''In the Photo's Lower Right Corner'': A Conversation with Ambassador Harry Geisel

By Harold W. Geisel

Harry Geisel likens his life to that of Selig, Woody Allens character who keeps showing up as an unknown little man in historic scenes. A long-time Foreign Service manager, Geisel had scenes in U.S. diplomatic history that included the Cold War, the South African anti-apartheid struggle, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the birth of the new Russia, and Chinas development as a great power.

In this series of very colorful and candid interviews, Ambassador Geisel describes his life in providing backstage support to U.S. foreign policy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 28, 2009
• ISBN: 9781465314550

Harold W. Geisel

Alfred H. Moses, a former partner and now senior counsel at Covington & Burling, LLP, Washington, is a co-founder and chief operating officer of Promontory Financial Group and affiliates in Washington. He served as U.S. Ambassador to Romania, 1994-97, and as the President’s Special Emissary for the Cyprus conflict from 1999-2001. In the Carter administration Ambassador Moses served as special counsel and special advisor to the President and was Lead Counsel to the President in the Billygate hearings. From 1976 to 1989 he negotiated the exodus to Israel of Jews from Communist Romania. An honorary national president of the American Jewish Committee, Ambassador Moses presently serves as Chair of UN Watch (Geneva), the Project on Ethnic Relations, the AJC National Advisory Council and in 2006 chaired AJC’s 100th Anniversary Committee

Book preview

"IN THE PHOTO’S

LOWER RIGHT

CORNER’’

A CONVERSATION WITH

AMBASSADOR HARRY GEISEL

Interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy

Initial Session : June 30, 2006

Diplomatic Oral History Series

Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training

Harold W. Geisel

Copyright © 2009 by Harold W. Geisel

and the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The opinions and characterizations in this book are those of the author and do not necessarily represent official positions of the United States Government or the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

63605

Contents

FOREWORD

FROM RHEINBACH TO CHICAGO

HISTORY AT HOPKINS,

BUSINESS AT UVA

FROM THE FIELD ARTILLERY

TO OSLO VIA BRUSSELS

MANAGING POSTS FOR JOAN

EMBASSY BERN:

WRATH IN THE RATHSKELLER

MALI, ALI, AND AFRAT

ETHNIC DIVIDES AND

IMPIS IN DURBAN

WRANGLING ROMANS

BONN AND BERLIN:

MANAGING A MERGER

SECURITY AMONG THE SOVIETS

LIFE WITH M

INSPECTING THE TROOPS

LEARNING THE ROPES IN INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

DELICIOUS MAURITIUS

COMOROS AND SEYCHELLES

POL-MIL AND RETIREMENT (?)

To the memory of my dad, Gus Geisel. His generosity, his love for and devotion to his family, and his selflessness will always be my guiding star.

FOREWORD

The ADST Diplomatic Oral History Series

For more than 230 years, extraordinary men and women have represented the United States abroad with courage and dedication. Yet their accomplishments in promoting and protecting American interests remain little known to their compatriots. The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST) created the Diplomatic Oral History Series to help fill this void by publishing in book form selected transcripts of interviews from its Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection.

The text contained herein acquaints readers with the distinguished service of the Honorable Harold W. Geisel as a career Foreign Service Officer and Ambassador to Mauritius, the Seychelles, and Comoros. We are proud to make his interview available through the Diplomatic Oral History Series.

ADST (www.adst.org) is an independent nonprofit organization founded in 1986 and committed to supporting training of foreign affairs personnel at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute and advancing knowledge of American diplomacy. It sponsors books on diplomacy through its Memoirs and Occasional Papers Series and, jointly with DACOR (Diplomats and Consular Officers, Retired), the Diplomats and Diplomacy Series. In addition to posting oral histories under Frontline Diplomacy on the website of the Library of Congress, ADST manages an instructional website at www.usdiplomacy.org.

