Atherton, Alfred Leroy Jr. - Association for Diplomatic Studies and

337 Pages·2012·1.84 MB·English

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

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Background
Born in Pennsylvania, raised in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts
Exeter Academy and Harvard University
ROTC, U.S. Army, World War II
Entered Foreign Service 1947

Stuttgart, Germany 1947-1950
Vice consul, visa officer
Kreis officer program

Bonn, Germany 1950-1952
Foreign Relations Division
Office of High Commissioner
West German Government
German reunification issue
McCarthy era

Damascus, Syria 1953-1956
Political officer
Dictator - Adib Shishakli
Arab-Israeli problem
Local politics

Aleppo, Syria 1956-1959
Consul
Suez War and evacuation
Syria-Turkey tension
UAR- Syria – Egypt Union

NEA -Iraq-Jordan-Cyprus 1959-1962
Nasser
Arab-Israeli problem
Cyprus desk

Economic Training 1962
University of California at Berkeley

Calcutta, India 1962-1965
Economic officer
Soviet activity
Chinese invasion
India-Pakistan warfare

NEA 1965-1974
Deputy director
Dimona reactor - Israel
PLO
Arab-Israel "bias"
Director, Arab States North
Director Arab-Israeli Affairs
Arab-Israeli 1967 War
Security Council resolution
Ball mission to Middle East
Gunnar Jarring Mission
Sisco-Dobrynin talks
Negotiating Arab-Israeli dispute
Soviet aid to Egypt - 1970
Rogers' Plan
Nasser PLO dispute
Anwar Sadat
Kissinger-Rogers tension
1973 War
Kissinger and Egyptians
Kissinger's Moscow visit 1973
Negotiating Egypt-Israeli cease fire
Aftermath of 1973 war
Arab oil embargo
Kissinger negotiations
Geneva conference
"Shuttle" diplomacy

NEA Assistant Secretary 1974-1979
U.S. diplomats murdered
Syrian-Israeli negotiations
Nixon visit
Sinai II - Sadat and Israel
Sinai Field Mission
President Carter and his team
Cairo Conference, December 1977
Jerusalem Conference 1978
President Carter's visit to Middle East
Leeds Castle Conference
Camp David
Camp David II

Cairo, Egypt 1979-1983
Ambassador
Iran's Shah
Strauss's Alexandria Conference
Embassy operations
Community Services Association
Relations with Sadat
Egypt's problems
U.S. hostages in Iran
AWACs in Egypt
Camp David loose ends
Egypt-Israel relations
Sadat's popularity
Assassination of Sadat
Final Israeli withdrawal from Sinai
Israeli invasion of Lebanon
Lebanon civil war
U.S. military in Egypt

Operating as an ambassador 1979-1983
Relations with U.S. government officials
Relations with President
Relations with diplomatic corps
Relations with American community
Use of DCM and staff
Use of USAID, CIA and military attaches

Director General of the Foreign Service 1983
New Foreign Service Act
Senior Service
Comments on Foreign Service

INTERVIEW
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. 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 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.

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 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. When we lived out in what
we used to call the country, I had a dog which we had to give away, a traumatic experience.
But in any case, we survived it. My brother was living with my grandparents, and there was
an elaborate arrangement to get the family all together. My grandparents brought my
brother to Pittsburgh, and reservations were made on the Pullman car on the train. And my
brother and I, I in charge, traveled alone on a sleeper from Pittsburgh to Boston overnight. I
can't remember how many hours it was, but it seemed like a long, long trip. And we were
met by my parents.

My father worked for a year in the Westinghouse office in Boston. We settled down in a
suburb of Boston called Needham, Massachusetts, which then was more separated from
Boston than it is today. And that's where I basically finished that last year of junior high
school. It turned out that we were only in Needham for about a year.

My father was then transferred again to become one of the deputies, I think, to the works
manager of the Westinghouse plant in East Springfield, Massachusetts. So we moved from
Needham after about a year. Again, in the middle of the school year. All of our moves
seemed to take place in the middle of the school year, disrupting friendships, and always
the classes were out of kilter. But I do recall leaving in the middle of the first year of high
school. So I finished a year, and I went for a summer and into the first year of high school in
Needham, and then suddenly picked up and into the middle of my first year of high school
in Springfield. Actually we lived in Longmeadow, a suburb. Longmeadow today has its
own high school, but in those days it didn't. It had only a junior high. Once you became of
high school age, you went to one of the four high schools in Springfield.

