. I started reading Tom Swift, Jr. He was more the Flying Lab and things like that. Tom Swift, Sr., a turn of the last century set of novels for boys were by Victor Appleton, who I guess, also was a construct? I finally 4 or 5 years later came across some of those in one of my relatives' libraries and found them delightful, too. Rick Brant Electronic Adventures. Then there was a third series as well: Tom Corbett: Space Cadet. Interview with Ambassador Timothy Michael Carney http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001333 Library of Congress Q: Did this attract to you to the scientific world or was this a reading exercise? CARNEY: It was basically the impulse for the college I chose to attend. Q: By the time you moved along, where did you go to high school? CARNEY: Various. If you count junior high school, I was in the 7th and 8th grades in Taipei, Taiwan, the Taipei American School, and then started 9th grade in Junction City, Kansas, right next to Fort Riley. I spent 2 years there. Then my last 2 years were at Christian Brothers High School in St. Joseph, Missouri. Q: How old were you in Taiwan? CARNEY: About 12. Q: Did you get any feel for the Far East? CARNEY: I did. I was fascinated by it. I liked the food. Chopsticks provided no challenge even left handed, although the Chinese were a little appalled from time to time to see someone actually using their chopsticks in the left hand. Incredibly green, lush. People were poor. There were an incredible number of peasants in Taiwan. There was a history that I was old enough to be aware of: of the ruthless men in Nationalist Chinese occupation of Taiwan following the communist victory in 1949. Our houseboy at the time had invited us over to his house in Tamshui and we went and met his family and enjoyed the Taiwanese version of Chinese food. Yes, it sparked an interest in the Far East as well. Q: How did you find being an Army brat? CARNEY: I loved it. I didn't mind the travel. I don't seem to have had any trouble making the relatively few friends that I ever hung out with as a preteen and teenager. It bothered my brother and sister a good bit having to cut the ties and then forge them anew whenever Interview with Ambassador Timothy Michael Carney http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001333 Library of Congress we moved. We moved very frequently: 10 elementary schools and 2 high schools. In that sense, the Foreign Service was almost sedentary. Q: Looking back on it, did you find that the military education, moving from place to place, do you think you came out ahead or behind? CARNEY: Probably high school was the most crucial period on the education side, and I was behind, but that was the result of the parochial schools that I attended in my 4 years of high school rather than military schools.