John [F.] Keane ’66

Dartmouth College Oral History Program

Dartmouth Vietnam Project

May 18, 2016

Transcribed by Mim Eisenberg/WordCraft

[ANDREW T.]

CAROTHERS:            All right, so this is Andrew Carothers interviewing John [F.] Keane for the Dartmouth Vietnam Project. It is Wednesday, May 18th at 11:43 a.m. I’m in Rauner [Special Collections] Library at Dartmouth College, and John is in the Outer Banks in North Carolina.

                                    John, good to get a chance to speak with you today.

KEANE:                      My pleasure, Andrew. I’m looking forward to this.

CAROTHERS:            So the plan for the interview is generally we’ll start off by kind of talking about your—your childhood, your upbringing. We’ll get into your—your time at Dartmouth and then move from there into your experiences in Vietnam, and then at the end, you know, kind of looking back on Vietnam and life after Vietnam.

                                    So to begin with—to start from the beginning, where—where and when were you born?

KEANE:                      I was born in Huntington, New York, on July 4, 1944.

CAROTHERS:            Oh born on the Fourth of July!

KEANE:                      And my parents—yeah, July 4, 1944. My—my brother used to complain because when we were little kids, they would have parades in our town for me, but they didn’t have it for his birthday, right?

CAROTHERS: [Laughs.] That’s funny. And where—where is Huntington, New York? Is that near New York City or upstate?

KEANE: Huntington is 35 miles from Manhattan on Long Island, on the North Shore of Long Island. My—my father was working in New York City and would travel the Long Island Railroad every day to New York from Huntington. But I grew up in Huntington and went to public schools in Huntington.

CAROTHERS:            Great. And to touch on your—your parents, what did—what did they do?

KEANE:                      Well, my parents were immigrants from—from Europe. My father came from Austria in 1938, after Austria had—had been taken over by the Nazis. And he—he knew that war was coming, so he decided to get out while the getting was good, and so he left Austria in November 1938 and came on a boat to Hoboken, New Jersey, of all places, and landed there and started working. He only had an eighth grade education. He went to school until he was 14. But then he—this was in Austria, of course, and then he went to work as an apprentice to a cabinet maker and learned how to make cabinets. And—but then went back to Austria after five years as a cabinet maker apprentice, got some jobs, and then, of course, everything happened with respect to the Nazis and [Adolf] Hitler’s takeover of Austria.

                                    And he decided to get out and came to the United States and got odd jobs. And the woman he met in Austria, who was Dutch-English—her father was Dutch; her mother was English—they—she came over a year later, in 1939, during what’s called the Sitzkrieg. I don’t know if you’re familiar with history, but between the Nazi invasion of Poland and the invasion of the Netherlands and France, there was a period where there was no—no war activity, and my mother took advantage of that period to get out of Holland and join my father in—in New York.

                                    And the—my father took odd jobs. He had learned to—to draw as a—as a cabinet maker. He was able to get a job working on the Lend-Lease program for a company in New York, and he was a draftsman. He would draw up—what would you call them?—blue sheets for the Lend-Lease program, doing boilers for the ships that were sent to the—to the United Kingdom, and some ships were sent to the—to the Soviet Union also, to support the Soviets. But mostly the Lend-Lease program was for the United Kingdom. And he worked in this company for a while.

                                    And then he—he then joined, as a draftsman, a architectural firm in New York, and after a while there, he realized that being an architect was not such a great deal, and so he went to night school at Brooklyn Polytechnic [Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, now New York University Tandon school of Engineering] and did that until 1952, when he got a degree as an architect and continued with the firm and eventually became a partner in one of New York’s largest architectural firms. That was his background.

                                    And my mother worked as a volunteer for the American Red Cross, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the League of Women Voters and a series of other volunteer organizations throughout her adult life.

                                    And that was—that’s the background of my parents. And I grew up in, as I say, public schools in Huntington.

CAROTHERS: That’s—that’s an amazing story. That’s very cool.

KEANE: [unintelligible; 5:41].

CAROTHERS:            Did—did—how did—did your parents, you know, sort of talk about their upbringing in Europe a lot? You know, how did—how did them coming over from Europe at kind of a war time—did that kind of affect how they—how they raised you or kind of, you know, like, the lessons that they would teach you, growing up?

KEANE:                      Well, I certainly—the fact that—you know, my father came to America with only an eighth grade education and was nevertheless able to do this Horatio Alger [Jr.] type—have this Horatio Alger history, where he rose—rose, through his diligence and—and perseverance and so on and had a successful career in the—in the architectural industry. He had a great deal of love for America. He thought—and my mother, the same way. They felt just that America was the greatest country on earth, by far, and they were particularly moved by the programs that [President] Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to help the disadvantaged during the [Great] Depression and afterwards.

                                    And so this was all extremely motivating to them and inspiring to them, and that’s one of the reasons why I believe my mother did all this volunteer work for—for—oh, for 50 years she worked as a volunteer on all these various programs, trying to help people, the disadvantaged, but chiefly African-Americans, but disadvantaged generally.

                                    And I think that probably was a bug that—a bug that I caught. And that’s what led me to join the Peace Corps as soon as I graduated from Dartmouth. I was—I joined the Peace Corps within—within five days of my graduation from Dartmouth. I was in the Peace Corps training to go to Colombia in South America to work with poor people in South America, to try to help them improve their opportunities for themselves and their families.

                                    And I believe that that upbringing, as you described, was probably—probably had a major impact on the way I looked at what I would do with my life.

CAROTHERS:            Very nice, very nice, and I’ll definitely want to circle back and talk about that—that time in the Peace Corps a little later in the—in the interview.

                                    And you mentioned that you have a brother as well.

KEANE:                      Yes, I have an older brother.

CAROTHERS:            And how—how much older is he?

KEANE:                      Oh, my brother is two years older, and he lives in New Jersey. He’s been in New Jersey now for 30-some years. He worked—he worked in the construction industry for many, many years, largely related, I think, to the fact that my father was an architect and worked with construction all of his life. My brother got into the construction industry as well, and he retired about six or seven years ago.

CAROTHERS:            Very nice. And were the two of you close, growing up?

KEANE:                      Like most brothers, we fought a great deal, and he was a bigger brother, so he would usually get the best of every fight [chuckles], but we have—we have become—after becoming adults, we’ve become very close, and we see each other regularly and talk all the time. You know, we’re very close now. We were not—we were not as teenagers or—well, we went our separate ways. You know, I went off to the Peace Corps and then the Foreign Service, Vietnam and—and many other places all over the world, so while I was traveling all around the world with—with the diplomatic service of the United States, I—we didn’t have that much contact, but we would see each other every, you know, two or three years when I came back, or sometimes he would visit me overseas, as he did in Colombia and Chile and so on. And so we—we saw each other. But we became particularly close once—after my parents were—were much older, and we would stick together with them, with my parents, the two of us and our families, and then particularly in the last ten years that I’ve been retired, and he’s been retired for the last seven, so we’ve seen each other a lot, three or four times a year.

