Bodde, William Jr.

192 Pages·2012·1.14 MB·English

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

AMBASSADOR WILLIAM BODDE, JR.

Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy
Initial interview date: October 5, 1998
Copyright 2006 ADST

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Background
Born in Brooklyn, New York; raised in Huntington, Long Island
U.S. Army Korea
Hofstra College
Newspaperman
Entered Foreign Service – 1962
A100

Vienna, Austria – Rotation Officer/Staff Aide 1962-1966
Ambassador Riddleberger
Environment
Kennedy-Khrushchev meeting
Kennedy assassination
Soviets
Waldheim affair
Espionage

State Department – Public Affairs Bureau 1966
Home Leave Travel Program

School of Advanced International Studies [SAIS] 1966-1967
Johns Hopkins University

Stockholm, Sweden – Political Officer 1967-1970
Vietnam issue
Political environment
Anti-Americanism
Environment
Soviet Union
U.S. deserters

State Department – Sweden Desk Officer 1970-1972
Olaf Palme
1
Embassy contacts
The “Middle Way”

State Department – Personnel Officer – European Bureau 1972-1973
Global Outlook Program [GLOP]
Observations

Berlin, Germany – Political Officer, U.S. Mission 1973-1974
Quadripartite Agreement
Ostpolitik
Liaison duties
The Wall
The French
Problem incidents

Bonn, Germany – Political Officer 1974-1977
Helmut Schmidt
U.S. troop presence
Carter and neutron bomb
Willi Brandt

State Department – East Asia Bureau – Auckland, New
Zealand and Pacific Islands 1977-1980
Micronesia agreements
Solomon report
Peace Corps
“Strategic denial”
ICBMs
Solomon Islands independence
French interests
Greenpeace vessel exploded
Australian and New Zealand interests
British interests
Treaty negotiations and ratification
ANZUS
Richard Holbrook
Kiribati and Tuvalu

Fiji - Ambassador, Tuvalu, and Tonga and EE/MP to Kiribati 1980-1982
Economy
Ethics
Government
Sinai Multinational Force
Environment

Hawaii - East-West Center - Diplomat in Residence 1982-1983
2
Vietnam
Operations
Pacific Island studies
Cross-cultural studies
Foreign diplomat training

Frankfurt, Germany - Consul General 1984-1986
Ambassador Arthur Burns
Case studies
Red Army Faction
Security
Wife’s contribution
General Colin Powell
U.S. military
Spies tradeoff
Sharansky
Beirut Marine bombing
Politics
Green Party
IBM missile deployment
Banking

State Department - European Bureau - Deputy Assistant Secretary 1986-1989
Assistant Secretary Roz Ridgway
German reunification
USSR disintegration
The French
French-German relations
Italians
Chirac
Portugal
U.S.-UK relations
Secretary of State Shultz
Gorbachev
Hans-Dietrich Genscher
Shultz-Whitehead relations
Reagan policies
Spain
Casper Weinberger
COCOM
Jewish claims on East Germany
Kurt Waldheim issue
Ambassador Ron Lauder
Accused war criminals
U.S.-Austria relations
Ex-Nazi problems
3
Ambassador to Switzerland
Green Party
Soviets
Germany policies
Short-range missiles
U.S. visa requirement
Kohl
German reunification
Secretary of State Baker
U.S. bases in Germany
Prime Minister Schroder
Gorbachev-Reagan Reykjavik meeting
“Star Wars”
Moscow summit
Baker’s staff
Canada
Acid rain
Bush-Mulroney meeting
Canadian sensitivities
U.S. Canada issues
Petra Kelly
Terrorism - European attitudes toward

State Department - Senior Seminar 1989-1990
Course of instruction
Comments on Foreign Service and State Department

Marshall Islands – Ambassador 1990-1992
U.S. aid
Economy
Health problems
U.S. missile range
Corruption
Relations with Washington
U.S. programs
PNGed
President Kabua
Environment
U.S. interests

State Department - Bureau of Oceans, Environment, and Science 1992
APEC
Trade and investment liberalization in Asia-Pacific
Organization
Seattle meeting

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Retirement 1994
“View from the 19th Floor”

INTERVIEW

Q: Today is the 5th of October, 1998. This is an interview with William Bodde, Jr.

