Not Exactly a Company Man: Notes from Half a Life in the U.S. Foreign Service with a Personal Account of the 1992-1995 U.S. Bosnia Policy Debacle

By Ron Neitzke

Not Exactly a Company Man is both an oral history memoir and a dissection of U.S. policy during the wars that engulfed the former Yugoslavia in the early-mid-1990s. Divided roughly by tours of duty, the first parts describe the professional coming of age of a young, newly-minted Foreign Service Officer as he adapted to the myriad challenges of diplomatic life at home and abroad. The middle parts provide sketches of Tito’s Yugoslavia, Thatcher’s Britain, resolution of the long intractable Czechoslovak Claims/Gold problem, and assorted scuffles in both the bureaucratic trenches and the upper reaches of government. An extended portion of the book deals with three critical years in which Administrations of both parties largely stood aside during the Bosnian genocide and how they sought, ingloriously, to justify their timidity. It describes in particular how Washington became so intent on avoiding a larger role in the Balkans that it greenlighted a major Iranian move into Europe, an act with potentially dire consequences for broader U.S. interests and for the immediate security of U.S. personnel on the ground. Finally, it explains how, in his time as chief of mission in front-line Croatia and later, before several Congressional Committees, this officer dealt with, as his interviewer puts it, the “real honest to god dragons” of conscience that would effectively end his Foreign Service career.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796042634

Ron Neitzke

After nearly 28 years in the Foreign Service, spent roughly half overseas and half in Washington, Ron Neitzke left the State Department to become a full-time dad to his three young children, an occasional community rabble-rouser, and a manic supporter of the Virginia Cavaliers men’s basketball team. He lives with his wife Jean, herself a former FSO, in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia.

Book preview

Copyright © 2019 by Ron Neitzke and the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.

Adapted from the Foreign Affairs Oral History Project

Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training

Original interview by Charles Stuart Kennedy, Copyright ©2009 by ADST

ISBN:                Softcover                978-1-7960-4264-1

                          eBook                     978-1-7960-4263-4

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.

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Front cover image information:

Former President Carter with Ambassador Peter Galbraith and the author as Carter transited Zagreb in December 1994 en route to Sarajevo to attempt to broker a ceasefire with Bosnian Serb leaders.

Rev. date: 07/18/2019

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For Matthew, Daniel, and Katherine

Contents

Introduction

Part 1   Most Improbable

Part 2   Off To Scandinavia

Part 3   On To The Balkans

Part 4   The Policy Planning Staff

Part 5   Nuts And Bolts Diplomacy

Part 6   Back To The Seventh Floor

Part 7   In Thatcher’s Britain

Part 8   An Academic Break

Part 9   Zagreb—And The Tragedy Of Bosnia

I.     Taking Washington’s pulse before heading out—and finding indifference. 7th Floor rejects war crimes reporting that doesn’t show the sides equally guilty. Did Baker’s Belgrade warning help or hurt? Eagleburger: nothing we can do until these people tire of killing one another. Germany’s rush to recognize Bosnia vs. Washington’s delay. Religion and nationalism in the breakup. Senior U.S. Yugo hands plead ignorance, downplay death camp reports. The diaspora’s influence. Early Croatian defense efforts.

II.   Arriving amid an eerie calm. Onslaught of high-level visitors. Bosnia reporting sources shift decisively toward Zagreb. A Tudjman at odds with his CIA bio. Initial calls. Signs of UNPROFOR Stockholm Syndrome. Aid agencies’ fear of Western intervention. Feeding Bosnia to death. Embassy opening with six Senators – blunt advice to Majority Leader Mitchell. Washington’s panic over early video of death camps. Leveling with the press. Eagleburger’s Serbo-philic London speech. The Panic-Scanlan charade. Diplomatic perversity—one for the books.

