1 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project ...

246 Pages·2013·1.37 MB·English

The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training
Foreign Affairs Oral History Project

AMBASSADOR LANGE SCHERMERHORN

Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy
Initial interview date: May 3, 2002
Copyright 2009 ADST

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Background
Born and raised in New Jersey
Mount Holyoke College
Entered the Foreign Service in 1966

Colombo, Ceylon: Rotation Officer 1967-1969
Environment
Government
Madame Bandaranaike
British presence
Maldives
Ambassador Cecil Lyon
Personnel
Tea
Tamils
Visa cases
Diego Garcia
Relations

Saigon, Vietnam; Consular Officer 1969-1970
Visa applicants
US military
Security
Environment
CORDS
Fraternization issues
Size of Embassy
Adoptions
Work anecdotes
US presence (size)

State Department; Operations Center 1971-1973
1
Divisions of Center
Duties
Secretary’s Middle East visit
Overseas travel assignments
Jerry Bremer
Henry Kissinger
Geographic Bureaus
Staff Personnel

State Department; FSI; Economic study 1974
Female marriage issue
Course substance
Commerce Dept. Export Seminar

Tehran, Iran; Economic/Commercial Officer 1974-1978
Embassy staff
Ambassador Richard Helms
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)
Oil price rise
Work load
National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC)
Influx of US businessmen
Environment
Iran housing market
Local business culture
Secret Police (SAVAK)
Joint Ventures
Local Business practices
European businessmen
Military Assistance Group (MAG)
Social classes
Worldwide political developments
Shah’s future
Tudeh Party

State Department; Phoenix Program 1978
Vietnamese refugees and boat people
Goals of the organization
Operations

London, England; Commercial Officer 1978-1981
Environment
Mrs. Thatcher
British culture
Status of women
2
American Ambassadors
Economy
Commerce Department

The National War College 1981-1982
Course content
Comments
Composition of student body

State Department; Office of North African Affairs 1982-1985
Maghrebian Affairs
Morocco
Vernon Reid
King of Morocco
Polisario
Libya
Algeria-Morocco relations
Economic Support Funds
National Security Studies
Morocco coup attempts
Euro controls

Brussels, Belgium 1985-1988
Economic Support Funds
Operations
Environment issues
Reporting
Economic Trends Report
Future of the European Union
Environment
Walloon-Flemish divide
Grievance filing

State Department; Special Trade Activities, Economic Bureau 1988-1990
European Union
Trade Requirements of GATT
Trade Legislation
Operations
Trade negotiations
US relations with the European Union
Reports
Human Rights

State Department; Office of Career Development and Assignments 1990-1993
Operations
3
Organization
Bidding process
Tandem assignments
Family issues
Handicap issues
Lawsuits
Assignment problems
Grievance process
Women’s issues
Geographic specialty issues
Training
Influence of top echelon
DCM Committee
Factors noted in assignment process
Rating personnel performance

Brussels, Belgium; Deputy Chief of Mission 1993-1997
151-191
Ambassador Allen Blinken
Political environment
Mission organization
American business community
Personnel
Presidential visits
Walloons and Flemish divide
African nation problems
Immigrants
Former Yugoslavia
Germany
Belgium’s relations with neighbors
Relations with government
Environment
Military
Benelux
Jewish assets
NATO
The French
Iraq
European nations’ individual interests
USIS/Commerce cooperation
Libya
Inspection

Ambassador to Djibouti; 1992-2000
Ambassadorial Seminar (FSI)
4
Background history
French presence
Clans
Government
Embassy organization
Environment
American community
Joint military forces
Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS)
Language
Chinese
Culture
Diplomatic Corps
French presence
Relations with neighbors
Eritrea
Mengistu
EGAT (Regional organization_
Eritrea/Ethiopia dispute
Embassy security
Past US Assistance
Non Government Organizations
Greater Horn of Africa Initiative (GHI)
United Nations Agencies
USAID
Famine Early Warning System (FEWS)Ship refueling contract
USS Cole attack
Djibouti airport
Elections
Somalia reconciliation
Djibouti port agreement

INTERVIEW

[Note: This interview was not edited by Ambassador Schermerhorn]

Q: I might say that Lange and I are old friends. Lange, starting at the beginning, can you
tell me when and where you were born, and something about your family?

SCHERMERHORN: I was born in September, 1939, a war baby, as it were, in northern
New Jersey. My parents at that point were living in a town called Florham Park, which is
near Morristown, the county seat of Morris County, New Jersey – about thirty-five miles
from New York City on a railroad line. In those days it was basically country, ex-urban;
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now it’s very much suburban and built up. When my parents moved there in the early
‘30s, you could walk out your back door and flush pheasants and things like that. My
father was a stockbroker, my mother did not have a job outside the home, a paying job,
but she was very active in community affairs, local politics, etc. She had a lot of
executive ability and had to find an outlet for it. I had one older brother, twelve-and-a-
half years older.

Q: The name Schermerhorn I have…it’s Schermerhorn.

