FROM THE UNITED NATIONS TO THE PALISADES
INTERVIEWED BY TED HESTER*
Ted Hester: Ambassador McHenry, you have had a fascinating career that will be of interest to the readers of The Conduit. You served as United States Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1979 to 1981. Let’s start with where you grew up and went to school.
Ambassador Donald McHenry: I grew up in East Saint Louis, Illinois. However, I was born in St. Louis, Missouri, which created a problem that would arise some 40 years later when I was up for confirmation in the Senate for my first appointment, US Deputy Representative to the UN Security Council. The Senate has a tradition that at a confirmation hearing, the nominee is introduced by one of the senators from his or her state. Well, I was born in Missouri and spent whatever time was required there for new mothers to stay in the hospital. That was the length of my stay in Missouri. The rest of my youth was in Illinois right across the river. When I came to be confirmed, the senators from Missouri insisted I was born there and the senators from Illinois insisted that it was a technicality and I had grown up in Illinois. The fact is they all four introduced me! Well, that was a good start.
TH: You had a lot of support moving to the UN!
DMcH: It was a very interesting town, about to reach its high point in population of about 95,000 when I was in high school, and then just kept going down. Now I don’t think it’s 20 percent the size. I went to local schools, and as I remember them, pretty good schools—de facto segregated, not de jure, but de facto segregated.
TH: And then from high school …
DMcH: I went to Illinois State. I looked at Southern Illinois. In fact, I went there for what they called a hospitality weekend where they invited high school seniors. My chaperone was Dick Gregory. He was himself a student at the time. He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and went to Southern Illinois in Carbondale. I don’t know how he was assigned to me, but he was. I saw him when I arrived and I saw him when I left.
Many years later we were both at a dinner and I told the story of how I met Dick Gregory and the audience cracked up. Gregory, who was quite agile with words, said, “Well, how the hell did I know he was gonna be somebody?” So I didn’t go. I went up to Illinois State. However, after I had finished my degree, I went back to Southern Illinois to do a Master’s degree. I couldn’t decide what I was going to do in life, and I actually did two majors at the Master’s level. One was in International Affairs and the other in Rhetoric and Public Address. I was fascinated with debate. I was an assistant debate coach when I was there.
I left there for Washington in the summer of 1957 and enrolled at Georgetown in the Graduate School. I was trying to decide whether I was going to be a teacher or go into the Foreign Service. I taught at night at Howard University and coached their debate team. I was waiting to see which would happen first, going into the State Department or finishing my PhD. Diplomacy won.
TH: So you got into the Foreign Service. Did you immediately go overseas?
DMcH: No, no, I didn’t. I was assigned to the Office of the United Nations Dependent Area Affairs. It was a fascinating assignment, in part because of the people who were there. Adlai Stevenson was in New York. Joe Sisco, who later became deputy secretary of state, was head of UN political affairs, which was a branch of where I was, and a number of people who later themselves became quite outstanding in the diplomatic service. But I started out in the bottom of that office. UN Dependent Area Affairs was really the relationships between the United States and the remaining colonies of the world, mostly in Africa and Southeast Asia. The objective in a sense was to work your way out of a job because responsibility for those areas would move from this office to a geographic office once those countries became independent. As long as they were not independent, they were in this office where I was. I started out working on Southwest Africa and a related case before the International Court of Justice; on South Africa, which we treated as still dependent even though it was independent; the Portuguese territories; the remaining colonies in Southeast Asia; and the remaining colonies in North Africa. So, it was a fascinating period of time for me.
An interesting part of that period was connected to my high school days when Adlai Stevenson came back to Illinois to become governor. He had been an idol of mine from high school days and now he was in New York as US Permanent Representative to the United Nations. I was in Washington, and I got to meet the great man and to work with him. He didn’t know I was from Illinois, and I didn’t tell him. But one day, Marietta Tree, who was at the UN with Stevenson and, as you know, was a very close companion of Stevenson, told him I was from Illinois. I had a pretty good relationship with Stevenson from that point on. He died while I was still in that office. I stayed there from 1963 to the election of 1968. It was during that period that the case I was working on before the International Court of Justice on the independence of South West Africa was decided, or you can say, sidestepped, by the Court. The Court decided that those who brought the case, namely Liberia and Ethiopia, did not have sufficient standing to receive a judgment from the Court.
