Library of Congress Interview with Ambassador Leslie M. Alexander The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR LESLIE M. ALEXANDER Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial Interview date: October 17, 2005 Copyright 2009 ADST [Note: This interview was not edited by Ambassador Alexander} Q: Today is the 17th of October, 2005. This is an interview with Leslie Alexander. This is being done- you have a middle initial of M, is it? ALEXANDER: I do. M as in Michael. Q: Michael. And this is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and I'm Charles Stuart Kennedy. And do you go by Les, Leslie or do you have another nickname or name? ALEXANDER: My friends call me Les or Leslie. My former spouses called me Leslie as do my parents. Q: Okay. Well, let's start sort of at the beginning. When and where were you born? ALEXANDER: I was born in November 1948 in Frankfurt, Germany. Q: Well, what were the circumstances of being born in Germany? Interview with Ambassador Leslie M. Alexander http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001515 Library of Congress ALEXANDER: My father, as did I guess an entire generation of young American men, went off to fight World War II. He found himself in Germany, a member of the occupation forces. He met my mother while he was in Europe. She was French, from France, a French citizen, and I was born of a marriage between that young American GI and that young French woman. Q: Then was the 97th General Hospital going when you were there? ALEXANDER: It was. In fact, that is the hospital where I was born. Whether it was the 97th at the time I don't know. I know it was a former SS hospital but I don't know whether it was called the 97th but that is the hospital. Q: I say this because I have a daughter who was born there and I also, my first post was Frankfurt and, this was in '55 to '57. I was baby birth officer and I did nothing but register babies born to GI families there for months. I mean, we'd have about 400 a month or something like that, we were really rolling them out in those days. Okay. Let's talk a bit about your father's side. What do you know about the family, where do they come from? ALEXANDER: My father was born in Houston, Texas. He was an only child. He had, well obviously he's only child, he had no siblings. Ironically or coincidentally his parents had no siblings therefore he had an absolutely miniscule family. His father died when he was five. Q: What was his father doing, do you remember? ALEXANDER: I have no idea. In fact, he has no recollection of his father. Every time we've tried to find out something about my dad, about my grandfather, my paternal grandfather my father professed to know, claimed to know nothing about him. Whether he did or didn't I don't know. My grandmother, on the other hand, whom I never met, she passed when my dad was 17, just as he was going into the service shortly after graduating from high school. Interview with Ambassador Leslie M. Alexander http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001515 Library of Congress He did speak of, a little bit, she was a single mom, having lost her husband when my father was only five years old. I don't know what she did for a living. I know that her, either her grandmother or her grandfather broke horses. And again, I don't know whether it was, because this is all rather vague, but as I understand it from my father, either his maternal grandmother or his maternal grandfather or perhaps both were Cherokee Indians. Anyway, his grandfather broke horses. That's about all that I know of that family. And I say that family because having had no siblings I had no American cousins, no uncles, no aunts. I had literally no American family. The only family I ever knew was my mother's family, these rather strange French people and well, that's pretty much it. Q: Well, we'll go to your mother's family but let's finish up with your father who was in the service. Did he stay in the service? ALEXANDER: He stayed in the service until the late '50s. After that he began working for the U.S. government, for the DoD (Department of Defense) to be specific in Europe and stayed in Europe until he retired in the late '80s. So he lived basically his entire professional life was spent, with the exception of a few years, in Europe, in either France, Germany or England. During the Korean War he was stationed in, among other places, Greenland. And that stuck in my mind because I was a young, young child at the time and had the impression that he was living in an igloo. All I knew is that he was someplace very cold and very isolated. I don't know what he was doing up there but he was a young lieutenant or young captain or something and, again, I don't really know what he was doing. And he lived in Europe until 1988, 1989. At that point he and my mother, who was still alive, came to the Washington area, where my father still resides; my mother did until she passed 10 years ago. Q: Let's talk about the French side. Where did they come from? Where in France? ALEXANDER: My mother was born in Toul. She was raised in Ahnjay where my very small French family continues to reside. She had one sibling, a sister, my aunt who is still alive Interview with Ambassador Leslie M. Alexander http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001515 Library of Congress and lives in Ahnjay. The aunt never married so again, I have no cousins there. I have, I believe, two half-cousins because my mother had a half-sister who was a nun and who left the nunnery and married and had two children. My grandfather on that side was killed in 1949 by the Germans. Again, a very small family and I know very little about them. There is one coincidence that they also had something to do with horses. I'm not quite certain but I think they bred them or raised them or did something with them. Q: Well then, you grew up, did you grow up essentially in Europe? ALEXANDER: I did. I lived in France. After I was born my mother took me to France and we went to join my grandmother who at the time was living in Nice and I lived there until I was about two. Then we went to New York where I lived until I was six. During that period of time I rarely saw my father because as I think I mentioned earlier Korea was on and he was off in various places in Korea and Greenland. Then in 1955 or so we moved to Germany because he was assigned to Germany; he was still in the service at the time. And so we lived in Germany until 1959. Q: Where in Germany? ALEXANDER: We lived in Kaiserslautern in the southwest of Germany. And it was about that time I think he left the service. We went back to New York for a year. My mother really didn't care very much for life in the U.S. so we went to France where I lived until I graduated from high school. Q: They're a real pattern here. French don't immigrate well, do they? ALEXANDER: No, no, they don't. Q: I was in personnel at one point and if an officer had a French wife you figured maybe 500 miles from Paris is about as far as you could assign an officer. Interview with Ambassador Leslie M. Alexander http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001515 Library of Congress ALEXANDER: I think my mother's attitude would certainly vindicate what you saw in personnel. So anyway, we went back to France where I spent essentially all my junior high school and high school years. Q: Well before that, in Germany, you were going to a military school or? ALEXANDER: Yes. Elementary school. Q: Well I assume that as a small child you learned French. ALEXANDER: I did. In fact, strangely we spoke, we grew up, I have three brothers, one of whom was also in Germany, in Langstadt, while we were living there, obviously while we were living there, but from '55 until '59. My other two brothers were born in New York. But we all spoke German at home because my parents didn't speak, my mother did not speak English, my father didn't speak French but they both spoke German. And so, actually German was quite, was more or less the everyday language and it was only after my grandmother came to live with us, I was about five years old at the time, that we began speaking French regularly. And then of course living in France, I mean, that became the everyday language. Q: Well how about your English? You don't speak with an accent at all. I mean, some people who have gone through something like this never can get rid of a certain twist or something. ALEXANDER: I think it was a function of having gone to military schools or schools in which a significant portion of the student body was American or English speaking.