Interview with Anthony Quainton

308 Pages·2016·0.6 MB·English

Library of Congress
Interview with Anthony Quainton
The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project
AMBASSADOR ANTHONY QUAINTON
Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy
Initial interview date: November 6, 1997
Copyright 2000 ADST
Q: Today is November 6, 1997. This is an interview with Anthony Quainton being done on
behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and I am Charles Stuart Kennedy. Tony,
let's start at the beginning. When and where were you born?
QUAINTON: I was born in Seattle, Washington on April 4, 1934.
Q: Tell me something about your parents.
QUAINTON: My father was a university professor at the University of Washington.
He was born in England and came to Canada just before the First World War. He
subsequently moved from Brandon, Manitoba to Victoria, British Columbia. He went to the
University of Cambridge in England and returned to be a school master in British Columbia
before receiving an appointment at the University of Washington in about 1930. He was
naturalized as an American citizen in early 1934.
Q: What was his specialty?
QUAINTON: European history, particularly English history in the 16tto 18th centuries.
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Q: And your mother?
QUAINTON: My mother was born in the United States of English and Irish parents who
had migrated about the turn of the century to California. She, in turn, moved with her
parents to Victoria, British Columbia shortly after the First World War, her father having
gone bankrupt in the period just before the war. So, the two families came together in
British Columbia and my mother and father were married there in 1930.
Q: How did the Depression affect your family?
QUAINTON: I have no recollection of the family being directly affected by the Depression.
I am sure they were. Professors were not well paid in the 1930s. On the other hand we
lived comfortably on my father's income and I certainly had no sense of economic hardship
growing up in Seattle in those years.
Q: Where did you go to school?
QUAINTON: I started school in Seattle in Catholic parochial schools. I went through
several of them before the third grade. In the third grade, my father, being of English
origins, believed that it was a good thing to send a boy away to boarding school at that
tender age. I was sent to boarding school at age nine in Victoria, British Columbia at
the little school where he had taught in the 1920s and where his brother, my uncle, was
teaching at the time in 1943. I stayed there for three years until 1946 when my father was
offered a teaching job in Mexico at the Colegio de Mexico. The family went for a year to
Mexico City returning in 1947 because my father suffered from a severe heart condition
which was not helped by a year at the altitude of Mexico City. He died in 1948 shortly after
our return.
Q: While you were both at the Canadian and Mexican schools, did yobecome aware of
foreign affairs or the Foreign Service?
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QUAINTON: I have no recollection of being aware of the Foreign Service or the existence
of a diplomatic corps, but going to school in Canada as a small boy one certainly learned
a great deal of geography, particularly those bits of geography where the map was painted
pink.
Q: Which was about a third of the globe.
QUAINTON: Yes. So, one learned a fair amount of esoterica about the British empire and
those colonies which were known to most children only through the postage stamps which
were much collected in that time. I can still remember map exercises where we had to
laboriously place on a map of India the two different Hyderabads, one now in Pakistan and
one in India.
Q: I didn't know there were two Hyderabads.
QUAINTON: Hyderabad Deccan, which is in the south of India and Hyderabad Sind which
is just a hundred miles or so from Karachi. That information later in a career turned out to
be of some considerable utility and interest. The world I saw was certainly seen through
the optic of the British empire. We listened faithfully at Christmas to the King's message
to the people of the empire and there was a sense of being a part of a large far flung
geographic enterprise led from London.
Q: Were you given a rough time as a Yank or not?
QUAINTON: This was a little tiny school, St. Michael's School, founded and run by an
Englishman who had come out to Canada in 1906 or 1907 from Keble College, Oxford.
He ran it on classical Dickensian lines. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was very much
the governing ethos and yet it was a school which cared about the children. There were
only three Americans in the school at the time out of 60 or 70 students all together. Fifteen
or so of them were boarders. Some of them were English boys who were evacuated from
England during the war to Canada with or without their parents. The school replicated
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in many ways the English education of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Latin,
French, mathematics, English were pretty much the sum total of what we worked on.
But, it is interesting that from my earliest education a foreign language was part of the
curriculum taught through the threat of a piece of wood applied to the hands if appropriate
declensions were not learned.
Q: Latin must have been the language.
QUAINTON: Latin was very important, as was French. We read Caesar'Gallic Wars at age
10 or 11.
Q: I could never get that bridge built. In Mexico was it different environment?
QUAINTON: Very much so. I went to the American school in Mexico City, which is still
there. I did a little bit of Spanish. We traveled fairly widely in Mexico, as much as my
father's health permitted, which was still at that time a fair amount. We lived in a small
apartment just a few blocks from where the current American embassy is. It was certainly
an eye opening experience for me to live in an entirely different culture, although social life
and society into which my parents were parachuted as university people was one which
was largely expatriate and largely British, although not exclusively so.
Q: You are approaching the end of high school. By the time you goout of Mexico you still
had some years to go didn't you?