Everybody, and I mean everybody, had thought that they had finally cornered the South Africans on that case and the case was a slam dunk. I, however, said, “well, I think we’re right, but we ought to do some contingency planning in the unlikely event the Court decided otherwise.” I think I was the only person of those working on that case, whether it was the legal office or political office or policy planning, who insisted on contingency planning. Well, there was an uproar when that case came down. The Court decided that the complainants did not have sufficient standing to receive a decision. The Court was denounced, and all the judges were denounced, particularly the white judges from the north and most specifically the Australian president of the Court who, as president, cast the tie-breaking vote. It was so bad that there was a special session of the General Assembly on what to do with this situation where the Court had taken this position.
President Lyndon Johnson decided to appoint former attorney general Bill Rogers as the special representative to this General Assembly session on what to do in this case. Obviously, this was a time when a Democratic president was not adverse to appointing an outstanding former Republican attorney general. I was assigned to work with Rogers in New York on this case.
TH: That should have been a treat.
DMcH: Yes, yes, and that’s how I met Bill Rogers, in that six- to nine-month period we worked together on this case in New York. I increasingly was running my office, which I now headed, almost in my spare time. It was 1966. Later, particularly after working with Rogers, I started being sent off by Secretary of State Rusk and [now Assistant Secretary] Joe Sisco and to work on various other high-level assignments, still responsible for my office. And it was during that period that I got to be known around the building.
But the real change in my assignments came after the 1968 election when Nixon was elected. The telephone rings, it’s Bill Rogers. “Don, the president is about to appoint me as Secretary of State and I need some help in this period right ahead.” Rusk agreed. I was assigned to the transition office for Rogers. This was the first transition office I was in, from Rusk to Rogers, Johnson to Nixon. And I stayed with Rogers, sometimes as a staff assistant, sometimes as a special assistant, sometimes in the Office of the Counselor of the Department of State until I left to go on leave in 1971. I left because I increasingly didn’t like what was going on in Vietnam and Cambodia. I was not responsible for those areas, but everybody knew that my position meant I knew what was going on and I had a hand in it.
TH: So, in 1971 you went on leave ...
DMcH: For two years. In that period, I had an International Affairs Fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, but I took it at the Brookings Institution in Washington. When Nixon was re-elected in 1973, I ended my leave and retired from the State Department. I mean, I quit, not retired. I quit, resigned and spent time at Brookings, and then the Carnegie Endowment until the Carter election, where I served again on a Presidential Transition Team, and went from there with Carter.
TH: Were you involved in the Carter campaign?
DMcH: From my point of view, no, but technically, yes. I was asked in June before the election to serve on an advisory group on foreign affairs that was going to be run by Stuart Eizenstat. I agreed to do so with a number of other people who had left the State Department because of Vietnam and Cambodia. However, it coincided with a fellowship that I had from the Common Market, now called the European Union. I had gotten a fellowship to travel for the summer of that year, which I think was 1976. I had planned to travel through Europe with my son. That’s what I did that summer. So technically I was on this advisory group. I tried occasionally to be on the telephone with them, but I wasn’t that active.
That fall, Cyrus Vance was appointed the incoming Secretary of State. He asked several of us including me and Tony Lake, Dick Moose and Dick Holbrooke to work on the transition team. I don’t know how they run transition teams today, but it was a small group of us then. I would say about ten people covered foreign affairs. We divided the State Department and the foreign affairs responsibilities among ourselves. I was responsible for USIA, USAID, Africa, Latin America. I worked both on briefing materials, trying to see what the president-elect had said in the campaign that we had to conform to, identifying people to fill the many positions and just the whole organizational structure. We did that, and a number of us went on to serve in the Carter Administration.
I went to the UN as deputy representative on the Security Council with the rank of ambassador. We have five ambassadors there that require confirmation. Andrew Young had been appointed as the permanent representative. He turned to Vance to ask him about who else might serve with him. It turned out that Vance wanted me to go there. I’m not sure he originally wanted me there. He kept asking me what I wanted to do. We had this little hiccup because National Security Advisor [Zbigniew] Brzezinski wanted me to come to the White House. Vance was not a great fan of Brzezinski. He said, “You don’t want to do that. Just go over and talk with him, but you don’t want to do that.” So, I did go, and I did talk with him, and I concluded: no, I don’t want to do that.