SCHERMERHORN: Yes, you have to guard it like a good Dutchman. Schermerhorn.
[laughs]

Q: It’s a name that one sees quite a bit in New York society type things or Philadelphia –
I’m not sure. But it’s a name that’s been around for a long time, or has it?

SCHERMERHORN: Well I wouldn’t say New York society, but it goes back to when
New York was New Amsterdam. I’m twelfth generation, so my paternal ancestor came in
1642 and he had three sons. The old horse thief, he must’ve been. [laughs] One who went
up to Schenectady – Fort Orange as it was in those days. And that’s the prolific branch
from which most people with that name are descended. One stayed in Manhattan and that
branch has pretty much died out now, and then another one is in the mid-Hudson Valley
and that branch has pretty much died out too. But my grandfather came to New Jersey. He
was born in 1860. He went to Union College in Schenectady and then began to work with
someone who was an inventor and had a laboratory there and had a number of backers in
that area. The inventor had been somewhat of a gadfly; he had moved around from Ohio
to Bridgeport, Connecticut to outside of Boston, and then to Schenectady. But then he
made what turned out to be the last move to New Jersey and my father went with him on
the business side and that fellow’s name was Thomas Edison. And his backers with
whom he had quarreled in Schenectady stayed behind and that became General Electric.

Q: Where did your father go to college?

SCHERMERHORN: He went to Lafayette.

Q: What was your mother’s family’s background?

SCHERMERHORN: She was fourth generation. Her mother was French descent –
actually I have two French grandmothers – and her father was German.

Q: Did she go to college?

SCHERMERHORN: No, she went to a secretarial, finishing school. Whatever you’d call
it.

Q: Katy Gibbs type thing.
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SCHERMERHORN: In the ‘20s. But she had worked in the ‘20s in New York in an
advertising agency. She had an interesting career. As I said, she had a lot of executive
ability.

Q: The ad business was a great place for young women in New York to show their stuff at
that time.

SCHERMERHORN: Actually the most interesting woman in my family was my
grandmother, my father’s mother. She was from a town in upstate New York, three miles
from the Canadian border. A town with a French name, Chateaugay, and she was French.
In 1837 when Victoria came to the throne in England that was a time when the French in
Quebec decided they could make a little mischief and maybe try to secede. There was
something called the Papineau Rebellion. It was actually put down by the crown and the
people who were involved in it, the participants, were proscribed. And so my
grandmother’s grandfather fled across the border into New York, as did a number of
them. But of course there are a lot of French Canadians in that part of the world too.

But she was a very intelligent and ambitious woman. She went to what in those days they
called normal schools, and then taught school. But she graduated at fifteen or something
like that and then she somehow found her way to New York and she worked for a
magazine called Frank Leslie’s Weekly and she got into that.

Q: Oh yes.

SCHERMERHORN: And I don’t know how she met my grandfather, but they did and he
was a bachelor until he was in his late thirties and she was about ten years younger.

Q: Did your family live in New Jersey more or less from the time you were born, on?

SCHERMERHORN: Yes.

Q: How about elementary school?

SCHERMERHORN: [laughs] I went to elementary school in my little town of Florham
Park. It was a beautiful, beautiful building built in the 1930s by the WPA (Work Projects
Administration). It was one of these wonderful…it was quite an imposing building
actually. I remember distinctly each one of my teachers from kindergarten through eighth
grade. I mean I still remember their names and I can picture them. I think it’s something
we’ve lost in the states today. We don’t have those dedicated. Most of them were women
but there were a couple of men teachers, too.

Q: I always like to immortalize a few names. You know, I mean it’s only fair. What the
hell? [laughs] Can you name any that were particularly influential as far as you were
concerned?
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SCHERMERHORN: Well I remember the kindergarten teacher, Katherine Martinay. I
remember that because in our rest period she used to read to us from Kipling from the
Just So stories. And Mrs. Adamson, the first grade teacher. But the one I remember the
most was the third grade teacher, Gladys Stanton. I remember her because she had us
embark on a project. What she did all year long was talk to the third graders and have us
do little projects about the age of discovery. In third grade. Now this is Magellan and
round the world, and Talbot and all these things. I think my interest in geography, foreign
affairs, the world outside America, really was piqued by her. And this was quite
ambitious; I don’t think in third grade maybe now they do that as much.

Q: How about as a small child growing up, what was life like at home? Were affairs
talked about over the dinner table? Was this a political family? How would you
characterize it?

SCHERMERHORN: I wouldn’t say political in a sense of foreign policy, but as I said,
my mother was interested in local politics and my father was on the Board of Health and
the Planning Board and did that kind of thing. This was a very small town, but you know,
not everybody contributed. We always had newspapers in the house. I started reading
when I was very young. I think the other thing that made a great impression on me was
we got National Geographic and Life magazine, and of course having been born in 1939,
I began to look at those when I was four- and five-years-old and there were all the stories
about the war. Particularly in Life you had all the things. So it was always knowing;
talking about it and being interested in that kind of thing was part of my first impressions.