CAROTHERS:            That’s very nice. It seems to be a common theme, siblings getting closer after [chuckles]—after you don’t have to live with each other anymore.

KEANE:                      That’s right. [Both chuckle.]

CAROTHERS:            Yeah, I have a younger sister. I think we’ve probably have gone closer since I—I moved off to college, but anyway—

                                    So—so you were born in ’44, so, you know, right towards the end of World War II. And as you were growing up, it was—that was kind of right as the Cold War was really kicking into gear. And did you notice the—the Cold War having an impact on—you know, on your life at home, on your life at school? Was it, you know, very visible, or was it more in the background?

KEANE:                      Oh, it was very visible, yes. For one, I mean, I followed the news. My—my parents liked to watch news report, and, you know, we saw things as I was a youngster, a young teenager. Of course, the Soviets launched the Sputnik [1], and [President John F.] Kennedy then made his announcement that the United States was going to invest heavily in the space program and put a—put a person on the moon and so on. So the competition with the Soviets was great in that sense.

                                    And, of course, we—as a—as a child, we were concerned about—“we”—I mean, the United States as a country was concerned about potential nuclear war, and we had, throughout the—at least as far as I know in the Long Island area and New York area—there were air—there were air raid shelters built everywhere, nuclear fallout shelters. And so we had drills when I was in elementary school and in junior high and high school, to go down into the basement, where they had these nuclear fallout shelters, with large—large signs in yellow—yellow and black stripes, I recall very clearly. And we would have to—we would have drills, visiting those—staying in those during an alarm. You know, it’s unlike we do nowadays, of course, when you have fire drills. We did fire drills, but we also did nuclear fallout drills.

                                  Anyway, and so in that sense it was, you know, ever present. After that, though, Andrew, it became part of much of what I thought about when I joined the Peace Corps because, as you probably recall, one of the motivations for the Peace Corps was to win the hearts and minds of people around the world so that they would not turn to communism as the solution to their—to their grievances over—over lack of public services: lack of health care, lack of opportunity for economic advancement, opportunities and so on.

                                    And so the Peace Corps was, like,—it was also, from Kennedy’s point of view, something—some way to help people for its own sake. But there was also, clearly, a political motivation to win over the populace, not just the—not at all, necessarily, the elites of society but the people at the working level of society so that they would not be—how would I call it?—won over by the siren song of communist union leaders, communist insurgent leaders, communist political leaders in a host of countries, who were saying that “the elites are simply capitalist pigs, and you will always be poor as long as you stick with them.” One of the notions of the Peace Corps was that there were ways to get ahead without necessarily joining a communist totalitarian movement.

                                    So that also continued when I—I should say that was also motivation of—one of—one of the elements that the United States was—had in mind with its efforts overseas: in Latin American, obviously in Vietnam and in Europe, as well Africa and the Middle East, et cetera, to provide a—to be a—an ally for those—those who would resist communist siren songs and strengthen the will of people to remain—to remain free.

                                    And this was a major part of what the Foreign Service did overseas throughout—throughout the world. And obviously, during my career of 39 years with the U.S. government, that was an element of what we did.

CAROTHERS:            And that seems to be a common theme throughout the Cold War period, was trying to, you know, win over the people, prevent them from moving towards communism. And it’s—it seems to be, honestly, even somewhat of a theme today when we’re looking at sort of terrorism around the world and trying to win over the people.

                                    So going back to—

KEANE:                      Right.

CAROTHERS:            —to—to your—your upbringing a little bit, I just wanted to touch on a—a couple more points before we move on to your time at Dartmouth. What—what were some of your favorite subjects in school? Were you a big—big history guy?—you know, interested in politics, that sort of thing?

KEANE:                      Right. Yes, indeed. I was always interested, from the time I was, I suspect, in elementary school—the fifth grade, sixth grade and going all the way up to university—in history, political science, government, geography, everything that related to international relations and political science. That was my—my strongest interest.

                                    And at Dartmouth, I majored in history, but I also found fascinating courses on religion because it just was just interesting to me because of also the cultural differences around the world, based on religion and—and geography. I studied geog- —several courses in geography.

                                    But I also enjoyed the sciences. I mean, I—in high school I loved physics, and at Dartmouth I took Locke’s Geology 1 and Geology 2, astronomy and so on—various—various science courses that I enjoyed, as well as—as well as art. In fact my wife is an artist, but—and art has always been a great interest of mine, and while I was at Dartmouth I took art—art history courses, and then I took one—one term off while I was at Dartmouth, the spring term of my, let’s see, junior year, and went—went to Europe for—for five months, more or less, and spent a great deal of time visiting art galleries all over—all over eight or nine countries in Europe because I enjoyed—I enjoyed seeing the original versions of all these various art works that we had studied in art history at Dartmouth.

CAROTHERS:            It sounds like it would have been amazing off term.

KEANE:                      Yeah, I—I’ve been very fortunate.

CAROTHERS:            Yes. And what did you do outside the classroom, growing up?

KEANE:                      Aside from wrestling, not a great deal, to be frank, Andrew, because I was—I felt challenged at Dartmouth. I had—I had studied very hard in high school and saw, before even starting classes at Dartmouth, I was—I was exempted from English 1 and two history courses, and I got credit for them based on the exams I took, and that was why I was able to take off—take off a semester in the spring of my—from my junior year, but—because I had extra credits.

                                    But I was thrown into a Spanish class and some other classes that—right in my freshman year, my first—the beginning of my freshman year that I felt extremely challenged. I mean, I was starting off with E’s and D’s!— which, of course, are unheard of nowadays, but even then they were hardly heard of. And scared me to death, and so I spent [chuckles] six hours a day just studying Spanish, not—not to mention my other two courses during—during my first—my freshman year first term. And so I spent an awful lot of time just studying at Dartmouth.

                                    Now, besides that, though, I was always involved in wrestling. I was the captain of the freshman wrestling team. I don’t think they have wrestling at Dartmouth anymore. There was a club at that time, but it was in a sense a full-fledged team. We had regular—regular program of—of meets against colleges throughout New England and New York and so on.

