Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project

HOWARD MEYERS

Interviewed by: Peter MoffatInitial Interview date: March 31, 2000

Copyright 2001 ADST

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about your early life and how you happened to join the government?

MEYERS: Well, I'd be delighted, but it's fairly common. I come from a family of Dutch dirt farmers who came from a little village. It was on the Hudson river, about half way between Poughkeepsie and Albany, and my father was literally born on a farm and had enough sense to get off the farm, it was very hard work, and to become a lawyer, in Manhattan. I grew up in a structured and normal way in Manhattan and went to the University of Michigan and Harvard Law School.

I was practicing law in New York for two years in two different places when I joined the army in the fall of 1942 and ended up in the 79th Infantry division and then was overseas in New Guinea and various unpleasant Philippine Islands attached in the Counterintelligence Corps to two other divisions, the 40th on Tanay, and the American on Cebu, and then up in Tokyo, where we were attached to General MacArthur's SCAP headquarters, that is to the international side as well as to the army side, really keeping an eye on the extremes of both the left and the right in Japanese political parties. It was very interesting work, realizing the extraordinary extent to which the methods and practices of these two extremes actually resembled each other.

When my time came to go back to the States and be discharged from the Army, (incidentally although we were military units in the Counterintelligence Corps we were never allowed to admit that we were in the army and indeed my identification badge simply said “Special Agent of the War Department”). At any rate, I got out of the Army in the spring. I think it was late March of 1946 and I had a very interesting job that I obtained as the legal and administrative assistant to the deputy administrator in the War Assets Administration. On the day that I reported to work, I got a cable from Tokyo asking me to come back to one of the sections in SCAP headquarters and I did. I was, in effect, the legal advisor to the G2, General Willoughby, then switched over to the Government Section, the Courts and Law Division, as the head of the criminal affairs branch, a small group of lawyers with both domestic and foreign law experience, as foreign legal advisors to the Japanese government in the modernization of the basic Japanese law codes.

The codes had to be in conformity with the Constitution and, on this matter, the Government Section played a major role, as the history books have well recorded. The fact of the matter was that the objectives were set forth in Constitutional type language very generally and the Japanese government found, or rather we helped them find, that in fact they were really engaged in a modernization process, rather than in a substantial law review process of a constitutional nature. The objectives were stated in much more general terms than they would be in the code law of Japan, since Japanese law had drawn on various European codes basically, in order to get out from under the extraterritorial aspects of foreign government interests from the period of the Meiji restoration. The objectives were general. How to get there was much more specific, and open to all sorts of interpretations. Rather than mandating how the changes should or possibly could be made, we in effect were ring holders. It was a very interesting exposure to the complexities of the political and the legal systems of Japan, if one can draw a distinction, and I think one can, both being open to a great deal of change.

We played an important role in helping induce the various Japanese specialists, whether from the Procurator General's office or the Ministry of Justice, or the bar associations, or the law professors in helping them find ways in resolving very real differences, and only rarely carried out that mandatory role which we were actually authorized to do. The result is that in most of the reforms that occurred, and these ranged from the civil and family codes to the Code of Criminal Procedure and the Agricultural Law revision, and on and on, we were helpful rather than mandatory. It was this background, I'm describing this at more length than perhaps is even remotely justified because it was this background that led me to realize that I was more interested in foreign affairs, in more general terms, than in law as a tool to achieve foreign policy objectives. I decided to return and see if I could not find a job in the foreign affairs field in Washington. We left, my little family and I, because my daughter was born in Japan (my son was born in the Washington area), and we came back without any job prospects on my part, but with great good fortune, I found three jobs offered to me within two weeks. I had come back at exactly the right time, and found myself then in November of 1949 on the rolls of the then Bureau of United Nations Affairs, in the office of UN Political and Security Affairs, which incidentally was full of lawyers, some of whom went on to become very distinguished professors of law.

Q: Who was the head of the office at that time?

MEYERS: Let me think for a moment. That was Harding Bancroft, an unusually intelligent and unusually wily man. Wily in the sense that he understood both the Washington and international bureaucratic processes, and the regional bureaus were not as adept, either in the Washington processes nor, understandably, in the complexities added by the growth of the UN, which was a very young institution as you realize. Harding Bancroft had been a part of the U.S. team that negotiated the UN agreement, the agreement on the nature and status of the United Nations, the treaty.

I started off trying to keep up with Afghanistan, Indian, Pakistan problems in the United Nations context. I had recently a brief conversation with a senior officer very much concerned, for example, with the Kashmir issues, and after I had described how we, that is the NEA Bureau and my own office, or me in particular, had finally counseled Secretary Acheson as to what was the only really sensible U.S. policy, he told me that with a few changes, it could be used for the recommendations to the Secretary of State today. Some things don't really change I guess. It was an interesting period and it was a period to which it is almost impossible for present day Foreign Service officers to relate because junior officers like me met regularly with the Secretary of State. If we were the so-called experts or among them, that is what we did. I once found myself being gently reprimanded by my own Assistant Secretary because another Assistant Secretary had complained about my approach or attitude, in that we had disagreed before Secretary Acheson and he had bought my argument and my boss had said to me, “Whereas I said that you were acting entirely under my instructions, which is not completely correct, I do think it is advisable for you to learn how to present your arguments before the Secretary of State when you are disagreeing, obviously quite strongly, with an Assistant Secretary.” And I thanked my boss very much for the advice, which I did try to follow for a while. But the point of my comment was that you could meet with the Secretary of State, you could disagree with a senior officer, and the Secretary could accept your argument. I think it is very different today. Of course, we were a much smaller organization and of course the Foreign Service was an even smaller part of the organization than it is today.

Q: You spoke of the Foreign Service, but at this time you were stila civil servant, am I not correct?

MEYERS: That's right. I joined the Foreign Service through lateral entry, that is I cannot remember the section of the Foreign Service Act, but after three years one could apply for lateral entry and did not have to take the written examination but did have to pass what was a very formidable oral examination, which I did. My entry was then suspended because, in the week before I was scheduled to join the Foreign Service, the Wriston Program came into effect and it was a year and a half before I could enter.

Q: But you stayed on as a civil servant.

MEYERS: Yes, until I was sworn in to the Service during negotiations in London in early 1955, but it was in a different kind of capacity because I was shifted in late 1951 to the arms control area, which was just beginning to move. It had been suspended, in all practical terms, by the striking disagreement between the Soviet Union and most of the Western powers, but basically the United States, over the Baruch Plan for the international control for atomic energy. That plan, whatever else may be said about it, was almost excessively favorable to the way in which the United States, with good reason, regarded any ability to control military nuclear materials. I sort of fell in on the ground floor of the whole arms control scene. There was a small group of us, and I do include myself very much in this, all professionals, in the Department of Defense and the State Department and the military services. CIA played really no role at all at that time, though later it became very valuable, in technical terms. The old Atomic Energy Commission played a role, but not initially a major role. Our concerns (by the way, this was as equally shared by the military as it was by the career State Department people); we were equally concerned at our sense that the Soviet Union officials did not adequately comprehend how dangerous was the nuclear weapons scene. The only way we could break out of the rut that we were in was to break away, ourselves, from the Baruch Plan, which we managed to do in the last General Assembly session held outside the United States, in Paris, in the winter of 1951-1952.

I was, despite my youth and rank, in fact, one of the two principal State Department advisors to Dean Acheson in the negotiations basically with the Soviet Union, but also with France, to set up what was initially the Five Power Disarmament Commission, which proceeded inexorably to enlarge itself as the 10 Power Commission, the 18 Nation Commission, and then the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament, and then led to the current organization, which is the Conference on Disarmament. The quality, the level of participation, in the negotiations with the Russians in Paris was really set by Vyshinsky, the Soviet foreign minister and head of delegation, who insisted there be no more than four people behind each representative of the five powers. So it was a question of whether Ambassador Alan Kirk, our Ambassador to Moscow, would attend or I would. There was no link in rank, it was a question of knowledge of the particular subject, and I had written or helped write most of the papers.

What resulted in this for me was a long time coping with these subjects, arms control and peaceful and non-peaceful uses of atomic energy. I became the head of UN Security Affairs. I was able to bring Ron Spiers into the Department to be my deputy, from the Atomic Energy Commission, certainly one of the most brilliant Foreign Service officers I have ever known. Loy Henderson told me at one point when I was trying to bring in Jim Goodby to join my organization (Goodby had been a Foreign Service officer, had military service, had asked for an extension so he could complete his master's at the Fletcher School, and with its usual perspicacity, Foreign Service Personnel said he had to come back or he would have to leave, so he had departed the Service, so he was working for the Atomic Energy Commission), Loy Henderson told me he had allowed me to get by once with Ron Spiers, but he was not going to make another exception because he was having too much trouble with the Wristonization program. And so, Ron came in many years later through having been working for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, as a civil servant initially, and then Jim Goodby later moved over to State, in his turn.

