The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR G. PHILIP HUGHES Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: August 21, 1997 Copyright 2016 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background Born and raised in Ohio University of Dayton Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy Harvard University Congressional Budget Office; National Security and International Affairs Division Operations Working environment Marriage Harvard University, Kennedy School: Doctoral studies Dissertation Department of Defense; Intelligence George Murphy The White House: Deputy Foreign Policy Advisor to Vice President George Bush 1981-1985 Secretary of State Al Haig Reagan White House Reagan/Bush relationship Reagan assassination attempt Operations Foreign visiting VIPs Briefing papers for VP VP visits abroad Bush role in foreign affairs Chemical Weapons Treaty El Salvador death squads Russians Reagan’s method of operations UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) 1 Relations with Congress Soviet Natural Gas Pipeline The White House; National Security Council; Staff Director for Latin America 1985-1986 Advance of Communism by proxy Latin America Ollie North’s operations Contras Caribbean Basin Initiative Panama Mexico Nancy Reagan’s Mexican visit President Reagan’s Mexican visit Constantine Menges Congressional interest State Department; Deputy Assistant Secretary, Political Military Affairs, 1986-1988 Technology transfer and arms export control Assistant Secretary Allen Holmes Relations with Pentagon Toshiba-Kongsberg COCOM issues Relations with Economic and Business Bureau Third Country Initiative Embargo surveillance Russia Selenia problem China sales Ed Derwinski TOW missiles Department of Commerce: Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement 1988-1989 Dual Use Export Control Program Operations Custom Service rivalry Investigations and prosecutions Bureau reorganization Export Administration Act Arab Boycott of Israel cases Trade with Cuba Helms-Burton Act Secretaries of Commerce Bush administration changes The White House: Executive Secretary of the National Security Council 1989-1990 2 Background of appointment Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor NSC Senior Staff selection Operations Working styles of National Security Advisors Contacts with the President Soviet Union/Open Skies Arab-Israel Peace Philippines Panama Latin America narcotics OMBCP Yeltsin Gorbachev Presidential speeches Presidential correspondence Presidential style of operations Tiananmen Square Ambassador to Barbados 1990-1993 Circumstances re appointment Senate confirmation hearing Jesse Helms Pamela Harriman Government Prime Minister Erskine Sandiford Grenada US diplomatic representation in region Political objectives British interests British Development Division (BDD) USAID Banana issue Europe’s African, Caribbean, Pacific (ACP) banana market Coordination of regional policies Regional drug flow Local drug use Karl Hudson-Phillips investigations Prime Minister Mitchell government Prime Minister (Dominica) Eugenia Charles Haitian refugees Cuba UN Human Rights Commission Tourism Hashish seizure at St. Vincent St. Vincent Prime Minister Son Mitchell 3 Prisoner escapees Attack on DCM Terry Comments on Embassies in small countries Visit of House Speaker Tom Foley Retirement 1993 National Council of World Affairs Organizations Addendum: The Accidental Re-counter 2000 INTERVIEW [Note: This interview was not edited by Mr. Hughes] Q: Today is the 10th of September 1996. This is tape one of an interview with Ambassador G. Philip Hughes. What does the G stand for? HUGHES: Gary. Q: To begin with can you tell me when and where you were born? HUGHES: I was born in Dayton, Ohio, on September 7th 1953. Q: Could you tell me a bit about your family and early education? HUGHES: My dad was a retired major league baseball player. He was a high school educated man who grew up in Cincinnati in sort of a working-class neighborhood. After his baseball playing career, which lasted all told about 20 years between time in the minors and the majors and time coaching, he had a couple of jobs in sales and then he founded a little paving company that did driveways, parking lots and construction and things like that. That was his second career, his small business for the next 20 years until he retired in about 1965. My mom was also from Cincinnati, partially educated in university until the combination of the depression and the voice of her parents forced her to withdraw from the university about a year or two from completion. She was sort of the main cultural and intellectual influence in my life. She was a doting housewife who, having been herself previously divorced, considered the fact of having me at the age of about 41 or 42 to be a near miraculous occurrence and that probably shaped her whole approach to raising me. Q: Where did you go to school? HUGHES: I went to parochial school in Dayton Ohio, our parish school at Our Lady of the