                                    And I was ca- —co-captain of the—of the wrestling team in my freshman year and wrestled all four years and spent a lot of time—when it wasn’t winter—when we were in wrestling season, I spent a lot of time in the physical education activities, staying in good shape: running, weight lifting, hiking, those kinds of things. And from time to—

                                    And I was, of course, a member of a fraternity. I joined Theta Delta Chi and was in Theta Delta Chi for the whole time I was—well after—beginning with my sophomore year, and spent some time with my col- —my fraternity brothers. Had parties on weekends and road trips from time to time, the way we used to do since there was no—no women at Dartmouth at that time. We went to various colleges in the area, in Boston or in Massachusetts generally—Northampton, Wellesley [College], Smith [College], Mount Holyoke [College], et cetera.

                                    And then—that’s—that’s about it. didn’t have—didn’t have many other activities. I did one other thing, though, I think probably inspired by my mother again, because of her interest in and her activities with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The [William Jewett] Tucker Foundation [now the William Jewett Tucker Center] offered a program of exchanges with—with historical black colleges. And so during the fall of my junior year, I went on an exchange program with Morehouse College, which is an all-male, black college in Atlanta, Georgia, part of the Atlanta University complex [sic; Atlanta University Center, now Atlanta University Center Consortium], which had the women’s college, named Spelman [College] and—and two others and then a university program.

                                    And I spent one semester at Morehouse College as the only white guy on the—on the campus. And it was a very, very interesting, enlightening experience. And I was very well received by almost everybody, students and faculty alike, during that exchange program. That was done through the Tucker Foundation. And I found that very—very rewarding.

CAROTHERS:            And tell me a little bit more about—about that, because that—that sounds like a really interesting exchange. What—what was it like to go down to Morehouse and be the only white person there? You know, obviously completely different environment than being up at Dartmouth.

KEANE:                      Yes. The—this was—it was 1964, fall of 1964, and it was during the civil rights movement, naturally, of course, and there were a number of whites, of course, with the Students for a Democratic Society and various other groups related to churches, et cetera, who went to the South to provide support to civil rights movements down there. Actually, while I was at Morehouse College, there was no—that I was aware of, at least—significant civil rights activity at the college or at Atlanta University, which—which Morehouse College was—was one-fourth of it. Morehouse College had about 800 students, and the university had about 3,200.

                                  Anyway, the—there was no significant civil rights activity in west Atlanta, where the college is located, so it was simply a—an experience, exchanging experience—points of view and experiences with college classmates at Morehouse. But there was no—nothing in the way of marches or other dramatic activities that the college was involved in or that I was involved in. I suspect that later on those things happened, but I—I don’t know that.

                                    The—the other aspect is that, as I mentioned earlier, everyone received me—almost everyone received me very, very well. There was only one or two persons who resented my presence in the sense—based on comments that they made, in the sense that, you know, “Who is this whitey coming down here to look at us as if we’re—you know, we’re part of a zoo or something?” It was antipathy towards the whole idea of—of exchange programs.

                                    But that was the exception. As I say, all my room- —I had three roommates, and all these other people in the dorm I—I lived in were very, very welcoming and friendly as were all the—all the professors.

CAROTHERS:            And were you expecting to get such a warm reception when you went down there, or did you think there would be more—tension?

KEANE:                      I—I didn’t really have an expectation, to be honest. I just—I just wanted to see—I thought it was a fascinating opportunity, something I would never have an opportunity to do again, and I said, Why—why not? You know, this is—if the college lets me, the college supports this program—you know, if I ran into trouble, I could always run back to Dartmouth, naturally. But I didn’t really have any particular expectations. I was obviously very pleasantly surprised that I was so—so warmly welcomed.

CAROTHERS:            Very nice.

                                    And now circling back to—kind of getting to Dartmouth, how did you—how did you end up at—at Dartmouth? How did you pick the school? When did you become interested in it?

KEANE:                      Well, my mother had the idea of visiting a whole series of colleges in New England and New York, Pennsylvania area, and so I visited Swarthmore [College], what was it?—Colgate [University]. I had done fairly well in high school, and only visited, I think,—what was it?—University of Connecticut and Dartmouth and a couple of other schools I don’t even remember.

                                    And after seeing the campus—and I knew that Dartmouth was an Ivy League school—and after seeing the campus and just saying, My God, this is the most lovely place on earth—and, of course, we visited—it was in the fall, like in September or October, when it’s Dartmouth at - at its most glorious—I said, I’d love to come here.

                                    That, in addition to the fact that my—my guidance counselor at—in my high school, who was not very helpful, would kind of—discouraged people from—from applying to places that might be a challenge for them to get into. And she said, “You know, You have five or six colleges. You know, pick—you know, pick—you know, the University of Connecticut” and this and that. “And you want to try for an Ivy League school? Well, you like Dartmouth, apply for that, but don’t apply for any more!” You know, “Don’t bother with Princeton [University] or Yale [University] or Columbia [University] or anything, because it’s just—there’s no chance.” So anyway [chuckles], I followed her advice, and I’m so glad that I did.

CAROTHERS:            Very nice. And tell me about your surviving—arriving—arriving at Dartmouth. What was it—what was it like to get on campus? What was the—what was the adjustment to Dartmouth like?

KEANE:                      It was very simple. I—I had—I participated in, you know, obviously the orientation program. I don’t even remember much about it. I did not do the—unfortunately—I regret it to this day—I didn’t do the Dartmouth Outing Club [First-Year] Trips that so many incoming freshmen do and many of my colleagues did in my class, because I—I had—I had to pay my own way for everything beyond—everything beyond tuition, room and board, and books was my own expense. So incidental expenses—that was just the deal my father said he could afford, so that’s—I said, “Fine.”

                                    And I had a good job during the summer, so I worked right up until the Friday be- —at the job I had in Huntington—right up until the Friday before the Monday when we had to report for—for freshman orientation. So I went into freshman orientation, but I had—I didn’t—I don’t even remember, Andrew, anything other than, you know, my parents brought me up over the weekend and installed me in the Smith dorm [sic; Smith Hall], and I met my roommate, who was from Omaha, Nebraska, a good fellow named Neil [B.] Danberg [Jr., Class of 1966].

                                    And we got to chatting, and we went to a meal together, met a few other people in the dorm. Most of the people I knew during my first—my first term were all from my dorm. Good folks, all of them. And that was about it. There wasn’t much—there wasn’t much to it other than just then starting classes and booking like mad.

CAROTHERS:            Yeah, I remember that. That’s a whirlwind of a time.

                                    And I—I imagine there were—were there any other kids from Huntington that were—were coming up to Dartmouth—Dartmouth with you? I assume it was a similar situation then as it is now, where there’s a large contingent from the New York area coming up to Dartmouth.

KEANE:                      There was none from Huntington. There were—there were from Long Island, a large number from all over—all the small towns—you know, Long Island has huge numbers of towns, and there were, oh, a couple of dozen from Long Island, at least. But I didn’t know any. I got to know some of them. There were a couple in my dorm who were from Long Island, in fact: Rockville Centre and a few other places, Massapequa, I believe. Anyway—but other than that, no.