III.   Early Iranian arms and mujahedeen infiltration. State Department insists on balanced atrocity reports. A high wire act with no net. The Ugly Virus of Moral Symmetry. Massive CIA study decisively apportions guilt. Bolstering Tudjman’s dark side. Unwelcome efforts to prod Washington. Christopher’s problem from hell. Biden’s meeting with Milosevic. Sensitive DART mission to Eastern enclaves. Clinton lets Pentagon call the shots. Fringe only U.S. military presence. Disgraceful, cowardly, and insidious. A no-holds-barred misinformation campaign. It’s all the Muslims’ fault. Airdrops gone astray.

IV.   Eagleburger’s impact. MacKenzie’s infamy. Clark’s Cavorting with Goering. Clinton’s expedient turnabout. UNPROFOR Leadership malaise. Tudjman prepares to attack; Washington flips. A pox on all their houses. Bosnian Croats run wild in early 1993. Boban’s rant and a challenge to Washington. Initial U.S. no to Iranian arms. Galbraith arrives. Uzis at soccer practice, bombs dropping from cars—family life in wartime Zagreb.

V.   The Z-4 initiative. Croatia prepares for war. The 1994 Washington Agreement. Iran steps into the breech—the green light U.S. policy punt. To what level had we sunk? Milosevic as peacemaker? Clinton is finally forced to get serious. The threat gets personal. State and the NSC lie to CIA and Defense. Evacuating the Embassy between rocket attacks. Operation Storm and our junk-yard dogs. Reflections on departure. The real miracle at Dayton.

Part 10   The Iranian Green Light Hearings

Part 11   Bending the System, Or Not

Part 12   A Final Task

Afterthoughts

INTRODUCTION

When I heard the first explosions on that bright spring Zagreb morning in 1995, my instant, gut reaction was that the Iranians or their terrorist proxies had finally struck. We knew they had been watching us closely, surveilling the Embassy, the Marine House, even the mini-bus on which my sons rode to school. We knew that an attack might be imminent. Only days earlier, I had insisted in a meeting with President Tudjman that the Croats finally rein them in. But the Croats by then were as reluctant as Washington to confront the Iranians, lest doing so impede Iranian arms flows to Croatia and through Croatia to the Bosnian Muslims. What this mutual reluctance implied for those of us on the ground had become unmistakably clear: our security was a lower priority than keeping the Iranian arms pipeline intact.

Why had the White House given Tudjman the green light to get in bed with Tehran, a regime we officially and correctly condemned as the world’s foremost exporter of terrorism? The answer was depressingly simple: Iran’s timely, self-serving offer of arms made it possible for the U.S. Government to remain largely on the sidelines during the worst genocidal slaughter in Europe since the Holocaust. And it did so after Washington, attempting to justify its reserve, had for years deliberately mischaracterized the nature and one-sidedness of that slaughter.

The fact that on that particular morning the shock we felt came not from an Iranian-backed terrorist strike but from Serbian rocket-launched cluster bombs was little consolation. Either way, it was time to start getting our people out and, in a different context, to start thinking about getting myself out as well. I had watched for three years as some of the most highly regarded officers in the Foreign Service made their careerist peace, or worse, with our all but craven stance and with the plain distortions of fact used to justify that stance. Now a new approach, born of little but expediency and sloppily executed, was putting additional lives, this time our lives, directly at risk. What, any longer, was the point?

That was among the questions I would wrestle with in the ensuing hectic days and weeks. One that I did not then have time to ponder is how, against all odds, I had come to be just there, a witness to the carnage of the Balkan wars in a place so very far from the Lake Wobegon-like circumstances of my youth. It had been a long haul.

I agreed to do this oral history, when asked, as a form of catharsis. And it was that. Putting it now in book form is mainly a gesture for my children, and theirs, so that they’ll have something more, something tangible, about where they came from and what made their father, or grandfather, tick. Others, perhaps some who have studied or who lived through the Balkan horrors of the 1990s, may find this additional, highly personal perspective of interest.

