The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR KENTON W. KEITH Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: June 4, 1998 Copyright 2007 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri University of Kansas US Navy Entered the Foreign Service in 1965 Beirut, Lebanon; Arabic Language Training 1965-1966 Baghdad, Iraq; USIA, Rotation Officer 1966-1967 Environment Soviet bloc Relations Educational Exchange Program Area politics Baath Party 1967 War Saddam Hussein Evacuation Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Assistant Public Affairs Officer 1967-1968 Environment Ambassador Hermann Eilts English Language Center in Riyadh Saudi students to US Saudi Royal family King Faisal Status of women Saudi receptivity American Cultural Center Relations with British and French programs Local press Alcohol 1 Istanbul, Turkey; Cultural Attaché 1968-1972 “Johnson Letter” resentment “Idea Clubs” Relations Anti-Americanism Islam German influence Environment Greece-Turkey issue Tangier, Morocco; Western Arabic Language Study 1972-1973 Environment King Hassan Relations Peace Corps Western Sahara Fez, Morocco; Branch Public Affairs Officer 1973-1974 Environment Culture Program French influence US military facilities Relations with neighbors Damascus, Syria; Public Affairs Officer 1974-1977 Restoration of diplomatic relations University linkages Relations Scholarships Cultural Agreement AID program Israel Hafez el-Assad American movies Baath Party Pan-Arabism Press Secret Police Washington, DC; USIAC; Near East, North African 1977-1978 & South Asian Affairs Restructuring USIA Washington, DC; USIAC; Special Assistant to Deputy Director 1978-1980 Transferring State’s Cultural Affairs functions to USIAC 2 President Carter’s policies Anwar Sadat visit to Israel VOA Israel Smith-Mundt Act Congressional interest USIA-State coordination Educational Exchange Program Iran revolution Personnel policies Foreign views of President Carter Brasilia, Brazil; Deputy Public Affairs Officer 1980-1983 Supervising branch posts President Reagan visit Relations Environment Economy Government Washington, DC USIA; Deputy Director for Near East and South Asia 1983-1985 Charles Wick “Enemies List” Israel Engaging Israelis and Arabs Libya Hafez al-Assad Syria relations Saddam Hussein Saudi Arabia Iran Paris, France; Senior Cultural Affairs Officer 1985-1988 Congressional views Fulbright Program Ministry of Education Reagan popularity France’s “Third Way” Mitterrand Cultural Minister Jacques Lang American Film Festival, Deauville Communists Le Pen American popular culture French film industry 3 Cairo, Egypt; Public Affairs Officer 1988-1992 USAID Relations Husni Mubarak American commercial presence Press relations Anti-Americanism Kuwait invasion Madrid Peace Conference Middle East Television Network influence Margaret Tutwiler Ambassador to Qatar 1992-1995 Relations US commercial interests US military facilities Border disputes Oil Crown Price coup Washington D.C, USIA; Director, Near East/North Africa and 1995-1997 South Asia Consolidation, USIA and Department of State Senator Helms AID opts out Problems and questions Consolidation plusses and minuses Retirement 1997 Islamabad, Pakistan, Recall to active duty to Establish a 2001 Coalition Information Center Countering misinformation Press briefing Accomplishments Future of Afghanistan INTERVIEW Q: Today is June 4, 1998. This is an interview with Ambassador Kenton W. Keith. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and I’m Charles Stuart Kennedy. I wonder if you could tell me when and where you were born. KEITH: I was born November 12, 1939 in Kansas City, Missouri. 4 Q: Tell me a bit about your family. KEITH: My parents were both musicians at a certain point. My father was a jazz in 1969 musician and my parents met when he was playing saxophone in a jazz orchestra and my mother was a singer. He remained a musician all his life. My mother changed professions along the way and became interested in housing issues, ended up working first for the state of Missouri and then for the city of Kansas City in various capacities and housing authorities. She is now retired in Phoenix, Arizona. My father passed away in 1969, Q: Could you tell me a little bit about where you were educated and grew up? KEITH: I grew up in Kansas City and was educated in local schools, including Lincoln High School, which at the time was the college preparatory high school for black students in Kansas City. There were a couple of other institutions which were more or less vocational schools. That was before schools were integrated in Kansas City. Q: Kansas City was pretty much a city of the old south? KEITH: It was a city of the border south. Certain aspects