It was a loss to the Department not to have those men in the Service, again in one case and newly in the other, both were absolutely brilliant officers, as broadly based in their understanding of the politics and the economics of the complicated issues with which they were concerned as any people I've ever known, marvelous people really. Sorry, that is a diversion, but I thought I had a useful role in getting Ron into the Department past Loy Henderson's apprehensions and it was certainly borne out.

Now there I am at a time I think of as the Harold Stassen time. I was again and again an advisor on various delegations to the five power conferences, most of which were held in London. Initially with Henry Cabot Lodge, then with a wonderful man, Jerry Wadsworth and finally with Harold Stassen. I could tell many stories about what life was like in those days. I spent many months out of the country. In one year I was out for almost seven months, not all at one time, but four months at a clip, and when I came back to Washington and rushed up to greet my little family, my daughter and son, who was then only a little more than two, and my wife. I rushed up to throw my arms around them and my son pointed a finger at me and turned around and asked my wife who I was. That is a literal story, absolutely literal. It was a very hard life, this conference life of mine.

Anyway, this Stassen relationship was a very difficult one. Because of that very intelligent man's inability, not just unwillingness to adhere to government instructions, which are put together laboriously, as you know, as anybody knows who has had to deal with multi-agency issues, and because of Stassen's own personal objectives, I would say, which were a mix of genuine intellectual divergences and his own political ambitions. I remember very vividly once, I was not in London at the conference meetings but rather was back in Washington, having John Foster Dulles stride up and down in front of me wagging his finger at me while Bob Bowie, the Assistant Secretary for Policy Planning sat behind him grinning like a Cheshire Cat, as Dulles said to me “I told you this is what Stassen would do and you talked me out of it!” And it was quite clear that he was more annoyed that he had allowed me to talk him into giving Stassen more flexibility than he was at what Stassen had done, and it was very dangerous what he had done. Without going into specifics at all, it held genuine problems for our principal European allies in matters which directly and vitally affected their own national security and it was done quite contrary to his instructions. It was vaguely possible, to say on a tangential basis that they were barely included, which is what Dulles was alluding to, but it was unwise and it was done without consultation. Now I can't describe the specifics.

Q: But do you think Governor Stassen realized this fully and jusmelded his views with the instructions to the point that...

MEYERS: I'm convinced. The instructions were reasonably clear. They did permit a degree of flexibility. They did not permit that degree of flexibility which enabled him to go and talk to the Soviet delegation leader without consulting with the Secretary of State. That is the difference and that I consider to have been done willfully. I had another occasion the following year, when I was the Senior State Department representative on Stassen's delegation when the delegation unanimously disagreed with a presentation in substance and in form, which Stassen wished to make to the Soviet delegation. We were unanimous, so much so that General John Gerhardt, who was the Joint Chiefs' representative, or say the Defense Department's representative, and I went together to complain about this. We did produce one good result - at least Dulles knew it wasn't my fault this time - Julius Holmes appeared on the delegation, and anybody who knew Ambassador Holmes, either when he was a military officer, a general, or in his Ambassadorial jobs, knew that he was one of the toughest - in the best sense - professional officers you could encounter. I can remember that vividly. Bob Murphy was my boss twice. Once when he was Assistant Secretary. Once when he was what was then called the Deputy Undersecretary; he was the principal Foreign Service career officer, and I think Julius Holmes compared with Bob Murphy in these qualities of gentlemanliness and absolutely steely character.

Q: Can you provide an appreciation of Stassen, as seen by you ivarious guises as seen over the years?

MEYERS: I can do it. I will try to be reasonably discreet in so doing. My colleague Ed Gullion, who was later the dean of the Fletcher School and was one of our ambassadors in Africa told me once after a fairly tumultuous meeting over at the Executive Office Building in Stassen's office, that I became so exasperated with Stassen that I told him “The problem with you Governor is that you simply don't understand this subject!” I can't believe that I was that indiscreet, but he did irritate me because of the obduracy with which he pursued what he saw as the proper objectives or tactics to get there when the entire rest of the United States' government disagreed with him, and I mean the entire United States government. Stassen had neither strong support in the White House nor among the very knowledgeable, and I thought on the whole very balanced, representatives of the major agencies or departments involved in this process of arms control. Nor after they had evinced strongly their disagreement would it move him an iota, well, move him very little, except tactically, from his original views.

He was unbelievably stubborn and he thought that he knew best when it was clear that he didn't or at least the almost united objections from all these specialists from all these agencies might have convinced him or made him think that maybe he was not wholly correct. It is this invincible stubbornness and in one instance as I've indicated, that almost seriously endangered United States relations with an important ally, without consultations with the Secretary of State. It is this aspect of Stassen that I consider objectively to be the most damaging. There were a couple of personal instances which simply supported in my mind this view but I think this question of invincible stubbornness, when he should have been given pause, is what remains most vivid in my mind.

Q: Well of course in the popular imagination now, Stassen is remembered for running repeatedly office long after anyone had any interest in his doing so, which I presume you would attribute to this same characteristic.

MEYERS: He was apparently a very good governor of Minnesota. That, I know nothing about. I have simply had friends who came from Minnesota talk about that. He was very intelligent in his appraisals and analyses of the truly ferociously complicated issues that we were trying to cope with. But it is this overall quality of just thinking, when he was wrong, that he was right when everybody else would disagree with him; this is the predominant quality that I recall from Stassen during his tenure as the U.S. representative on this five power disarmament conference.

In this early period, back starting with the winter of 1951-52 and then going on, when we were developing policies toward arms control and limitation, the Soviet and American professionals dealing with the issue developed a kind of personal relationship. This produced at one time a marvelously illustrative experience of how professionals do tend, whatever their nationalities, to think in somewhat similar lines about similar kinds of questions. It was the 1954 General Assembly and I had written the section of Secretary Dulles' General Assembly speech which dealt with arms control issues. It may have been 1953, but in any event, it was this early period. I had written language that welcomed our efforts and collaboration to move forward toward the goals, etc., etc. Well, Molotov was the Soviet Foreign Minister and he spoke before Mr. Dulles, and to my astonishment, when he got toward this part of his speech, he gave one of the most old fashioned, typical, Cold War Soviet diatribes you have ever heard. Mr. Dulles, of course, tossed away anything I provided for him and proceeded to go up one side of Mr. Molotov and down the other verbally, in a most devastating fashion as he was certainly capable of doing whenever he wanted. I got out of the General Assembly conference room and I was going up the stairs and I encountered my opposite number, a man named Usachov. Igor Usachov, who went on subsequently to be a very successful Soviet Ambassador. I looked at him and said, in effect, that I was rather surprised that Mr. Molotov had taken the line he did; wouldn't he have known that Secretary Dulles would reply in the way he did. What I got was this marvelous response, “I told him and I told him and he simply wouldn't listen to me!” I thought that was just wonderful, something always to remember. Once a bureaucrat always a bureaucrat. It doesn't matter what your national origin might be.

The second is another pleasant indication of professionalism as well. It was during the 1956 meetings of the Five Power Disarmament Commission in London, just before I had to turn around and come back to London to be an officer at the Embassy. I was the senior State representative on Harold Stassen's delegation, and when we had an official lunch, we sat in protocol order. This meant that the Soviet representative, later Foreign Minister, Gromyko, sat on Mr. Stassen's right, and I sat on Mr. Gromyko's right. Well, Stassen had absolutely no small talk of any kind. You could not have a conversation with him, if it was not about a matter of substance, in which he was interested. So perforce, Mr. Gromyko and I passed the time of day and I discovered to my surprise, because Mr. Gromyko was known you may recall as the great stone face, that he was a charming and witty man who knew more about politics, regional and national, in the United States, than I did, and about the economy of the United States, and was extremely interesting. Then we came to the part of the luncheon where Stassen would want to start substantive discussions, and a mask would fall over Gromyko's face and he would be the great stone face again, but this other face and attitude was a very revelatory one.

Q: Was this through an interpreter?

MEYERS: No, no.

Q: His English was...?

MEYERS: Fluent. He had been ambassador in the United Nations and iWashington.

Q: After you got your reward: an assignment to London, one thawould be coveted by all your colleagues, I'm sure.