When Andrew Young’s name was announced, it was a Saturday. All the transition staff was dead tired. I mean absolutely dead tired. We had been working every day from early morning to late night. And there were two logical people from our staff to brief Andy Young. One was Bill Maynes who had been with me in the same State Department office. Bill was a brilliant writer who would serve as assistant secretary for international organization affairs and later as editor of Foreign Policy magazine. The other was Don McHenry. I knew the UN thoroughly from my earlier days there. And the question was, who was going to brief Andy? We flipped a coin. I didn’t want to do it. Bill didn’t want to do it. Not because we had anything against Andy. We were just dead tired. I won! Bill Maynes had to brief Andrew Young.
If you go to some reference books, somehow the story got out that I was a longtime associate of Andy Young, had been active and worked with Andy in the civil rights movement. I had never met Andy Young, had never spent any time in the South and had never worked in the civil rights movement except in putting people up who came to march in Washington. Whether they were marching on Vietnam or Cambodia or whatever, my house was known to be open to students. This story is still out there today, that I was a long-time associate of Andy Young, active in the civil rights movement. It’s fascinating. And you can’t get rid of the story. I know when over the years I’ve been introduced by one person or another, I know exactly where they did their research.
TH: So, you were in the UN in the role of deputy representative to the Security Council serving with Andrew Young.
DMcH: I handled the Security Council, which is the number three position in the US delegation at the UN. The number two position was held by Jim Leonard, who also was very close to Cy Vance. Vance had also recommended to Andy that Leonard be there. We carved up our responsibilities. I spent most of the first period of time trying to solve that South West Africa case and succeeded in getting the Security Council to endorse an independence plan in early ’79, could have been late ’78. Everybody signed on to it. It had not been fully implemented at the time that Reagan came in. Reagan added all kinds of additional things that he wanted. It took them ten years to implement, and it was the same plan that we had negotiated in 1978. It’s very interesting that a new book on Reagan by Max Boot is one of the first books that looks at Reagan with a cold and objective eye. It comes down pretty hard on Reagan for his policies in this area. That’s consistent with the stalling and stuff that went on for ten years in which thousands of people lost their lives, and they still ended up doing exactly what we had agreed to ten years earlier.
I probably would have continued on, on implementation and other things. But Camp David took place during the same period. The Camp David Agreement had been reached. Jim Leonard was pulled out of the US mission to go set up the military arrangements for Camp David. And so, the pecking order at the mission went one to three, to me. Jim was away and I was there.
And then, the pressure to resign built up on Andy Young, who then resigned. I ran the place for that summer with a lot of speculation on who was going to be this and that. I received a request from Carter to come down and talk, “but don’t tell anybody where you’re going!” I said, “How in the world am I going to get down there without telling anybody?” “And he wants you to come this evening.” I said, “well, I have a party this evening for one of the people who’s leaving.” So after an hour or so at the party, I got a plane down and went directly to the White House. The president was in his private quarters, and we sat down, talked for about an hour. He went over all kinds of things and told me he was looking for someone to succeed Andy Young. He had worked with me very closely on a number of things while I was handling the Security Council: on the Middle East, on the Israelis going into Lebanon, on the boat people in Southeast Asia and, of course, on South Africa and Namibia. So, I’d had a pretty good amount of time with him just from the position where I was. And, of course, right before then, we had had this huge brouhaha with the Soviet Union that took place in New York.
I was somewhere at one reception or another, and I got a call that I should come immediately to JFK because they needed someone there of “stature” to handle a problem with a dancer from the Bolshoi who had defected. The Soviets were trying to smuggle his wife, who was also a Bolshoi dancer, out of the United States. Rumor was (it wasn’t a rumor because the FBI knew exactly what was going on) that she was going to be on a plane leaving that evening for Moscow. They were trying to keep it all quiet. And, we should make sure that she’s going of her own free will. So, I jumped in the car and we went to JFK. I told the driver I’ll be about an hour, just wait for me.