FROM RHEINBACH TO CHICAGO

Q: Let’s start at the beginning. When and where were you born?

GEISEL: I was born in Chicago, Illinois on May 11, 1947.

Q: Let’s talk a bit about the Geisel family. Let’s do the father’s side first. Do you know where they came from?

GEISEL: Oh, I know exactly where they came from. They came from the Rhineland in Germany. And my dad came to America as did the rest of his family as a result of the Nazi persecution because we were all Jewish. And that would have been in the late 1930s.

Q: What do you know about your father’s family in Germany? What were they involved in and doing?

GEISEL: Primarily it was a very Jewish thing; they were butchers and cattle dealers. Or I should say both, you generally did both. My father was the first person in his family to finish gymnasium, let alone go to university, which he did, and he graduated as a lawyer.

Q: Where in the Rhineland?

GEISEL: The town was called Rheinbach, which is very close to Bonn.

Q: Then why Chicago?

GEISEL: Actually he started in New York, and he started in New York, of course, because that’s where people found him a job, that is, connections. Just before he left Germany he worked for a Baron Von Hirsch, who was I guess Jewish but lived in Switzerland, was fabulously rich, and in fact left a very famous art collection; and my father was recommended to a leather company in New York. But then after a year or two, I think a year, he moved to Chicago. Again there was a German-Jewish connection, and he worked for some people named Adler in Chicago.

Q: Now on your mother’s side, where do they come from?

GEISEL: They all came from near Heidelberg, a little town called Mosbach. And what’s interesting is she actually did a very extensive family tree. You know, Germans are into that sort of thing. And she got her family all the way back to, I think it was 1493. And they all came from that area and they all were Jewish and they all were also small dealers of one thing or another.

Q: Your mother’s family, were they merchants?

GEISEL: They were all merchants. Jews really couldn’t go into the professions in the old days in Germany.

Q: Medicine maybe at the beginning.

GEISEL: Exactly. A little bit of medicine, a little bit of law. And, you know, the rich ones were bankers. I think she may have had a distant relative who was a banker, but by and large they were merchants of one kind or another, some more successful than others.

Q: What sort of schooling did she have?

GEISEL: She, I believe, had to leave the Gymnasium at 16 because of the Nazi time. She stayed as long as she could. In fact, she’s still very bitter, and she has done tape recordings, because it was very, very hard at the end, and the principal quietly said to her, Try to stay as long as you can, you won’t regret getting the education. I guess she left when she was 16 and then she went to a Jewish household school in Frankfurt for a bit and wandered around just waiting for her American visa to come through.

Q: Do you know how the American visa came through?

GEISEL: Well, it came through the Consulate in Stuttgart for both of them, although they didn’t know each other, of course. And in both cases it was as a result of being sponsored by people in America that they didn’t know at all. I do know who sponsored my father. It was Uncle Charlie. He came from Chicago, lived in the Sherman House Hotel, was actually quite a well-to-do man, and sponsored a number of people. I actually met him. My mother was sponsored by some farmer in Missouri whom she never met as far as I know.

Q: How did your mother and father meet?

GEISEL: Not a bad story. My father actually had met her father once when he was working for his own father briefly. The parents were in London waiting to be able to go to the United States. Both sets of parents met. My father’s brother was also in London. My mother’s parents heard that he was going to America, to Chicago, and they asked if he could bring a pair of alligator shoes to my mother. My father’s brother was a shy guy and he asked my father to do that, and that was the story. And apparently my father said to my mother, as they got on well on the first date, I’m not the marrying type, and my mother decided he was.

Q: Well that shows where power lies.

GEISEL: Indeed, indeed.

Q: How Jewish was your family?