The title, "Not Exactly a Company Man, as in to put it mildly…you’re not…, Ron," more or less burst from the lips of my dogged interviewer, Stu Kennedy, near the end of our many sessions together. I’m pretty sure it was not meant as irony.

PART ONE

MOST IMPROBABLE

Or

How an inexperienced, untraveled kid from

the northern Minnesota lakes country

found himself, at 22, in the U.S. Foreign Service

Q: Today is the first of December, 2006. This is an interview with Ron Neitzke. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and I am Charles Stuart Kennedy. Alright, Ron, we will start at the beginning. When and where were you born?

NEITZKE: March 19, 1949, in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. It’s a town of seven or eight thousand about 200 miles northwest of the Twin Cities.

Q: 1949. Okay, let’s talk about the Neitzkes. Where did the Neitzkes come from and how did they end up in the northern reaches of the United States?

NEITZKE: The name is German. Family lore has it that my great-grandfather Franz, Frank, Neitzke came from Prussia. We were told that he had left for America to avoid conscription into the Kaiser’s army. I’m not sure about that. What I do know is that he boarded the S.S. Strassburg in Bremen in 1881, traveled in steerage, apparently alone, and arrived in Baltimore. He was 22, listed on the ship’s manifest as workman. He had five years of formal education. At some point he made his way to Buffalo, New York, then a magnet for German immigrants, and stayed there at least long enough to meet the woman, Josephine Stark, whom he would later marry. Both sides of her family, also German, had come to the U.S. a couple generations earlier.

Exactly when Frank headed west to Minnesota, and why he chose Minnesota, isn’t clear. Nor is it clear how he got there. It’s said that he hopped a freight train. Adding to the confusion is that he and Miss Stark didn’t marry until 1884 and she didn’t make her way to Minnesota until 1886. Yet by 1883 Frank had already purchased 80 acres of land for $250 in an area being settled by German and Scandinavian immigrants five miles or so outside of what was then called simply Detroit, Minnesota. So how all this came together remains a mystery. Northern Minnesota in the early 1880s still had something of a frontier character; permanent white settlement in the area where Frank built his first house, a log cabin, only dated from the 1860s. When Frank died, in 1943, the local paper remembered him as one of the area’s pioneers.

My other paternal great-grandparents, the Catholic side of the family, came from Luxembourg and the Rhineland around the 1870s.

Q: What did he, Franz, or Frank, do for a living?

NEITZKE: He farmed for a while, but he was, or at least he became, a carpenter, then a home builder. He built several houses in my home town, including the one in which my dad grew up.

Q: Was there much discussion of family history when you were young?

NEITZKE: No. None at all, really. Whether that’s typically Midwestern, or typically German-American—because of Germany’s image from the two World Wars, or just something about my family, I’m not sure. I started asking questions about family history in my mid-20s, but by then my grandparents were dead and my dad and his brothers didn’t seem to remember much of what little they’d ever been told. My sense is that most of the original immigrants, my great-grandparents’ generation mainly, had few regrets about leaving the old country, found here the opportunity they were looking for, worked hard, and didn’t spend a whole lot of time looking back. Which is understandable. What seems a bit strange is the apparent complete lack of communication among the various Neitzkes in this country who emigrated around the same time, many, it seems, from the same general area. We in northern Minnesota long thought ourselves unique, with this often-mangled name. In fact, quite a number came over, most from Prussia, including some at around the same time as my great grandfather. If there were any continuing ties at all with those other Neitzkes, we never heard about them.

Q: Tell me about your grandparents on your father’s side. Do you know what kind of work your grandfather did?

NEITZKE: Robert and Katherine, Kate, Neitzke. Robert and his several siblings were all born in that original log cabin. He and Kate had seven children, two of whom died young of the largely untreatable diseases that periodically swept through the population back then. Robert and Kate could both speak German but apparently did so only rarely, such as when they wanted to keep something secret from their children. My dad and his brothers spoke no German at all.

