Library of Congress Interview with George G. B. Griffin Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project GEORGE G. B. GRIFFIN Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: April 30, 2002 Copyright 2004 ADST Q: Today is April 30, 2002. This is an interview with George Griffin. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, and I'm Charles Stuart Kennedy. Do you go by George? GRIFFIN: Sure. Q: Let's start at the beginning. When and where were you born? GRIFFIN: I was born on October 22nd, 1934, in Istanbul, Turkey, at the Admiral Bristol Hospital. Q: How come? Istanbul is not the normal place. GRIFFIN: My father was a businessman. He was in the tobacco business in Turkey. He was originally from North Carolina, and my mother was from South Carolina. He was in Turkey for 40-plus years in that business. He started in Greece, in Salonika, and then moved to Turkey, after which he got married. Because my mother had lost her first baby in Samsun, which is where they were living first, they decided she should go to a proper hospital to have me. After that, we lived Interview with George G. B. Griffin http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001355 Library of Congress in Samsun until my mother, my little sister, and I left in the summer of 1939. She was about to have another baby and thought there was a war coming, so we left. My father left Turkey in 1941. He was almost captured by the Japanese. Because the war had blocked shipping in the Mediterranean, he and two colleagues had to go through the Pacific, and he managed to get out. They went first to Cairo, where they knew Charg# d'Affaires Ray Hare, who had served earlier in Istanbul. He helped them get passage to Bombay, where they were stuck because of events in the Pacific, and they soon ran out of money. I don't know how long they were there, but they stayed at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay, which was the top of the line there at that time. Eventually Liggett & Myers, my father's parent company, wired them money for a PanAm Clipper flight to Manila via Singapore, and enough to pay their hotel bill, but nothing else. My father always told a story about their departure from Bombay, saying that as they opened the door to their room they saw most of the hotel staff lined up outside with their hands out for bakshish. The three huddled to figure out what to do. Finally one of them said, “All we can do is to thank them profusely and shake their hands.” So that's what they did. When they got to Manila in December 1941, things got even tighter, with chaos and panic. Apparently they were bumped from their Pan Am flight, and all other flights were rerouted away from Manila as Japanese forces approached. Finally they located one deck passage ticket, on a ship headed for Australia. They drew straws, and my father was the lucky one. The other two didn't get out, and became prisoners of the Japanese for the remainder of the war, enduring miserable concentration camp conditions and a “death march.” After my father got to Sydney he found a plane to, I think, Chile, and from there up to Miami. I remember that my mother managed to get some extra gasoline ration coupons, and we drove to Miami to meet him. I hadn't seen him for at least a year and wasn't too sure what he looked like. That was a traumatic time for me. My father returned to Turkey in 1945, by freighter, in an international convoy accompanied by U.S. warships. Q: Let's get a little about your family. What about your father's background? Interview with George G. B. Griffin http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001355 Library of Congress GRIFFIN: He was the eldest son of a school administrator, school superintendent, in North Carolina. He grew up here and there, as his father was transferred from one school district to another. He went to Davidson College briefly, and then to the University of North Carolina, where one of his classmates was the actor Randolph Scott. For whatever reason, when he heard about a job offer in Turkey, he seized it and went there in 1928. On his first home leave, he met my mother. They were married in Turkey. I wasn't alive so I don't remember the details. They would have been married in 1931 or '32. Q: Were the Griffins a long-time Carolina family? GRIFFIN: Yes, as far as I know. I can go back two generations before my father, but that family Bible didn't have very good records. They were certainly North Carolinians. Before that, I don't know, except that they came originally from Ireland. Q: Your mother's maiden name was...? GRIFFIN: Mary Carroll Byers. Q: Was she a South Carolinian? GRIFFIN: She was a South Carolinian. Q: Where did she go to school? GRIFFIN: Well, she went to several places. Her family was from a small town called Gaffney, where her father and grandfather were business partners. By the time she met my father, the family had become quite prosperous and owned most of the businesses and much of the land in and around the town. She apparently was a good scholar. She studied in Gaffney at Limestone Girls Academy (now College), and went on to Shorter College in Rome, Georgia, and then to Boston College. She taught briefly at St. John's in Annapolis before she went off to Turkey and got married. Interview with George G. B. Griffin http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001355 Library of Congress Q: After your mother and father were married, did your mother continue teaching? GRIFFIN: She taught me when there was no formal school. I think she taught kindergarten for a while in Turkey, but most of the international communither Turkish was rudimentary at firswas French, so she concentrated on learning those languages. She learned both pretty well over the years. Q: You were about five when you left Turkey. Do you recall anything about it? GRIFFIN: Not really. I have some vague memories, but they are probably based on family photos. Apparently, to help them fit in with their friends, my parents practiced French at home and didn't want me to rely solely on English. I had different nannies; over time there was a Greek, a Syrian, and an Armenian. The cook and maid were Turks, and so I learned a little bit of all those languages as a youngster. I'm told that I began speaking English with a British accent, much of it picked up on the way to America on the ?I can't remember?was it the Gripsholm? Q: Well, the Gripsholm was the Swedish one that sort of went back and forth particularly during the war for repatriation. GRIFFIN: Well, I'm not sure which ship, but apparently our cabin steward was a British man who talked to me a lot, which helped improve my English. During my first summer in South Carolina, my mother sent me to a boy's camp to help me integrate into American society. There I learned American English. Camp Le Conte was in Tennessee, in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I went to grammar school in South Carolina. Q: How did you find elementary school? Did you enjoy it? GRIFFIN: Yes and no. I got beaten up by the class bully about the third day there, so I quickly learned who was in charge. I've still got a split tooth from that incident. But I liked to read, and was a pretty good student. By the time I reached the third grade, I had read Interview with George G. B. Griffin http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001355 Library of Congress more books than the rest of the class put together. At first my teacher didn't believe that I had read all the books I listed, but after testing my memory of the contents of several, she gave me top marks. Q: What sort of books did you like to read? GRIFFIN: Anything. My parents kept a good library. Of course I read children's books, but quickly began reading some of the books they would leave about. One book I remember reading at an early age was Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which I found extremely funny. By the end of the third grade, I had read some 300 books; something my teacher said was “remarkable.” Q: As you finished elementary school, you were still in North Carolina? GRIFFIN: South Carolina. No, I didn't finish there. We went back to Turkey in 1946 before the end of grammar school, which in those days went through the eighth grade. We lived in Istanbul at that time, and my sister and I attended an American community school at Robert College. Then I moved up into the high school (that wasn't the terminology used by the school). After a couple of years, my parents saw me struggling with mathematics and other courses in Turkish, and decided I needed a proper American education. I was sent to boarding school at Darlington School in Rome, Georgia; the same town where my mother had attended Shorter College. After I was there a year, my grandmother died, and my mother came back to South Carolina to settle the estate.