IRELAND COUNTRY READER TABLE OF CONTENTS Robert M. Beaudry 1946-1948 Secretary of Legation, Dublin Clarence Swift Gulick 1948-1951 Marshall Plan Aide, Dublin Nicholas Shapiro Lakas 1951-1953 Principal Officer, Island of Cork William H. Taft III 1953-1957 Ambassador, Ireland James E. Hoofnagle 1965-1967 Deputy Chief of Mission, Dublin Roger A. Sorenson 1969-1974 Economic Counselor/Deputy Chief of Mission, Dublin Walter J.P. Curley 1975-1978 Ambassador, Ireland Richard L. Stockman 1977-1980 Communications Officer, Dublin Robin Berrington 1978-1981 Public Affairs Officer, USIS, Dublin Larry Colbert 1978-1981 Chief Consular Officer, Dublin Charles E. Rushing 1978-1982 Deputy Chief of Mission, Dublin Katherine P. Kennedy 1982-1984 Manager, North Ireland Exchange Program, Belfast Sarah Horsey-Barr 1984-1986 Desk Officer for Ireland, Northern Ireland and Iceland, Washington, DC Eleanore Raven-Hamilton 1985-1987 Consul General, Belfast William H.G. FitzGerald 1992-1993 Ambassador, Ireland Ann B. Sides 1993-1996 Chief Consular Officer, Dublin ROBERT M. BEAUDRY Secretary of Legation Dublin (1946-1948) 1 Robert M. Beaudry entered the Foreign Service in 1946 after serving in the U.S. Army during World War II. His career included positions in Ireland, Morocco, Switzerland, and Italy. Mr. Beaudry was interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy in 1992. Q: You came in in 1946. What did you start doing? Did you get some training? BEAUDRY: Well, we all had a month. FSI at the time was up at the Lothrop mansion at Columbia Road and Connecticut Avenue. It was a good group. Mac Toon was there and Frank Meloy, and Dean Brown. Everybody was in or out of the military. Bud Sherer was there. Most of the people were around 30 years old. I was a 23. We did that and then we had our first assignments. Mine was to Dublin, at the Legation. I am one of the few people you will run into who was a third secretary of legation. It was split. There was a consulate general in Dublin, but they had nothing to do with us. We were stashed away out at the Residence at Phoenix Park--almost two miles from the nearest bus stop. That cut down on the casual visitors. Q: Was anybody interested in it? What kind of relations did we have at that time? BEAUDRY: The first thing was that the Minister was David Gray, who was married to Maude Hall, who was Eleanor Roosevelt's aunt. But everybody in the world was interested in Ireland it seemed. They all came...all the politicians, including John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He was then a congressman. Ireland had been neutral during the War, yet they got in on the Marshall Plan. The doing of that and the fights with the people who wanted to penalize them for being neutral made the work interesting. So that was good for a couple of years. Q: What were you doing? BEAUDRY: Everything. It was a three man post. David Gray, the Minister, was a writer. He and Somerset Maugham had collaborated prior to World War I, so he did the heavy writing. Then we had Montgomery Holiday, then Vinton Chapin and Jack Poole, who were the senior...we would have called them DCMs in a later day. So I did political, economic, admin, everything except consular. Q: While you were dealing with this was the understanding always that you really had to watch out because of the Irish vote and Irish political influence within the States? Was this a major factor in how one looked at anything there? BEAUDRY: Nobody got very excited about it. One of the things that was interesting though was that Dublin was on the Israeli circuit. A lot of Israelis came through in those years because they were carrying on an urban guerrilla warfare against the British themselves, and they thought the Irish had written the book on the subject. They used to come and consult, but not with us. 2 Q: At that time it was Palestine. BEAUDRY: That's right. Q: How did you find dealing with the Irish authorities? BEAUDRY: Congenial. When dealing with traveling American statesmen out of Congress, they would give them the blarney treatment. It was my first experience with the future President Kennedy, and I was fascinated because he would not put up with that nonsense. They would give him all this business about his ancient relatives and he would say, "But Minister, why did you let the teachers' strike go on for nine months?" I figured that he was a cut above the average. Q: So essentially, two people would be carrying on most of the work? BEAUDRY: Pretty much. The other big issue was visas because there hadn't been any visas issued since 1941. The consulate General had a backlog of 6,000 active cases and the filing system was such that the files were in boxes sitting around the consular offices. You could tell when a case was coming up for decision by whether the file was within three feet of the door. Q: But you didn't get involved in that? BEAUDRY: No. I don't know why, but I didn't. Q: After that...you left there in 1948? BEAUDRY: The very end of 1948, like December 30th. Q: Oh, one other thing, did you get involved with the IRA...was it doing much at that time? BEAUDRY: No. They had been active in the early days of the war, but they were tainted by having had German connections. The Germans were obviously going to exploit them for whatever it was worth. The Irish, also, during the war interned the IRA types. But that was also in the past. In FY 49, the budget was tight so some 40 or 50 of us were blanketed into the Information Program which was in State, of course, but which had its own budget. I was sent off to Casablanca to be the public affairs officer there. CLARENCE S. GULICK Marshall Plan Aide Dublin (1948-1951) 3 Clarence Swift Gulick was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Milburn and Maplewood, New Jersey. He received a bachelor's degree in economics and political science from Swarthmore University and attended graduate school at Harvard University. In January of 1943, he began active duty in the U.S. Navy. His Foreign Service career included positions in India, Ireland, Pakistan, and Nigeria. Mr. Gulick was interviewed by W. Haven North on February 1, 1996. GULICKSo I worked on that for several months-but meanwhile I had gotten very interested in the Marshall Plan and, of course, the Marshall Plan legislation was working its way through Congress at the time. Interim aid had already started-I guess that started in the fall of 1947 as such, maybe earlier. The Marshall legislation was passed in April of ‘48 and almost immediately I got a job in the Marshall Plan Organization in the UK and Ireland, Iceland Branch. Q: Why did it appeal to you? GULICK: I just thought it was important. Actually I had taken the Foreign Service exams when I was in the Navy more or less as an idea this might be a way to get out of the Navy faster at the end of the war. But I didn’t have my heart much in it, because by the time-I guess I had passed the written part, but when I got to the oral part I didn’t really want to do it. In any case I did not succeed in getting into the Foreign Service if I had wanted to. Possibly my attitude had something to do with that, because I was already back in school. By the time the orals came around I was already out of the Navy. But anyway I thought of taking the Foreign Service exams again, but I really got more interested in fiscal policy and controlling depressions and that sort of thing during my graduate work and didn’t do much -didn’t do anything; had no international trade or anything. But I did get interested in the Marshall Plan because I thought that was very important and so when the chance came... I started exploring that as soon as I got to Washington and got on their lists. Immediately when they started hiring people for ECA I was probably one of the early ones to be hired from outside. Q: What was your first job? GULICK: I was in the UK/Ireland/Iceland branch-of course most of our work was on the UK. We had one young fellow who sort of specialized on Iceland on the side, and I specialized on Ireland on the side. I guess it was that fall they began to set up missions-maybe during the summer, yes during the summer they began to set up missions-in the European countries. The Mission to Ireland came later. I believe this is right, this is what we heard: One day someone called Paul Hoffman’s office - Hoffman was the head of ECA - and said, “Who is going to be the Mission Director in Ireland?” and the secretary who took the call, called back and said, “We are probably not going to have a Mission in Ireland, we’ll handle that from London.” It turned out that it was Representative McCormack’s secretary (McCormack was the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee) who had called and by that evening we had a Mission Director nominated for the Mission in Ireland. The idea of handling Ireland from London was just intolerable to people like McCormack.