Library of Congress Interview with Ambassador David Greenlee The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR DAVID N. GREENLEE Interviewed by: Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: January 19, 2007 Copyright 2009 ADST Q: Today is the 19th of January 2007. This is an interview with David N. GreenleeWhat does N stand for? GREENLEE: Nicol. Q: You didn't get into the “leigh.” GREENLEE: I'm not sure. Maybe way back it was “leigh.” Q: You go by David. Let's start at the beginning. When and where were you born? GREENLEE: I was born in White Plains, New York, June 3, 1943. Q: Let's talk first about your family. Let's take your father's side. Where did the family come from originally? GREENLEE: I don't have detailed knowledge of my father's roots. My father's father came out of Philadelphia. He was born in Pennsylvania. My father was part Irish, part German, and I think part Scots-Irish as well. Interview with Ambassador David Greenlee http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001557 Library of Congress Q: If you can go back a bit, on your father's side, do you know what your great- grandparents were involved in? GREENLEE: I only know as far back as my grandfather, who died when I was about seven years old. My grandfather was in real estate and was a gambler in real estate, and I think a gambler in horses. He made a great deal of money before the depression.He was said to be a very colorful guy, a sharp dresser, somebody who people around him liked a great deal. I think he had a fairly tense marriage with my grandmother, who was very strong- willed. She had a German background. My father was their only son. After my grandfather died, my grandmother came to live with us. Q: With a German grandmother and the only son, was she the fuehrer? GREENLEE: She was very assertive. She was bright, but not very well educated, no college. She was a strong presence in our family when I was growing up. Looking back, I realize that I carry some of her opinions—biases—today. There was often an angle to her comments and views that was destructive and created collateral damage in her personal relationships. She liked to play against type. For example, she was of pure German descent but was prone to say things like the Germans “started all the wars” and every German male should be “castrated.” She said this kind of stuff in front of Germans. She was particularly vivid in condemning the holocaust. She liked to say she contributed to Hadassah, the Jewish women's charitable organization, although she was not Jewish. From time to time, though, she would let slip in an anti-Semitic comment. At the same time she was a strong supporter of human and civil rights, at least in the abstract. That influenced me greatly. Q: How would you describe your father's upbringing? GREENLEE: For most of his youth, I think, his family was quite well-to-do, and as an only child he was doted on. He grew up in a Philadelphia Main Line community and attended Interview with Ambassador David Greenlee http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001557 Library of Congress a prep school called St. Luke's, which later merged with or became the Haverford School. The family had a small yacht, a motorboat large enough to have a captain, and my father cruised to Maine a couple of summers. He went on to Williams College and Harvard Law School. As a young lawyer he was with the firm of Donovan and Liege, and from there was recruited for the Office of Strategic Service during World War II. Q: Wild Bill Donovan. GREENLEE: Yes. My father was sent behind Japanese lines in Siam (now Thailand). His exploits were written up in a couple of books. One was Sub Rosa, by Stewart Alsop. My father never talked about what he did, but I understood from what I read that he was involved in setting up a guerrilla network from the King Regent's palace in Bangkok. The King Regent was nominally with the Japanese but actually with us. My father was commissioned as a major in the U.S. Army and awarded a bunch of U.S. and Siamese medals. To me he was a heroic but sort of distant figure. He stayed involved with the intelligence community in some fashion until he died in 1965. For example, one of his law clients was Radio Free Europe, and he traveled frequently to Munich. My father loved being a lawyer, but in the decade after the war he tried to branch into other things. He got involved with an oil-drilling venture, for example, and we used to have a bottle of the oil that his company pulled up in our pantry. It was probably the only oil. He also bought and ran, with my grandmother's help, a sports car outlet in White Plains called Shamrock Motors. After that he got into German cars through a law client who was the distributor for Mercedes Benz in Brazil. We had a 220 S and a 300 SL gull wing coup, today a real classic. Q: I had a 180. GREENLEE: We had a 180, too. That was our first one. Q: That was a sort of taxi. Interview with Ambassador David Greenlee http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001557 Library of Congress GREENLEE: Yes, small but boxy. My father loved cars. When he had the dealership he used to run a supercharged MG TF at the track in Lime Rock, Connecticut. He didn't drive it himself, but it was part of his identity. Q: It was also an era of sports cars. They were much more around then. GREENLEE: The British ones were particularly stylish and part of their appeal was that they were rough and wet in the rain. Q: The open thing. And it had luggage straps all over the treads and that sort of thing. GREENLEE: The other thing about that time was a house my father bought, I think largely with my grandmother's money, in Bay Head, New Jersey. It was a large summer cottage, without central heat. My grandmother presided over the house from May through September and we spent our summers there for a number of years. I was an avid sailor, racing a small planing hull called a Jet 14 as much as three times a week. I was the junior national champion of that class in 1961. My father was not a sailor. His experience was with motorboats. But through me he became interested in sailing and towards the end of his life acquired a 28foot sloop, which we sailed together for several summers. We would go off shore through the Mannesquan Inlet and, in the fall and spring, we would sail from Larchmont, New York, up and down Long Island Sound, as far as Newport and Block Island, Rhode Island. In November or December of 1964 my father started to feel ill, with shortness of breath. He checked into the hospital a couple of times, but the doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong. In late March of 1965, my senior year in college, he became very sick. He had an operation to drain fluid that had built up around his heart, but died in the recovery room. It turned out he had a rapidly spreading cancer that probably started in his lower intestine. Q: When did your father graduate from Williams? Interview with Ambassador David Greenlee http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001557 Library of Congress GREENLEE: He graduated in 1934. Q: Do you remember if he was in a fraternity there? GREENLEE: Yes, but I don't know which one. The story was he was almost blackballed for wearing a yellow tie, but it turned out okay because the tie was a Sulka. Q: I was asking that because I was a 1950 graduate of Williams. Williams, particularly prior to World War II was known very much as one of these small, elite, gentlemen's schools. The people who mattered got what was known as “gentlemen C's,” and they didn't take their education too seriously. They had very good social connections. That changed quite a bit. There's always been a good education, but after the war you had the GI Bill, and a very serious group came in. GREENLEE: My father was not socially connected. He was, I think, considered an Irish Catholic. Q: That would put him down a couple of notches. GREENLEE: He was a Catholic who became Episcopalian when he married my mother, who had been a Presbyterian. My grandmother was Episcopalian, although she raised my father as a Catholic in deference to my grandfather. My mother also became Episcopalian and my brother, two sisters and I were raised in that church. Q: We'll come back to both your mother and your father, but let's go to your mother's side. Go back as far as you can. What do you know about your mother's side of the family? GREENLEE: I know more about because me mother's side because she was interested in genealogy. She grew up in a tradition where people told stories about their families. My mother was born in Appomattox, Virginia. Her father was a small-town doctor in Appomattox whose name was David Nicol Twyman. My mother's mother died of Interview with Ambassador David Greenlee http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001557 Library of Congress pneumonia when my mother was an infant.