Q: You mentioned your teacher in third grade and the age of discovery. Did maps and
this sort of thing have a fascination?

SCHERMERHORN: Oh yes, because the National Geographic always came with maps.
My mother finally said we had to get rid of the magazines, but I still have the maps.
[laughs]

Q: Well they now come on a CD with all the National Geographic. It’s not quite as good
but I have it with all six or seven CDs.

How about reading, were you a reader?

SCHERMERHORN: Yes, I was a reader. My father is a reader, my mother somewhat but
not as much. All my father’s family were readers. You know, we went to the library every
week or a couple of times a week.

Q: Was it a Carnegie Library?

SCHERMERHORN: Well it was in the town called Madison, which is three miles away.
Our town didn’t have one. It was a wonderful library in one of these buildings built,
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Carnegie, and the librarians were these very erudite women. I remember one summer
later, when I was ten or eleven, deciding…I had read The Count of Monte Cristo and then
I discovered in the library that Dumas had actually written a whole bookshelf of things
which actually details French history if you read them all. The popular ones were The
Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. But I remember trying to get through a
lot of those. We read, we listened to the radio because this was before most people had
television anyway, and we played outdoors all the time.

Q: Were there any particular sports that you were interested in?

SCHERMERHORN: Well, everybody played sandlot baseball, or whatever you want to
call it, and in the winter we went ice skating because we had a pond not too far away.
Actually, we were situated between two golf courses, one was a private golf course and
one was public – each about two miles away. Well, one was closer and one was about a
mile away. But one in particular was very flat because we were in a part of New Jersey
which is verging on marsh actually, the Passaic River, and so along the golf course it was
very shallow. It would flood and then freeze and we could skate for a long, long time, and
toboggan and things like that. My brother was always very athletic and I was always
tagging along after. I was the little pain in the neck who tagged after. [laughs] There
weren’t that many children my age; there were some who were older. I was a little
tomboy because most of them were little boys.

Q: By the time you got to high school, where did you go to high school?

SCHERMERHORN: Well, grade school. We didn’t have a high school, the town wasn’t
big enough. We were sending district to the high school in Madison which is a suburb of
Morris. If you know the geography of northern New Jersey, you go out from New York
and you go to the Oranges and then you have Summit which is a fairly large town and
Short Hills is one of its satellites. And Chatham and then Madison and then Condit
Station and Morristown and Bernardsville and you go on. So we went to Madison High
School.

Q: You were at the high school from when to when?

SCHERMERHORN: 1953 to ’57.

Q: How was the high school?

SCHERMERHORN: Well it was considered a good high school but it was an interesting
mix of people because there was another town slightly further away called Hanover which
was also a sending district. And this was still, forty or fifty years ago, a lot of small farms.
I mean that’s all gone now. And so there were sort of farm people and people who
weren’t probably college material. On the other hand, in my brother’s high school class
was Alison Shockley, the daughter of William Shockley, Nobel Prize winner. And the
reason you had that, you had the Bell Laboratories in that part of New Jersey and you had
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a lot of people from there. And Drew University is in Madison. So you had quite a mix of
people. I mean we had a chapter of the Future Farmers of America.

Q: Did farming ever attract you? [laughs]

SCHERMERHORN: No, this wasn’t my…but, you know, we used to have turkey shoots
and go skeet shooting too. It was an interesting mix. But they sent people to very good
colleges. In my time only about half the student body was doing the college preparatory
thing.

Q: What type of courses were you taking and which ones appealed to you the most?

SCHERMERHORN: They still offered Latin in those days and I took Latin. The
prescribed things: algebra, Latin, English, history. Then I took two years of Latin and
three years of French.

Q: Were you picking up any French from your family?

SCHERMERHORN: No. My grandmother spoke very good French, not French
Canadian. And my grandparents, a few months after my father was born in 1905, they
went and lived in London for five years but went often to the continent because my
grandfather was the European representative of Edison Industries there.

Q: How about in high school, any extra-curricular activities?

SCHERMERHORN: Oh yes, I did sports. We played field hockey, and basketball and
volleyball in the winter, and we did archery in the spring. Now most of the people in the
class had started out in kindergarten together. Since we were from a different place, you
know, there were like twenty people in my grade school class that went there. And of
course my brother had been there before me and he was a very prominent athlete – but he
was already out of high school by the time I got there. I became, or maybe what I guess
are my natural inclinations emerged, because at the end of our freshman year when we
had our election for the class president, I was elected for the next two years and then I
was the student body president among other things, which was unusual because I was a
girl and this was the 1950s and this was a co-ed high school.

Q: And also you weren’t part of the clique.

SCHERMERHORN: Well no, but that was why one could…

Q: Let them split their votes or something.

SCHERMERHORN: I actually was a bit of an entrepreneur; when I ran for student body
president I decided I would run on a platform that we needed a foreign student in the
school. Now this was 1956 and the American Field Service and these other groups were
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