GEISEL: You know, I think they had a lot of background on my mother’s side and they were observant but not to the point that anything really was fanatic. I would just call them observant. They came from a small town, so they didn’t even know what the Reform movement was. And they certainly didn’t follow any of the big commandments on the Sabbath about don’t do this and don’t do that. On my mother’s side, her mother was fanatic from the day she was born to the day she died. So fanatic that, if she had a cold, she wouldn’t put a handkerchief in her pocket on the Sabbath because that would be carrying something; she would pin it to her dress so it was part of her clothing. My mother totally revolted against that and had no time for it at all. She was like my father, traditional, but had no time for the fanatic stuff and they certainly wouldn’t hesitate to drive a car on the Sabbath. They went to the synagogue more out of a social thing than out of a religious thing.

Q: I assume that the Holocaust must have hit the family?

GEISEL: Well you know, it didn’t hit most German Jews that hard. That was the irony of it all. Most German Jews saw Hitler firsthand. It wasn’t like the poor Russian and Polish Jews who lived with governments that were against the Nazis and didn’t know it would come there. It hit my mother’s side quite hard though. My mother’s brother perished in Bergen-Belsen because he only got as far as Holland before the war started. She lost aunts and uncles and cousins, mostly people who could have gotten out but who didn’t move fast enough or who, the older ones, the aunts and uncles, just thought they were too old. Or one, for instance, had been injured as a combatant in the First World War, so he thought he would be safe, and that sort of thing. My father lost only distant relatives; no one that he was close to at all. Once in a while I would ask him and he would say, oh yes, that cousin, or something like that. So their different attitudes toward Germany were tempered by their experiences, of course.

Q: Chicago of course has a large German population.

GEISEL: Indeed.

Q: As a matter of fact, I was born in Chicago.

GEISEL: On the north side, I suppose.

Q: Oh yes.

GEISEL: We were the south side.

Q: My grandfather on my mother’s side was a German-American lawyer and he had German clientele. And they spoke German at home. What was home life and all like?

GEISEL: My parents, much to their sorrow and mine, especially my mother, hated Germany much too much to speak German at the time because, remember I was born in 1947, it was too soon after the war. My mother had found out that her brother had died, I think in 1946, so she just didn’t want German spoken in the house. Now, of course, all of us are sorry; it would have been a wonderful opportunity. And many of their friends did speak German to their children. When they were younger, I would say, the majority of their friends were fellow German Jewish refugees, all of whom came with absolutely nothing and all of whom did very well. As they got older, obviously, their circle of friends widened enormously, not only Jews but Gentiles, to the point where I would say now my mother probably has more Gentile friends than Jewish friends.

Q: Well, you lived on the south side.

GEISEL: That’s right.

Q: That was the time of the Leopold-Loeb, Bobby Franks episode?

GEISEL: Oh no, no. You’re about two decades too early.

Q: Oh I realize that, but I mean it was in the area, wasn’t it?

GEISEL: They were more in what was called Kenwood-Hyde Park. I grew up in a neighborhood, although my first few years were in Hyde Park, called South Shore, which was a little farther south and comparably wealthy, I guess. But that area in turn ultimately became black. We stayed. In fact, I was one of the few people from my grammar school who went to my high school, which was 88 percent black. It was a grand old high school, Hyde Park High, which had such alumni as Amelia Earhart, Steve Allen, Benny Goodman and, even in my day, it was ranked by some academic organization as being number 17 in the nation for having the most students who went on to PhDs. We were always amused because Hyde Park High, of course, took care of South Shore but also especially Hyde Park, including the University of Chicago area, which had its own laboratory school. We used to joke that the assistant professors and associate professors sent their kids to the lab school but the full professors sent their kids to Hyde Park High. So we had this vast majority of very underprivileged kids with a sprinkling of very, very, very sharp kids who went on to the likes of all the Ivy League schools.

Q: Back again to the family, do you have brothers, sisters?

GEISEL: I have a brother who is four years younger and a journalist.

Q: What was home life like?