MEYERS: I knew a number who were very anxious to have the job. I was actually the first political-military officer in London. Obviously there had been officers long before me dealing with these issues, but I had the combined responsibility for defense, atomic energy - both peaceful and warlike - and arms control before during and after the Suez crisis. It was one of the most exhilarating times to be in London and it was certainly difficult. In the midst of this period, one of my carefully unnamed but very senior British colleagues, who came from a British family with a very long and distinguished military background, he himself had won the Military Cross during World War II, wanted to take me to lunch at his club, which was “Boodle's,” the most conservative, old fashioned club in all of London, and he wanted to take me there so he could wave me like a banner of defiance. I managed to take him to lunch instead, in the more neutral atmosphere of a restaurant.

On the other hand, I went to lunch with two charming, well-bred American ladies, who screamed at me in disagreement with U.S. policy. On this subject, as I kept on saying to them feebly, I had nothing to do with the formulation of this policy back in Washington. I am grateful that I didn't, though I did try to explain why I thought we were right. The British and the French didn't have the sealift or the airlift sufficient to bring enough troops to bear quickly to be decisive. Only the Israelis, who egged the British and the French on to doing this, were able to move as they did for their own purposes, but certainly not our principal allies.

That was a great time to be there. As you can see from what I am talking about, I had the background of these many, many months over the years of being in these arms control discussions, and coming to know the people with whom I would be in contact all the time on vastly divergent issues. It gave me a leg up in doing my work and enjoying this marvelous country, Britain, as it was coming out of this period of deprivation. You know, of all of my experiences, the one that most moved me was the dedication of the Eisenhower Chapel in St. Paul's Cathedral. We were very well represented by the then Vice President, Richard Milhous Nixon. The entire Cathedral was filled. The Dean of St. Paul's gave the address and he ended it by quoting from that fascinating chapter in the second volume of Pilgrim's Progress in which Valiant for Truth crosses the River Jordan to the City of God. It is a wonderful one in which, without giving you all the details, Valiant for Truth as he goes down into the river, has all the trumpets blow for him from the other side. As the Dean of St. Paul's concluded, the trumpeters of the Household Cavalry at one end of the nave blew the American taps, which is different from the British, and as those notes died away, the Household Cavalry trumpeters blew from the other end of the cathedral, blew the American reveille, which is also different from the British, and the congregation rose as one and sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic. I tell you, that was an experience that put the hairs up on the back of my neck.

It was one of the glorious experiences that I had in all my time abroad, although I had something somewhat similar the second time I was in Japan, many, many years later. Anyhow, I ended my London tour more than abruptly. I didn't realize but there had been long discussions going back and forth between London and Brussels and Washington. Walton Butterworth insisted that I was the man that he wanted for a couple of practical reasons and nobody else, and there was some dispute over my fair body as a result. The European Communities, as they then were, had moved to Brussels for the first time. The U.S. Mission was the executor of a very complicated and as I thought far too ambitious program for nuclear cooperation with the EURATOM Commission, in power reactor development. It was a strange business. The French opposed this strongly. They didn't oppose a program, but they did oppose the extent of this program. They did that for their own reasons, but in the end I came to think that the French were right, not for their reasons, but for our reasons. So I was not the most popular member of the U.S. Mission. At any rate I had one week's notice to get from London to Brussels, to be there by the first of August.

Now anybody who knows Europe knows that there is nothing going on the first of August! Almost everybody, almost all the senior representative officials, anyway, are off on their own holidays. But I was a personnel problem, because of the level at which this had been discussed and particularly because my revered Loy Henderson was involved and our Administrative Counselor, Mace was his name, wanted to avoid problems for him. So off I went and I said to the Administrative Counselor in my departure, “I will be consulting with the damn files!” and that is what I did, for that month. But we made it through. I paid more for the storage of my goods than the State Department did. This is why I have always had a reserved view about the administrative side of the State Department, but I leave that to one side. Brussels was a marvelous place to be at that time. I saw the city change from a provincial city to a vibrant, culturally, artistically, politically interesting place. I very much enjoyed meeting the people that I saw there. The extent to which, for example, the Germans sent the finest career people you could imagine, including people like descendants of the Von Moltkes, who had been hung up from meat hooks by the Nazis - that is a serious comment, it's not an idle description. The quality of the other delegations, particularly the French, who had simply superb people...

Q: Who was the American?

MEYERS: Walton Butterworth.

Q: Through your whole time there?

MEYERS: Yes. The collegiality, almost, of relationships between members of the European Communities delegations and the central representatives, that is to say central in the sense of not the missions of the countries, but the staff of the five, as they were then, European Community authorities, the collegiality between these groups and ourselves was very marked. Even when we disagreed, for example, with the French, and I had a couple of, to me, absolutely hilarious negotiations with the French - they could not see the forest in some instances because of the trees of their singular approach to the relationship between the European Communities and the United States, that being the forest and the trees being the basic interests - but there was a real sense of community, of collegiality, because it was so clear that the United States was, I think objectively, the strongest supporter of the European Community concept of any state not a member of the Community.

I saw this from two sides, because the British were negotiating to join and they had a very distinguished team known as the Flying Knights, because they had all been knighted by the British government, as it does to recognize seniors who are professionals and distinguished. One of them was a very close friend of mine, so that we saw him regularly when he came over from London. We entertained him and he entertained us. Indeed I communicate even today with his daughter, who was my daughter's closest friend and who is the wife of the European Community representative to the United Nations' offices in Geneva. Time does pass. I think that my description of our relationships with the concept of the European Communities is an objectively fair one. I did think and unfortunately probably for me it was described in a few official communications, that the relatively small group in our State Department which was pushing ahead so strongly in support of the European Community was moving ahead too fast too hard, and they were wrong, simply wrong in thinking that the European Community would rather quickly become a United States of Europe. Since everybody knows who these people were and two of them I regarded as friends, I won't mention them.

I think this was a genuine failure to appreciate that, at that time, the European Community was simply an expanded customs union. The difficulties which exist today, in my view, of enabling an adequate balance of power between different sides, different groupings - grouping in this case means a government organizational grouping were not adequately comprehended. I had, not that long ago, a fascinating conversation with an unnamed Justice of our Supreme Court, who is very knowledgeable on the institutions of the European Union, as it is now known, on one aspect which was the ambit, or the reach of the European Court. This was a very recent conversation in the last month. I raised the same questions that I had raised officially and unofficially, with this group of important people in the State Department and expressed my concern that the jurisdictional ambit of the European Court was too broad to avoid running into conflict with the other European institutions and particularly the lack of real power in a European legislature, rather than those which existed, and found that this distinguished Justice with rather more recent experience than I, substantially agreed with me. That is the sort of thing that I was concerned with in an entirely different framework a couple of decades earlier, even though there has been much progress. But the United States was still the best supporter the European Community had outside of itself. Anyhow, that gets me to when I went back to Washington.

Q: That was in 1962?

MEYERS: It was the end of 1962. I ended up in a new institutional arrangement. There was no Bureau of Political Military Affairs; there was an office of Political Military Affairs. Without exaggeration, we did absolutely everything that the current bureau is doing but as an office we were, in effect, attached to the Secretary's office through the fact that our boss was Alexis Johnson, who I think can honestly be said to have succeeded the mantle of Bob Murphy in terms of the respect in which he was held and the reach of his office's influence. Just to show you how we did a lot with little: I was the coordinator for foreign military and security assistance in the State Department, as one of my jobs, only one, as the Deputy in that office for Operations. We did things differently. Regional bureaus had their own specialists. We would meet and try and coordinate, that is to say we would try and figure out what we were really interested in. We just did it with less people. I don't know if we did it as well, but we did it.

It was a fascinating period. As you can see from the dates I actually arrived about the beginning of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember vividly one nice secretary asking to go home just for a brief visit, for just a few days, to see her family because she was convinced she would never be alive after that. I really do remember that. It's incidental, but I sure remember that. Alexis Johnson was, of course, a principal member of the Special Committee that was trying to cope with the issues.

Q: Were you drawn into this at all?

MEYERS: Only on the periphery. It was a very closely guarded committee and fond as I was of Alec Johnson, one of my principal memories of him is driving with him out to Andrews Air Force Base for him to go somewhere and going over the variety of topics that he wanted me to follow up, and in the middle of the conversation he started to go “uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.” I knew that was the end of the conversation. He had concluded that he was starting to impinge on topics that he shouldn't divulge even to me, and I assure you he trusted me with all kinds of sensitive subjects. That's when he stopped. He was a wonderful man to work for.

Q: What were the principal issues you were involved in?

