Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR STEPHEN J. LEDOGAR Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: March 1, 2000 Copyright 2003 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background Born and raised in New ork City U.S. Navy, Korean War Fordham University Entered Foreign Service - 1,5, .ontreal, Canada - /isa Officer 1,01-1,02 Anti-bourbon rule /oting fraud French-English .ilan, Italy - Administrative Officer 1,02-1,05 President Kennedy visit State Department - FSI - /ietnamese 6anguage Training 1,05-1,05 7uang Tri Province, /ietnam - AID 8epresentative 1,05-1,0, Security Environment D.9 Pacification Buddhists /iet Cong Saigon, /ietnam :TD ) - Interagency Study 1,00 Situation deterioration Torture /iet Cong Security Saigon, /ietnam - CO8DS 1,00-1,07 .arriage 1,07 1 Defense Department - National .ilitary Command Center 1,07 /ietnam State Department - Office of /ietnam Information 1,07-1,08 State Department - EAP - /ietnam Desk Officer 1,08-1,0, /ietnam Working Group Pacification desk Tet offensive Wheeler trip Embassy attacked Westmoreland troop request U.S. public support of /ietnam War Speechmaking U.S. mistakes @Wise .enA State Department - FSI - Economic Training 1,0, Paris, France - /ietnam Peace Talks 1,0,-1,72 Post-war retrospect Ambassador 6odge Press corps Negotiations U.S. politics POWs and .IAs North /ietnamese and the press South /ietnamese delegations Phil Habib Issues .isspeaks Ambassador Bruce Kissinger talks Cambodia invasion Ambassador William Porter Stanford University - Senior Training 1,72-1,73 Student behavior Brussels, Belgium - Political Officer 1,73-1,70 @Codfish WarA Turkey-Greece European Economic Community Portugal 2 State Department - Security Assistance 1,70-1,77 Arms sales NATO Nuclear issues Weaponry French 8ussians Senior Seminar 1,77-1,78 Interim Assignments 1,78-1,81 Brussels, Belgium - NATO - DC. 1,81-1,,1 European Union French attitude Helsinki process CSCE Congressional interest NATO organiCations Spain /ienna Conventional Forces, Europe DCFEE Treaty .BF8 Geneva, SwitCerland - Conference on Disarmament - Ambassador 1,,1-1,,7 Conference on Disarmament Participants Chemical weapons Iraq Desert Storm Nuclear testing /erification India/Pakistan Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty DCTBTE Arms Control and Disarmament Agency DACDAE Non-Proliferation Treaty DNPTE 8etirement 1,,7 INTERVIEW Q: Today is March 1, 2000. This is an interview with Stephen J. Ledogar. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and I)m Charles Stuart Kennedy. What do you go by? Steve? 3 6EDOGA8: es. Q: Let)s start at the beginning. When and where were you born? Tell me something about your family? 6EDOGA8: I was born in New ork City in 1,2,. I was one of four children of my father Edward 6edogar, who was a self-employed attorney. .y mother was a homemaker. We grew up in New ork City, 7ueens County. I went to school at Fordham University in the Bronx. .y period in college was interrupted by four years in the U.S. Navy during which time I became a naval aviator. Q: I want to go bac,. Was your family Catholic? 6EDOGA8: es. Q: Did you go to Catholic schools in New .or,? 6EDOGA8: es, I did, all parochial schools followed by a Catholic high school in Brooklyn. Fordham is a Iesuit university. Q: What did you thin, of the elementary school system? Did you feel that there was a division between Catholics and Protestants? 6EDOGA8: Oh, yes. It was a competition of sorts. But it was rather benign. At that time, the Catholic elementary schools were completely staffed by nuns. 6ay teachers were few and far between. That has totally changed today. The high school was run by the Christian Brothers and was staffed by J to 2/3 brothers with the rest being lay teachers. Then the university was maybe 11% Iesuit fathers and the rest were all lay teachers. Q: In elementary school, were the nuns traditional disciplinarians? 