The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project STEVEN WAGENSEIL Interviewed by: Peter Eicher Interview Date: January 15, 2008 Copyright 2018 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Childhood and Education Born in Danbury, Connecticut 1947 Family immigrated from Germany 1852 Eleventh grade at Le Collège Cévenol in France 1964 Post-graduate year at Gresham’s School in England 1966 BA from Yale University in French 1970 Married Jamilée 1980 Pre-Foreign Service Work Assistant Manager of hotel in Block Island, RI 1968-1970 Peace Corps Volunteer in Ivory Coast 1971-1973 Foreign Service Career Washington D.C.—Press Office, Information Officer-Media 1974-1975 Madrid, Spain—Special Assistant to the Ambassador 1976-1977 Madrid, Spain—Officer of Political/Military Affairs 1977-1978 Bamako, Mali—Vice Consul 1978-1980 Washington, DC—Office of Central African Affairs 1980-1982 Desk Officer for Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and Sao Tomé y Principe Interactions with Ambassador to Cameroon Hume Horan (oral history available) Zimbabwe—Second Political Officer 1982-1985 Dakar, Senegal—Political Officer 1985-1988 Washington, D.C.—Office of UN Political Affairs in the Bureau of 1988-1990 International Organizations, Africa Expert 1 Switched to the Latin American Portfolio 1990 Lesotho—Deputy Chief of Mission 1990-1992 Chargé 1990 Geneva, Switzerland—First Secretary and Human Rights Officer in the 1992-1995 Political and Specialized Agencies Affairs Section Worked on the Human Rights Commission Worked with the wars surrounding the former Yugoslavia Strasbourg, France—Consul General 1995-1998 Washington, D.C.—Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor 1998-2001 Director for Multinational Affairs Detail at the National Democratic Institute, Africa focus 2001-2002 Post-Foreign Service Work Warsaw, Poland—Office of Democratic Institutions of Human Rights 2002-2005 of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, First Deputy Director Acting Director of the Office of Democratic Institutions of Human Rights 2002 Contract with the United Nations Electoral Assistance Division for the 2006 UN Development Programme in the Solomon Islands Chief Electoral Officer for the peacekeeping mission, now the UN 2006-2007 Integrated Mission in Timor Worked for the Council for a Community of Democracies 2008-present Head of the Elections Project for the UN Development Programme 2008-2009 in Ivory Coast Worked on Elections Project for the UN Development Programme in Kyrgyzstan 2010 Election Observation Mission for the Office of Democratic Institutions 2010 of Human Rights in Kazakhstan INTERVIEW Q: Let’s start at the beginning. Maybe you can tell me when and where you were born. 2 WAGENSEIL: I was born the first of September, 1947 in Danbury, Connecticut, brought up in Brookfield Center, Connecticut, which is right next door, where I went to elementary school through the seventh grade. My father was a travel agent, owned a travel agency in Danbury. Q: Are you a Connecticut family? WAGENSEIL: Oh, no. My folks had settled there after the Second World War because my dad’s father had a house in Brookfield. My grandfather worked for the New York Telephone company as an engineer. He retired right about the time I was born in Brookfield so my folks bought a house near my dad’s folks. My dad is originally from New York City. My mother was born in Colorado and brought up in Pasadena, California. They met and married during the war. They were both in uniform. Not an old Connecticut family by any stretch of the imagination, although I was brought up with the image of the New England Pilgrims and all of the mythology of Plymouth Rock and all that kind of stuff as part of my heritage. Q: Do you know the history of your family? When they came to the United States? WAGENSEIL: I do, to a certain extent. My grandfather’s grandfather immigrated from southern Germany in 1852. Q: That was the Wagenseils? WAGENSEIL: That was the Wagenseils, yes. His name was Jacob, actually came through Hamilton, Ontario, I believe, and wound up in Port Huron, Michigan where he settled down and raised a family. My great grandfather was the town clerk and then the sheriff. My grandfather was born in Port Huron, went to the University of Michigan and then moved to New York to get a job, met my grandmother and the rest is history. Q: And your mother’s family? WAGENSEIL: My mother was born in Colorado but all of “her people” are from Texas and before that from Arkansas and Tennessee, Virginia and what all. English, Irish