Library of Congress Interview with Richard E. Undeland The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project RICHARD E. UNDELAND Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: July 29, 1994 Text revised May 2006 Copyright 2006 ADST Introductory Explanation: In taking another look at this oral history more than a decade after the original version came out, I have decided to revise this document. Why? I felt I could and should be more pointed in talking about people with whom I interacted, to include much more the naming of names, letting the chips fall where they may. This “reform” brings, to my mind at least, greater context, moment and verve. There are still a very few cases where I have on purpose held back on direct identification, mostly foreigners, out of the wish to avoid any potential embarrassment. And, alas, that doesn't count the all too many names I have forgotten. More is to be said, more vignettes to be told, more meat to be added to what is already there, so as to present a fuller and rounder picture of situations throughout my career and how I fit into them. In the interviews, too much seemed to be slighted, incompletely handled or overlooked/forgotten. While the initial editing let me fill in many of these gaps, I now find the job I did back then more than a little inadequate. Interview with Richard E. Undeland http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001202 Library of Congress I realize I could have written another document that expands on what came out originally, but I like the give and take of the interview formula. Thus, expansion made more sense to me. It somehow facilitates my saying what I want to and keeps an informal, often quite personal, character that appeals to me. I ask, is it too personal? I believe the time and distance of an added decade plus lets me look back at my career in a fuller, more focused and, frankly, clearer way. I find that my memory has not flagged with the passage of the extra time. At a few places, I did not, on reflection, say exactly what I wish I had, and then did not catch and correct these instances in the editing done back then. Some of it was due to over-telescoping my responses. In other cases, I just did not get it quite right on the initial go-round. And a couple of purely personal considerations. I have had the time and, obviously, the inclination to take on the task, and, secondly, it is a record, as I want to leave it, for my children as much as for the Foreign Affairs Oral History Program. Dunno, but maybe some colleagues and friends will also be interested. If so, it will be out there for them. Richard E. UndelandMay, 2006 Beginnings: Q: Could we start this off by your giving me something about your parents, your early background and schooling? UNDELAND: I was born in 1930 in Omaha, where I attended the same grade school and high school that my parents had gone to, Saunders' and Central High respectively, although in their earlier days it was Omaha High School. My mother was also born in Omaha and my father arrived there as a baby. In the real estate/property appraisal business for himself throughout his adult life, he was at one point the president of the Interview with Richard E. Undeland http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001202 Library of Congress National Association of Real Estate Appraisers. He threw himself into getting housing loan guarantees for black veterans after World War II, and to the end of his life looked on this as professionally his finest hour. The family lived all their lives in Omaha. It is where they are buried, as are three of my four grandparents. Q: Is Undeland a German name? UNDELAND: No, it's Norwegian, and whereas I had earlier assumed it meant the ancestors had lived in the lowlands, I have now learned its origin is far more complex. Tied up in the complexities of the Hardanger dialect, it probably denotes the family took on the name of a remote area up in the mountains, which seems to be what the name means, though there are a couple of other possibilities. It lies above Ulvik, at the uppermost reaches of Hardanger Fjord. My grandfather immigrated in early 1881from the family homestead at Undeland. After a couple of years in Illinois, where he worked in a watch factory, he settled in Omaha. He opened a barber supply business, but was at heart a technical person, a self-taught engineer, if you will. He invented the hydraulic mechanism, which to this day is used to raise and lower barber chairs. When he died suddenly in 1932, he was working on an electric shaver. A flawed businessman, his shop burned down three times, but he never saw the need for fire insurance; he never made any money from his inventions. In 1905 he became the Norwegian consul for Nebraska and environs, a position he held until his death 27 years later. My mother's family was quite well off. Her father was vice president of the largest wholesale dry goods company between Chicago and the West Coast into the 1920's. Among other things, he was a pioneer in developing new ways of handling commercial credit. When the Depression struck, my parents and so many of their friends, their “class” if you will, were not made destitute, but the means to maintain their former status Interview with Richard E. Undeland http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001202 Library of Congress disappeared. I had a modest upbringing. There was not enough money for many extras, but we were well clothed and fed and never in real want. They were happy years for me. Q: At that time, were you developing any interest in foreign affairs, or anything like that? UNDELAND: Not specifically, at least nothing hinting at where I would end up, although I was an avid reader, and a lot of it was history, historical fiction and biography. My interest in the wider world dated from World War II, which held for me a consuming interest. I still have the scrap book of photos and articles I clipped from newspapers and magazines to trace the course of the fighting. That war dominated our thinking in a way and to an extent that no other single world event had or has since. I, my parents and many of our friends took to heart the news on each American and British defeat and victory, being saddened by the former and welcoming the latter. We looked on Americans and Brits almost as one, for they were representing the good and defending themselves and others against evil. In 1948, I entered Harvard, where I majored in English literature, but took nearly as many courses in modern history and government, as political science was called there in those days. It was at Harvard my real appreciation of the whys and hows and whats of the world seriously came forth, although this interest had begun earlier. In thinking back on it now, yes it was at Harvard, my internationalist focus and outlook took hold. My 1949 summer in Norway strengthened this outlook. Q: You graduated in 1952, correct? UNDELAND: Spring of 1952, yes. In autumn I entered the Stanford Business School, though I am still more than a little befuddled as to why I went there. I saw it through the normal two years and got my MBA, but by the second year I was pretty thoroughly bored with marketing, finance and the rest of the SBS fare. Looking for something more stimulating, I found it at the Hoover Institute largely through the colorful and dynamic professor, Christina Phelps Harris, who was its resident scholar on the Middle East. An intrepid Englishwoman, she had flown airplanes over much of the Arab world in the 1930's. Interview with Richard E. Undeland http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001202 Library of Congress She came to the U.S., got American citizenship and in the immediate post-war years, worked in the Department of State, from which she resigned in protest over the U.S. recognition of Israel. She, remarried to the noted historian David Harris, then joined him on the faculty of the Hoover Institute. In those days it was not the bastion of the right it was later to become. Though I was lacking in the required background, she accepted me for her graduate seminar on modern Egypt. My second Middle East awakener was an Egyptian professor, Mohammed Kafafi, a Cairo University librarian, who was spending a year at Stanford on a Fulbright grant and with whom I developed abiding ties. He was my de facto advisor for my term paper on the early emergence of the Egyptian nationalist movement. Though my interest was much aroused by these persons, I was by no means yet hooked on the Middle East, and, on getting My MBA in spring of 1954, I went to work for Shell Chemical in San Francisco, a stop-gap job, while awaiting my draft number to come up. Unbeknownst to me, Christina Harris had put forth my name for a scholarship offered by the Egyptian government for one year of unrestricted study in Egypt. I was elated, though thoroughly surprised, when she tracked me down and informed me I had the grant, if I wanted it. With Stanford, State and the Egyptian embassy in Washington all weighing in, my Omaha draft board gave me an academic extension, and, at the beginning of 1955, Joan, my wife of less than six months, and I were on a South African Airways flight into Cairo.