Library of Congress Interview with Richard W. Boehm The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR RICHARD W. BOEHM Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: June 27, 1994 Copyright 1998 ADST Today is June 27, 1994. This is an interview with Ambassador Richard W. Boehm, being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies. I am Charles Stuart Kennedy. Could we start by your giving me a bit about your background: when and where you were born and something about your family. BOEHM: I'd be glad to. I was born in 1926 in Queens, NY, which was then thought of as a suburb but which, as you know, is part of New York City. My father was a printer who worked all of his life for Hearst Newspapers. My mother was a housewife. So I grew up in what you may call a working class or middle class environment in New York City, in Queens. I went to school there. Q: Where did you go to school? BOEHM: I went to the New York City public schools for elementary and high school— Jamaica High School might mean something to some people. It's still there. Then World War II came along. I joined the Army and ended up going overseas. Interview with Richard W. Boehm http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000107 Library of Congress Q: You joined the Army without going to college? BOEHM: That's right, after graduating from high school. I went into the service and ended up in Germany just before the end of World War II. Q: What part of the Army did you end up in? BOEHM: I ended up in an armored division. I got there before the war ended, but it was really too late to get into combat. So I occupied Germany for about a year and then left the service in 1946. Thanks to the GI Bill, I then went to college. Q: Where did you go to college? BOEHM: I went to Adelphi College, now Adelphi University. Adelphi had been a women's college, but then, when the war ended, they saw both the need and the opportunity to expand and take in veterans. So it became a coed college at that point. I think that mine was the second class after World War II to include men. I took a year off in 1948 to go to France. I went over there for a summer program at Grenoble in southern France, in Provence. I found, when I got to Grenoble, that the only people there were foreign students. The French had all left for the summer. So I wasn't satisfied either with the state of my French at that point or with my experience in France. So I decided to stay on. I moved to Paris and signed up at the Sorbonne. I spent the year of 1948-1949 in France. I also did some traveling around in Europe. Q: Was there any particular point to that? Were you working on your French? BOEHM: I think that I may have had some remote idea of doing something with it, but it was primarily intellectual curiosity, I think. I wished to live over there and have a look at Europe, which I did. Then I returned to the United States in 1949, went back to Adelphi, and got my degree. I was married in the fall of 1949 while still in my senior year at Adelphi. Interview with Richard W. Boehm http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000107 Library of Congress Q: What was your area of study? BOEHM: I was an English major. My wife was also from Long Island, from Nassau County, if you know the area. From Rockville Center, in fact. So I graduated from college in June, 1950. By that time I was about to become a father and had to go to work. Q: The GI Bill lasted just so long. BOEHM: It did lots for me. I always appreciated it. Q: We are now, in this month of June, 1994, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the GI Bill, to which I owe a graduate degree and also the house which I am living in. BOEHM: I also bought a house. I bought it 15 years ago using the VA [Veterans' Administration] mortgage for the second time. I wanted to do something with my education. I got a job with Prentice Hall Publishing Company in Manhattan at the same time that we bought a house in Levittown, which was the typical sort of veteran's thing that you did at the time. I liked the work at Prentice Hall. They started me out as a proof reader. Then, if you showed any flair at all as a proof reader, they made you an editor fairly quickly. I became an editor, primarily of textbooks. The only problem was that you couldn't live on what they paid. There were plenty of English majors coming out of college every year, and they didn't have to pay anything, so it was really a luxury, which I couldn't afford. So I had to leave there. By that time, my son had been born. I went to work as a management trainee for an insurance company. So I was headed in precisely the opposite direction from where I wanted to go. I did that for a couple of years. It paid better and was enough to live on, though I wasn't terribly happy about it. Q: What company was it? Interview with Richard W. Boehm http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000107 Library of Congress BOEHM: Mutual Insurance Co. of New York. They were perfectly good employers. I am grateful to them for having kept me going for a few years. However, both my wife and I were dissatisfied with life in Levittown and with life in the insurance company. So in the fall of 1953 I took the Foreign Service examination. At that time, as you will probably recall, it was given once a year and took a week to complete. Q: I remember that I took the exam in 1953 or 1954, I think, and it took three and one-half days. BOEHM: It may have been three and one-half days, but I seem to recall that it took four and one-half days. It seemed like four and one-half days. It was a long examination and took a certain amount of physical endurance. And then you waited to hear the results. In December, 1953, I learned that I had passed the examination. But of course, as you recall, that was only the beginning of the process. You then had to take an oral exam, a physical exam, and go through a security check. That whole process went on for another year. It was in the summer of 1954 that I went down to Washington to take the oral exam. Again, being an old timer, I have to recall that everyone had to go to Washington to take the oral exam. There were no traveling examination panels, as there are now. The examining panel was made up of very senior officials who happened to be in Washington at the time. The panel which examined me included Raymond Hare, Gerald Drew, and the Inspector General at the time, Raymond Miller. There was one other member whose name I've forgotten. Q: Cromwell Riches—was he the permanent member? BOEHM: I don't think he was then. He may well have been a semi-permanent member. It was a rather intimidating panel. Since I didn't know that much about the Foreign Service or Foreign Service people, I wasn't quite as awe-struck as I should have been. [Laughter]. Interview with Richard W. Boehm http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000107 Library of Congress You went in and took the oral examination and then they said, “Go out and get a cup of coffee and come back in an hour.” And they told you then whether you'd passed or not. It must have been a close thing with me. Gerald Drew, who was the chairman, saw me when I returned. He said, “You're in, but there were certain members of the board who felt that you weren't in very close touch with what is going on in foreign affairs.” This was quite true. I was living as a suburbanite and supporting a family. I wasn't all that much up to date. But he said, “I told them that this was the kind of thing that happened to people in your circumstances.” So they took me. Then, of course, I had to take the physical and await the outcome of the security check. Then, as now, it took time. Eventually, in December, 1954, I was told that I had been appointed to the Foreign Service and could come down to Washington in January, 1955, and that I was going to be assigned to Washington. This came as a great disappointment to me. I was told that I was going to be assigned to what was then called the News Division, which speaks for itself, headed by a political appointee by the name of Henry Suydam. Henry Suydam had been, I think, editorial page editor of the Newark News. He was a fascinating man who, in 1917 or 1918, as a very young man just out of college, had become a newspaperman and had been sent to Russia. In fact, he was at the Finland Station [in St.