GEISEL: Home life was, I’d say very 1950s, very Leave it to Beaverish, albeit without suburbia: doors left open, total Age of Innocence, walking around the neighborhood and going to Rosenblum’s drugstore to get a Green River.

Q: A green river was a syrup mixed with carbonated water.

GEISEL: Right. The neighborhood itself, I would say, was 50 percent Jewish and 50 percent Irish Catholic. And the Jews all went to O’Keefe Elementary School and then Hyde Park High or South Shore High, depending on what side of the Illinois Central Tracks you were. The Catholic kids, unfortunately for them from our point of view, went to St. Phillip Neri, because of course the nuns didn’t hesitate to box ears and rap knuckles with rulers. This was then followed by the brothers at Mount Carmel who beat the crap out of bad boys.

Q: Well how did they mix? Often Irish Catholic and Jewish kids would pick up the worst of the prejudices of the parents or others.

GEISEL: I think there was some conflict but not much. I remember my father used to have this thing; he used to say, Ah, Chicago. It’s a wonderful town. The Jews own it, the Irish run it, and the Schwartzes enjoy it.

Q: Were you much of a reader?

GEISEL: I was a tremendous reader. I took great pride in having read every American history book in the South Shore Public Library by the time I was, oh, in my mid-teens.

Q: Can you think of any books in particular that you enjoyed?

GEISEL: Oh yes. I used to get hooked by series, so I did the whole Alexander Dumas, Three Musketeers, of which The Three Musketeers are only the start. And then I did the same thing with Victor Hugo. Oh, too far back for me to remember more but my nose was always in a book.

Q: Did you get involved in, for example, Kenneth Roberts?

GEISEL: No.

Q: American historical novels?

GEISEL: Not so much in terms of novels, I mean, other than Gone with the Wind, of course, which I must have read five times.

Q: At school, which subjects turned you on and which didn’t turn you on?

GEISEL: The only subject that really turned me on, turned me on massively, was American history and government, which I was absolutely wild about. I hated math, I hated science, I barely tolerated English, I liked economics. But I was so much into extracurricular activities that schoolwork was not important to me unless I liked it.

Q: What were your extracurricular activities?

GEISEL: I was big in student government. Notwithstanding the fact that it was an 88 percent black high school, I was president of the student council and had worked my way up to that. I was on the yearbook; I was in the honor society when I managed to have decent grades. My grades were extremely mediocre, by and large, except in things I liked.

Q: By the way, back at home, did you get bar mitzvahed and all of that?

GEISEL: Oh yes, yes, I did and my brother did. Again, it wasn’t a huge deal but it was something that I and all of my friends did. I went through a stage when I had been bar mitzvahed and for a year or two afterwards was very interested in things Jewish and then that interest died down. And we were always observant of the holidays, but again it was more of a traditional thing than a religious thing.

Q: What activity was your father doing then?

GEISEL: My dad, after he graduated from law school, was unable to practice law because of the Nazis. He took the bar exam and he passed it but was not allowed to take an oath of allegiance to Hitler. In those days you had to first serve the state as a civil servant for, I think, the first three or six years after you graduated as an assistant state’s attorney, a defense counsel, or a clerk in a state law office.

Q: This was in Germany?

GEISEL: In Germany. That’s how he got his job in America, because he worked as an unofficial law clerk for one of Baron Von Hirsch’s tanneries in Offenbach and then went to America in the hide business, and of course had no money to study law. So he stayed in the hide business, hides and skins. He started out in as awful a job as you can imagine, going in the boxcars and cutting off horsetails and inspecting cowhides and that sort of thing but, you know, that’s what you did in the depression. He stayed with his firm forever but eventually, of course, moved in the office and ultimately was running the firm when the bosses died. And then he took over the firm; he bought it out from the heirs.

Q: Was the depression something that you all lived with, I mean, the residue of it?

GEISEL: In terms of my parents’ attitude, yes. They were not well-to-do. I would describe them as very middle class, but they always lived as if they were just