of Kansas City historically were quite close to aspects of southern culture, including racial segregation. But I think it would be inaccurate to call Kansas City a pure southern city in the same sense as Jackson, Mississippi would be, for example. Q: What about in elementary and high school – what subjects interested you the most? KEITH: Without question the subjects that interested me most were things that had to do with literature, reading, civics, government. I did pretty well in math and science courses, too. But that was a lot more work and drudgery. English and literature have had a deep influence in my life. We had a teacher at Lincoln High School named Neil Herriford, a Harvard graduate. He was a man of great learning and sensitivity and he inspired a lot of us. He opened the door to literature. In eleventh grade, we did Macbeth and that, for us inner-city kids, was a revelation. Q: How were the libraries in Kansas City? KEITH: Not bad at all. There wasn’t anything that I ever needed that I couldn’t find. Even after I had gone off to university, when I was back on vacation and working on papers of one kind or another, I found that either Kansas City’s public library or one of its local branches had what I needed. Q: What type of reading were you particularly interested in? KEITH: I was interested in fiction and I was interested in foreign lands. Those were the 1950s and by the time I went off to high school, we had just emerged from the Korean war. This was the McCarthy era,. I remember being glued to the television for the Army 5 McCarthy hearings. So, I did a lot of reading about that. I read a lot of fiction that had some reference to exotic lands or places far away from Kansas City, “Tales of the South Pacific,” for example. Q: This was a generation earlier, but did you read Richard Halliburton? KEITH: Anything that had those themes was of interest to me. And of course we did a lot of movie going in those days. Certain films that left a deep impression (The Snows of Kilimanjaro, King Solomon’s mines, etc.) but the sum total of the films and the books and the articles and the television programs and so on, I seemed to extract from all of that a desire to travel, to work abroad, to be abroad, to have a very wide canvas. I didn’t know much about what I would find once I left home, but I knew that it was going to be a lot more interesting than Kansas City, Missouri. Q: Did this in any way influence where you were looking to get further education? KEITH: Not really. I was certainly interested in going to school as far away from Kansas City as I could. For a combination of reasons, I ended up going quite close to Kansas City. But the University of Kansas, where I did eventually go to school, 30 miles from Kansas City, was a very interesting place in those days. It was a kind of an island of liberalism in a conservative sea composed of wheat and Kansas farmers. I went for the first time to school with white students and had white teachers. But also there were a lot of foreigners. I had friends who were from South Asia, from Europe, from Africa. I got interested right away in international affairs. Those years and the people I met both in the faculty and among my student peers sealed the issue. I really wanted to know more about foreign cultures and governments. I had a very influential professor and counselor named Clifford Ketzel. He encouraged me not just toward the Foreign Service but specifically toward USIA. Q: You were at the University of Kansas from when to when? KEITH: From 1957 to 1961. Q: This was the beginning of the civil rights movement. There was Brown vs. the Board of Education in ’54. Was this having an impact? KEITH: Indeed yes. Q: Were you caught up in this at all? KEITH: I was at one point vice president of an organization called the Group for the Improvement of Human Relations, which was a multiracial civil rights organization on campus. It could hardly be called a radical group, but it was active. Yes, we were out there on the prairie, but what was happening in the rest of the country was very much on our minds. We were mostly the children of the Eisenhower years in which very little activism took place. We were the quiet generation. It was a group of people who were 6 two or three years younger than I who came along and pushed the rest of us in a certain direction. But there were racial issues at the University of Kansas and we got very much involved in them. So, yes, that was a period that was increasingly marked by the civil rights movement. Q: ’60 was the Kennedy campaign, which seemed to touch a core that hadn’t been touched before or since. Did that touch your particular group at the university? KEITH: I had left the university by then.