BODDE: Right.

Q: And I’m Charles Stuart Kennedy, and this interview is being done on behalf of
the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. All right, well, let’s start at
the beginning. Could you tell me when and where you were born and something
about your family?

BODDE: Yes, I was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 27, 1931, but
grew up in Huntington, Long Island. My father was a blue-collar worker.

Q: What type of work was he doing?

BODDE: He was a letterer and striper, you know, that is sign painting on vehicles
and striping. In those days, they didn’t have chromium on the cars, and so they
used to stripe them. They still do on hot rods and fire engines and detailed stuff
now.

Q: It takes a very steady hand.

BODDE: It’s a special skill. He was self-educated and an extremely well read
person. He talked to me about world affairs and politics from when I was a little
boy on.

Q: Your mother?

BODDE: My mother was Irish and from Brooklyn. Although my father was born
in Holland and emigrated to the United States as a teenager, my mother was more
Irish than he was Dutch because she grew up in an Irish neighborhood and so on.
My wife claims it’s an impossible combination of stubbornness: Irish and Dutch.
She’s probably right.

Q: What about growing up in Huntington? What was Huntington like?

BODDE: Huntington was neat because it was rural in those days. My father was
probably one of the first of a handful of people who commuted into the city in
those days. He worked for the Brooklyn Union Gas Company. My mother could
never understand why I didn’t take a job with the Brooklyn Union Gas Company,
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a good steady job, you know. But anyhow Huntington was wonderful because
although it was rural it was situated in the New York Metropolitan Area. It was
sort of plugged-in, so to speak. We read the New York papers and listened to the
New York radio stations. It was a nice place to grow up. Huntington had 35,000
people then and now has at least 100,000.

Q: What about school, elementary and then on?

BODDE: I went to a small elementary school. In fact, the first one I went to was
just one step up from the proverbial one-room schoolhouse. To create an
auditorium, they opened a wall between two of the classrooms and packed all four
grades in. Then I went to a somewhat larger one, and on to a small high school,
South Huntington High School. It is now called Walt Whitman High School, after
Huntington’s most famous son. We had 257 students in all with 30 in my
graduating class.

Q: During your education at the elementary and high school level, what were
your interests?

BODDE: Well, I was a typical American kid, I played football. In fact, I was
captain of the football team, which would be really something, except that it was a
lousy small school team. I did all the stuff that an average American teenager did.
But because my father was European he didn’t have any feeling for American
sports. He was also very handy and could do things like repair radios and cars. I
wasn’t interested in home repairs although later as a homeowner I was sorry I
hadn’t learned more from my dad. Our meeting ground was made up of books,
politics and world affairs. We spent many hours late into the night discussing
world events. When I was in the embassy in Bonn and my father had been dead
for many years, I got a Superior Honor Award for my political reporting. At the
ceremony I told my colleagues that, “My father wouldn’t believe I get paid to do
what I do here.” I owe my everlasting interest in politics to him. He read a lot, and
he got me in the habit.

Q: Could you give me some ideas, in the first place, about some of the kids’ books
or young people’s books? Do any of those come back to you that you liked?

BODDE: Yes, sure, I read the Hardy Boys and I listened to the radio. In those
days it was Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy; The Lone Ranger; and all those
things. Of course, we went to Saturday afternoon movies and to see the serials,
which we called “the chapters.” They included, “Dick Tracy”, “The Lone
Ranger”, “The Invisible Man”, etc. At 12 or 13 I started reading more adult
books, you know, or at least not kid’s books. I also read comic books and a lot of
pulp literature in the form of idealistic sports stories that were published in
monthly magazines, printed on cheap paper. They only had about three plots, you
know.

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Q: The kid comes to the big team and –

BODDE: You’ve got it. Or the bonus baby who hasn’t panned out but finally
proves himself, or the veteran that’s being pushed out and plays that one last great
game. You probably read the same ones. They were this sort of Horatio Alger
saga. I, like most people never read Horatio Alger, but I think that they were that
kind of thing. You know, virtue is rewarded; good guys win in the end. Because I
was a Brooklyn Dodger fan, the sports stories were right up my alley.