As a young man, my grandfather worked out West on farms and rail lines. For most of his adult life, back in Detroit Lakes, he owned some farmland and worked that on the side, but mainly he owned and ran a saloon, or pool hall. The euphemism back in the day was recreation; my grandfather operated a recreation. How strange. My father and his brothers helped out there, and my dad even played pool competitively there, hustled, I guess, to earn extra money for the family. My grandfather never completed high school, but he managed to keep his business afloat through the Depression and beyond. And, as tough as things were for him, I’ve heard he was known for helping others even less fortunate, particularly Indians, Native Americans, who would come to him for help.

Q: Did your father go to college?

NEITZKE: My dad was the oldest of the five surviving children, all male. No Neitzke in his line had ever attended college. My dad was determined to go, and did go, but only for a year. He did well and wanted to continue but couldn’t. It was the Depression. Money was tight, and his dad, my grandfather, wasn’t able to help him. More importantly, he lost the on-campus job he’d had his freshman year, in large part, he felt, because of his religion. He was Catholic, and there were strong undercurrents of anti-Catholicism in that part of the country then. So he had to leave school. He went out to California and worked for several years in and around L.A. installing air conditioning systems, including, as he later recalled, for some of the stars of the pre-war motion picture industry, whose libertine antics left quite an impression. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, he came back and enlisted right away. Later, when he got out of the Navy, he was 28 and already had a wife and infant son, so going back to school didn’t seem practical.

Q: What do you know about your mother’s background, her family?

NEITZKE: Not much, unfortunately. My mother was placed with a Danish-American couple shortly after her birth in Minneapolis in 1918 and was raised by them. They owned a hardware store and later a grocery store in a couple of small towns in southern Minnesota. Her biological mother was of German extraction. Her biological father, a Norwegian-American, was reportedly killed in France in World War I.

Q: How did your mother and father meet?

NEITZKE: They met early in the war, in the early 1940s. My dad was a Navy air corpsman, a radio man. He spent a couple years flying out of remote bases in the Aleutian Islands, hunting for Japanese subs, I believe. Interesting duty, to hear him tell it. Flying conditions could be godawful; planes would occasionally crash into fog-shrouded mountains or pilots would lose their bearings and never return. And some men would just kind of go crazy, he said, from the extreme isolation and the often-horrific weather conditions. My dad was in and out of Seattle a few times during that service. My mom was working there as a secretary for Shell Oil. They met on a blind date arranged by a mutual friend from Minnesota. They were married in 1944.

Q: Well then, did you grow up in Minnesota?

NEITZKE: Yes.

Q: Talk a bit about being a kid. I mean, I am talking about a small kid there, growing up in, where was it, Detroit Lakes? What kind of place was it?

NEITZKE: It was small town, or smallish town, middle America. I was the third of six children—four boys and two girls. I had two older brothers. I was a fairly serious kid, always serious about school, but I also liked sports, especially hockey. This was northern Minnesota, so we were all skaters from early on. I loved being outdoors. I even did some trapping, muskrats and gophers mainly, and fishing. My dad and brothers were avid hunters, so I hunted a bit too, mostly ducks. And there was scouting, Cub Scouts and, later, Boy Scouts. Life when I was very young was carefree. Families were larger then. There were always lots of kids around to play with, lots of adventures to be had, things to explore, and parents didn’t hover over you and worry obsessively as they do now.

