Library of Congress Interview with Alfred Leroy Atherton Jr., Summer 1990 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR ALFRED LEROY ATHERTON, JR. Interviewed by: Dayton Mak Initial interview date: Summer 1990 Copyright 1998 ADST Q: Ambassador, you've had an outstanding career in the U.S. Foreign Service, having served in a number of posts throughout the Middle East and South Asia, in particular. You were Director General of the Foreign Service, Director of Personnel in the Department of State, Ambassador to Egypt, Ambassador at Large for Middle East negotiations and Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East and South Asia for the years 1974 through 1978. You were appointed a Career Ambassador of the United States in 1981. This, everyone will agree, is a most illustrious career in the Foreign Service. I wonder, first of all, Mr. Ambassador, if you would give us a bit of your family background, where you were raised, where you went to school, what made you decide to go into the Foreign Service, why you chose certain universities that you did? In other words, give us a bit of the background that brought you into the Foreign Service. ATHERTON: Let me talk a little bit about how it all started. As I've reflected on this, it occurs to me that I had a very unlikely background to have brought me eventually into a Foreign Service career. As far as I can recall, there was no real international experience on the part of my family, my father's family, my mother's family. My father's father, my grandfather on his side, ran a hardware store in Worcester, Massachusetts, and he was a cabinet maker—I'm told a very good one. I never met him, he died before I was born. Interview with Alfred Leroy Atherton Jr., Summer 1990 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000030 Library of Congress My father's mother was perhaps the stronger person, in various ways the family matriarch and a very strong-willed person. She was determined that her sons would be the first members of the Atherton family to get a college education. And my father, as well as his older brother, went to Worcester Tech and both became engineers. Q: I assume you were living in Worcester? ATHERTON: Well, this was before I was born. I was going back into the generation where my roots were. My mother's family lived in a small town of about, as I recall, two hundred people, up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My mother's father was a self-made businessman, a small town businessman. He mined coal, he cut and sold lumber, and he drove the delivery truck himself. It was not a very big operation. I remember that, because I used to visit my mother's parents when I was very small-take a train from Pittsburgh up the river to a little town called Templeton. But certainly I don't recall any discussion of the world or world events in my very early years at all. My world, until I was 12 or 14 years old, was really a very inward-looking world of a small neighborhood of friends. We lived outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I guess what would today be called the beginning of the suburbs. It was an area that was in transition between rural and being where commuters who lived and worked in the city would live. My father worked for Westinghouse as an engineer in East Pittsburgh, and we lived in a little place called...I guess it was between towns, but the nearest town was a little place called Verona. The school I started out in was basically a rural school. On one side of our house was a farm, and the other side was beginning to get built up, so we were right on the dividing line of rural and suburban. I can't remember exactly what year, but after I had been in this little school for a couple of years, maybe more, maybe it was through elementary school days, my parents decided it was not the kind of education they wanted me to have, so they made arrangements for me to go to school in the town of Wilkinsburg, which is a suburb of Pittsburgh, for the last part of elementary school or the beginning of junior high. That was the system when you had six years of elementary Interview with Alfred Leroy Atherton Jr., Summer 1990 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000030 Library of Congress school, three years of junior high, three years of high school. My recollection was that it was somewhere towards the end of elementary school, the beginning of junior high, that they made arrangements for me to be transferred from the school district where we lived, to the school in town. I think they had to pay some small fee to the Town of Wilkinsburg for me to attend that school. And it was a proper city school with larger classes, more structured. So that really was how I spent those pre-teen years. But at the same time, as I recall, while my daytimes were spent going on a rural streetcar into Wilkinsburg, going to school and coming home on the streetcar, my free time was spent visiting one of my very best friends, who lived on a farm on the hill not far from us. I would go up and spend weekends with him, and learn to milk cows and do all the things that farm children do. It was an interesting family. Could I digress a little bit on this, because it's always stayed with me? Q: Yes, please. ATHERTON: His father was a high school principal in Pittsburgh. Q: Not your high school, though? ATHERTON: Not my high school. And I gather he was a very strict, old-fashioned disciplinarian. He certainly was, with his family and with his children. He was also a fundamentalist, Bible-reading Christian. For example, if I spent Sunday with them, we spent it listening to the Bible being read and perhaps playing educational-type games, but certainly nothing more than that. Q: No cards. ATHERTON: There was a game called Authors, remember that? They were on cards, but it was instructional. You had the authors and a bit of their biography and what they'd written. It was good. Interview with Alfred Leroy Atherton Jr., Summer 1990 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000030 Library of Congress Q: I haven't thought of that for 40 years, make that 50. ATHERTON: Maybe I hadn't either. But that was the kind of very limited circle of friends, when you live in a place where there are not lots of people. I wasn't part of a large group. I didn't belong to teams, I didn't play team sports. I was pretty much on my own. I had a younger brother, six years younger, so we were not terribly close. There was too big an age difference between us. I remember visiting, as I mentioned earlier, my mother's parents, by taking the train, 50 miles or so I suppose, up the river to this little town. There, again, I was a stranger in the town. They were sort of clannish, and I wasn't part of that gang of young people, so I didn't have many friends there either. As a result, I used to read a lot when I was younger, perhaps more than a lot of people nowadays. But what I can most remember was a very uneventful, even kind of life. Some vague recollections were the worries of my parents during this period. It was the Depression, and there were lots of people at Westinghouse being laid off. My father did not lose his job, but they all had to take a cut in salary. It was a belt-tightening experience for my family, for all of us. And then the world all suddenly changed, very suddenly, in 1935, when I would have been, I think, 14 years old, when my father was transferred from Pittsburgh to the Westinghouse office in Boston, Massachusetts. In a way, it was going home for him. He was a native of Massachusetts, and he had gone to Pittsburgh because that's where he was first offered a position after graduating from Worcester Tech. It was where he had met my mother and they were married, and I was born and then my brother was born. But in 1935, suddenly the whole world changed. To me it was going to a place I had only heard my father talk about. Boston, Massachusetts. I didn't go right away, actually. I was in the middle of a school term. As a result, my parents went ahead. We by then had given Interview with Alfred Leroy Atherton Jr., Summer 1990 http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000030 Library of Congress up the house and were living in an apartment hotel in Wilkinsburg within waking distance of the junior high. So I just simply stayed on at the hotel, living there with the manager as kind of my guardian. My parents had said keep an eye on him and make sure he gets to bed and does his homework. So I was really kind of on my own. I can't remember honestly how long it was, but it seemed like a long time. Q: Quite an exciting experience. ATHERTON: Well, it was exciting, and in a way it was also kind of lonely, because I didn't really have many friends whom I could spend a lot of time with.