It was three days later that I left. Every newspaper, every television in the United States was there at JFK and the Pan Am terminal. I stopped the plane. I mean, I would not allow them to take off. I wanted to interview the wife, and the Soviets did not want me to interview her. I said, “Well, we’ll just sit here.” Then they said, “You can interview her on the plane.” I said, “Nope. I’m not going to do that. What if she wants to leave? I want her to know that she doesn’t have to stay on this plane.” This went on for three days, day and night. She was on the plane, and the plane was loaded. The Soviets wouldn’t let any of the passengers off. We offered to let them off, but they wouldn’t let them. Those Soviet planes were three and three across, and I mean really tight. So, they were all sitting there when I went on the plane, but I wouldn’t interview her. I explained to her what was going on and why she was being held up.
I was in touch with Carter and Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher constantly to let them know what I was doing. Finally, I suggested to the Soviets, “You know we’re in New York where they have these buggies that they hook up to planes and go in and out. I’ll interview her in one of those. We’ll attach one of these and when she comes out I can tell her ‘if you want to stay here, you go that way, if you want to go out, if you want to go back, you go that way.’ And if I’m convinced that she did it on her own free will, we’ll let her go.” Well, that’s what we did. We hooked up one of those mobile lounges to the plane. I had an American expert on the Soviet Union with me, as well as a Russian interpreter. I also had a psychologist with me, and I had an aide. That’s how we did that. I talked with her for about half an hour or so with a translator. I was convinced that she was going back on her own free will and so were all the others who were with me. After the discussion, I said, “now you can go either way you want to go.” She got on the plane. Then all those people who for three days had been cheering me, saying stand up to those commies, now were saying, “You stupid idiot, how could anybody want to go back to communism.” That wasn’t my job. My job was to find out what she wanted to do.
So, back to my visit with Carter. I knew him very well from that, and from the negotiations on South Africa and the trip with [Vice President Walter] Mondale to Austria for negotiations with the South Africans. So, I’d seen him a lot and talked with him a lot. But in any event, we talked for about an hour that night. At the end of it, he said, “Thanks for coming down. I’m going to make up my mind in the next couple of days.” I got up to leave, went downstairs and was waiting for my car to pick me up. Bouncing out of the door after a couple of minutes comes Jimmy Carter who says, “I’ve changed my mind, I’ve decided I want you to take this job.” So, that’s how it happened. After that I was with him frequently, especially on the Iran hostage situation. He was a very businesslike guy. Sometimes I was in agreement with him, sometimes not. I didn’t hesitate to tell him when I wasn’t in agreement with him. He came down on my side more times than not, whether it was a dispute with [Edmund] Muskie, who became secretary of state, or Brzezinski. I stayed as permanent representative until the end of the Carter administration when I came down to Georgetown.
TH: So, at the end of your term, which would have been January of 1981, you came back to Georgetown. When you were at the UN, did you and your family move to New York? Were you living in New York at the time?
DMcH: When I left Brookings to go to the Carnegie Endowment in late ’74, my then-wife took a position at Mount Holyoke College and the girls for most of the time were in South Hadley.
We ended up getting a divorce in about ’77. Shortly after I was in New York, but I guess before we got a divorce, the girls came to New York to live. We lived in a townhouse until my appointment as permanent representative when we moved to the official home of the permanent representative, a large apartment on the 42nd floor of the Waldorf Astoria. It was an adaptation for all of us as the girls didn’t like the security guys knowing everything about them, and even about me. One of them said to me one day, “Daddy, you can't even have an affair without these guys knowing it.” We stayed there until it was clear that I might leave, depending on the election. And so, the September before I left in January, I sent Elizabeth off to boarding school. She still had two or three years of high school left. Christina had left high school a year early and started going to NYU. She couldn’t graduate from high school because she hadn’t taken driving, so she took driving and courses at NYU from January to June.
When I came back from New York, I had previously lived up on 16th Street, almost out of the District. We had a grand old house there. I came back and sold it and bought a place on Oregon Avenue. I stayed there for about fifteen years and started looking around. That’s when I came to Partridge Lane. I moved here in January of 2000, so I must have bought this place in about ’97, something like that.
The girls and I, in this instance both girls, Michael was off in Oxford at school, started looking for a house to move out of our townhouse. I was looking for something that I could tear down. The girls were looking for a nice house. We would go from one house to another and they’d look at them and come away enchanted. I didn’t even bother to look at them. I was just looking for a nice neighborhood to build a house.
TH: Did you have something in mind for your house?