QUAINTON: I was beginning high school. I was in the eighth grade in Mexico. The three
years I was in Canada accelerated my education. I finished the third grade in Seattle and
three years later was in the eighth grade in Mexico City. Very young and socially very
immature for my age. I did half a year in the eighth grade and half a year of my freshman
year in Mexico and returned to Seattle to public high school where I remained for two
years.
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Q: Was there a cultural shock when you went back to high school iSeattle?
QUAINTON: I have no great sense of cultural shock. It was a very large public high school,
some 2000 boys and girls. I was plunged into the freshman class at age 13. I didn't have
terrible academic problems, it all seemed quite easy. I became engaged in a range of
activities typical for freshmen and sophomores of that era. In the course of my sophomore
year, I was offered a chance to go east to Phillips Academy at Andover. Entirely by
chance, I think it was 1947, the “Saturday Evening Post” ran an article about Phillips
Academy. I had no connection with eastern United States or with boarding schools in the
east. But, I was much taken by this article and showed it to my mother. Some months
later she was at a dinner party and her dinner partner asked about me and my brother
and what we were doing and where we were going to school. She told him and said, “You
know, he always dreamed of going to a school like Andover.” The man said, “Well, I'm an
Andover graduate. I'll make it happen.” One of those small, extraordinary coincidences. He
wrote to Andover and they sent me the exam papers. At that time there was a competitive
examination to get into Andover. I went there on full scholarship I suppose as a diversity
candidate, a boy from the West, eastern schools had very few western boys, in 1948. The
only condition was that I redo my sophomore year in high school, which I did. So I ended
up at Andover, where I spent three years and graduated in the class of 1951.
Q: Did you have a major there or was it a rather general education?
QUAINTON: It was entirely a general education, although the things I had done before I
continued doing - Latin, French, basic sciences. I was exposed for the first time to amateur
theater, being on the stage, taking part in debating contests. I was not a very athletic boy.
In fact, I wasn't athletic at all and did very little that was of note in field sports.
Q: What sciences did you take?
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QUAINTON: I did a little chemistry. Essentially my education was without science. My later
education beyond Andover had no scientific component at all.
Q: It is a beautiful school. I went there one summer in 1945 to take a course in physics.
Were you pointed towards anything when you graduated?
QUAINTON: No, I wasn't pointed towards any particular career. My house master, the
senior English teacher at the school, suggested since I was still quite young when I
graduated, I was only 17, that another year before going to university might not be a bad
thing and that I apply for an English Speaking Union schoolboy fellowship. I did and spent
the school year of 1951-52 in England at one of the great English public schools, the
Sherborne School, out in the west of England in Dorset. I had been admitted to Princeton
on graduation from Andover but did not go immediately. I took that sixth year of high
school, something of a record, I suppose, in terms of years spent in secondary education
before going to university.
Q: I went by Sherborne this spring.
QUAINTON: There is a beautiful abbey there. At the school there was a continuity of
spirit with the little school in Canada that I had gone to some 10 years before. It was a
very rigorous school. I did English and history, the only subjects that it was thought an
American boy could possibly master at an English standard. I did both English and History
at A levels and did very satisfactorily.
During my time in England I was able to travel a fair amount and indeed spent the
Christmas of 1951 in bombed-out Cologne, which was still terribly destroyed. One of
the teachers at Sherborne was a naturalized British subject of German origin whose
father was the head of West German railroads in the Rhineland and we went and spent
Christmas with his family there. In the Easter holidays that followed in 1952, he and I (He
was only five or six years older than I.) traveled to Italy and to what was then Yugoslavia,
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a very gray communist country. Yugoslavia was an eye opener in terms of a first exposure
to a country ruled in an absolutely ruthless way. These were the very earliest days of
Tito's break with Moscow. On the beaches of the Dalmatian coast there were troops every
hundred yards or so to prevent people from escaping across to Italy. There was no sense
of the freedom that evolved in Yugoslavia during the '70s and '80s before its final break up.
Both trips were an exposure for me to conditions that were radically different from those
that I had known growing up in Canada and the States.
Q: Were you picking up during your time at Sherborne the problem thBritish were having of
adjusting to a new role in the world?
QUAINTON: It had a little effect. A very high percentage of the boys were still going on to
careers in the military, the army and the navy. There was a strong tradition of Sherborne
boys going into the Royal Navy. I think there was still a great faith in Britain's role in the
world, not withstanding the independence of India and Pakistan which had taken place in
1947. There was little sense of Britain's changing role. I think young men were still raised
on the ethos of public service on a variety of continents in the service of the Empire.
Q: After schooling in Canada, Mexico and England, did the wandelust begin to take hold?
QUAINTON: I suppose so, although I never consciously thought of it in those terms. I was
fascinated by foreign languages, and was much interested in being able to communicate in
different cultural contexts. Certainly these experiences, particularly in Mexico and England,
began to orient me towards a career external to the United States.
I went to Princeton, in the fall of 1952, where I spent three years, having argued foolishly
but successfully that the year I had in England was equivalent to the freshman year at
university - in intellectual years it was but not in social terms. I majored in history and
studied a variety of languages. I clearly had a vocation for languages. I had French and
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began Russian and Chinese and did some German and Italian. I concentrated on a range
of subjects in the humanities.