MEYERS: I was concerned with the nuts and bolts of military operations - of base rights, facilities, how to assure an adequate role for the State Department in coping with the Defense Department's generally superior ability to advance its own interests. In coordinating - that means approving basically - not just the visits but the areas to be discussed of Defense Department scientists. It was a very influential operation. Actually, I remember one time Alex Johnson sent me over to see Gene Fubini, who was then the Assistant Secretary for Defense Research and Engineering, and who I knew by accident anyhow, personally, because our daughters were in the same class at Sidwell Friends School, here in Washington, to explain why the State Department would not support Defense's effort to include civil as well as defense capabilities in its communications satellite system. Fubini heard me out, and turned around and picked up another phone and I was there when he gave the order to commence the system. It was one of the instances where you realize the messenger is carrying more than he thought. That was Alex Johnson. Those were the issues.I was one of the two principals, the other being my boss, Jeff Kitchen, who started what became the Diego Garcia facility. It is really one of the fascinating instances, when the State Department, or we in any instance, foresaw that we would have overflight and basing difficulties if it became necessary to get our forces, air and naval and land, to many places in Asia. We had a very complicated but helpful series of discussions with the British, who were very helpful. In fact, the British provided a British Navy vessel which had a large team of American specialists as well as, of course, British specialists and they toured the Pacific looking at designated possible locations and eventually settled on Diego Garcia, as it was. There were alternatives. In some respects, this negotiation had the most amusing side agreement I ever encountered in my innumerable negotiations on base rights and facilities and issues of that kind all over the world, because there was an endangered species on one of the islands which was under consideration but not chosen. We agreed that we would provide the world's leading specialist in this species, who turned out to be a professor at the University of Florida, in the event that we had to move the species from the island chosen to another one. I think that in its way is one of the funniest political-military agreements that anyone could ever have conceived of, but you see you got led into very strange issues. Not to dwell on it too long, I came to the end of my tour and after four years went to the ninth senior seminar.

Q: I notice from the record that you had a Superior Honor Award.

MEYERS: I guess so.

Q: In 1965? Was that...

MEYERS: Well, I will tell you how I got it, in all honesty. One of my subordinates had done a simply marvelous job under very difficult circumstances and I thought that he should have a Superior Honor Award, and I put in the recommendation supporting it in great detail. The poor man got the next level down, I don't know what it was, and I had not asked for it at all, but I got the Superior Honor Award.

Q: There is a moral there somewhere.

MEYERS: There is a moral there alright. It is the way the State Department works! This was not a Foreign Service officer who made the decision. I think I was right in the first place and I did not ask for this honor. Yes, that's right.

Q: You got another award - the Senior Seminar - thereafter, right?

MEYERS: That was a wonderful year. I had had a fair amount to do, from a distance, with Turkish military assistance, and supporting assistance. We had essentially a Master's level thesis writing requirement and there was a requirement that you could not ask to go to a foreign country in which you had served or for which you had been directly responsible back in Washington. I chose Turkey, though I had to explain that, yes, I had a fair amount to do with Turkey in the odd role I had in supporting military assistance, but I was not directly responsible and I had always been fascinated by it. It was accepted and it enabled me to produce a paper which was contentious within the embassy, where my friend Jim Grant was the AID program coordinator and the economics minister joined Grant in opposing some of my recommendations. But the Consul General in Istanbul was in thorough agreement and that is how I became the friend of Pete Hart. He was our Ambassador. I had known him but I had not known him well. He was so objective that he did not interpose any disagreement with my paper.

My paper became one of the basic briefing papers for NEA for a long time. I really felt I was producing something. It has been published now, with careful excisions, the subject matter was Turkey's changing relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and how this will affect basic U.S. foreign policy objectives toward Turkey. The first thing I discovered was that there was no agreed U.S. policy on the basic policy objectives. I concluded, after some careful explorations back in Washington, that the reason was born basically of bureaucratic turf. So I said if I write out what I think is the basic policy and I put it in a footnote and I submit it to all three most concerned agencies and you agree, would that be acceptable? The agencies said sure. So that is how I wrote the policy: in a footnote. I thought this was one of the silliest illustrations of Washington bureaucracy that I have ever encountered, because they basically didn't disagree but they would not agree on language. That was my greatest experience in the Senior Seminar. I thought it was marvelous. I was just absolutely torn with laughter at the thought that you had to try to resolve the policy through this device. It was a shock.

Anyway, we were due to go back overseas, and Hope, my wife, couldn't pass the medical exam and had to have a very serious operation, so I ended up as Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Programs in the old CU - International Cultural Relations. That was actually one of the best assignments I ever had. Completely out of my area, but it was the only bureau in the State Department that had a substantial budget requirement. So I learned about budgets. John Rooney was the chair of the House Appropriations Committee for the State Department and I remember one day Rooney saying to my old friend, Jake Canter, who was acting Assistant Secretary, “Well, you've got this one chance to get the brass ring.” What he meant was that he would not be as much in opposition, or as sharp and critical, and unpleasant, as usual. It was quite an experience. Not only did I have the regional officers under my sway, but the performing arts program was fabulous, something unbelievable. I learned that I just took what the very skillful bureaucrat, who was the office director, suggested, because I didn't know beans about the performing arts program and it included all kinds. They had a very self protective advisory committee and that is what you followed as best you could, and you had no idea what the Congress would say about it. We didn't know anymore than the Congress knew. You choose professionals and you've got so much money and you try to decide between competing groups. What an experience that was. Anyway, that was a very valuable year for me because I learned about totally different subjects, with which I had never dealt.

Q: Do you feel that strongly the loss to the Department, the loss -at least for a period - of the old CU programs and responsibilities?

MEYERS: Well, I have mixed views. Having worked closely with the USIS people abroad and then having this concentration for a year, it became very clear to me that most of the USIA programs were close to worthless except for those dealing with exchanges and cultural affairs. The only real and valid reason for the existence of the United States Information Agency carrying out these activities lay in these two areas, both of which had been in State in CU. It is a very interesting business. In fact I think I am quite objective that I saw a sufficiency of what was being done overseas to think that the fast media response was almost worthless. The international cultural and, particularly, the educational exchanges were superb. They had a long effect on the intellectual and cultural elites of foreign countries and they exposed Americans to some of this influence on the other side, but on the whole they were really valid. Whereas I thought the changing world of communications was such that by radio or whatever, that there was no sense in having an Agency for this. I don't know if that is the right answer.

Q: Oh, no, I agree with you. I notice you said a year. But didn'you go for two years, 1967-1969?

MEYERS: It was about a year and a half. I have difficulty remembering the years. I was sent by the then director general of the Foreign Service to do a special inspection in Vietnam.

Q: This was the Director General of the Foreign Service.

MEYERS: The Director General of the Foreign Service. Q: Who was?

MEYERS: Burns. John Burns. It is interesting trying to keep a secret from Washington. My instructions were to report back in reasonable detail on whether the State Department should support sending Foreign Service officers to the CORDS Program, or whether State should be stop. The CORDS Program, which was a civil operation or coordination program, whatever the right name was, was sopping up every last one of our junior officers and distorting the assignment process for mid-career officers. At the same time, and I know this does not sound reasonable, there was absolutely no career planning statement on the part of any of these young officers: no indication of how they would like to have career planning, how they would like to have career development, where they would like to go, what kind of tasks, and so on. Foreign Service Personnel desperately needed to have this information. They might disagree with it eventually, but they needed it.

I took along with me a very experienced personnel officer, Larry Lawrence, a very good personnel officer and a great sailor. We spent a month all over Vietnam, that is, what was under our control. It was desperately hard work, as the number of people we had to see were many and the tasks were very difficult. Of course, Colby, who later became Director of CIA and who was then CIA head for Far Eastern affairs, knew exactly why I was there. I really talked more with Jorgenson, his deputy, later assigned to the Embassy as the coordinator. He was an absolutely first class former military officer. I told him very frankly not only what was my principal objective, but what were my conclusions before I submitted my report, because it seemed to me that he should know and I assumed that my views would be accepted, I really did.

