Interview with Frederick C. Smith FM-V-L-2010-015 Interview # 1: April 2, 2010 Interviewer: Mark R. DePue COPYRIGHT The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955 Note to the Reader: Readers of the oral history memoir should bear in mind that this is a transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, interviewee and editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for the views expressed therein. We leave these for the reader to judge. DePue: Good afternoon. My name is Mark DePue. I’m the Director of Oral History at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. Today, I’m excited to have with me right to my left here, Fred Smith. Good afternoon, Fred. Smith: Good afternoon. DePue: We’re going to be talking to Fred about his experiences going and visiting every single presidential library and museum throughout the United States. Let me start by saying today is April 2, Friday, it is actually Good Friday, and Fred you mentioned that it’s not just Good Friday, but it’s your anniversary as well. Smith: That is good; yes, it is our anniversary. DePue: Tell me when and where you were born. That’s how we like to start these. Smith: I was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in March 1947, sixty-three years ago. DePue: Okay. And can we get a little bit of a very brief thumbnail of what you have been doing here for the last thirty years of your life. Smith: Okay. Following college, when I graduated from Becknell University, the draft was still in effect, which was during the Viet Nam War and so, while there were other things that I may have wanted to have done at that period of Frederick C. Smith Interview # FM-V-L-2010-015 my life, I really didn’t have a choice. However, going into the military proved to be the most valuable experience that I probably have had to this day. I went to naval officer’s training at Newport, Rhode Island in 1969, and then I served in the Navy for four years. That opened my eyes to a lot of things in the world, things that I honestly didn’t know existed having been brought up here in the United States and leading a somewhat sheltered life, I suppose. But after my experience in the military, I then went and got a graduate degree in international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and that then led me to Washington, DC, where I was fortunate to get a job in 1978 with the Department of Defense. I spent the next twenty-six years as a career civil servant serving in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, working in international security affairs. I retired from government in late 2004 and ran a company for a couple of years, and most recently, I helped run an energy institute at the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. Energy is a huge issue these days. It is critically important and part of our national security, as well. So, virtually all of my adult career was spent in the government in Washington, DC. DePue: What was your title you had when you retired in 2004? Smith: I really didn’t have a title then, but the best title I had in the government, the best job, was Principle Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. (DePue laughs) It was a title about this long and, as somebody once remarked to me, the length of your title is directly inversely related to your importance. In other words, if you have a title like President or even Secretary of Defense, you’re far more important than somebody with a title as long as mine was. It was an incredible position. I was fortunate as a career civil servant to have been given that opportunity and was in that job for five years and oversaw our defense relations all over the world. This was during the late 1990s when a lot of our defense relationships in the post-Cold War era were just really beginning with a lot of countries. DePue: In other words, in your career, you’ve seen and been involved with a lot of history, a lot of America’s history. Smith: Well, I’m not that old, Mark, (DePue laughs) but I started in the Carter administration when I moved to Washington in 1978, so I served from the Carter administration up through the George W. Bush, that was ‘43, administration. And so I started in late 70s, early 80s, Reagan, when the Cold War was in effect and right through, I was heavily involved in both Gulf Wars and at the Pentagon. So yes, I did see a lot of history. I worked in an area of the government that is usually called the National Security Arena and the Inter-Agency Arena that involves the Department of Defense, Department of State, all of the intelligence community, as well as some of the other departments, like Treasury and Energy and the National Security Council staff of the White House. So that was my involvement and direct participation with 2 Frederick C. Smith Interview # FM-V-L-2010-015 these government agencies under different presidential administrations, how each administration operated, what the processes were and all that. It is what led me to this interest in the presidents and presidential libraries. DePue: Well, that’s a great transition. As much as I’d like to talk to you about all these other experiences which you’ve obviously had for the last couple of decades, tell me why you embarked on this process of going and visiting every single presidential library and museum. Smith: Okay. There’s a strong personal nature to all this. A little over a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer, something that really hits you in the stomach when you get this news and you don’t know what the rest of life will bring. I and my family were dealing with it. I’m under treatment up until this day and well into the future, I hope. But not quite a year ago, it was actually about six or seven months ago, last fall one of my close friends—I suppose I should also say one of my sensitive close friends—asked me, “Fred, what’s on your bucket list?” So I thought a little bit and given the government career that I just described and interest in national security and Presidents and how they operate and all, I said, “I would like to visit as many of the presidential libraries as possible.” When I made that statement, honestly, I didn’t even know how many there were. I knew they existed because I had very briefly in my life, visited two of them: at Hyde Park, the FDR Library and Museum; and once up in Boston, when I was at the Pentagon, went to the Kennedy Library. But the Kennedy Library was not to visit the museum or Library itself, but was really for a dinner one evening there. So I knew they existed and I had also read more recently about the dedication of several libraries, most recently the dedication of the Clinton Library in 2004 down in Little Rock. So I knew they existed, but I didn’t know how many or to what extent or even where most of them were, or where they are located. So I started going research on that and what I found is that there are twelve sort of official presidential libraries. The thirteenth will be George W. Bush’s when it opens in Dallas in 2013. But there are twelve today that, in the sense of administration of these libraries, they’re run by a combination of either a foundation that’s established by the former president, or his family and friends. The foundation raises the money to build the library and then the National Archives and Records Administration, NARA, which is the National Archives in Washington, D. C., which many people are familiar with, they actually run the operations and maintenance of the twelve libraries. The operations and maintenance is paid for by a line item in the U. S. budget. Last year it cost about sixty-five million dollars to run these twelve libraries. Then there are six other sort of unofficial libraries that are listed, and here’s where I think it gets a little bit fuzzy. You have these six libraries, 3 Frederick C. Smith Interview # FM-V-L-2010-015 which includes the Lincoln Library and Museum here in Springfield, Illinois; also, the Wilson Museum in Staunton, Virginia; the Coolidge; Rutherford B. Hayes; John Adams up in Massachusetts; and one or two others that they list as unofficial, which are run by private foundations or by state government, such as the government of Illinois. So they are not part of the official library system that’s run by the National Archives and Records Administration.