CAROTHERS:            Got it. And you said at Dartmouth you were a—a history major.

KEANE:                      That’s right.

CAROTHERS:            How did you decide to be a—a history major? What—what kind of sparked that?

KEANE: Because I was always strong in history. And, as I mentioned, I took world his- —I took the exams for world history and for American history when I arrived at Dartmouth, and I got credit for them without having to take the courses. And history was always the greatest interest to me and—and strength for me. And so that’s—that’s what I decided to do. Those were the courses that I enjoyed the most—well, among the courses that I enjoyed the most, other than—other than the religion courses and—well, and Greek and Roman studies, I loved. I thought that was terrific. I loved practically everything I studied. But history was what I liked the most.

CAROTHERS:            And [cross-talk; unintelligible; 31:55].

KEANE:                      And probably—and I was also interested in international relations. I know that. Probably because of my—my parents’ background and because we had traveled a bit. I had—I had traveled once to Europe as a—as a youngster, with my mother, to visit a grandmother and grandfather. And it just—because they had a lot of world experience, we talked about world affairs at home, and I supposed that since I was interested in international relations, I don’t—I may have already been interested somewhat in—in some kind of a career related to international relations, so that’s probably also one of the reasons why I decided to study history. And I studied history of Japan, history of China, history of Africa. I took a lot of history courses at Dartmouth.

CAROTHERS:            Very nice. And I was going to ask: Did you have a specific focus within history, or kind of all over?

KEANE:                      Yeah, particularly Latin America. I was particularly inter- —I mean, I was interested in history of areas outside the United States. That’s where—most of my courses were related to history outside the United States, although I—one of the best courses I ever took was the Intellectual History of the South, which was a fascinating—because the Southern—well, you’re from North Carolina. The intellectual history of the South is very, very different from that of the Northeast. Quite different. What they—anyway, I won’t go into detail on that.

                                    The—the—Latin America was an area of particular focus for me, and one of my favorite professors was Kalman [H.] Silvert, who taught Latin Amer- —one of the Latin—several of the Latin American courses and seminars. And another guy named Frank [R.] Safford. Those are two of my favorite history profs.

CAROTHERS:            Very nice, very nice. I’m actually—I—I’m a government major here, but I’ve taken a number of Latin American classes, and it’s a fascinating region.

                                    And I want to talk a little bit about the—sort of the—the environment at Dartmouth in the mid-’60s. So what was the—what was the campus culture like?

KEANE:                      Well, there was a great deal of camaraderie. There was—well, in terms of entertainment, it was fairly straightforward. Those who were members—most of the social activities revolved around the fraternities and, to a lesser extent, the senior societies, Casque and Gauntlet, Sphinx,—I forget what the other one is now. Anyway, there was a third, well there was, at least.

                                    In any case—and then there was some social activity organized by the college or college institutions at—at the Hop [Hopkins Center for the Arts], but that was minimal. Nearly—nearly all the parties would—well, in some of the dorms also. The Wigwams [now River Cluster] would have occasional—occasionally their own parties down there. But other than the Wigwams, I don't remember there being very many big dorm parties. Most of the parties were at the fraternities, and that was the—that was the social life. It revolved around that.

                                    A lot of drinking. I think probably not as much binge drinking as—as is now common in so many colleges and I gather at Dartmouth also. There was drinking, but people didn’t drink for the purpose of getting shitfaced. Anyway, getting totally smashed. They would—they would drink, but not very many people would drink to the point of collapsing or falling asleep on a coach or falling asleep on the—on the floor. But there was a significant drinking culture.

                                    A lot of—there was a lot of focus on sports: football, hockey, basketball, baseball, rugby, all the sports. There was a tremendous focus on sporting—sporting activities. But also at theater, concerts, the [Dartmouth College] Glee Club and the various singing groups in those days. One of the groups was called the Injunaires. It later became known as I think the Aires, because of dropping the term “Injun” because it’s offensive to Native Americans.

                                    There were a number of clubs that worked in one way or another at the Hopkins Center related to sculpting and art, theater and music, so those were other activities. But it didn’t—there wasn’t that much of a rich cultural life at Dartmouth then as there is now. Now, of course, probably it’s much bigger. It has women, which makes a difference too, a big difference.

                                    And the—what they did was—what we had was the beginning, just the beginning of a few people in anti-Vietnam War—movement. It was just beginning when I was there. I was there, as you know, from ’62 to ’66. It became much more vital and vibrant in the late ’60s, early ’70s, but it was beginning already when I was there.

                                    You did not have the—the other kinds of activities when I was there related to [the] civil rights movement, human rights movements, environmental interests and so many of the others that are now so current on college campuses everywhere.

CAROTHERS: Interesting. Do you have a sense of why a movement like the civil rights movement, which—which definitely was big on many campuses in America, wasn’t as prominent at Dartmouth?

KEANE:                      I’m sorry, Andrew. Sometimes I’m having a hard time hearing you. Your voice does not come through clearly. I couldn’t understand what you said that time. I’m sorry.

CAROTHERS:            Sure. I’ll speak up a little bit. Do you have a sense of why a movement like the civil rights movement, which was big on a lot of college campuses, wasn’t as prevalent at Dartmouth?

KEANE: Probably—well, for several reasons. One, a huge majority of Dartmouth students there were paying their own way, or their families were paying their way at that time. The number of people who had scholarships or student loans or other support was relatively small. You did not have very many people from families—working-class families. It was all middle-class and—and—and well-to-do families, by and large.

                                    You did not have a significant number of Native Americans. You had a few, but—in fact, the head of Casque and Gauntlet when I was there in my senior year was I think one-eighth Native American. His name was [Michael B.] “Mike” MacQuarrie [Class of 1966]. He was a Native American. And he was the president—he was Arthur of the Casque and Gauntlet, basically the president of Casque and Gauntlet. But that was the exception. The people who were Native Americans were very, very few as students, and African-Americans were very, very few as well. I mean, I only remember two in my class. There may have been more, but I remember only two. And Asian-Americans were few and far between as well. So there wasn’t this notion of ethnic or racial identity on campus of individuals or groups that is—that is quite common today at Dartmouth and everyplace else.

CAROTHERS:            Yeah, that certainly seems like something that’s—that’s changed. Dartmouth is—I’ve found Dartmouth to be fairly diverse—you know, ethnically, socioeconomic status wise. It sounds like much more so than—than when you were here.

KEANE:                      Right.

