Library of Congress Interview with Ambassador Roscoe S. Suddarth The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR ROSCOE S. SUDDARTH Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: March 30, 1999 Copyright 2008 ADST Q: Today is March 30, 1999. This is an interview with Ambassador Roscoe S. Suddarth. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. Could you tell me when and where you were born and something about your family? SUDDARTH: I was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1935. My father was the manager of a General Mills plant that made flour out of wheat. The plant was right next to the Louisville Colonels baseball field, so some of my earliest memories were sitting in my father's office watching baseball games at night. Q: You say you started out in Tennessee, but your father moved. SUDDARTH: No, I was born in Louisville, Kentucky. My father had a heart attack when I was five years old. He was 47. We then moved back to Nashville, Tennessee. He had been born in Lebanon, Tennessee and had grown up there and then went through schools in Nashville. I guess the most meaningful was being at Peabody Demonstration School. That was a school that was a demonstration school for the teaching college, Peabody College for Teachers. That is now part of Vanderbilt. They selected so-called “bright” students from around the city as well as others. We had a kind of rarified atmosphere of Interview with Ambassador Roscoe S. Suddarth http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001649 Library of Congress really tremendous coursework that was wide-ranging - music, chess, Indian beadwork, you name it. Q: This was based on the John Dewey system. He was at Columbia at the time. SUDDARTH: Yes, that's right. We had a regular corps of teachers, highly experienced people, but they would bring in practice teachers and watch them. I remember being given all kinds of IQ tests, aptitude tests, throughout this. We were sort of guinea pigs and took pride in being kind of a young intellectual elite. From my class of 30, we had at least four Ph.D.s, a couple of doctors, an outstanding researcher at NIH, a Rhodes scholar, two diplomats (Olaf Grobel and I both were in the Foreign Service.)... So, it was a great place to get started. Geography was a very important part, thinking about things that led you to the Foreign Service. Dr. Hodson taught us world geography and American geography. Actually, we learned American geography in a very interesting way. We did it at the time of the Indians. So, there were no political bounds in the United States. We learned what America seemed like from a geological, horticulture, natural environment. Then we would study Hiawatha, the way the Indians were looked at. And it was a great musical education. All of this I now draw on in my adult life in a way that I wouldn't have if I hadn't had that exposure. Q: Coming from Kentucky, which was the dark and bloody ground, how was the war between the settlers and the Indians taught you at that time? SUDDARTH: It really wasn't taught. There was the Natchez Trace, which was the Trail of Tears where the Cherokees had to move out into reservations. But the real defining experience was the Civil War. In effect, Tennessee was an underdeveloped country by most standards in 1900 when my father grew up. His father died of typhoid, impure drinking water. He had to leave his school after the fourth grade in order to help his mother support her four younger children. So, there was a perception of tremendous wrongdoing, that the South had lost the war and then had been left and in effect penalized in terms of Interview with Ambassador Roscoe S. Suddarth http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001649 Library of Congress developing itself. That was the kind of [thing] that my grandmother would put in my head, so there was a sense of grievance. On the Indians, people have a way conveniently of forgetting bad memories. I think there was a guilt about the Indians. I never heard about the Battle of Nashville or the Battle of Donaldson, where the Confederates turned tail and ran like hell! So, we were pretty selective. Q: Those were Grant's early victories. SUDDARTH: That's right. Q: In folk memory, you were there part of the time as a kid. Were you picking up anything about the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt? SUDDARTH: Yes. That is a very deep question. Roosevelt was revered almost as a demigod. I remember my mother crying like a baby April 20, 1945 when he died. I remember sitting in the barber's chair when the radio carried the announcement. I had heard so much about Roosevelt and TVA. My sister, as a matter of fact, had worked as a bookkeeper for the Corps of Engineers during World War II. I only realized a few years ago that she was actually working on the Manhattan Project. She was recording billions of dollars worth of expenditures. That was all made possible because of TVA. But more importantly from our viewpoint was that it really developed the middle South. It allowed farmers to quit eroding the soil and opened up lakes for fishing. It just did a tremendous amount. It was like having the Marshall Plan for middle Tennessee and the middle South. I wanted to mention also another formative influence on my, my high school principal, Dr. Yarborough, who was a celebrated historian and was principal of our school at West End High School. I transferred out of Peabody because I wanted to play football and Peabody didn't have a football team. Dr. Yarborough had written a book on U.S. diplomatic history which he had me read as a special tutorial in my senior year. That is when I decided to try to try for the Foreign Service. Interview with Ambassador Roscoe S. Suddarth http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001649 Library of Congress Q: Did you have any discussions with him about what diplomats do and that sort of thing? SUDDARTH: No, it was really on a policy level. I remember reading endless letters and memoranda from John Quincy Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Again, Americans have a convenient way of forgetting things. We had a pretty imperial history if you look at the Mexican wars and Cuba and all of that. So, he I think was a very liberal historian and almost a revisionist in wanting to show the blemishes of American foreign policy. I got a sense of what it was like. Just reading these policy memos and letters that Jefferson would write to Washington from Paris or that James K. Polk would be doing gave me a real sense of what diplomatic policy was all about. Unfortunately, it also involved a lot of wars. Q: What about the post-World War II period? For a lot of people, particularly growing up away from the coast, Europe and Asia sort of disappeared from view. I take it you were getting a look at what we were up to at that time. SUDDARTH: That wasn't true of Nashville. I almost always was a newspaper reader. Nashville had two newspapers. One was conservative; one was liberal. But they both seemed to be very interested in foreign policy. I started reading about it during the war. I remember even in my “weekly reader” in the sixth grade reading about the Common tern. I remember dramatically newspaper headlines depicting the events in China. I never felt insulated where I was. Nashville is a university center. I lived very close to Vanderbilt University. My mother and father actually took in boarders who were graduate students, some studying political science. I had parents of friends, as well as my own parents, who were very much interested in foreign affairs, probably more than one would have thought. Q: What about the Middle East? Did that crop up? SUDDARTH: Yes. My early memories include collecting in the movies B'nai B'rith collections for the Jewish refugees who were going to Palestine. That is my earliest Interview with Ambassador Roscoe S. Suddarth http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001649 Library of Congress memory. That was about 1946. “The man called “X”” on radio was always flying on a mission to help the Jewish refugees in Palestine, but the Middle East didn't factor at all into events that I recall. It was much more China and Europe when I was in school. Q: What about race relations? This was not an active time in that. Things were happening, but did that intrude at all? SUDDARTH: Well, it was part of the landscape. My mother didn't have good milk, so I was nurtured on what was called in those days a black wet nurse. We had black domestic help throughout most of my childhood. They lived in the basement. They were part of the family. My mother died of cancer when I was age 11. Julia, our maid, really helped to raise me. But it was very much the old order. I remember playing with her son. He was younger than I was, but stronger than I was. He was besting me. One of my shameful memories was saying, “You have no right to do that. I am superior to you.” But at some point in probably middle through high school, I realized that this was unjust.