immigrants. Q: You say them met during the war. What were they doing during the war? WAGENSEIL: My mother was in the Women’s Army Corps. She was brought up in Pasadena and was recruited by the WACS to be, well, it wasn’t a publicity stunt but it was to help them with support for the soldiers and so to have some public relations effect. She was an attractive young woman and was actually featured on the cover of Life 3 Magazine; actually she and her platoon marching past and she was front and center. I still have a copy of that somewhere. She was working in the WACS and supporting the soldiers. My dad was a military policeman and his unit was transferred out to California at some point and they met out there. Q: He was enlisted or drafted? WAGENSEIL: He was drafted, in 1940. Q: This was the army rather than the marines? WAGENSEIL: The army, yes, indeed. He went to college and dropped out for a variety of reasons a couple of times, I guess and wound up being drafted and was serving his one year of compulsory military service from 1940 to ’41 or ’41 to ’42, I can’t remember. He was on his Christmas leave expecting to be released from service in January when he got word that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and he was stuck for the following four and a half years. He was a military policeman and went ashore Omaha Beach on the third wave of the Normandy Invasion. Q: Did he tell stories about that? WAGENSEIL: He never told a single story. He was very traumatized by the war. He was in the Battle of the Bulge and I never heard him tell any battle stories. It was very traumatic for him. When I was a kid, we were always told if dad is sleeping on the couch, don’t wake him up because he woke up very brusquely. Q: That’s interesting because you hear a lot of people who were in World War II don’t talk about their combat experiences. WAGENSEIL: He never talked about it. He told a couple of stories about when he was supporting the general but nothing about himself. Q: So they got married in California during the war? WAGENSEIL: They got married in California in January of ’44. They were immediately separated. Dad went off to the European Theater as the Normandy Landings were being prepared, and my mom was on tenterhooks until he came back. Actually, he was on board a troop carrier, being shipped from the European Theater to the Pacific Theater when word came that the Japanese had surrendered so the ship turned back. Q: That’s a nice twist. Then came back and they married in California? 4 WAGENSEIL: They were married in California the beginning of ’44, before he went to the European Theater, then he came back, they both demobilized and settled in Connecticut where my dad opened a travel agency. Q: Why a travel agency? WAGENSEIL: Well, he had worked at the New York’s World’s Fair in ’39 and saw how much people were interested in the rest of the world. People, children of immigrants, who had been in the U.S. for a generation or two but were maybe interested in traveling back and so forth. He saw during the war that transport was becoming easier. It was not necessary any longer to take a ship for a week or something to cross the ocean, but that it would be possible, he realized, to fly across the ocean. People are going to want to do that, he thought. Having been in Europe or the Pacific in the service they are going to want to go back. They will want to travel. He said there’s a market there and he got into it. Q: Was it a successful business? WAGENSEIL: Very successful. He built it up into quite a little successful business. He ended up having three separate offices in three towns in western Connecticut. Because of that business and the fact that he was traveling, he took his family with him occasionally traveling. As a kid I remember going not just to Maine and Cape Cod in the summers but also we went to Bermuda on a cruise when I was about three and went down to the Caribbean quite a bit. Every year we’d go down for a couple of weeks in the depths of the winter because my mother from California hated the snow. So as a kid I was virtually at every island in the Caribbean except for Hispaniola. I went to Jamaica; I went to Cuba as a kid. I went to Trinidad and everything between. So I was bitten by the travel bug at an early age. Q: Were you the first child? WAGENSEIL: I was the eldest of two. My brother, Ross is three and a half years younger than me. Q: You grew up living in the same town in Connecticut the whole time? WAGENSEIL: Grew up living in the same New England farmhouse in the same town in Connecticut.