CAROTHERS:            And was the—so I know you were—you were saying that towards the end of your time at Dartmouth, some antiwar activity was starting to go on. How visible, in general, was the Vietnam War on campus? Because you—you were there from ’62 to ’66, so the Tonkin Gulf Resolution [sic; the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution] was in ’64, you get kind of escalation in ’65. How—how much was that being talked about? How much was it in the news around here?

KEANE:                      It was—it was talked about quite a bit towards my—in my junior and senior year, in part, of course, because we had the draft then, and people who graduated in ’64, ’65 and in my class—many of them were—were drafted, and there was discussion about that. And, of course, many people—aside from the issue of the draft, which most students opposed, there was also—the draft and being sent to Vietnam, I should say; I don’t know that there was that much opposition to the draft per se, but being sent to Vietnam to fight a war and possibly get killed or maimed—clearly, there was a lot of people concerned about that.

                                    The—the—but the issue of being opposed to the war in principle because the war was wrong, immorally wrong or—or politically inept or for other reasons, that it was the wrong policy—that was also—there was some of that, but it had not yet—it did not yet develop much vibrancy during the time I was there. And there were occasionally—you know, groups would get together and talk about this, but that’s really all. I can’t recall that there was ever any march or takeover of Parkhurst [Hall] or any other, if you will, forceful movement to express that view of opposition to the war during my time there.

CAROTHERS:            And what were your thoughts regarding our involvement in Vietnam at the time?

KEANE:                      At the time, and still today, I thought it was a mistake. I thought the United States—that this was fundamentally an issue of nationalism, that it wasn’t—it wasn’t so much an issue of—of—that the nationalism impulse—nationalist impulse of the—of the movement in Vietnam to throw out the French and to have an independent country without—without the involvement of foreigners and to have—in this case, since it was led by the communists of North Vietnam, to have a—a communist independent Vietnam. I felt—my feeling was that it was fundamentally a nationalist movement, not something directed by communists from—from Moscow [Russia]  or from Beijing [China].

                                    And I remain convinced of that to this day. Nevertheless, there was—the other point of view was reiterated over and over by the various administrations: [President Harry S.] Truman, [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower, Kennedy and [President Lyndon B.] Johnson that the—what might happen in Southeast Asia was similar to what happened in—in Europe, in that there may be—these might fall like dominoes. You may recall the domino theory, that these may fall like dominoes and that they would then have all of Southeast Asia—because there had been insurgencies, a communist insurgency in Malaysia, which the British, over a 13-year, ferocious counterinsurgency effort, were able to put down. That happened in the ‘50s—in the late ‘40s and ‘50s. And then there were communist strong- —strong communist movements in Indonesia and some other countries.

                                    So that led [sic] some credence to the arguments that there—there could be a—if communists could take over Vietnam (which was one of the largest countries in Southeast Asia)—if that took place, that that could have an influence on what happened in neighboring states. That was basically what—what I felt about it.

CAROTHERS: Interesting, interesting.

                                    And so is there anything—anything else about your time at Dartmouth that you wanted to touch on before we move on to the Peace Corps and Vietnam?

KEANE:                      I don’t think so, no, except the sense—I was very pleased by the sense of camaraderie at Dartmouth during the time I was there, whether it was a dorm camaraderie—you know, we did a lot of dorm activities together my first—my freshman and my sophomore years, lots of—lots of activities together as—as students.

                                    And then, similarly—in my junior year I was away much of the time, as I mentioned, at Morehouse in my [unintelligible; 47:01] term, the fall term, and then in Europe in the spring term, so I didn’t—I spent one term at Dartmouth during my junior year. That was at Topliff [Hall], and I didn’t know anybody there, so I just spent my time studying and wrestling.

                                    And then my senior year, I was in Casque and Gauntlet, and there was a strong sense of camaraderie there. We all got along very, very well. Had lots of intellectual discussions. There was just so much open-mindedness. People could—people could have very strong disagreements about whatever the subject was—whether it was civil rights or Vietnam or whatever the topic was; it didn’t matter—and people would respect each others’ opinions. And that was—that was just one of the marvelous things about Dartmouth at the time.

CAROTHERS:            That’s excellent. And to touch on the, you know, dorm activities, I remember we still, in many of the dorms that you know, had been built before the, you know, the ’60s and ’70s still have the—basically the dorm competition sort of leader boards, of—of which—which events various dorms had won, so it’s—it’s—it’s fun to look at that and imagine what that kind of sense of community and that competition would have been like. I wish we had a little bit more of that today, but—

KEANE:                      Yeah, there was a lot of dorm competition in intramural sports, for example, a lot of that, all the various—a whole series of intramural sports strengthened dorm identity, and, you know, human beings always want to have an identity with a group, or most human beings do. There are some—very few who don’t, the hermit types. But most human beings like to have identity with a group, whether—you know, whether it’s, you know, the town you grew up in or the south side of town, the high school, the Boy Scout troop that you're with or whatever. And at Dartmouth it was dorms. And the guys [unintelligible; 49:03] would be all charged up to try to beat the guys in—in Woodward [Hall] or in Topliff or whatever. And that was—it added a great deal to the—to the experience.

CAROTHERS:            I imagine. I imagine.

                                    And so you graduated in the spring of 1966, correct? June ’66.

KEANE:                      In ’66, right.

CAROTHERS:            And you said you signed up for the Peace Corps five days after you graduated.

KEANE:                      Right. Well, actually, I signed up ahead of time, but—but I—you know, within five days of graduation, I—I went—I joined—I was in the Peace Corps, being sworn in, in Washington, D.C., and starting my training to go to Colombia as a Peace Corps volunteer, with about, oh, I don’t know, maybe 35 or 40 other Peace Corps volunteers, men and women, to work in—in Colombia, either in urban or rural community development. And that meant a host of different things, but I’ll let you ask the question.

CAROTHERS:            Sure. And what—what kind of training did they give you down in D.C.?

KEANE:                      Yeah, we were at George Washington University for five weeks, during which we had all morning—four hours in the morning, we would have intensive Spanish language training, and then in the afternoon we would have three hours of let’s call them orientation studies: the sociology, history, politics, economics, et cetera, of Colombia. And also particularly how society was organized. In other words, cultural—cultural aspects, sociological aspects of Colombia.

                                    Then after five weeks in—in Washington, those who were approved for going down to Colombia—and not everyone was approved; 98 percent were, but during five weeks they have enough time to determine if a person is—how would I say?—not—not adaptable because they’re too rigid, because they show biases, cultural biases or whatever, for some reason—or they have total incapacity to learn the language. And so I think one person was selected out.

                                    And the rest of us all went down to Colombia, and we were placed with families in Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, to live with host families for 14 weeks while we continued with our training program at a—at an institute in Bogotá, where we also continued with language training in the morning and then let’s call them cultural studies in the—cultural and specific training studies in the afternoon.