I remember especially the strong sense of seasonality to life back then. The dozens of lakes around where I grew up attracted large numbers of tourists every summer; the whole tenor of the place would change. Summers also brought to town, when I was very young, the circus, with its exotic animals and acts, along with the annual water carnival, the parades, the county fair, the rides and the midway with its sideshows and barkers, and the automobile thrill-show, all great eye-openers for a kid. I remember too how hot and humid those summers could get, nearly Washington-like. And there wasn’t much air conditioning. Around Labor Day, the swimming, boating and the rest of it would wind down, and the tourists would depart as we headed back to school. Fall, although brief, could be stunningly beautiful as the pace quieted and the leaves turned. Fall encompassed duck hunting season, almost a formal season in itself where I came from, at least then. That was followed by dropping temperatures, early snowfall, and freezing lakes. Winters were dark, long, and cold. We really did walk to school at times through six-foot snow drifts and play hockey outdoors at twenty below zero. And there was ice fishing and snowmobiling. Spring, just to round things out, was not unlike a dinner guest from hell—almost always arriving late, behaving erratically, with wild temperature swings, then leaving early. Good for melting the snow and ice but not much else.

You don’t reflect on such things when you’re very young, but life seemed full. Only later, when I’d gotten out into the world a little, did I begin to get a better sense of how different the experiences of my childhood and ‘teens had been from those of most of my Foreign Service colleagues. I came to appreciate, though, that my parents’ lives back then embodied much of the post-war American dream—come back from the war, marry, have kids, work hard, save, send your kids to college, contribute to your community.

Q: I have to say, since you’re from Minnesota, your description reminds me just a little of Lake Wobegon. Do you ever listen to Prairie Home Companion?

NEITZKE: Sure. I remember Keillor’s once describing where his mythical Lake Wobegon was located, or would have been located, mentioning a place about 100 miles or so from my home town. There are similarities, but Lake Wobegon is smaller and more insular. The population in the area where I grew up could swell to 20-30,000 in the summertime. Life in tiny Lake Wobegon, on the other hand, seems simpler, in a way that life in very small-town America often seems to outsiders or in retrospect, idealized, uncomplicated. In reality, it probably wasn’t that way at all. Life in those towns could be very rough at times, at least for some people. And there was probably a whole lot more going on—social stratification, tragedy, scandal, the gamut—than most would have been aware of at the time. But there are aspects of Keillor’s Wobegon that hit home, especially the strong sense of place that many of his characters feel, knowing that that’s where they belong and, while grousing a little, embracing it.

The flip side of that contentedness is a certain wariness of the outside world and a suspicion of anyone who might want to leave what Time magazine once glowingly featured on its cover as The Good Life in Minnesota. Keillor never tires of lampooning the Wobegon attitude toward those who actually leave, who seek to live a larger, or different life out there. Those who venture out too often, or permanently, are guilty of the unforgiveable sin of pride, of thinking themselves better than others. Which they aren’t, he hastens to add. There’s a lot about small town life and attitudes that Keillor just nails. And he does so in a much more sympathetic way than, say, Sinclair Lewis, another Minnesotan.

Q: Tell me more about your early life. What did your father do for a living?

NEITZKE: My dad owned a concrete products factory, where my brothers and I worked from an early age. In fact, from about age 13 or 14 onwards, other than school and sports, what I recall most vividly is work in my dad’s factory, all summer and many Saturdays in the spring and fall. It was hard, a very formative experience. My dad was a proud, independent businessman, strongly opposed to unions, for example, but he treated his workers well and gave a lot back to his community. He headed nearly every local service organization at one time or another, served on the school board, even ran for the state legislature and came within a hair of unseating a long-term incumbent. My mom, too, when she wasn’t tending to us kids, was active in community service organizations.

Q: Well a couple of things. In the first place, how Catholic was your family?

NEITZKE: Not zealous, but we had a pronounced Catholic identity. Some of that was a reaction to the native anti-Catholicism I referred to earlier and some of it came from old, sharp Catholic vs. Lutheran tensions in my dad’s parents’ families. Added to that, my mother’s conversion to Catholicism before marrying my dad caused tension in her family. But the fact that we were raised Catholic at all was attributable to my dad’s mother, whose family, as I mentioned, had come from southwestern Germany and was Catholic from way back. She was determined, in the face of strong opposition from the northern German, Lutheran, Neitzke side of the family, that her children and, hence, my generation as well, would be raised Catholic. And she prevailed; she was tough, a very strong woman. Nonetheless, being Catholic when my dad was growing up could target you for verbal and even physical abuse; he told of getting into fights because of his religion, to defend himself, and he developed a strong sense of being Catholic.