DMcH: I had something in mind. I did then and still favor early American, by which I mean almost British housing, and 18th-century furniture and housing. I even had a place down in Williamsburg that I really liked. It was owned by a guy named Hennage, who had a printing company in Alexandria. It was a fascinating house. There were books written about how he collected this and collected that and the materials used and so forth. But I couldn’t find any place in Washington that was wide enough for this house. And finally my architects said, “Well, let’s bend it.” It really is supposed to be straight.
TH: Fascinating. So, it was not the Governor’s Palace in Colonial Williamsburg, it was a different house that was your model.
DMcH: Yes, I have books on it. And so we looked at a lot of houses, in this neighborhood and further back, going towards Wisconsin and right outside of where the old mill is in Rock Creek Park, close to Marjorie Merriweather Post’s house. We just looked and we came upon this house. It was a nice area and it was close in. It’s sort of like being in a big city but almost as if you’re in a rural area.
TH:So you have a nice big lot and not a lot of traffic on a cul de sac.
DMcH: Right. And there’s a community spirit which has been maintained through the period that I’ve been here. At one period, I toyed with downsizing and finally decided that I wasn’t going to do it. There were a variety of reasons. A: I couldn’t find anything I wanted to downsize to in the way of an apartment, and B: the pandemic came along and I decided that I did not want to be locked up in an apartment in these circumstances. So, I just decided to stay and make some changes here. I have been pleased with that decision. I wish I’d done it a little earlier. It’s worked out very well, actually.
TH: Let’s turn to your career when you came back to Washington. You said you came back to Georgetown University.
DMcH: While I was on leave back in ’71 to ’73, I also taught at Georgetown. I was at Brookings and taught courses at Georgetown in the evening. During that period of time, I met Father Timothy Healy, the president of Georgetown University. I was on a committee to select White House Fellows and he was the chair. That’s where our friendship started. When I was ready to leave the UN, unbeknownst to me, Father Healy had started scheming with Elsworth Bunker and Peter Krogh, the dean of the School of Foreign Service, to get me back to Georgetown. And that’s how I came back.
TH: So from that time, you have stayed at Georgetown.
DMcH: I have stayed at Georgetown all this period of time, more than 30 years, and it was a delightful place to teach. The first thing is that Healy made it clear that I would not be burdened with some of the parts of the university that are not so pleasant, like committees and stuff, and they allowed me to take on a number of international assignments while still at Georgetown. And so, I served for two years as special presidential envoy for [Bill] Clinton on Nigeria. I would go off to Nigeria and I’d stay for a week or two weeks or something of that nature a number of times. I was able to do that while still meeting my responsibilities at Georgetown. I served as a special envoy on Algeria, can’t remember the year, for Kofi Annan, secretary general of the UN and I didn’t have to leave Georgetown. After the bombing of our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the president wanted a review of our embassies from a security point view. I served on a panel, I traveled quite extensively around our embassies, but I was able to do it while staying at Georgetown. And Healy’s attitude extended beyond that. For example, he called me one day and he said, “There’s a guy from Black & Decker who wants to talk with you. I think they want you to serve on a corporate board. Can you have dinner or whatever with him?” He says, “I’m just the middleman. You decide if you want to.” Well, it turned out it was a guy from Black & Decker, but he was speaking for what is now GlaxoSmithKline. And so, I did that. I served on that board, and then I got a call from Jim Robinson, CEO of American Express, with whom I had had some previous association. He said they’re making a lot of changes at Coca-Cola, and I just want to talk with you about Coke. He said, “I would like for you to meet the chairman.” That’s how Coke came up. I knew Jim Robinson from New York at American Express. He had been so nice to me, and he was on the Coke board. As you know, those jobs like US permanent representative to the UN or ambassador to Paris or London can require some deep pockets, and I did not have a deep pocket. One of the things Carter did was appoint people who didn’t have deep pockets. Art Hartman went to Paris for example, and he was a career Foreign Service officer. Robinson co-sponsored a number of receptions as part of American Express’s operation. It was extremely helpful. So I knew him from then.