                                    Some of us were being trained to work in urban community development with community organizers, like [President] Barack [H.] Obama, if you will. And others were being trained to work in the rural areas, where you’d have to learn a lot about—whether it was corn or raising bees or working with hogs or some other—some other ac- —or cooperative development.

                                    Excuse me, I’m just going to change the phone from one hand to the other. One hand froze up.

                                    And so—and, you know, we had to learn to ride horses because a lot of us would have to work—work on horseback. And so we went through these both—specialized training for the types of things we would be doing in the Peace Corps, as well as continuing with cultural studies and language studies.

                                    And then we were—after the total of 19 weeks—five weeks in Washington, 14 weeks in Bogotá—we were sent out to our what they called Peace Corps site, “site” meaning village, town, city where we would be working. And by the local Peace Corps director in that region, we were introduced to what they would call our counterparts. In other words, if a guy was going to work with cooperatives, he would be introduced to a cooperative leader in the—in the town and any technically qualified background people for cooperatives, like accountants and stuff like that.

                                    And others, who were going to be working on beekeeping, would be introduced to village leaders or hamlet leaders, who would be influential in trying to encourage people to try beekeeping. Or if it was, like, you know, related to cattle, it would be to a local—local, small cattle—people involved with—who had two or three head of cattle or maybe six or seven head of cattle, or cows, whatever.

                                    And so—and in my case, I was introduced to the leaders of what they call community action programs in my town, which was in western Colombia. It was a town of about 20,000 people, with a whole lot of poor neighborhoods, and I was going to work with poor neighborhoods and helping them on community organizing and trying to improve their—improve their lives. And I was introduced to a—to the individual who was in charge of what they called community action in that—in that—in that city.

CAROTHERS:            And had you studied Colombia at all at Dartmouth? Did—did you know a lot about the country going in? And had you—had you studied any Spanish before the training as well?

KEANE:                      Well, yes. As I—as I mentioned one of my shocking experiences was my first term at Dartmouth in freshman year. I was thrown into a Spanish 3 class, because I had had two years of high school Spanish, but you know how much that gets you. And I was ill prepared, but I was put into this Spanish literature class in my first term at Dartmouth, and almost flunked. I had to work like—like a mule to—to get decent grades and ended up getting good grades. But it was—it was a chore. Then, as I mentioned, we studied Spanish in—during the Peace Corps training.

                                    Now, as far as Colombia specifically, one of my—during one of my history courses—in fact, I remember Frank Safford was the name of the professor. I think he’s out in California now, [University of California,] Berkeley or someplace. In any case, he—he had—he had done a lot of studies on Colombia, and he’d written books on Colombia. And he—he—he talked about Latin America generally in his course, but he—he used a lot of examples from Colombia. And one of his—I read one of his books and a couple of other books.

                                    So I had read a fair amount of—about Colombia even before entering the Peace Corps. And then during those—during those 19 weeks of studies, we were given lots of literature about Colombia. So, you know, we had a fairly good grounding on the country.

CAROTHERS:            Very nice. And what—so you were in a—in a town of about 25- —20,000 people, so a relatively small city. What was it—what was it like being there, interacting directly with these community organizers and going from sort of a more theoretical understanding of the country and its people to really being on the ground, interacting with them face to face?

KEANE:                      Yes. It was—it was challenging, but—but—challenging but rewarding. One of the—there was—perhaps two of the most rewarding things I’ll give you, not to bore you with all of it, but in one of the neighborhoods that I worked with, they—what they needed was a—a school because there was no school there, not even an elementary school. And the kids had to walk a long distance to get to a school. And they wanted—they wanted a school. And so—and this was one of the things we were taught to do, is to listen to the people’s felt needs, those that we worked with in these neighborhoods.

                                    And so I—but they didn’t have a teacher. They didn’t have a locale for a school. They didn’t have anything. So I worked with them—worked with them and with the mayor of the city to eventually—it took many months, but eventually we were able to get a locale that was refurbished as a school classroom, with electricity and so on and so forth.

                                    And the—and desks, and a teacher assigned, and the toughest part is usually getting a teacher assigned because in an area where—in a poor neighborhood, sometimes teachers don’t want to be assigned there. But we eventually did. We got a teacher assigned, and so the kids were able to go to school in their neighborhood. And that was—that was gratifying.

                                    The other—on a different scale, I had the ex- —I was selected by my regional Peace Corps leader to become—my regional Peace Corps director, excuse me. I was in this town called Cartago, in the southwest of Colombia, and there was a director for the Peace Corps in that southwest area of Colombia, in a city called Cali, which was about 120 miles south of my town. And he was responsible for a large region.

                                    And he—after I worked in this town of Cartago for a little over  year he offered me the opportunity to become his deputy for that department. A department is like a state, but it’s much smaller than a U.S. state, but it’s a significant—I mean, it’s a department with about two million people or so, and we had 75 Peace Corps volunteers there in that department, in all kinds of programs: agriculture, education, health care.

                                    And so he asked me to be his backup, his—his deputy, and so I was chos- —I—I moved to that other city called Cali, and I visited volunteers all the time to—to—to try to—whenever they had difficulties, to try to help them sort through the difficulties with counterparts or whatever the difficulty might be. And I also chose new sites for volunteers when they would—when—when new volunteers were coming in and they were not going to replace other volunteers in the same site, for whatever reason. I would—I would select new sites after visiting towns and talking to, you know, Colombian officials there, et cetera.

                                    But the most significant thing I did in terms of my own—my own sense of gratification was helping to establish a—a—a group of seven different agricultural vocational high school programs. To make a long story short, there were—in many of these towns around—in the countryside of Colombia, they had traditional academic programs for students, which meant preparing them to go to university.

                                    Well, in rural towns of Colombia, so few people who graduated from high school could go to university, so very, very, very few could go to university. Most of the ended up staying in town. And what they—what they—what they had learned in the last four years of high school was worthless for what they were going to be doing, you know, working in agriculture mostly, or livestock raising.

                                    So I helped establish, with the support of—getting—getting several different ministries involved, Colombian ministries involved, I was able to establish agricultural vocational high school programs at—at seven different high school in the rural areas of Colombia so that these young men and women would have a knowledge of things that would be useful to them in their—for their lives going forward, working in agriculture or livestock raising. And that was very gratifying.

CAROTHERS:            I imagine. And did you find that generally the—the people with whom you were working in Colombia were happy to have you there and happy to have the other Peace Corps representatives there, or was there ever any conflict between people in Colombia and, you know, potentially, especially, you know, government people in Colombia and the American volunteers that were coming in?