Q: Was the priest an authority figure much?

NEITZKE: Respected, and yes, an authority figure in church matters, but not beyond that. I recall a mini-scandal once when the pastor tried to tell the parishioners how to vote in an upcoming election. That didn’t sit well. I was influenced by him, though, or more by his assistant. After eight years in parochial school, taught by Benedictine nuns, I went off to St. John’s University Prep School in Collegeville, Minnesota, in part to consider whether to become a priest. I did well, but one year of that was enough. I decided I’d need a lot more experience of life before considering that kind of commitment.

Q: You say your father ran a concrete products factory. What does that mean?

NEITZKE: We manufactured, sold, and delivered concrete building blocks of all shapes and sizes. My dad started it after the war and built it into a prosperous business, dominating the regional market. He was the best salesman, in fact one of the best one-on-one negotiators, I’ve ever met. Working at the block plant taught my brothers and me some important values. On the other hand, much of it was hard, grunt labor, often dirty and sometimes unhealthy. I remember especially, and hated at the time, having to descend into clouds of cement dust to scrape out train cars. Other days were spent driving delivery trucks or lifting tons of blocks 40 pounds at a time while standing next to loud, screeching machinery. There would be OSHA problems with some of that today.

Q: OSHA?

NEITZKE: The Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Q: I see. You mentioned values you learned working in your father’s factory. Such as…

NEITZKE: The value of a dollar measured in hard physical labor, but also the dignity of physical work, and just the ability to do hard physical labor all day, day after day. Also pride in earning one’s way, learning what it takes to run a business successfully, how to treat workers and customers to earn their loyalty, in general, basic things that over time become part of your outlook on life. The physicality of that experience left its mark even to this day, working with your hands, your muscles, amid dust and dirt, around heavy machinery, making things that would last. I remember being struck, after entering the Foreign Service, by the stark contrast between the kind of work I’d earlier done, and the wages it paid, and much of the work done in government, at incomparably better salaries, generating ideas and producing papers that often led nowhere, left no trace, in organizations that essentially had no bottom line.

Q: You mentioned your father was strongly anti-union. Were your parents Republican?

NEITZKE: My dad was a true independent, voting for the candidate rather than the party. But it was the Democrats—in Minnesota, the DFL, the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party—who persuaded him to run for the state legislature. My mom was strongly Democratic, but she didn’t wear this affiliation openly. I think they both felt—as did so many who lived through the Depression—that the Democrats had more often been the party looking out for people without great wealth or connections. That said, neither was all that comfortable with where the Democrats started heading in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

My dad’s attitude on unions, by the way, didn’t spring from any threat to organize in his factory. It was the implication, inherent in unionization, of a naturally adversarial employer-employee relationship. He rejected that. Nor did he like the idea of the government telling him how to run things. At the same time, he did a lot to help his employees, well beyond their paychecks.

Q: At home, was there much interest in the news, from papers, radio, or TV?

NEITZKE: There were always magazines, books, and newspapers in our home, and we had TV early on. We were always interested in what was going on in the wider world, but sources of international news were much more limited then: the nightly TV news, maybe a Sunday talk show, and the Minneapolis papers. Obviously, it was nothing like the 24/7 news-info blitz we now live with, but political events and figures were talked about at home. There was a clear distinction, however, between what adults discussed among themselves and what they discussed with children, even older children. I remember heated political arguments among my grandfather, my dad, and his brothers at my grandparents’ house on Sundays, real free-for-alls from which everyone would storm out shouting, only to gather again for another round the following week. I jumped into a few of those when I reached high school age. I had the impression that the war, World War II, getting out and experiencing something of the larger world had helped shape how my dad and his brothers thought about the issues of the day.