I majored formally in the history department, but also took part in a program which no
longer exists, the Special Program in the Humanities (SPH). Twenty undergraduates were
chosen in their sophomore year to go into this special program. The requirements were
that one completed all the coursework for one's degree in the junior year and spent the
senior year engaged in more serious thought about the world. All Princetonians today, as
then, were required to write a senior thesis, but the special program people were expected
to write a longer and more substantial thesis. I wrote about Christian Humanism and the
Protestant Reformation. That year provided me an opportunity to do a number of things: to
begin the study of Chinese and German as well as do a more extensive piece of research.
Q: This was 1952-55. There was the Korean War, McCarthyism, and a very cold Cold War
during that period. Did they intrude at all in your thoughts or experiences?
QUAINTON: The McCarthy period did, in part because I began Russian in my sophomore
year, my first year at Princeton and the FBI was enormously interested in all students of
Russian. At Princeton we were expected to subscribe to a Soviet publication, I subscribed
to something called the Literaturnaya Gazeta. This was a Communist Party publication
and led to considerable interest on the part of the FBI in my political orientation. My
mother was questioned about my interests. That FBI concern actually became a more
serious problem, which we will get to sometime later in 1956, when I was a participant
in a communist youth festival in Moscow. But, clearly the McCarthy era was something
we watched closely. It was of some importance in family terms because the University
of Washington was a hot bed of leftist sentiment in the '30s and '40s and many of my
father's colleagues were investigated not by the House Un-American Activities Committee,
but by its equivalent in Washington State. There was a fairly considerable scandal in the
'30s at the University of Washington about leftist influence. Harold Laski came and was a
visiting professor at the University of Washington in 1938 or 1939. People went from the
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University of Washington into the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight in the Spanish Civil
War. So McCarthy had a particular resonance to someone like myself.
Q: Washington was a rather radical labor state.
QUAINTON: Yes, that is right. The other cloud over everyone in my generation was the
draft. This is the period after the Korean War and before the Vietnam War. Many of us did
not serve; I did not serve. We were just too old, or just married, or for a variety of reasons
deferments were available to people in the classes of 1955, '56 and '57. Graduate study
got you deferred and that carried me four more years beyond 1955.
Q: You graduated in 1955 with a concentration in humanities?
QUAINTON: Yes, that is right. A major in history and concentration in the humanities.
Q: So what does one do with that?
QUAINTON: One goes into the Foreign Service. I went on studying. In the course of my
senior year I became interested in the possibility of studying abroad. I applied for a number
of different scholarships - a Fulbright, a Keyesby, a Rhodes Scholarship. In the end I
received a Marshall Scholarship and went to Christ Church College, Oxford. My family
had been strongly connected to Cambridge University, to Queens College, where both my
father and grandfather had gone; I had no Oxford connections. I went to Oxford with the
intention of carrying on my studies of history and Russian and did a post graduate degree,
which was a thesis degree, no coursework.
I wrote on Franco-Soviet relations in the period from the revolution to French recognition
of the Soviet Union in 1923. Coincidentally, George Kennan was at Oxford at the same
time writing his work on U.S. -Soviet relations in the same period and an old friend and
colleague from Andover days, now the David Bruce Professor of International Relations
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in Princeton, Richard Ullman, was writing on Anglo-Soviet relations in that period. So, this
further whetted my interest in the Soviet Union.
In due course this interest looked as it might be something which the Foreign Service
might want. I had taken the Foreign Service exam in the spring of 1955 before graduating
from Princeton. I believe this was the first year that the new one-day multiple choice exam
was given.
Q: I took it in 1953 and it was a three and a half day exam.
QUAINTON: Yes, that had gone by 1955.
Q: You were taking Russian studies at Princeton. You were taking them at Oxford. I think
it would be interesting for somebody to get a perspective on how the Soviet Union was
viewed during this period, the middle of the Cold War. People tried to approach this as
intellectuals. Can you give your impressions as to how they were displayed?
QUAINTON: That is a very hard question. I think in European academic circles the Cold
War was a less intense phenomenon than it was in American political circles at the time.
When I was at Oxford, the defining event was the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956. I
think that changed the environment in terms of thinking about the geo-strategic ambitions
of the Soviet Union. Having studied the history of the early 1920s, I think there was a
predisposition to think that the Soviet Union had been hardly done by in its relations
with the West. The British, but also the French and the Americans, had invaded and
occupied large parts of Russia in hopes of overturning the revolution. That, I think, left
a kind of sense of guilt on the part of those who were aware of those events, a feeling
that we had not given the Soviet Union a fair chance in the beginning of the revolution,
at least. Although with the purges in the 1930s and the Soviet occupation of eastern
Europe after the War, those attitudes began to change. I think it is fair to say that the
intellectual climate at Oxford was a fairly liberal one, I won't say a radical one. Thinking of
the outside world was very much in the context of an anti-imperialist mood. The Labor club
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