KEANE:                      By and large, there was extremely—they were extremely receptive to us. I—I think—I look back on it, and I’m actually astonished at how receptive they were to us—officials and people generally, whether it was the authorities in the neighborhoods that we had to deal with—I mean, when you think about it, this foreigner comes in here and starts making suggestions on how they should organize their lives. I mean, it’s pretty outrageous. But they were perfectly friendly and warm.

                                    One of the reasons, I believe, was because John Kennedy and his wife [Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy] were extremely popular in Latin America. John Kennedy had created something called the Alliance for Progress and funded it significantly, and with Alliance for Progress funds, the poor were helped in many countries in Latin America with agriculture, housing developments, et cetera. One of the largest neighborhood construction jobs in Bogota, Colombia, is called—is Kennedy Center—Kennedy Center [Ciudad Kennedy, a locality of Bogota]. It’s an area of thousands of homes were built with Alliance for Progress funds.

                                    And then, of course, Kennedy was a Catholic, and he had young children. He was a handsome man. His wife was beautiful. All of those things made the Kennedys extremely popular in Latin America. He was also a great orator, of course.

                                    And so when he created—and the Peace Corps was a creation of Kennedy, and so that basically provided a good entrée for most American Peace Corps volunteers. And they could see that these—these young Americans were trying very hard to speak Spanish, learn about their culture, get along with their culture, in fact adapt many of their cultural mores, and that made them very—for the most part, very recep- —receptive to these—to these foreign Peace Corps volunteers.

                           Government officials generally were also very supportive. Now, that said, of course there was a strong leftist movement among university students in many—many of the—well, particularly the public universities in Colombia, and the leftist students, generally speaking—I should say many of the students were leftists, because that’s just the way it is. I won’t go into the history of that, but that’s just—most university students in Latin America were either left leaning or in fact communist oriented. Many of them were.

                                    And those, of course, saw this as capitalist American imperialism, and they were critical of it. But we had almost—we had—the Peace Corps had almost nothing to do with the universities, by and large, so we didn’t run into those kinds of—that kind of friction.

CAROTHERS:            Got it. And how long were you in Colombia? So the—there was the—the 14-week training period in Colombia, and then while you were actually on your—you know, while you were stationed. How long was it?

KEANE:                      Yeah. I was—during the 14 weeks—well, 14 weeks of training in—in—in Bogotá, and then about a year and two months in my town of Cartago, and then another year, approximately, in the city of Cali, in the southwest. So all together, I spent in Colombia two and a half years, from—from August of—well, it must have been July, July, end of July, 1966, until January 1969.

CAROTHERS:            And what was the—what was it like going from, you know, Cartago, a smaller city, down to—to Cali, which is I believe a relatively large city?

KEANE:                      Oh, yeah. Cali—Cali—Cali already was a million and half people, a big city, very vibrant, all kinds of things going on. it was—but it was still Colombia. I mean, it was still Colombian cultural—cultural mores, but it was a much more sophisticated place. And you had a big—you—you had in Cali also a fairly—fairly good-sized group of people who were well to do, you know, in beautiful homes, beautiful neighborhoods, along with enormous slums, with hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken people living. So you had this huge contrast as you so often have in big cities, which is less common in small towns. And you had universities, you had cultural life. Cali is a vibrant city, from every point of view.

CAROTHERS:            And so after two and a half years [cross-talk; unintelligible; 1:08:32].

KEANE:                      But I—I spent—I spent nearly all my—I spent half my time on the road, because, as I mentioned, most of my work was—was visiting sites where the volunteers were working, or visiting sites—visiting potential sites, to choose—choose places for—for volunteers who were incoming, to be working in the future. So I spent half my time traveling around—around my department.

CAROTHERS:            And so you were in—in Colombia for two and a half years. So that takes us up through 1968, or 1969, rather.

KEANE:                      Yeah, I left in January of ’69.

CAROTHERS:            And what did you do after Colombia, in between Colombia and the time you left for Vietnam?

KEANE:                      When I left Colombia, I—I spent just a few days with my family in Huntington, New York, and then I entered the Pe- —I entered the [U.S.] Foreign Service in Washington. I went back to Washington and entered my Foreign Service class, and I began the program of orientation to be- —to become a Foreign Service officer—that is, you know, a diplomat for the United States.

                                    And I was in Washington in training, what they call basic officer training for I think it was about three months or so, and then I was selected to go to Vietnam, to—because the Foreign Service was providing something like 200 or 300 officers to work in Vietnam in various programs. And the—I was selected, along with four others from my—my Foreign Service class was about 35, and I was selected with the four others to go to Vietnam because I—I had experience as a Peace Corps volunteer, and the others who were selected to go to Vietnam had already—had other experiences of various types. They were not fresh out of college, in other words. They were people who had other experiences. In some cases, Ph.D.s or master’s degrees and some time working in the private sector or whatever, but they were not—they were not just 22-year-olds; they were generally 25 or—or—or older, so had a little bit more experience. And those were the ones who were selected to go. Oh, and also the people who were single. Married—married guys were not sent to Vietnam at that time, only single guys. And no women.

                                    So I was selected to go to Vietnam, and then I—I started a one-year course of training from late March, I guess it was, March or early April of 1969 and—until the—the end of March of 1970. I was in a training program where I—I learned to speak Vietnamese, and—and I was also given cultural orientation and a specific orientation about the type of work that I would be doing in Vietnam.

CAROTHERS:            And what was your reaction to hearing the news that you were going to be sent to Vietnam as a—as a Foreign Service officer? Did you—was it—was it excitement, fear?

KEANE:                      Well, I was—I was not excited. I wasn’t keen, because of what I expressed earlier about my disagreement with—in principle with what—what—my disagreement in principle with the war, with the U.S. conduct with the war.

                                    That said, it was my spirit of adventure and also my spirit of public service because I knew that in Vietnam there were two different options, and they explained this to us during the course of our training program. You can go either to the U.S. Embassy and work in—work in the Embassy, or you can go to work in the—in the rural area on programs related to what were called “rural development.”

                                    And so I said, Heck, you know, that’s what I did for two and a half years in Colombia. Why don’t—I can do that. And so that’s—and so I said, Fine, this—this could be interesting. It would be an opportunity perhaps to do the kinds of things that I had done in—in Colombia, trying to help people lift themselves up and improve their lives and the opportunities for their children and so on.

                                    And not only that, but I would have resources, because—if we have time to get into it, Andrew, I could tell you more detail about the resources we had available, but we had—unlike the Peace Corps, where it was just us and we had to scrounge from the local government—you know, the local government and the local authorities, the Colombian authorities to try to find resources to do some- —do something like the schools or create an agricultural vocational program, et cetera.