That was valuable for lots of reasons. In the first place, for God's sakes, we had information about where these fine young officers would like to go. That was very valuable. Second, I think we helped advance the careers of a number of very good mid-level officers. Thirdly, I had another wonderful exposure to how utterly imbecilic is the way in which State Department Personnel deals with bureaucratic problems. Of course, one thing in my report - I had conclusions and very careful views, for example, it got Foreign Service Officers out of the Phoenix Program, as just one illustration, that was a recommendation that was absolutely followed. I ended up by saying that I thought we should continue to have Foreign Service Officers go to the CORDS Program and explained why in reasonable detail. But there was absolutely no basis at all for the numbers. They were simply the best civilian officers that the military could get their hands on and they did not want to let them go. They loved them dearly. But there was no basis for this and a survey would have to be made to provide one. Anybody who knew Colby and what he had done before would have known exactly what would happen. The CIA asked for double the number of officers and the State Department compromised on about 50% and I think Colby lost about 12 officers. I swear this is an absolutely true story. The numbers may not be quite right - it may not have been 12, it may have been 14, but my story is absolutely accurate, and this is a decision made by people who were not then involved in really hard international negotiations. Anyhow, that's why when you said two years I was somewhat uncertain. Because when I got back after that I found myself involved in another study.

Q: Before we leave this study behind, did you find that the majoritof your recommendations, all but the numbers were...

MEYERS: All but the numbers, absolutely.

Q: But that was the main one.

MEYERS: No. I forgot to say that, yes, I thought this was a valuable experience because it imposed command, budget, and analytic responsibilities. That was what I felt, what I believed. Oh, well, this is not what I call one of my successful reports because I was really so infuriated at what happened, which, of course, I learned later, after I was already out of the country. Anyway, I also found myself called on to do a joint study for Alexis Johnson and David Packard, of Hewlett-Packard, who was then Deputy Secretary of Defense, on a program that I used to manage when I was in GPM, the State-Defense officer exchange program. They wanted someone who knew the subject matter, knew all the organizations, and could be expected to provide a reasonably objective report. I did. There were a number of deficiencies in the administration of this excellent program, I've seen since I managed it. I was amused by the bureaucratics because the Joint Chiefs insisted on having a team of their own to perform this same study. They came out with the same conclusions, but they took a lot longer to get finished. That was really very funny, and sad, also.

In addition to these two studies, I inspected and wrote comments about the FSOs assigned to all the other “Out of State” programs; that is, assigned to other departments or agencies out of the State Department in Washington. There were considerable variations in the responsibilities of these FSOs, but one roughly common denominator. This was their sense they were likely to be considered less favorably for next assignments than if they had continued in a more traditional State bureau assignment. My sense was that, except for assignments at a deputy assistant secretary level or similar, this concern was justified. Later, when I held a job as inspector general of a small but vital White House agency, I found that Personnel's record - the computerized record for that assignment - said simply “Detail!” When I complained about this characterization, the response was simply: oh, well, everyone knows w hat you did.

Q: ...destined back for Japan many, many years after your previoutime there?

MEYERS: Yes, a long time. It was a fascinating job, absolutely fascinating. It was a very difficult job because it was the mid-stage of Okinawa-reversion negotiations. We had, I would say, one of the most competent career officers managing the negotiations, this was Dick Snyder, in Tokyo. He had come directly from his assignment on the National Security Council dealing with the same issues, so there was certainly nobody who knew the issues better and who knew so many of the career Japanese officials. I never encountered an occasion on which we disagreed on substance, but we certainly disagreed on procedures, and how to get there. I put that to one side; I really think he was superbly competent for the job. We had innumerable difficult issues, ranging from the entry and the departure of nuclear powered submarines to naval visits to noise at Yakota, for example, the principal base, to what to do with the complaints raised about the Marines' use of the artillery base further down in Honshu. There was hardly a day that we didn't have some sort of minor crisis and it was just fascinating.

It was particularly fascinating to me and for my amazingly linguistically competent spouse, who I swear learned foreign languages by osmosis and who had the charm and graciousness that the Japanese have always found, even in our coming here in our very different tenure there more than 20 years previous, to be so attractive. She was, for example, the only foreign woman on the Board of the International Ladies Benevolent Association, a fascinating organization. The Board was composed, with the single exclusion of Hope, of the ancient Japanese Christian nobility - they were all Christian and mostly Catholic. I think my long Presbyterian background wife was just right to fit in. There was one result of this, we were always turning up at social occasions where nobody else but Ambassadors were invited and I assure you it had nothing to do with me. I was the third ranking career officer in the Embassy, but I had nothing to do with this kind of invitation, it was all due to Hope. It gave a very interesting view, which I got second hand, of the difficulties for the Japanese in establishing close feelings of responsibility or concern about lesser favored people, because though the Buddhists do a reasonable job locally, they do not have the same sense - and I am not saying this in a critical way, but a factual way - of ethical and moral responsibility that we Christians do. I shouldn't say we Christians, Jews do, others do, who have a different tradition, but this group was exceptional because of this fact. I don't know that all the ladies were Christians, but most were. I don't know the percentages anymore, but certainly not more than 2-3% of Japanese are Christians.

I wish that I could relate some of the stories of my interactional role with the U.S. nuclear navy, but I can't. I'm afraid I would get some of my navy friends in trouble, although Hyman Rickover is no longer there. It was very difficult to cope with this extraordinarily single-minded man who would not accept in any way, the complexities of foreign relations when it involved his blessed nuclear navy. I got involved in a number of these issues typically because of allegations of nuclear radiation that weren't true but that caused a lot of trouble. I found my U.S. navy friends to be extraordinarily helpful, to the extent they were able to do it, and if I may be very blunt about it to some extent going around Admiral Rickover. It was a very interesting exposure to what life was like in the nuclear navy. We got through all of these issues successfully except for one dreadful period, when for its own lack of examination naval headquarters in Washington, that is the CNO's office, decided they wanted to save money on ship repair and decided that they would opt for essentially a commercial operation at Sasebo, instead of being able to use the only Japanese government facility that had always been a government facility in Yokosuka. All of the services: Air Force, Army, Navy, State, kept on saying this is crazy. I won't go into all the details, but this was the issue because Sasebo was a commercial operation and even with special prerogatives, you had to force your way into line. Finally at the last moment, based in part, I guess, on this absolutely unified representation position, the Navy changed its mind.

At this time they had succeeded in doing something I never encountered in my two tours in Japan. They had united the Liberal Democratic Party, the Socialists, the Communists, the Chamber of Commerce, that is the Japanese version, the labor unions - every single business and political interest was united because they were ready to grapple and grab this gem that had only been an imperial navy base. I suddenly got a notice that a navy team would come out and hopefully reverse the Japanese position. So they came out and we met in my office, on a Sunday as usual, and I told them in the most direct terms - there was a commander who was their leader, an obviously first class technical person, and they have the technical personnel - “I'm going to introduce you and I am going to sit down. You got us into this mess and you're going to get us out of this mess. I have a promise from the Foreign Office that they will help to the best they can.”

So we went through this procedure on Monday, the next day, and sitting across the table were the very senior representatives of the largest and most important Japanese industrial corporations, the ones that were involved in Sasebo. After I had introduced the navy commander and sat down, saying he would explain what U.S. views were, I listened to him and his view was that these organizations did not have adequate quality control to take care of U.S. navy ships in Sasebo and that it should be done, therefore, in Yokosuka. I managed to keep a straight face, but I want to tell you that one of my two Japanese opposite numbers actually dropped his jaw, but they were manful and they carried out their promise to me, and somehow, God knows what the Japanese government promised, but somehow or other we managed to get out of that particular trap. I have never forgotten that. I was ready to hoot with laughter when I heard what the Navy's reason was. That was almost the highlight of my experience in Japan except for one.

I was there at the time of the actual formal transfer of administrative responsibility for Okinawa. Our representative was the great man, our then Vice President, and he did quite a good job. But the moment for me which was so transcendent, having landed there as a CIC agent five days after the surrender on the battleship “Missouri,” then to come back and be among the fortunate invited guests when the Prime Minister of Japan announced with tears running down his cheeks, this final recovery of Okinawa.

That was Esaku Sato. But I did not describe an interesting aspect of this ceremony, which was that our information agency had arranged with Washington so that the signing of the changes in the Treaty of Peace would be done simultaneously in Washington by President Nixon and in Tokyo by Prime Minister Sato and shown on a split screen side by side. That was very fascinating, perhaps more so to our friends in USIA than to ourselves. But it was also very interesting to me because of what had happened the preceding night.