I got to know Robinson even better because of one of the people I brought into the UN, Joan Spero. I brought her in as the number four ambassador to the UN. Joan had been an economics professor at Columbia with a solid background in international economics. Historically, we had had that number four position filled by some socialite woman, politically connected. I decided we were going to have it filled by a woman, but a woman whose expertise was without question. And she didn’t have to be politically connected. Carter had given me a blank check in terms of the people who were going to be around me. So I put out the word that we were looking for a woman in international economics for that position. A number of people were referred to me. One of them who was not referred, but we went to her, was Joan Spero. Marvelous woman, very bright, and she was reluctant. Why? Because she was up for tenure, and she had worked very hard for it. Well, the brilliant male chauvinists at Columbia decided they weren’t going to give her tenure, and nobody could figure out why, except the good old boys who made the decision. So I went back to her when I found out she didn’t get tenure and persuaded her to take the job. She did. She was great. When we left after the end of the Carter Administration, I put her in touch with Jim Robinson, who hired her on the spot. She became number three at American Express. And later on, after she left there, she became undersecretary of state for international economic affairs. And then she was the founding head of the Doris Duke Foundation. By the way, the people at Columbia called me and wanted me to help persuade Joan to go back to Columbia. She did later, as a trustee, and when her term ended as a trustee, at the trustees’ dinner, she told the story of her association with Columbia. And she said there were two important people in her life that she had a special place for. The first one was one of the guys at Columbia who was in economics and who had favored giving her tenure. He got his revenge because one of his children told Joan that every time Joan’s name appeared in the newspaper, he would send the column to the Economics Department. And then she said the second one was Don McHenry, with whom she worked.
But in any event, I then went on a number of corporate boards. AT&T, Coke, SmithKline Bechman, International Paper, Bank of Boston, which is now Bank of America. This was a period when you could do a number of corporate boards because the board meetings were sort of a two-hour meeting-lunch, and that was it. Today, it requires a tremendous amount of time. Board meetings are two days, plus committee meetings in the intervals, plus special meetings. I mean, it’s now become jobs. I saw this change take place over a period of years. So, today you wouldn’t think of trying to do five corporate boards. You couldn’t do it. But I did a number of corporate boards and I was able to do those while at Georgetown. I was able to both continue to take these special assignments, and to do those corporate boards while teaching.
TH: Do you still have a relationship with Georgetown?
DMcH: Yes. I’m still on the Advisory Board of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. There are some students there who are called McHenry Fellows, which I have financed to a great extent. Graduate students. Occasionally, I will teach in somebody else’s class. I do that less and less, but I’m still technically on the faculty. I’m emeritus.
TH: As we wind down, would you like to comment on the current direction of US foreign policy?
DMcH: You know, I was thinking about that the other day. There was a time when young foreign service officers who had worked with me and who had moved up in the Foreign Service were very discouraged about some event or the direction of policy. This was particularly true with Trump the first time. I tried to encourage them to stay in the service, that it would be important for them to make whatever contribution they could, to make sure they inserted their own perspective into the process. They were gathering experience which they could use later on, either in life or at the State Department, because things change. And I asked myself this same thing the other day; what would I counsel them now? The young woman who is the current interim ambassador to the UN is a former Georgetown student of mine. She remains interim ambassador because she was deputy in the number two slot when the Administration changed. They don’t want to put the new ambassador in because they would lose a vote in the House of Representatives and the margin is razor-thin. The person they wanted to put there is Representative [Elise] Stefanik from New York. So, she stays there.
But what is she going through? I know, not because she’s told me so, but I worked with her long enough to know that these positions she’s had to take there are not hers. I think she thinks it’s sufficiently clear that they are not hers, that everybody who knows her understands the position she’s in. But what would I advise someone now in terms of going there? I don’t know. If she were younger in the service I suppose I would advise her the way I have traditionally done, which is, hang in there. Stay in there. It’s important to stay in there. But the changes are so drastic that I might even have a hard time convincing myself that I should look forward and not be despondent about what I see going on. When I was at the UN, if I did something somebody on the staff didn’t like, they knew me well enough that they would say, “well, this too shall pass,” meaning they’d be there and I’d be gone. And our relationship was such that it didn’t bother me. And I think I have to continue telling myself, this too shall pass. The question is, how much damage is being done now, not just in policies but, more importantly, in terms of our institutions. That’s the thing that bothers me. The institutions are being wrecked. When I was a kid growing up, I always thought that in the final analysis, whatever there was would eventually be corrected, because we had these marvelous institutions. In particular, we had the Supreme Court. I don't know what I would tell myself today because I think the court has been politicized more than it has historically been.