Q: What about a minor thing that was going on in the time you were in
Huntington, and it was called World War II? Your father, particularly, from the
Netherlands and all this, how did this - did this have an effect on you?

BODDE: Oh, sure. My father had been wounded in the First World War, while
serving in the American Army. He was too old for the Second World War. But of
course, he was very caught up in what was happening. He had left Holland when
he was a teenager, and had lost contact with his family. After the war he tried,
through the Red Cross, to find them, but had no luck. I don’t know why he lost
contact. It could be that he felt he hadn’t been successful enough or whatever. The
story has a happy ending, however. Many years later when I was in the army in
Germany, and I went on leave to Holland, through a girl I met there I located his
family, and he got back to see them before he died.

World War II is a big thing in our life. At that time every kid followed the war.
Long Island was full of truck farms in those days so we got off from school to
pick crops because the people who would normally do it were away in the service.
World War II was a big thing, and a formative thing in a kid’s life. I went in the
army later during the Korean War. Years later, when I was involved with the
South Pacific, I got to visit many of the famous battlegrounds of W.W.II such as
Tarawa, Kwajalein and Guadalcanal

Q: Oh, yes.
BODDE: Of course, the names meant something to me.

Q: I’m slightly older than you. I was born in 1928, and there was a wonderful
sense of world geography.

BODDE: That’s right. We got a geography lesson.

Q: You could tell where Iwo Jima was and Wake Island and Novorossiysk and on
and on.

BODDE: Exactly. In Fiji my wife and I would go out into the bush to visit
villages. We would meet the village headman or chief and maybe the minister and
the schoolteacher. Often there would also be some old men there to greet us. They
would dress up for the occasion. In Fiji they wore lava-lavas you know, sarongs,
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and they usually wore tattered white shirts. On their chests would be their medals
from the Second World War when they served as scouts with the American troops
at Guadalcanal.

Q: Oh, boy.

BODDE: I used to get choked up.

Q: Absolutely. Coming out of this, while you were in high school, did you have
any of your teachers sort of particularly strike you or get you inspired?

BODDE: Oh, yes. South Huntington was not a very good high school, and I was
not a very good student, I must say. The high school was small and the role
models were more or less juvenile delinquents. Athletes were also role models
and certainly being a so-called “brain” was not the thing to be. I had a few good
teachers. One social studies teacher in particular was inspiring. He was very
liberal in a very Republican and conservative town, so he didn’t stay but for a few
years. My father inspired me to take an interest in social studies.

Q: Well, as I do these oral histories, for the men, anyway, the predominant theme
if you want to be a successful Foreign Service Officer in high school one should
major in sports and girls.

BODDE: I was more successful in sports than I was with girls. In fact, I was
thinking how much nicer life is as an adult than as a teenager, with all the
insecurities about this, that, and the other. But I didn’t know what a Foreign
Service Officer was when I was in high school. When I was in the army I used to
talk with my buddies, and we used to talk about maybe becoming foreign
correspondents. That was about as far as our imaginations stretched. Now when I
went to school, especially in a school like mine and a neighborhood like I grew up
in, you were considered a success if you graduated from high school. In the 1930s
many of my neighbors didn’t even do that because they had to quit and go to work
during the Depression. Very few went off to college. It was a minority. If you
went to college your aspirations would have been limited to becoming a
schoolteacher. That would have been the height of your aspirations.

Q: Well, you graduated from high school when?

BODDE: 1950.

Q: 1950, so this again was a good year to graduate.

BODDE: Yes.

Q: So what happened?

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BODDE: I started at Hofstra College. I went for a semester, and I wasn’t settling
down very well, although I was enjoying myself. And of course, that was, as you
intimated, the height of the Korean War. Like many guys I wanted to join the Air
Force so I wouldn’t be drafted in the Army. But there’s a waiting list for the Air
Force, and between my two sisters nagging “When is Billy going to get a job?”
and the boredom of hanging around, I decided the hell with it. I went down and
signed up for three years in the U.S. Army. When I started basic training I thought
I wanted to be a paratrooper. By the time I was through basic training I had
figured out that was not very smart. I was very lucky because there were 220
people in my basic training company and 200 of them went to Korea. I’m sure
many of them were killed or wounded because at the time they were pouring
replacements right into the front lines. That was in 1951 and the situation was
grim

I went to Europe and I was assigned to an armored infantry battalion in the 2nd
Armored Division. It didn’t take me very long to figure out that I didn’t like the
army at all. I didn’t like obeying orders and being in an infantry outfit wasn’t that
much fun. But after a while I was able to get a job teaching in the education
center.