But at our house meal times, and the family always ate together, were usually spent discussing everyday matters, who was doing what, or who was going where, rather than, say, national or international events. There were exceptions, however. I remember my oldest brother, still just a kid himself, campaigning for Eisenhower in ’56. And I recall the great tenseness in my family during the Cuban missile crisis. As I grew older and Vietnam loomed larger, that began to creep into family discussions as well, often by my taking on my father over war-related issues.

Q: Going back to your elementary and high school time, you said you were doing this hard labor most of the time, but were you much of a reader?

NEITZKE: I was. I liked books a lot. When and where I was growing up, they were among one’s few openings to the wider world. I recall one Christmas, when I was very young and things were a bit tight for my parents, when the only presents we got were new hockey sticks and a World Book Encyclopedia, the old, twenty-some volume kind. I dove into that encyclopedia; that did expand my horizons. We also had a Carnegie Library in town, a beautiful building, and another stimulus to read more broadly. That said, however, I was never the kind of kid who’d hole up in his room for long periods just reading books. There was always too much else to do.

Q: When you reached high school, were there some subjects you really liked and those you did not?

NEITZKE: I didn’t strongly dislike anything, but math, science, and history were probably of greatest interest.

Q: Well, what was high school like?

NEITZKE: As I mentioned, the first year I went away to a private Catholic prep school. That was the year, 1963-64, when Kennedy was shot and the Beatles came to America. My final three years were back at the local public high school. There was a strong public commitment in Minnesota and in my home town to education. Some of my teachers were outstanding. And a few, just as memorably, were not. The high school was tenth through twelfth grades, about 200-225 students per grade. The course of study was serious for the most part, but it wasn’t what you’d now call college prep; in fact, quite a number of my classmates would not be going on to college; they’d be entering the workforce or the military. Beyond the classroom, I played basketball as a sophomore, then switched to hockey. I was a Student Council representative, president of the National Honor Society, had excellent grades. I went through something of a Holden Caulfield phase as a junior and senior. My thinking on many things took a sharp, skeptical turn. And again, this was the Vietnam era, so that tended to color a lot of things.

Q: Holden Caulfield, now that was Catcher in the Rye, was it not, I mean, the young man obsessed with, what, the phoniness, the people…

NEITZKE: Yes, that’s it.

Q: Well, did that manifest itself in any particular way?

NEITZKE: An epiphany of sorts, a sense of alienation, and long discussions with friends and a teacher or two who seemed to get it, to understand and partly share that perspective. What we debated, nearly ad nauseam, is whether society could ever be changed fundamentally, whether one person could hope to change anything. I recall one teacher in particular, not quite wanting to burst my bubble, strongly advising me not to waste my life challenging the unchangeable.

Q: Well, you graduated in-?

NEITZKE: ’67.

Q: 1967. How did you stand with the draft?

NEITZKE: I was given the standard 2S student deferment to go to college. Not a fair or just system, but that’s the way it was.

Q: Where did you go to college?

NEITZKE: I ended up going to St. Thomas College in St. Paul my freshman year. That followed a hurried, basically unguided search for some place more exotic and distant from home. I wanted to break out, but I didn’t know what was out there. Except for a quick trip out to Spokane, Washington, to look at Gonzaga University, a school that a family we knew had sent their kids to, the hunt was essentially directionless. No one took me in tow, for example, and said here’s a list of the schools you should really look at. No long distance, concentrated, multi-college tours of the sort that many kids go on today. My two older brothers were attending the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities. My parents strongly supported our going to college but, with six kids, it was unlikely they’d be able to pay for me to go somewhere private. In any event, we were expected to pay, and we did pay, nearly all of our own college expenses out of our summer earnings or from work during the school year. Ultimately, I spent everything I’d saved up until then on freshman year at St. Thomas, a small, private, all-male college in St. Paul. It’s where Gene McCarthy had taught.

Q: This is Eugene McCarthy?