6EDOGA8: Especially in those days. We would get whacked around. The classes were quite large so discipline was rather strict. That was also true in high school. Physical chastisement was not unknown. A ruler on the knuckles and that sort of thing. Q: In elementary school, what sort of things do you recall as far as sub0ects and sports that particularly interested you? 6EDOGA8: I went to a very progressive school in parochial school terms, a school which was very big on extracurricular activities. They had a band. They had a brigade. They had a marching band. They even had an orchestra in grammar school. They had all kinds of programs for afterschool activities - theater, roller skatingL I canMt remember them all. The only one I can remember that was not there was the Boy Scouts. Q: What sort of things did you get involved in? 4 6EDOGA8: I played the fife in the marching band. But I kind of drifted away from extracurricular activities at school for two reasons. One, we lived quite far away. Also, I still was attached to buddies from a previous neighborhood. They were gravitating toward the Scouts, so I kind of went back to the old gang and went through a scouting program. Then at about the end of grade school, I got involved pretty much with the old gang in the sport of bicycle racing. This was during World War II, so there werenMt many cars on the road. We did an awful lot of road riding and racing including great distances. This pulled me away from this rather advanced elementary school and its activities. But I somehow managed to stick with the marching band. Q: I ta,e it the bi,es were Schwinns or something li,e that? 6EDOGA8: No, we had European imports, all custom made. The hardest thing was to get tires during the war. They used sew-up tires which were imported from Europe and were very hard to come by. Q: During the high school days, a good part of World War II was on. Were you interested in reading the paper, finding out where things were, and following events? 6EDOGA8: Absolutely. We not only played war as kids, but I was with a couple of friends who did a lot of drawing. An awful lot of drawing would be sequential battlefield scenes. We even had some of these war games. Our older brothers were beginning to be called up in the draft. I can remember participating in the war bond and war stamp campaigns. Of course, there were all of the elements of rationing that kept the war in front of you. I paid quite a bit of attention to the news. Q: I)m a year older than you. I was born in 1122. 3ne of the things I got out of the e4perience was a sense of geography, 5uadalcanal6 6EDOGA8: Absolutely. One of the games that we had employed little lead models of ships. We devised a naval war game. We were quite a bit ahead of the technology we were reading about as regards the role of aircraft carriers being more important than battleships in the war, more of a threat. So, we were very conscious of the war. I think that that led to a sense of geography. I had uncles in the Pacific. Some of the older guys in the neighborhood were going off to war. Q: Just to go bac, to your family, where did your father go to school? 6EDOGA8: He went to public schools in New ork, 7ueens, and Brooklyn. .y mother also grew up in Brooklyn. At that time, one could get a law degree without first having to get a prior bachelor degree. ou could go directly into an 66B program and thatMs what he did. He had served in World War I. ThatMs another influence on my awareness of geography and history. HeMd tell war stories and tell us about where it was he served, which was both down in .exico chasing Pancho /illa and also in France. I suppose that era of war really did teach us a lot of geography and history. 5 Q: What were your ma0or lines of concentration at Fordham? 6EDOGA8: In the last year of high school, I signed up for and was successful in getting a scholarship from the U.S. Navy called the Naval Aviation College Program. This was a post-World War II follow-on to what used to be called the /-5 program. The aviation portion, unlike the N8OTC :Naval 8eserve Officer Training Corps) surface portion of the navy, required that you do two years of college, then go off and do your flight training and your obligated service, with the promise that they would send you back to finish college sometime later. Well, I did that. The @blackshoeA :surface navy) portion of it was the N8OTC, and they had 52 colleges that were designated and had staffs to teach naval science during the otherwise civilian portion of your college education. The aviation portion allowed you to go to any accredited college, but they had certain requirements. ou had to take two years of English and one year of Physics before you left for flight training. So, that pushed me towards the Physics department. Then when we were halfway through freshmen year, there was a change in the program. The Navy realiCed that the design of the aviation program wasnMt very efficient. First of all, they didnMt have the money to give us the summer training between freshman and sophomore year as they had planned. Then they decided it was less efficient to bring everybody in the program down to Florida in Iune at the end of sophomore year.