Rosary, and then I went to an all boys’ Catholic high school, Chaminade High School 4 in Dayton. There isn’t a theme to this but then I graduated university from the University of Dayton also in Dayton, Ohio. It turns out it’s a Marianist Catholic university although not very self consciously so. I then went to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy for the Master of Arts [in Law and Diplomacy]. Q: I want to go back a bit. Growing up going through Catholic schools particularly in the ‘60s I suppose and ‘70s, the Catholic Church and education has changed very much. What sort of things were you getting? Were you getting what you and I would probably consider the traditional Catholic education or had the influence of the reforms of the church hit? Were you getting rather strict nuns? HUGHES: I would say that my elementary education was about half lay teachers and half nuns, almost exactly half and half. I should say that I spent seven years in elementary school and then went to high school. In elementary school I had three nuns and four lay teachers. Two of the three nuns were what you might call rather strict and old school and they taught you a very hefty dose of religious doctrine. They also instilled a very disciplined, work oriented, accomplishment oriented, excellence rewarding, sort of approach to living. They gave frankly a very good education on fact and material of content. I was blessed, I think, also with really excellent lay teachers as well. Thinking about the seven teachers I had in elementary school, only one of them was I think a weak teacher. I wouldn’t say so much reforms of the church but reforms of the approach to education began to take hold about my junior year of high school or maybe my senior year of high school which would have put us at about 1968 to 1970. We had a very structured high school curriculum where boys came to school in coats and ties. There were tracks at our school for honor students and academic students and basic students, where honor students were prescribed to take certain things and honor roll was taken very seriously. Extracurricular activities were taken very seriously. There were Latin clubs and Greek clubs and classics clubs and chess clubs and things like that, and math clubs and so forth for the more academically talented students. Much of that started to be erased in junior and senior year with more self-guided study, unstructured study, fewer curriculum requirements and so forth, and less emphasis on grades, excellence, honor roll and stuff like that. Those were the influences of my last two years of high school, influences that I very much resisted. I hated it with a passion and opposed it strongly with a clique of my friends. Q: In high school you were there during the Vietnam years. HUGHES: Yes, I was in high school from ‘66 to ‘70. Q: How did that affect you? Was your area sort of what you might call a more working class area? HUGHES: Not really. Our home was in a modest suburban area outside of Dayton. We 5 happened to have a somewhat large piece of property, as did our immediate neighbors. There was what I would call a professional class subdivision that bordered our group of homes where houses were on quarter acre tracts. The kind of people that lived there were professional office workers from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base or accountants, insurance salesmen and people like that from those sorts of professional lives with families in these tract homes. I would say that, in home life, events like the Vietnam War and the disturbances of Vietnam had no influence. What was very perceptible in my high school was that we started out in coats in ties in 1966 with very strict requirements on attendance and so forth. By 1969-70 coats and ties were thrown out the window and students were running around with long hair and shabby clothes. With the connivance of the faculty we were having traditional and content oriented education replaced by literature courses focusing on the poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and sort of protest-era poets and things like that. It was a very pronounced transition. Q: Why did it hit there? HUGHES: I don’t know. I suppose it was just the tenor of the times. Q: What was sort of the general attitude at the high school towards the Vietnam War? HUGHES: I think by and large my sense was that all the young men, because it was an all male school, were concerned about being drafted. Because college deferments were, I believe, still available at that stage, the more academically oriented people weren’t overly worried about being drafted because everybody knew they were going on to college. My immediate circle of friends weren’t people who were particularly concerned about being drafted. I would say that the prevailing attitude was one of a fashionable protest. What I mean to say is that I’m not sure how authentically morally offended any of these young men were by the conduct of the war or how really closely they were following it.