A major aspect of political military relations between Japan and the United States is governed by a committee established under our Mutual Defense Treaty. I was a member of that committee. It was necessary to change various technical aspects of that agreement resulting from changes administratively and otherwise in Okinawa and, as I recall, in Japan proper. The Japanese government was very nervous about this, much more so than we. They wanted nothing to go wrong and also they were inclined to be very formal and correct on matters of this high state level. So it was arranged that the two sides of the committee would get together about half an hour or so before midnight, at the Foreign Minister's guesthouse in Tokyo, and the signing ceremony would take place and we would raise a glass toasting each other and then depart gracefully and go home and go to bed. We Americans (there were only a few of us, and would fit in two cars), we gathered at the Embassy Chancery at about 11 PM. About 11:30 or so, we departed and as our cars departed from the Chancery, as the gates opened into what you could call the square that was immediately in front of it, this was in the heart of administrative downtown Tokyo, the streets leading into this area were suddenly blocked by squadrons of burly riot police, so that nobody could get in. As we turned and went up the major avenue, called Ripongi, as these two cars drove along, ahead of us on either side, platoons of these same riot police would appear blocking all entrance or exit and as we got up the block, they would then disappear, and this happened all the way up Ripongi, until we had to turn left in the direction of the Foreign Office Guest House, which by the way is on the same street, only a short distance from, the Soviet Embassy, but in this case, they blocked entrance from any egress or access to anybody for the entire time we were there for the signing ceremony and the formal toast of greeting to each other. I have never forgotten the efficiency which this was done. And that was a fitting approach to the next day's ceremony. That was all I have to say.

Q: With experience behind you, tell us what befell you next?

MEYERS: I came back to Washington, having broken my minimum four year assignment to Tokyo because of exigent family reasons. I would like to say here that Foreign Service Personnel, regarding me as a problem, was supportive, but that meant that I had, as almost always, to find my own job. Thanks to my past connections and experience with the Pentagon, I did. The remarkable retired Army officer known as Abe Lincoln, but really General George A. Lincoln, who was the head of one of the White House organizations called then. I can't remember the name, but it is now called FEMA, the Office of Federal Emergency Management, but it had a somewhat different name then: the Office of Emergency Preparedness is what it was. He had a very practical problem. Their regional offices, all ten of them, were spread across the country, were for the most part, not in the what are called the federal regional cities - the regional cities where there was an absolutely appropriate effort to group the principal federal agencies' regional offices. That had caused a lot of people to be moved in this organization. They were quite unhappy and the regional directors had various kinds of problems. What General Lincoln needed was a senior officer from another career agency who understood how to analyze what were basically inspector problems and to provide a report; who would, thank goodness, then go back to his own agency and not be around to provide difficulties in the continuation of I guess that leader's tenure, but any other leader's tenure. He was an old friend of Bill MacComber, who was what would now be called the Under Secretary for Administration, and MacComber knowing my background, because I had done some very unpleasant work for him in the past, tapped me and off I went.

It was one of the most interesting and most educational experiences in my career. In the first place, it got me all over the country. In the second place, it exposed me to the kinds of management problems that other major federal agencies have. In the third place it introduced me to a large number of these other agency regional directors. I had not appreciated, for example, that the regional directors of other agencies in Washington, such as Health and Education, or now Health and Human Services, would have management problems that were honestly somewhat comparable to those of other agencies. These regional directors have a lot of local, regional political support, so they were powers in dealing with their home offices in Washington. I had an opportunity thus to meet, in very pleasant lunches and other meetings, a fair number of these regional directors who were not members of the Office of Emergency Preparedness but who worked with it. It gave me an insight into the role of the federal government and differences and similarities in coping with regional issues so it was very valuable.

I developed a reputation, I discovered somewhat later, with the regional directors of this Emergency Preparedness Organization that when I came, bad weather was sure to accompany me. When I came to Atlanta, for example, they had the worst ice storm that they had had in two decades. But beyond these physical unpleasantnesses, what I received was a very useful education in both the differences and the similarities in the problems of regional offices. They are really quite different from the problems that the State Department has with the embassies and Consulates General, because we are all working, essentially, in the same field and if anybody has met a Consul General or even an Ambassador who has comparable political support vis-ŕ-vis the Department of State, I sure would like to meet him, because I haven't and these people were very impressive, most of them.

My experience in writing these various reports, analyses and recommendations for moderation or change lasted about nine months. Then I was called into the State Department and my old friend and colleague, Bill Sherman, gently but firmly said to me that I had to make up my mind to come back to the Department because I was really having a good time. I did, and ended up as the director of this very large office, the largest office in INR. My recollection is that we had 21 officers in three sections each in a different floor, so I maintained control by keeping in good physical condition, by running up and down those confounded stairs. I also had a very practical illustration of the difference between CIA and State because my opposite number in CIA, on the overt side, the directorate of intelligence, was Hank Knoche - he later became acting Director of CIA; he was a first class career person. For my 21 officers, he had over 250. I don't remember the exact number, but it doesn't matter. It is a good illustration of the difference. These were absolutely superb professionals, as if they were the best of members of academic faculties.

Q: May I interject here, would you give us the name of the officyou were assigned to?

MEYERS: Yes, I was director of Strategic and General Research. I found this numerical difference, as well as the exceptionally high quality and professionalism of the CIA people, to be very impressive and very sobering for me in terms of the role that we play. In my own office we had a very good, absolutely first class Strategic Affairs group. We were the technical backup for the SALT negotiations, so I was often in meetings of the SALT I working group and as frustrated as anybody else by the assignments given the group by Henry Kissinger, who was then in the White House, in order to keep us busy, and to keep us away from what he was doing in back channel. I had a number of old friends and colleagues who were on Gerard Smith's delegation doing the, let's call it the front channel work, mostly in Helsinki and in Moscow. They were remarkably qualified people, so I knew a fair amount of what was going on in these other locations. We also did much of the technical support work for the various efforts to make changes in NATO's activities in a broader field, particularly in the conventional arms reductions in Europe and things of that nature.

My happy experience was changed when I discovered that the highly competent head of my Strategic Affairs division was doing work that I knew nothing about, and he said that he could not disclose to me except that it was on Secretary Kissinger's direct order, Dr. Kissinger had then moved over to State. I went to my boss, Bill Hyland, the Assistant Secretary, who had been Kissinger's deputy at the National Security Council, and was subsequently the editor of the fine journal Foreign Affairs, and a long time CIA specialist and a gentleman, a fine man and a fine intellectual. I queried what was going on, and I said I realized that my colleague had understandably been reticent. He then said, well this was what Secretary Kissinger wanted. I then, in turn, said that the Secretary would, of course, achieve what he wished in these reorganizations, or in these terms, but I would not work for Bill Hyland under these circumstances.

Q: Did Mr. Hyland indicate that he had been aware of...

MEYERS: Yes. He regretted that he had not informed or advised me earlier and said that he understood my attitude, and here I would like to say that like the gentleman that he is and was, Hyland never held this against me and later on when I moved on to the job that I will describe in a bit, he was materially helpful in assuring that Kissinger would brief the very distinguished committee that I was working for, and in every respect was helpful when I sought advice or information. I can't speak more highly than I do of this very fine, utterly professional man. Well, once again, I was a personnel problem and once again I was able to work it out and ended up as the staff director of one of the two important advisory committees to the President. The other was PFIAB, the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. In this case, it was the Advisory Committee on Arms Control. It was chaired by Agnew, then director of Los Alamos, and had on it as such luminaries as Gerard Smith, and Dean Rusk, and Johnnie Wheeler, the man who discovered black holes, among the preeminent physicists of the world. And not least, the former governor of Pennsylvania, who was a close friend of then Vice President Ford's.

Q: Scranton?

MEYERS: Bill Scranton. And then of course, the committee was all of vast experience at a high level and of surpassing intelligence. My job was to brief the committee regularly and in order to achieve this, to maintain and extend the quite wide knowledge that I had of the key organizations in Washington and people who had known me for X number of years who were very helpful and on the whole very open in discussing such matters. I could not have been useful without this kind of relationship because I wrote papers to brief the committee, prepared their briefing books, arranged for speakers to come in. I forgot that among others, Harold Brown was a member of this committee, this was after he had been Secretary of the Air Force, but before he became the Defense Department's chief. He was at that time the President of Caltech.

Just to indicate the nature of the committee, normally the best person at a high level in a particular field would brief and one of the most disconcerting experiences I think for anybody must have been to brief when Harold Brown was present, because you have a high ranking general for example, or Assistant Secretary and they would be discoursing on a very technical subject or on a broad ranging important national security subject and Harold Brown would simultaneously be reading the Financial Times, turning over the pages of his briefing book, doing something else that I can't remember and then all of a sudden he would stop and he would ask a precise question on the precise subject being discussed by the briefer. He could do three things at one time. I don't know anybody who can do that.