I think the Justice Department has been politicized. I think our civil service, which I look to be the nonpartisan implementer of laws and practices, has been politicized. So, I’m not very encouraged. I’m not encouraged at all. You take something like Ukraine, of course one wants an end to the war, but there are ways of going about it. If you want negotiation based on a ceasefire, you don’t shoot your friend in the foot or tie his hands behind his back. There are ways of doing that, and certainly you have to understand the problem more thoroughly, I think, than the current Administration understands it. Putin isn’t going to agree separately just because he wants to befriend Trump. Putin has a vision, and unless he gets what he wants to fulfill that vision, he is not going to make any substantive changes. He’s just not going to do it. He won’t even do it with a ceasefire. He’ll try to negotiate that ceasefire concept in some kind of way in which he can enshrine the achievement of his objectives, which are to enlarge and reincarnate in essence the old Soviet Union. That’s what he’s trying to do. It’s frightening.
And even on these big changes that are being made in government. If you believe that there is waste, fraud and inefficiency, there are ways of tackling that. Clinton and his vice president went through a whole process of reduction of numbers in budget, but they did it systematically. They did not do it recklessly. They did not change everything overnight. But they did a substantial job. Why can’t that be done now? I don’t know.
TH: When you were working in the transition for President Carter, you indicated that USIA was your responsibility. So you’ve watched USIA, at least from that point in time.
DMcH: USIA was, at that time independent, and it later got pulled over into the State Department. AID was off by itself, so was the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, which was also under my supervision at that time. I have my own view about them and how independent they should be, and how much they ought to be intertwined with foreign policy and how much do you do because you’re human and how much do you do because you’re trying to push a specific political policy objective. But you don’t do what these people did. They shoot first and ask questions later. I mean, all of these diseases that we’ve been working on. We may ask the question, should we or should we not have been working on them—legitimate questions. But you have to ask yourself how they will be managed if you decide you are not going to do them. What damage is there going to be? How do you transition from our role to some other way of handling them? You don’t just say the hell with it, blow them up and put them out of business. That’s the thing I don’t understand. That’s the part I just don’t understand. I can understand questioning their existence. I can understand questioning how they go about their work. All kinds of things. And I can even possibly envision a conclusion that this task should not be done by them but should be done by somebody else and not us. I can see that, too, but you’ve got to get there. And they aren’t doing that. Shoot first and ask questions later. That’s what we have.
TH: Well, Donald, thank you so much for your time. It’s been fascinating to me.
DMcH: I don't know how we get out of this, Ted, I just don’t know.
TH: In closing, you moved into this house in 2000 and you now live here with your wife, Marine. I think you met Marine through your diplomatic service, isn’t that right?
DMcH: We met early on in my diplomatic career, in about ’77 or ’78. It’s an interesting story. I was off on this negotiation on South West Africa and had gone to Angola. We, the United States, had no diplomatic relations. We had had, but we didn’t have any then. In fact, we had Americans in jail in Angola. But our relations with Angola went completely down the tube in ’75 when the Portuguese pulled out and a faction closer to the Soviet Union and the Cubans, took over. Anyway, I had to go there as part of these negotiations on Namibia. There were five countries in this group of the permanent members of the UN Security Council. The Germans had representation, the French did, the British did, the Americans did not. And so the French were the ones who took care of our things on this trip. And Marine was working at the French embassy. That’s when I met her right then in Angola. And somewhere around 1982 or so, maybe ’85, I lost sight of her, didn’t know where she was. It turns out she was in Southeast Asia and in Mozambique. I mean, moving around. When I finally caught up with her, she was in Venezuela. It was right after 9/11. The next day, as a matter of fact. I was in the kitchen and the phone rings, and it was Marine, who I hadn’t talked with in, I don’t know, 20 years. And she was calling to find out if I was okay, you know, after that incident. And then she went from Venezuela to San Francisco, and I started going out there for a pretty good period of time.
TH: And you were finally married.
DMcH: Yes, about 17 years ago.
TH: Well, we love having her in the neighborhood.
DMcH: She’s down in Guadeloupe now, I’m going down there. It’s a really hard place to get to.
TH: Thank you so much for a delightful and informative conversation.
THIS INTERVIEW WAS CONDUCTED ON MARCH 12, 2025. IT HAS BEEN EDITED.
* This is a shortened version of the two gentlemen’s conversation. The parts highlighted in yellow in this version are not included in the shortened version featured in the Spring 2025 issue of The Conduit.