Springfield had then what I think was known as the Springfield system. It was a track
system. There was Classical High, which is where those who were expected to go on to
university, liberal arts, college prep, went. Then there was Technical High, which was in a
way also college prep, but for those who were more scientifically inclined and were
probably going to go to one of the technical colleges. Commerce High was clearly indicated
if you were going to be clerks and typists. And then there was Trade High, which was of
course a trade school, where you would go to learn a trade. How it was decided which one
of these schools you went to, I never really understood.

Q: You couldn't choose?

ATHERTON: Well, I think you had a choice, but also you had to be accepted, as well as
have a choice. There were certain academic minimums. It was always assumed, the
question never arose whether I would go anywhere except Classical High. So I went in the
middle of my first year. I graduated from there in 1939, so this was the end of the fall term
of 1936. I had almost a full three years in Classical High.

It was a remarkable school. In some ways it had a faculty as good as many colleges. It had,
for example, a math teacher (and I was not good in math, but I did take some of the high
school math courses) who every week would disappear for a day and go down and teach an
advanced math course at Columbia University. We were all told that for many years they
had tried to get him to become a professor of mathematics at Columbia, but he liked living
in this smaller town, and he liked teaching high school mathematics. My forte was in the
humanities, English, and I took German from a teacher who was a native German-speaker.
Then you hear a proper accent from the beginning. I went onto the high school paper, and
by the time I graduated I was the editor of the high school Recorder, I think it was called. I
forget how often it came out, it was probably monthly. But anyway, I had begun to get some
sense by then that maybe there was a world beyond whatever town or school I happened to
be in.

Q: At that time did you find that you were pretty good at writing, say, if you were in
journalism there?

ATHERTON: I did like to write. I can remember usually doing pretty well in essays or
book reviews. I was in the advanced English class, because I had pretty well covered the
ground that was in the standard English class. It was a special class for seniors who were up
to it. It was really like taking a freshman college class in that respect. Heavy, heavy reading.
An honors course. So I did this. I was editor, but I also did a lot of writing, editorials, and
got into other extracurricular activities. I was a great joiner--German club and the school
paper among others.

Q: Were you good at German?

ATHERTON: Academically. I couldn't speak it. You know they never taught us to speak
languages. The emphasis was on learning grammar and memorizing vocabulary, on being
able to read it, being able to conjugate verbs and decline nouns, learn all the rules, but in a
mechanical way. So I had a good foundation in the instruction of German, but I never really
thought about speaking it. You sang songs. I never thought of it as a language I would ever
use as a spoken language. It clearly was a school and an environment in which one's
horizons could be broadened.

And of course on top of that, one couldn't help but be aware, if you just read the
newspapers, that there was a war in Europe, even then. But I became acutely aware of that
because of two things. First of all, I met my international cousins. My father's older brother,
who was also an engineer, had in fact taken a position as an overseas representative of
General Electric Company. He was living in Switzerland.

I should add, by the way, that my father never traveled outside the United States in all of his
life. He never left the country, except perhaps to visit Canada. And my mother never left
until after I joined the Foreign Service, when she visited us. After my father died, she came
to live with us. But she had never before been out of the States. As far as I know, my
mother's father and mother spent their whole lives in a little corner of Pennsylvania. Not
always in the same town, but in the same general area, Western Pennsylvania, north of
Pittsburgh, in places in transition themselves from farms to small towns.
But I did meet the children of my father's older brother, Carl. Uncle Carl had a daughter and
a son who were a little older than I, but not much, and they had been brought up in Europe.
To me a very romantic thing. They talked to each other in French.

Q: There is sophistication.

ATHERTON: They were very sophisticated. They had gone to private schools in
Switzerland and France, traveled all over Europe, and were back now because my uncle
saw the clouds of war coming and decided to move his family back to the States. And so he
brought them back and into private schools. He obviously had a lot more money on his side
of the family than we had on ours. And my cousin, Betsy, who was the older of the two,
went to a very, very posh, private school in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, called Miss Halls.
Miss Halls still exists. I learned just this last year when I was up there for a Tanglewood
concert that their dormitories are available during the summer for the young people to come
and play in the Tanglewood orchestra. A place to study and to play . David, the younger of
the two, was sent to a private school in New Hampshire.
But, anyway, there was that sort of an opening up, listening to them talk. They talked about
very different things. Betsy had spent some time visiting, traveling in Spain. And of course
it was the time of the Spanish Civil War. The war pictures in the newsreels in the theaters,
and the terrible destruction, the scenes in Spain. I remember going to the movies, and
seeing how upset she was. To her it was very traumatic.

Well, the next thing to which I trace the awakening of my interest in the world outside was
probably in the summer of 1938 when my parents, who clearly made a lot of decisions,
thought it would be a very broadening thing if I went on a hostel/bicycle trip to Europe. We
were members of a church in Longmeadow which had a youth group. My father hardly ever
went to church, but he and my mother encouraged me to have some church affiliation, and
most of it was this youth group. The youth group leader organized the trip under the
auspices of the American Youth Hostel Movement to go to Europe in the summer of 1938.