When he became Secretary of Defense, I thought I had persuaded him - I really think I did - through our relationship on the committee, I was continuously in conversation over the telephone when he was in California or when he was here, I thought I had persuaded him that a great deal more work could be done with simulation where nuclear tests were concerned than had been done and with more accuracy, than particularly the AEC and secondly elements of the Pentagon believed. Whereas there was a field of doubt as to the accuracy of any kind of “inspection” system, a combination of various systems coupled with a larger extent of simulation efforts should narrow the area and we were being pressed - we being the United States government, as a result of achieving in the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament the Nonproliferation Treaty, to carry out those parts of the treaty which committed the major nuclear powers to much greater movement theoretically towards getting rid of nuclear weapons, practically towards eliminating nuclear weapons tests. We had entered into a commitment that, however difficult to achieve, required more active efforts to convince that we were trying to achieve them. I thought that I had Harold Brown pretty well convinced of this and then he became Secretary of Defense and that was the end of his continued support for this particular goal.

That's a slight diversion, but what I had not realized in my efforts to do more than a reasonably good job for the committee, where we might meet in, for example, SANDIA, or State, or at Los Alamos, and it was essential to get them the best briefings, to make the best kinds of suggestions for their further information in trying to get some kind of consensus, and apparently I had aroused opposition, among other areas on the part of the deputy director of ACDA, John Lehman, and the legal advisor of ACDA, Jim Malone, with the result that I was suddenly removed from my job. The State Department and the National Security Council staff subsequently objected to Lehman and to Malone that it was not their prerogative to make these decisions, but the decisions had been made and, as is the case in dealing with people with very strong political connections, as John Lehman had, it is difficult to reverse an action already taken. Let me say here that I found Lehman to be an extraordinarily intelligent and ruthless man. Malone was a lightweight, and I say this without mincing any words, I did in fact call him a stupid son-of-a-bitch to his face, so I don't think calling him a lightweight is pejorative. He had been a poor congressional liaison. It was he who identified those people on Gerard Smith's negotiating team who should be removed because they were not adequately supportive of the most conservative approach to arms control, and they were removed. A number of them told me how they were and why they were. These are mostly professionals from the other organizations and from the State Department. He came back to State in the Reagan administration as Assistant Secretary for Oceans, Environment etc, and I think it is widely agreed that he made an utter mess of our coping with the Law of the Sea Conference, which others had to straighten out subsequently.

Q: How would he and Lehman have the power to...

MEYERS: Oh, technically, the staff director position of this committee was paid for and housed in ACDA, but it was a position that required the consent of Defense, CIA, the NSC, in particular, and State. That's why there were these protests after the fact. But the high bureaucracy in those organizations didn't forget what had happened as I will describe subsequently, bureaucracy sometimes having a longer memory than people think. At any rate, unlike Malone, John Lehman had an absolutely first class mind, but he was ruthless with people that didn't agree with him and I was one of those people. I draw a clean distinction between the two in terms of competence.

It was done very neatly. I was moved to be a special assistant to Fred E. Iklé, the director of ACDA, and told to leave my files, and had as a result a direct confrontation with Malone, because when Iklé, another true gentleman, a very conservative man, but a very fine man, explained that he would like to have me work on the arms control impact analyses, that he was not getting what he considered to be, let's say adequate advice, he also asked me to make sure that the next meeting of the committee would be prepared for adequately, as he knew that I had started, and when I went to my files, I was barred from getting them and confronted by Malone. That's when I called him what he was but I said he was stupid because I couldn't possibly carry out my instructions given from Iklé if I couldn't get at the files. So, that is the way it got settled and I then found myself in a kind of a miasma.

In the first place, how do you get adequate information from the armed services, in particular, and the Pentagon's office of Defense Research and Engineering about the modalities of weapons development when they are not quite sure what those modalities might be and they certainly do not want to exchange or provide too much information to the arms control and disarmament organization. I knew that I was wandering around in an area in which nobody could be absolutely clear. I did the best that I could with clear understanding on my part that I was really quite inept. I could figure out a large part of the national security implications, but how much did they extend to the more precise weapons fields and how that might impact on arms control? That was an area largely of guess work. That's not unfair to say that it was guess work. But I went along and apparently my guess work was satisfactory to Iklé because for some months we met and discussed these issues, talking about forward planning and advanced DOD budgets and what is the ACDA position. We had to make a report to the Congress on this fertile subject. What should be the view of ACDA? We met regularly Iklé with Lehman and Malone and me. After some time had passed Iklé said that he would prefer to meet for an hour with me first and then to meet with the other two.

Q: With you present?

MEYERS: It was with me present. But he and I would have a meeting beforehand for me to express my views on the immediate issues presented which might not be necessarily wholly consistent with those of the other two, and that worked quite well till we got through the election campaign in which Jimmy Carter got elected. I kept doing my work and everything was moving along at a relative pace when I was asked by the acting head of ACDA, Iklé had of course departed, this was Lee Schloss, who was a friend and old colleague going back to the political military days, a first class mind and first class temperament, I was asked if I would be interested in going to Geneva to be the U.S. representative to the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament. Of course, as I always do when faced with that type of a question, I said, “Well, of course.”

Q: Before we leave your previous two incarnations to move on tGeneva, where was the Secretary of State in all of this? Did he...

MEYERS: Do you mean in my getting removed?

Q: In what was going on with ACDA and the relationships. You said that earlier on he had had special instructions for someone else working for you and then he more or less disappears from the scene. Was he lurking in the background there somewhere?

MEYERS: Well I was not even a fly on the wall so far as he was concerned, of course. This was a problem for some of his subordinates, but of course not for him. Of course, he played the major role in arms control issues, but in my judgment, he was simply the executor of views and policies decided upon by President Nixon. I believe that though surpassingly intelligent that Henry Kissinger is, that's all he was really. Whatever one may think about President Nixon in other respects, he really was superlatively competent in international affairs and I think genuinely understood the complexities of these multiple relations in arms control areas. So Kissinger basically ran the policy areas. People like Lehman, and to a much lesser degree, Malone, played their minor part in implementing the views that either he or other important players might have. My complaint about the ACDA people is that they were both largely mouth pieces for the most conservative Pentagon views. I think that is a fair statement, and not adequately representing either the responsibilities assigned by statute to the director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency or to the Secretary of State. So far as arms control policy was concerned and its general implementation, that's Henry Kissinger, and he in turn was just following what his master had concluded. I think that is a fair answer.

Q: But was he satisfied with the work that you were involved in?Not you personally, but...

MEYERS: He couldn't have cared less, as far as I could see. Q: So there was a dual track still going?

MEYERS: Yes, in my judgment. Well, dual track: the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency had a statutory responsibility to provide advice basically to the Secretary of State. Various ACDA directors may have thought it was providing advice directly to the President, but it was through the Secretary of State, as it should be. I think it is sensible to have ACDA back in the State Department. No, the issues extended beyond the basic State-ACDA relations. They even extended beyond Defense-State relations. It involved often the personal views of all the military services and organizations such as the old AEC. They played very important roles, as is only natural in the development of any policy. Every delegation to international arms control discussions was very carefully put together with representation from all the major players. There was usually, not always, only one Defense representative, and that was provided through the Joint Chiefs of Staff, there might also be a Secretary of Defense International Security Affairs representative, but not always. I think on the whole that the United States government fielded very responsible and competent delegations with effective support, not always enthusiastic, but effective support from the military and other organizations.

Q: Well, forgive me, you were being offered Geneva?

MEYERS: Well, this was a great surprise, and I didn't think much about it in any way. Some time went by and then at 5:15 on a Thursday evening, I was called up to the office of the expectant head of ACDA, Paul Warnke, and his appointment had been held up in the Senate by the distinguished Republican Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms, who claimed he had all kinds of questions he wanted to ask. Warnke asked if I would be ready to go to Geneva, leaving at noon on the following Saturday, to be present for the entire session, which would last for three or four months, it was four months, and I said, “Of course.”

Q: This session of the Conference of the...

MEYERS: Committee on Disarmament. Now called the Conference on Disarmament and it has changed in to important respects. The first is that in the Conference on the Committee on Disarmament, the Soviet and American representatives were co-chairs, expected to develop the Committee's plan of work, which was very important because the Committee operated then, and always has, and still does, on the basis of consensus. No, it has moved up from, I think it was 32 in my day, to something like 72 now, and the Chinese have come in and the French have come in so it is much more complicated, but at least, thank goodness, they do not have this system of American and Soviet co-chairs. That was I think by all odds the most difficult job I ever had. It was a great strain.