NEITZKE: Senator Eugene McCarthy, yes, and this was 1967-68, when he challenged Johnson over Vietnam. I heard him speak there once and was impressed, not least by his delivering the punch line to a joke in Latin. But it turned out it wasn’t for me. The professors were excellent and I did well, but most of the students had come from all-male Catholic prep schools in the Twin Cities or Chicago. It wasn’t a good fit. I found it claustrophobic. It was expensive, at least for me at that time. And there were no girls, which felt strange. So, after a year, I moved up river and made my peace with the University of Minnesota. And I liked it. I changed my major from psychology to international relations and spent my final three years there.

Q: What was the campus of the University of Minnesota like when you got there?

NEITZKE: It was one of the largest schools in the country, some 45,000 students. And it was also huge in terms of the area it covered. I would walk, speed walk, across the Mississippi River a couple times a day to and from classes. Given its size, it could be very impersonal. Often you wouldn’t see any student twice in the same day, so you tended to form a small group of close friends. But what I liked about a school that size was that there was always a lot going on, speakers and activities of all sorts. And if you were determined and disciplined about it, as I tried to be, you could spend many nights at special speeches, rallies, film showings, presentations, or seminars on race relations, Vietnam, the environment, and other hot issues. I remember, for example, going to hear Julian Bond speak, as well as David Halberstam, who had just written The Best and the Brightest, about Vietnam, Paul Ehrlich, who’d written The Population Bomb, and many others.

Q: Did any of the professors or instructors particularly impress you? Do any other books stick in your mind?

NEITZKE: For Econ 101 I had, along with hundreds of others in a massive auditorium, Walter Heller, who had chaired President Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisors. I had a professor of American intellectual history named David Noble, who had written Historians Against History, The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden, and others. He was a stubborn iconoclast, contesting the notion of American exceptionalism. His lectures were standing room only and sometimes raucous. This was the time when other historians, the revisionists, were challenging America’s self-image from other directions. And it was a time of mass student protests over Vietnam.

As for books from those years, the three that come most readily to mind are Thomas Kuhn’s classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The Making of a Counter Culture, by Theodore Rozak, and the first volume of George Kennan’s Memoirs.

Q: I want to back up for a minute. What about racial consciousness? What about the Indian population of Minnesota? How aware were you of the Indians growing up? There were Indian reservations all over that part of the country.

NEITZKE: It’s strange. If you had asked me at the age of 18 about racial attitudes based on personal experience, I’d largely have drawn a blank. I wouldn’t have first thought of the Indians. I’d have assumed you were talking about African-Americans. I don’t remember there being any black families in town, any black kids in school. The only blacks I had met up to that point were, I’m not kidding, Jesse Owens, who had come to town to give a speech and played golf with my dad and some other men, and Elgin Baylor and others on the Minneapolis Lakers basketball team that played an exhibition game in my town not long before the franchise moved to Los Angeles. Somewhat later, the Job Corps, a Johnson Administration Great Society program, began to bring groups of black, inner-city youth from Chicago and elsewhere to training camps in the northern woods twenty or thirty miles from my home, but they rarely appeared in town.

As for Indians, however, yes, there were Indian reservations around where I lived. The largest, I believe, was north of town at White Earth. I knew that the Indians on the reservations were poor, but they were largely out of sight, and you didn’t often see a lot of people around who were recognizably Indian. This was before the tribal rights and Native American pride movements, before the large monetary settlements with some of the tribes, before the building of casinos on reservations and so forth. You would occasionally hear something in elementary school about missions or church schools on the reservations, to which we’d be asked to contribute, but that was about all. That said, at my dad’s factory I worked daily with an Indian, a military vet, the crew foreman. Doug was a great guy, and a friend, although much older than me. But, again, I never thought of Doug as an Indian in the first instance; it’s not how I looked at people.

Q: Back on the campus, before we move on to Vietnam, what about the civil rights movement and all of that? Did