Library of Congress Interview with Ambassador Richard W. Teare The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR RICHARD W. TEARE Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: July 31, 1998 Copyright 2006 ADST Q: Can we start? Could you tell me something about when and where you were born and about your family? TEARE: Cleveland, Ohio, February 21st, 1937. My father was an architect at that time working for the government, later for most of his career in private practice. My mother had taught for a little while but did not work while my sister and I were growing up. I lived from age three or so through high school in the suburb of Lakewood which is the first one west of Cleveland. I graduated from high school there. Q: Could you talk about your early schooling? TEARE: Well I don't know that there is a lot to be said. It was essentially like everyone else's. One of the interesting angles though was that the high school I went to was brand new in 1918 just at the time of the flu epidemic. It had a lot of newly hired faculty and some of them who had taught my parents and my parents' siblings were still there when I got there thirty years later. Q: During the war, World War II, did this cross your horizon or were you too young? Interview with Ambassador Richard W. Teare http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001466 Library of Congress TEARE: Oh, no, very definitely. I entered kindergarten I think right after Pearl Harbor. So I remember stepping on cans for example to conserve metal for the war effort and I remember ration books. I particularly remember on the morning of D Day my mother... we must have been out of school already because it was a weekday... and my mother woke me up to tell me that Allied forces had landed in Normandy. That was pretty exciting! Q: Oh, yes. In elementary and as you moved into high school did you do much reading? TEARE: I did of various kinds. I remember the Mariette novels. Q: Oh, yes, Richard and Jack? TEARE: Yes that sort of thing. And I read some more serious stuff. I remember reading Schlesinger's Age of Jackson. Q: Good God! TEARE: Well by this time I was a junior or senior in high school. Q: Still, we studied that in college! TEARE: Well, I don't know how I got into it. I worked on the school newspaper. That was probably my most time consuming activity or the activity to which I devoted the most time. I became editor of the front page, there were four pages, and chairman of the editorial board by my senior year. Q: Your senior year would have been '52 or so? TEARE: '53 to '54. Q: The Korean War was over by this time but had been going on while you were in high school. Interview with Ambassador Richard W. Teare http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001466 Library of Congress TEARE: Yes in fact I remember vividly also the day that the news came out in church, it was a Sunday, that the North had invaded the South. Q: June 25th, 1950. TEARE: Precisely. Certainly that colored the thinking of everyone who was coming up toward draft age. That led me in fact to apply for a student deferment. I think it led a lot of people to apply for student deferments during the latter part of the '50s. As it turned out I don't think I ever would have needed one because my draft board had a good cross section of people to draw from and they always getting people volunteering for the draft as opposed to enlisting which meant a shorter commitment. So I don't think they would ever have gotten around to calling me. Q: At Lakewood High, other than the war did you get involved at all or interested in foreign affairs? TEARE: I think I was to some degree, but certainly not spectacularly. I also liked American history. I didn't take world history for some reason but I remember reading a book on world history, skimming it, on the evening of the College Board examinations so I would be a little better equipped for that. One teacher who had some influence on me was a woman named Margaret Warner, who did teach the whole range of social studies. She just died this year in her mid 90s, I read. My mother sent me a clipping about it. She was one of those people who had built up a lot of money and I think she donated several hundred thousand dollars to churches and charities. Q: When you applied to college where did you want to go and where did you go? TEARE: I applied to five places, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth and Oberlin and Oberlin was really to please my mother and her family because they had all gone there. I Interview with Ambassador Richard W. Teare http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001466 Library of Congress didn't want to go there, it was too close to home. I wound up being accepted at all of them and my father's income was such that I was above the line for scholarships. But I had the point that this income fluctuated and Harvard offered me something called a National Scholarship that was honorary. It carried no money at the time, but could have brought a stipend if the family's situation had changed. That sounded very appealing. Also Harvard, I thought, had the classiest literature of any of the five, including its acceptance letter, so that is where I went. Q: You were at Harvard from when to when? TEARE: From '54 to '58. Q: What was Harvard like in '54, when you got there? TEARE: I think it was pretty square compared with what it later became in the '60s. In fact I think the whole country was pretty square. This was the Eisenhower era, after all, and we wore jackets and ties certainly to lunch and dinner, and I think even breakfast, although we wore chinos with them. Everything was pretty buttoned up or buttoned down, depending on how you look at it. I don't think there was any great political ferment on the campus. I think the cutting edge people were those in the arts and I was not really one of them. Q: Did you major in any particular thing? TEARE: I majored in English and in effect minored in history and this was in keeping with my journalistic thoughts or interests. And in fact I went into the competition for a position on the newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, in the fall of my freshman year. I had barely started on that when I got the grades from my first mid term exams and they were not very good so I thought I had better drop out of the Crimson competition and concentrate on my studies. Before doing so I talked to one of the executives of the Crimson, I forget his precise title, but it was David Halberstam who later went on to much greater things. Interview with Ambassador Richard W. Teare http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001466 Library of Congress He said in effect that they'd like to see people like me stay in the competition but also our first duty was to get educated and if that was the only way to do it so be it. That was essentially it. I guess there was some possibility of going back to the competition in the spring or in your sophomore year but very few people did that and I didn't try. Q: Were there any other activities that you were involved in? TEARE: Not too much. I did a little intramural sports but did a lot of reading as an English major, and the history carried a lot of reading, too. I went on and wrote a senior honors thesis on one aspect of the works of Joseph Conrad, comparing one of his books with one of Dickens' novels. This was an idea suggested to me by my tutor. It was not anything I would have come up with on my own. I enjoyed it. By the time I had finished that the one thing I was certain of was that I did not want to go on to graduate school in English. I wanted to do something else. If it was going to be journalism, then straight on through the school of hard knocks, or something. Then in the fall of my senior year a high school classmate of mine who had gone to Cornell and had been pointing for the Foreign Service ever since junior high sent me a postcard. It said that the deadline for applying for the Foreign Service exam was coming up in a few weeks. Sort of on a flyer I sent off a postcard or whatever it took and asked for an application. I went on and took the written exam in December, I believe it was, the oral the next spring and then they did the security check and I did the physical. The irony is that my friend, who scored higher than I did on the written exam and I am sure aced the oral exam was then disqualified on the physical exam because he had only one functioning kidney. Q: Oh, my goodness. TEARE: The other one had atrophied.