Library of Congress Interview with Ambassador David G. Newton The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR DAVID G. NEWTON Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: November 1, 2005 Copyright 2009 ADST Q: All right today is the 1st of November, 2005, All Saints Day. I guess it is. NEWTON: Yes, All Saints Day it is. Q: This is an interview with David G. Newton, N-E-W-T-O-N. What does the G stand for? NEWTON: George. Q: And you go by Dave or David or? NEWTON: David. Q: David. NEWTON: Yes. Q: This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. I'm Charles Stewart Kennedy. David, when and where were you born? NEWTON: I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, 13th of November, 1935. Interview with Ambassador David G. Newton http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001613 Library of Congress Q: Okay, so you're moving up to your seventieth birthday. NEWTON: Yes, just in a couple of weeks. Big event. Q: Okay, well, now, tell me something about your family. Let's take your father's side first, and then we'll do your mother's side. NEWTON: They both came from reasonably well to do Boston Irish families. My father was a step-son, but his father, his step-father, was in the hotel business. He ran and partly owned the first major hotel in New York, the Prince George. So my father spent a good bit of time in New York although he was, he was born in Boston. He was fairly adventuresome. He went off in 1917, joined the Royal Flying Corps but flunked the physical at the end after surviving the training. He went off and joined the Navy, and he ended up eventually in the hotel business. He wanted to become a stock broker, but had the misfortune to land such a job just before he married my mother on September 25, 1929. During his honeymoon the market and his new job crashed. Then during World War Two, the hotel he managed was bought out from under him and he went to work for Pratt and Whitney, feeding war workers.. He continued after the war in the hotel business, but for health reasons he later went to work for the City of Boston. My father was a great reader, which certainly influenced me to haunt the Boston Public Library as a kid. Q: Well, did your father go to college? NEWTON: No, he didn't because he was a step-son. His mother was a widow with two children who married a widower with one child. Only their two common sons were able to attend college (Yale and Amherst) and then Harvard Business School. My father was relegated to the hotel business. Q: Did you father ever mention being in the Boston area about the Boston Irish and the, sort of the Brahmin establishment in Boston? Interview with Ambassador David G. Newton http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001613 Library of Congress NEWTON: Oh yes, everybody in Boston, everybody knew it was an ethnic city, and there was a pecking order. The Brahmins came first, the Boston Irish came second, the Italians came third, etc.. It was very well organized. Q: Yeah, I went to Boston University for a year to get my master's and with a name Kennedy, actually it's a Scottish Kennedy, but people immediately put me into a certain category, which I didn't belong. I wasn't even Catholic. But— Q: How about on your mother's side? NEWTON: Yes, my mother came from a pretty well-to-do family. Her father was in the first class at Boston College, and she worked before becoming engaged, but then like most women of that age, when she became engaged to my father, she stopped. My father had been married once before, and his wife had died during the influenza epidemic. My mother then stayed home; they got married and for the rest of her life took care of her family. Q: Now was she, had she gone to college? NEWTON: No, she didn't. Neither one had gone to college. Her family was, I guess the person she remembered fondly was her father's first cousin Eddie Moore, who was the close associate of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy. She remembered how he would come back to the family and have all of these fantastic descriptions of life in London and things like that. My parents were a very traditional, very nice couple, happily married for 46 years.. Q: Well, now did your, how Catholic was your, I assume your family was Catholic or not? NEWTON: Yes. I'm not Catholic anymore but my family was very much Catholic. My mother, like in most families, was more devout than my father. Q: Did where did you grow up? Interview with Ambassador David G. Newton http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001613 Library of Congress NEWTON: I grew up mostly in the Back Bay section. When I was born, my father was the manager of the Miles Standish Hotel in Kenmore Square, which is now a very large dormitory for Boston University. We lived in Boston all the time with the exception of two and a half years during the war. We lived in Connecticut, in Bristol and in Hartford. Q: Did you have a close, you say your mother had a, did she, do you have brothers, sisters? NEWTON: Yes, I have a sister who is three years older. She and her family have lived in Caracas, Venezuela since she married in 1958. Q: Well, when you grew up as a kid in Boston, were you living, was it, I take it you were a city kid. NEWTON: Yes, very much so. Q: Did you live in a hotel more or less, an apartment, or a house? NEWTON: Well, for seven years in a hotel, the rest of the time in apartments in various places, Newbury Street especially and Commonwealth Avenue. Q: How did you, what was it like being a kid? Did you get out and play in the, I won't say in the streets but on the sidewalks or did you find a place to go or were you constrained or what? NEWTON: No, I mean I suppose it doesn't seem constraining because it's what you're used to. I went to school in Brookline, to a Catholic school. I think the one thing about growing up downtown and so forth is I wandered around a lot on my own. I was pretty much a bookworm as well. I developed feelings that stayed with me for my life. Number one, people are pretty much the same no matter what they look like or where they come from. Secondly, almost everyone has something that you can learn. You just have to find Interview with Ambassador David G. Newton http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001613 Library of Congress out what special knowledge that person has. So I was used to diversity. Boston was a diverse place even though it was carefully segregated ethnically. Q: Well, people who were older knew about it, but kids didn't particularly. NEWTON: True. Q: What about, you say you were a reader. Did you go to the BPL and— NEWTON: Especially in my sub-teenage years, we used to go off once a week and my father and I and usually would come home with five or six books a week to read. I wasn't too selective! I'm a fast reader and I always enjoyed reading. Q: What, can you think of any types of books when you first got into books that you were particularly interested in? NEWTON: Well, I think particularly nonfiction, history. I remember when I was, I supposed I was, I don't know, twelve or something, maybe thirteen, I don't remember. I read the entire history of the U.S. Naval operations in World War II by Samuel Eliot Morrison. Q: Oh yeah by Morison. NEWTON: Samuel Eliot Morison. I read I think eighteen volumes but I read— Q: I have it at home. NEWTON: Yeah, history, military history, and anything about the world. Q: Did the world intrude much when you were youngish, a young kid? NEWTON: Well, I was interested. Maybe it was because I read a lot. I always remember my sister and I, our father took us to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see the Egyptology collection. That was my first interest in the Middle East. My other great love as Interview with Ambassador David G. Newton http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001613 Library of Congress a kid was baseball, since Boston then had two teams, the Red Sox and the Braves. I used the BPL to research addresses and amassed a major collection of old-timers' autographs. Q: Oh did, you went to what school in Boston, your first school? NEWTON: I went to a Catholic school that doesn't exist anymore called Saint Aidan's in Brookline. Except for two and a half years in Connecticut, I went through there right up to grade twelve. Q: Who ran it? NEWTON: It was run by nuns, Sisters of Saint Joseph. Q: How did you find, one hears these stories about nuns and all. NEWTON: My sister and I went there because my parents when they were first married lived in the area. It's the area within a few blocks of the Kennedy birthplace in Brookline.