Q: Just in time.

ATHERTON: Just in time. So off we went. I can't remember how many, there must have
been a dozen of us, most about my age. This was between my junior and senior year, so I
was almost 17 years old; I was 16 in the summer. Most of the others were my
contemporaries. There were a few somewhat older. We went in steerage class, an inside
stuffy stateroom on the S.S. Staatendam. But as far as I was concerned it was first class.
Off we went. Sailed to Europe and spent the summer bicycling from Rotterdam, where we
docked. We picked up bicycles. We didn't take bicycles with us, they were pre-ordered.
And the bicycles, German bicycles, actually had three speeds, which was unusual in those
days, a three-speed bicycle, not too heavy. We had that and sleeping bags and knapsacks.
Our itinerary took us from youth hostel to youth hostel, where we stayed for the equivalent
of 25-cents-a-night, as I recall. Very inexpensive trip. I think the whole summer vacation,
counting the round-trip steerage class on the Staatendam and all of our other expenses,
couldn't have been more than maybe $300. That seemed like a lot of money in those days.
So we went off as a group, and we toured the Low Countries, and then we crossed into
Germany and did the Rhine, down into Switzerland. In Switzerland, I visited my Uncle
Carl, whom I had never met before.
This was my father's older brother. He had sent the children back to school in the States. By
then he was divorced from his wife and living with a very attractive and much younger
Hungarian woman. It was the first time I had ever been aware of a couple living together
that weren't married, but it seemed a perfectly normal thing for them. They did eventually
marry and came to the States when the war broke out.

I broke away from the hostel group, got permission from my leader, and spent a little time
visiting them in their very fancy apartment on the shore of Lake Geneva. It was an
apartment of a size and of a style that I had never seen in my life before. Old Victorian sort
of place.

Anyway, that was great, but I had to get on a train, catch up, and rejoin the group finally in
Paris. In Paris, I had the first champagne in my life. And then headed for North Germany,
crossed over into Denmark and then to Norway. And we were going to tour the fiords, and
then a very quick tour of Norway, across the Channel to England, and to be at Southampton
by a certain date when we were to get back on the Staatendam. Three of us decided we
really wanted to see more of England. We didn't care that much about biking up and down
all the hills, even with three speeds. So we got permission from our leader, and he gave us
our share of the money to get us through the trip, and gave us our passports, and we were
off. We took a little cross-Channel steamer called the Blenheim, as I recall, which ran from,
must have been Oslo to Newcastle. It was one of those typically rough Channel crossings. I
had been a pretty good sailor, but I remember being deathly seasick. Having eaten a great
jar of Norwegian goat cheese didn't help.

We got to Newcastle, the three of us, and discovered that we had neglected one thing. We
were not just transiting, we were coming to spend a couple of weeks in England, and we
didn't have visas. So we got a rough lecture from the British immigration inspector, and
then he looked at us and let us in after the lecture about how we shouldn't come to England
without visas. And we literally spent what must have been ten days or two weeks going
through Scotland, all the way down through the lake country, down to London, London to
Southampton.

By that time we had spent our money. We were down to something like the equivalent of a
dollar a day for a week before it was time to get on the ship again. So we gave up staying at
youth hostels and began staying in the country. We'd go to farms and say: "Can you put us
up? We'll do some chores for you." They were wonderfully hospitable. We never had
anyone turn us away, and they usually gave us a meal. And we eventually ended up in
Southampton and met the group and got on the ship and came home. A whole new world.
The impressions of that trip were with me for years, and particularly the impressions of
Germany. The impressions of being in youth hostels with very tough, hard, disciplined
youths of the Hitler Jugend.

Q: That impressed you.

ATHERTON: What impressed me was, I guess, these youths were convinced Nazis. They
wanted to lecture us on what a great thing Hitler was doing for Germany and for Europe,
and how they were going to bring this new civilization to all the countries of Europe. One
of our members was Jewish, one woman in our group, and when this occasionally would
come out, this was potentially always an awkward situation, because, of course, they were
strongly anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish. This was long after Kristallnacht. Restaurants would
have the big juden verboten signs. It was frightening what we saw happening in Germany. I
didn't totally take it aboard. My recollection was that a very frightening thing happened, but
I didn't understand what it was or why. But it was there, and it became clear afterwards.

I did go back and finish the last year of high school. Then another thing happened to me. I
had a very good academic record, but my parents decided that I really wasn't quite mature
enough to go away to college. They thought I needed a little maturing time, and so they
decided I should go for a year to a private prep school between high school and college.