The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project JOHN F. MELBY Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: June 16, 1989 Copyright 1998 A ST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background ducation in Brazilian girls school Foreign Service xam Foreign Service class of 1937 Juarez, Mexico 1937-1939 First impressions of the Foreign Service U.S. world role in the 193./s 0aracas, 1enezuela 1939-1921 3orld 3ar II Peru- cuador Desk 1921-1923 3orking to end war between Peru and cuador Moscow, Soviet Union 1923-1925 Travel to post Acting director of O3I Ambassador Harriman and 7eorge 8ennan San Francisco 1925 Delegation liaison 0hungking, 0hina 1925-1928 Ambassador Hurley mbassy morale Lack of coordinated action towards 0hina Ambassador John Leighton Stuart Madam 0hiang 8ai-shek vacuating Americans Fall of Nanking 1 Philippine Desk 1928-1953 0hina 3hite Paper Promoting Ramon Magsaysay President Truman 0onclusion Mc0arthyism Subsequent career 1ietnam trip Thailand ffects of 8orean 3ar on U.S. policy INTERVIEW ": This is an interview on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies with John F. Melby, a retired Foreign Service officer. )e are in )illiamsburg, Virginia, at a conference of historians of diplomatic relations. This is more or less a spontaneous interview of him, of which I am taking advantage of Mr. Melby. So it is not done with a great deal of preparation, But Mr. Melby has had a very interesting career, and I do want to capture it. I wonder if you could give me a little biographic of you, when you were born, where, how you were educated and how you then became interested in foreign affairs. M LBY: I was born in Portland, Oregon, July 1, 1913. 3e lived in Portland until I was six or seven. 3e lived in 0olumbus, Ohio for two years. And then we moved to Brazil, my father being with the international YM0A. I did all my elementary schoolwork in Rio. It was all done in Portuguese. I had to learn the language all sort of overnight. Interestingly enough, it was a girlsA school I was going to. The American school in Rio had closed the day before we arrived. There wasnAt anyplace else to go and this was an American mission school. But it was for Brazilian girls, and they took a half dozen boys of assorted nationalities on sort of an interim basis. I was there long enough to get all my grade school work and actually I graduated from there. IAm one of the few living males that has actually graduated from a girlsA schoolB CLaughterD Then, with certain changes that were happening, particularly in the missionary field, but more particularly in the YM0A, my father came back to the States. This was just prior to the beginning of the Depression. 3e settled in Bloomington, Illinois, where he was general secretary of the Y there. 2 So I went to high school in Bloomington. And I did my college work, my undergraduate work, at Illinois 3esleyan University, which was an extraordinarily good school for those days. And then I did my graduate work at the University of 0hicago, in international relations. I guess I got my interest in foreign affairs living in Brazil, after all. There I was a foreign student at age seven. Pretty young age to start out as a foreign student. And IAve never lost that interest. ThatAs been my whole career and my life. ": .ow did you get into the Foreign Service/ )e0re talking about in the mid11920s. M LBY: I came in the hard way, by examination. ": Three1and1a1half1day e4am, or something like that/ M LBY: Five-day exam in those days. I was in the first class after the Depression. ": This was when/ M LBY: I took the exams in the spring of 1937. And I passed them. There were quite an accumulation of people because they hadnAt been given for a number of years. I think there were some 5,... or E,... of us who took them. Twenty-three of us passed the exams and were in the first class of the Foreign Service. ": Could you give an impression of who was in the first class/ Not necessarily the names, though this would be nice. The type of person you saw as you came into the Foreign Service at this particular period of time. M LBY: By 1937, when the RogerAs Act--you know, weAd sort of gotten over the old Harvard-Yale-Princeton syndrome. There were two or three people in my class--well, come to think of it, there was only one who came from Princeton and one from Brown. This was in the early days, and there were only two of us in that class who had our Ph.Ds. Of course, thatAs become fairly common now, but it wasnAt then. Ray Thurston and I were the first two to get our Ph.Ds. HeAd gone to 3isconsin. Fred Reinhardt from Stanford, 0alifornia, his mother was the president of Mills 0ollege. There were 23 or 22 of us. They came pretty much from all over the country. Milton Raywinkle, he was the last one to retire, came from Minneapolis. ": So this was a good solid cut of America, rather than being an Ivy League elite/ M LBY: Anything but Ivy League, really. 3 lim OAShaughnessy was a member. He had lived all over the world. He had trouble getting in because of his accentF a very British accent. Jack rhardt, who was then chief of personnel, told him to go out and get a job in the middle west working in a filling station. CLaughterD 3hich lim didB And he worked in this filling station for a year, and he came back and his accent hadnAt changed one iota. CLaughterD Harlan 0lark came from Ohio. There were a couple from Massachusetts, but not Ivy League. I think Aaron Brown was the only Ivy League member. ": The training of Foreign Service officers was 7uite a bit different in those days. I wonder if you could describe your early e4periences. 8ou came in, you passed the e4am. )hat did they do with you/ M LBY: The first thing they did was assign us to our probationary post, which in my case was 0iudad Juarez, Mexico, across the river from l Paso. I was there in Juarez for a year and a half. ": )hat were you doing/ M LBY: I did a little bit of everything. It was a training thing. Juarez was the supervisory consulate general for the Mexican border. But there were very few officers in there. 7eorge Shaw was the consul general. At one point, I was still a student officer, 7eorge went off on leave and left me in chargeB CLaughterD 3hich was pretty good fun. 3e did all sorts of things. I worked with the Mexican border patrol on narcotics control. I did my stint at learning what visas were all about, passports, and so on. 7eneral reporting that we did out of there, I did some of that. Political reporting, of course, 7eorge did most of it. I enjoyed it. I thought it was a great advantage to a young vice consul to go to a post like that, rather than being assigned, as some of the others were, to Mexico 0ity or Paris or Montreal, one of these huge offices which sound glamorous, but you get there and you get stuck in the visa office. And thatAs all you ever do and all you ever learn sometimes. After a year and a half, I was pretty well versed in the overall functioning of the consulate. ": )hich is of course what the system was supposed to do. So your impression of the Foreign Service wasn0t one of 9Oh, my God, this isn0t the glamorous diplomatic life9 or something like that/ This didn0t bother you, did it/ M LBY: I loved every minute of it. IAd do it to this day. ": Then you went back to the Foreign Service School in 1928/ M LBY: Yes. arly winter of A38. It was six months. 2 ": )hat was the training like then/ Had any of your class been weeded out by that point/ Or when they were in, they were in to stay/ M LBY: Yes. It was 8lahr Huddle in charge of us. 0ornelia Bassell was sort of the mother hen who looked after us. And what we had was really four or five months of lectures on political subjects, on area studies. Had lectures from the passport division, visas. Somebody came in from the economic section. It was largely a matter of just lectures. No examinations involved. ": id you have a feeling11this was 028102911that the United States really wasn0t one of the major powers/ )e were doing a lot of reporting, but we really weren0t playing much of a role in a very turbulent period of time leading up to )orld )ar II/ M LBY: No, I think we thought the United States was one of the major powers of the world. I think we were quite conscious of that. 0onscious of playing our role, too. ": )hat was our role/ )e didn0t have much of a part in all the maneuvering as Hitler rose to power and leading up to the start of )orld )ar II. M LBY: I think we did play a pretty active role. ItAs true that there was a very strong isolationist sentiment in the States, which was sort of a backfire from 3orld 3ar I, and the Senator Nye and the old merchants-of-death hearing that he held.