I was doing two things. I led a delegation first to the Conference to prepare for the treaty review of the Seabed Arms Control Treaty, which is a very important one that you don't hear much about, in which the various powers agree that they will not site nuclear weapons on the seabeds beyond their territorial sea. That was quite an experience. That job was done first. That resulted in a minor first-time event. The chair of that Conference was the Polish Ambassador. He was very objective. This was a very large conference, I think we had well over a hundred states represented and the need both to try to move the proceedings along and to get agreements, when we were disagreeing on such important points as the amount of money that we were going to contribute, I had a somewhat acid exchange with the Indian representative on that particular point till with help from my colleagues at my back, I drew out what a difference it would be in the amount of money; it was very minor. I no longer remember the sums, but what the Indian was proposing and what we were proposing amounted to a relatively small amount of money as to what our support costs would be. This was just an objection just to be objectionable on the part of the Indian government, really.

The Polish representative did a superlative job in moving the Conference along, helping resolve disagreements, and being absolutely fair and objective. My Soviet colleague, to my surprise, approached me at a reception one time and asked whether the United States might possibly agree to support the Soviets, if they proposed, or we jointly proposed, that the Polish representative be the chair of the review conference. I said that I would certainly support that, but that I would have to find out what Washington thought. To my enormous surprise, they agreed! It was the first time that the Soviet Union and the United States had jointly proposed something of this order. I think it was a triumph of common sense in Washington and nothing that I argued in my cable of proposal. That was one nice aspect of what was otherwise a rather dull conference.

When we moved on to the disarmament conference, that was a different matter. In the first place, I started the bilateral discussions with the Soviets on chemical warfare. They brought in experts, we had one expert, who continued on with this subject for years. It was the beginning of what, I think about 14 years later, was a treaty, very much in our interest, because of the inspection problems, broadly supported by the chemical industry in the United States and held up for purely ideological point, or grounds in the Senate, as you know. That was one advance. The other was trying to move forward discussions on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. I cannot say that we made any progress in any discernable way on that subject. It took many years. I picked up, in other words, where I had been unsuccessful with Harold Brown and tried to move it forward, with support and directions from Washington, now, not just my own views, but I very thoroughly approved of this effort which got nowhere. That's really about it. We did work out, in the committee, a forward-looking work plan, but that was about it.

There were a couple of funny occasions during the meetings. One I remember vividly was a luncheon at the Finnish Ambassador's, which he was using trying to push forward his candidacy for chair of a committee, as being in the European interest. The Soviet representative, a career officer who was a Chinese specialist, named Likhachef, first name was Victor, and who was as tough as nails, but a first class professional. The two of us were explaining how our countries were regarded as both Asian powers, as well as European powers, in almost exactly the same language. It was genuinely funny. I was trying not to laugh while this was going on, because we would pick up each other's comments at the end of the comment, and very smoothly carry on and it did not matter we were both saying the same thing. That was very amusing. I enjoyed that. Anyhow, the conference came to an end after almost four months. I returned to Washington, I cleared out my desk and I wrote a whole series of notes and comments that I thought would be useful for my successor representative, and who was interestingly enough, an old friend and colleague, the former legal advisor at State.

Q: ...elder...

MEYERS: He was a fellow elder at the same church in Georgetown. This was of course the end of my Foreign Service career, because I turned 60 years while I was away on this assignment and the Foreign Service act provided in those days (I retired under the Act of 1946), that if you did not have a Presidential assignment task, which is what the job held then was, you would have to retire at age 60. My successor, Adrian Fisher, was to be the chosen U.S. representative to this committee, so I wrote a whole series of notes I thought would be useful, I packed up my books and I went off to write a study for a group of papers that were being put together by the U.S. Information Agency on various policies of the new administration. I wrote one on the nuclear foreign policy of the new administration. Then formally retired. But I found myself back in the State Department as senior reviewer for classified document declassification. In fact, another man, Clay McManaway, and I put together the Department's centralized declassification system. That was the end of that part of my formal career, although I did carry on in two other part-time jobs for the State Department.

Q: ...Freedom of Information work you did, which has certainly become a major user of Department resources.

MEYERS: Indeed it has and will continue to do so. It is one of these usual experiences, I was standing in a coffee line in the Department in this period after I had retired and while I was preoccupied with writing this very complicated paper, trying to make sense out of the Carter administration's nuclear policy, and I ran into a personnel officer from EUR who had been with me in London who said “Would you be interested?” And as I've indicated, I always said yes to questions like these and the next thing I knew I found myself going over declassification requests for documents still classified that were in the purview of the Bureau of European Affairs, which had the widest purview. 80 some odd percent of requests under the Freedom of Information Act in those days were for documents in EUR. They were hopelessly swamped. I helped alleviate this issue.

One day, we had a meeting of all the Deputy Assistants on this subject and the questions which was posed by the senior to the others was “Well what do you think of this operation that Howard and the others are involved in?” and they all said, “Oh, thank God, it enables us to do our work and we have a chance to see what is being proposed and disagree with it if necessary; we rarely do. It is just great.” Then I was asked the question, and I said, “It is all very interesting. I think things are going along very well, but I have never been anywhere where you can get so many divergent views on exactly the same problem as is in this Bureau.” Next thing I knew I was tasked with writing guidelines, so I did and we cleared them. Other people remember Warren Zimmerman in different ways, an absolutely superb officer, an Ambassador, but I remember him as a tough nut when it came to protecting the interests of his parish, jurisdictionally. We argued like mad over fine points of language, in working out what was a very useful statement of policy and how to deal with issues. We were so happy with our very obviously, very widespread appreciation in the Bureau that we tried to sell it to other bureaus. At least one other did adopt it. As usual, NEA was way ahead of the rest of the Department, less constricted for some reason - very forward thinking.

Then the decision was made, when Clay McManaway was brought in by Larry Eagleburger, that we needed to have this on a Department-wide basis, with a couple of exceptions, one of them naturally being Diplomatic Security. Then we struggled for a year, trying to put together procedures and, in my case, writing the policy proposals for each functional and geographical area, clearing it carefully with the bureaus concerned in order to have a comprehensive system. There were some strange aspects to this. I remember going up to the senior Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Inter-American Affairs Bureau and saying to him, “Look we can't go forward like this - in fact we can't go on like this. Why should I have to consider that anything having to do with tourism in this bureau must be cleared with the desk? This is absurd!” That's the sort of attitude we had to overcome, and did, successfully. This particular man has remained a friend of mine ever since, a very sensible and hard driving officer. This, however, then faced us with the problem of incorporating, the Department's civil service bureaucracy in the A bureau, the Bureau of Administration. That proved and is still a much more difficult issue: How to move paper rapidly enough to satisfy exigencies? The Department does poorly in this respect. It has tried, but it has done poorly in my judgment. I do place the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the paper movers. That's about all that I really ought to say about this subject, because I would then become more indiscreet than I have already been. I would like to go back...

Q: Before you go back, you mentioned that you did one or two othethings for the government. Could you just mention what those were?

MEYERS: Well, I was and I still am actually a member of the State Department Board of Appellate Review. This is one of the ways in which the Department uses obtuse terms to hide what an organization actually does. I am actually an administrative law judge for the Department, where appeals for loss of U.S. nationality abroad or restrictions on or denial of passport services are concerned. This has been a singularly good operation, because it costs the Department practically nothing. All of the members of the Board work for other organizations in the State Department with the single exception, until recently, of one fine man, Allen James, chairman of the Board who was a retired Foreign Service officer paid as a WAE employee (i.e., when actually employed), and who has been the chair of this committee for many, many years. He's a first class lawyer and extremely knowledgeable in this kind of 14th Amendment to the Constitution issue. I cannot describe the kinds of questions that have come up except to say that it is the decision of this Board and its predecessors, which can be appealed to the federal courts, which have ultimately gone to the Supreme Court and that now ultimately guide the Department and the INS - the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Some of them are very important, some of them are not quite so important. The Congress, in particular, has loosened its approach to the nationality question over the last ten years to a degree that makes it far more difficult for the Department to remove U.S. nationality, unless there is a straightforward self-abrogation of nationality accompanied by an act so clear that there isn't any questionabout the state of mind. This is simple language, getting away from the language of the law. Some of the cases have been very interesting.

That's the main job I have continued for the State Department. I am also an arbitrator for the Attorney Client Arbitration Board for the District of Columbia bar. That has been very satisfactory. It takes out of the District Courts material with which juries are often ill-equipped to deal and, more importantly, it lightens the load on the court system. I will not describe it other than to say that it can involve amounts as little as a thousand dollars and as much as - this is a straightforward description of a case in which I was not only involved but in which I was the chair of the panel - that ended up with our awarding over a million dollars in an issue that involved over 20 million dollars.

End of interview