Q: Where were you stationed?

BODDE: The oldest city in Germany, Worms, the city of Martin Luther and the
Diet of Worms. That’s what really changed my life, because when I was teaching
I met my wife-to-be. She was working as a secretary/interpreter for a lieutenant
colonel who was in charge of all the installations. The German secretary at the
education center kept telling me about the nice German girl she wanted me to
meet. Of course, I had grown up, as you can imagine with a Dutch father during
the Second World War, in a very anti-German atmosphere. To make matters
worse I was all of 20 years old and full of nonsense. I would tell the secretary that
I didn’t want to meet any nice German girls I wanted to meet the other kind! She
persevered and finally the three of us went out to dinner.

Q: Your wife was German.

BODDE: She was born in Germany and went to school, we later joked, for a
thousand years, because she went to school from ‘31 to ‘45, during the period of
the Thousand-Year Reich. My first remark over dinner was, “I want you to know
that I don’t like the Germans very much.” And she responded, “Well, I’m not that
impressed with the Americans.” That was exactly what I needed. Anyhow, she
had been married before, and I told her I was never getting married, so within a
year we were married and leaving for the United States. She had a daughter,
Barbara, from the first marriage whom I adopted. She was six years old at the
time. Within the first year we had another child so our economic situation was
tight. With two kids obviously my first priority was to get a job and worry about
going back to college later. I got a job in advertising production at the Long Island
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daily, Newsday.

Q: Of Long Island.

BODDE: Yes, a Long Island newspaper. After about six months my wife, Ingrid,
had secretly saved up the money so that I could go back to school part time. I
worked nights from 4 pm to 12 am and went to school during the day. My wife,
Ingrid, was remarkably supportive and a wonderful helpmate. I went to school
fulltime and worked fulltime.

Q: Where were you going to school?

BODDE: Hofstra College, now Hofstra University. I’d leave the house at 7:30 in
the morning and get back at 1:30 the next morning. People ask, “How did you do
it,” but when you’re young, you’re tough, and I knew what I wanted out of life. I
wanted to do something that would be meaningful and intellectual. Our son, Peter,
had spinal meningitis when he was seven months old and required brain surgery.
So on top of everything we went into a big-time debt! He’s a Senior Foreign
Service officer now, believe it or not. In fact, those years were difficult and I
wouldn’t have gotten through them without Ingrid’s enormous support.

I finished college in 1961 (it took me five years to go through school).

Q: Hofstra - is this a Catholic school?

BODDE: No, no, it’s a secular school. It was one of the first post-war, suburban
commuter colleges. Like Huntington, Hofstra benefited a great deal from being
located in the New York Metropolitan Area. The college was able to attract
faculty who wanted to be near New York City, and it had a large pool of bright
kids to draw on. In those days you couldn’t get into City College unless you were
very smart, and Hofstra got the ones who just missed getting into CCNY [City
College of New York]. Hofstra was a pretty good school with good professors. I
did a split major, political science and history.

Q: Did you find that the faculty there was coming at political science from any
direction? I mean, this is slightly after the McCarthy time.

BODDE: I went there during the McCarthy period. In fact, when I started at
Newsday the McCarthy witch-hunts were at their height. At the time, The New
York Times fired an editor who had been attacked by McCarthy. I remember
talking to a reporter at Newsday about it and we were both appalled by the NYT’s
lack of courage. The political science faculty was liberal. The head of the
department became the dean of the graduate school of political science at
Syracuse University. Later he was Deputy Comptroller of New York State and he
headed the Civil Service Commission in the Carter Administration. They were a
bit old fashioned and still taught things like voting behavior while some other
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