                                    In—in Vietnam we had huge resources available at our fingertips to get things done. And so I said, Gee, this would be—this could be—this could be fun. You know, it’s dangerous, sure. But it could be fun. And so that’s why I—I selected that program, which was called the Civil—Civil Operations and Rural Developments Support. C-O-R-D-S, CORDS, was the program that I was assigned to. And so I went with some—I went with—you know, some trepidation [sic], but nevertheless some enthusiasm.

CAROTHERS:            And did you find that when you got to Vietnam and were—were working on this rural development program—did you find a lot of parallels between the work that you had been doing in Colombia and the work that you were doing in Vietnam?

KEANE:                      Half of it was, and half of it was not. Let me explain a little bit the context. In Vietnam there was—outside the larger cities, there was an ab- —absence of state presence, of government presence. In other words, there was—there was no such thing as government-provided health care, education, support for agriculture or—or—or stock raising, livestock or fishing or whatever. Very little in the way of infrastructure. Partly this was a—a reflection of the fact that the country had been at war for so long and that the—the authorities in the capital cities were just so much involved in themselves and unable to provide security.

                                    In one of the areas where I was working, it—it had been dominated by the Viet Cong guerillas for 15 years. In other words, the—the South Vietnamese government in Saigon, in—in Hồ Chí Minh City now—they had almost no presence in that area during 15 years. No police, no justice, no education, nothing. The Viet Cong were in charge. That was in one specific area of—near where I was working.

                                    In other areas, it was a hodge-podge: some government services, some not. Okay. In order for—and the purpose of the U.S. presence there, of course, was to defeat the communists, right? But it wasn’t just defeating the communists on the battlefield against North Vietnamese or Viet Cong battalions, regular troops; it was also supposedly to win the minds and hearts of the Vietnamese people at the local level, the peasant level. And that’s the program that—that I was involved in.

                                    But since there was almost no state presence for a long time in many of these areas and there was no—what would we call it?—South Vietnamese government bureaucracy, human capital capable of doing the things like providing agricultural—support for agriculture or fishing or refugee resettlement or building schools or health clinics or maternity clinics or anything else—the—the South Vietnamese government requested the United States to provide support for that.

                                    So the South Vietnamese—and South Vietnam is divided into—was divided, excuse me—into 22 provinces—and I’m only talking about South Vietnam, of course, at the time—22 provinces, and each province had several—several districts, and mine was—I was in the province in the—in the Delta, the Mekong Delta, about two and a half hours south of Saigon, and the—the—and I was assigned as a district senior adviser.

                                    What does that mean? The—the government of—of Vietnam was a military government. It had assigned province chiefs. There was a province chief for each one of these 22 provinces and a district chief for—in my province, each of the four districts had a district chief. And the province chief had both military and civilian responsibilities. Military responsibilities were to carry out military operations against Viet Cong or, if there were any, in any case, North Vietnamese, but almost always Viet Cong forces. And the—the district same, the same at his level, in the district level.

                                    And there were appropriate forces for each of them. There were province forces, called regional forces, and there were district forces, called popular forces. That was the official name, popular forces.  

                                    And then each village had a militia called a village self-defense force. That’s on the military side. On the civilian side, they—there was a—at the province level there was a secretary for agriculture, a secretary for health, et cetera, and for infrastructure and so on, agri- —and these—then at the district level, each district chief, who was a military officer because it was a military government all the way from the top down—each district chief had a military deputy and a civilian deputy. And the civ- —the military deputy was in charge of operations and security; the civilian deputy was in charge of all the other activities which normally take place in a—like, in a municipality in the United States: education, health, collecting trash, et cetera.

                                    And we—we—as district senior adviser, we were a parallel—if you will, a parallel entity to all of these different levels of the Vietnam government. I was the district senior adviser to the district chief, who was a major in my district. And I had under me two lieutenants of the U.S. Army and six noncommissioned officers of various levels: staff sergeants and then senior sergeants, from O-6s [colonels] and O-7s [brigadier generals] and an O-8 [major general], plus two interpreters, a secretary, and, very, very critically, two Filipinos, who were trained in agriculture, livestock raising, fishing, construction. Each of these two Filipinos had four or five specialties.

                                    And my job, as district senior adviser, was—on the military side, the lieutenants and the noncommissioned officers who worked for me trained the Vietnamese popular forces and village self-defense forces, the militias. The—the Filipinos who worked with me worked with village chiefs and village organizations for a cooperative, for construction of schools, health clinics, maternity clinics, dams. We had—I was in an area where there was a lot of water in the Delta, and the dams had to be reconstructed from time to time, roads built, bridges put in, et cetera, et cetera. And the—the Filipinos who worked with me—they would oversee and provide recommendations to the local—the locals in the government and at the local level on all these various projects.

                                    And I—we had to—I had to sign off on—on authorizing expenses for all these—for hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly on all these various projects that were being carried out in order to improve the lives of the—of the Vietnamese—the Vietnamese people.

                                    And, in fact, in my area it was quite successful. That’s not true of all of Vietnam. Are you following me?

CAROTHERS:            Yeah.

                                    And one question I had that kind of came up during this was: What was it like arriving in an area of the Mekong Delta? Because earlier in the war, the Mekong Delta had been an area with a lot of—large Viet Cong presence, a lot of conflict between American and South Vietnamese forces and the Viet Cong. Was it still—by the time you arrived in the ’70s, I believe it had quieted down a little bit, but were you still having to deal with a Viet Cong presence and their efforts to disrupt the work that you were trying to do?

KEANE:                      Yes, definitely. The area that I worked in was a province called Gò Công, G as in George, O as in orange, C-ô-n-g, Charlie, Ohio, November, Georgia. And that province had, you know, a big Viet Cong presence in the early ‘60s and throughout the ‘60s. As I mentioned, one area, one—one region of the province had been under Viet Cong control for 15 years. But during—after the Tet Offensive of 1968, the U.S. 1st Division [1st Infantry Division], accompanied by Vietnamese troops, cleared that place out. I mean, there was huge destruction there during 1968, and cleared out nearly all of the Viet Cong.

                                    And after those heavy-duty operations in that period of 1968, ’69, I arrived there in April 1970, and we had a—we had 200 Americans in the province, who were advisers to the Vietnamese, along the lines of what I described earlier, and in every imaginable field: refugee resettlement, agriculture, you name it. And the—we did have, from time to time, Viet Cong incursions in some areas of the province more than in others, particularly not in my district but in the western—the district in the west—northwest of me, there was a significant amount of Viet Cong activity. Their squads or platoons of Viet Cong would come in and kill a number of popular forces or—or—or teachers or village chiefs or whatever.

                                    In my district, it was much—it was much more peaceful, so to speak. We would have incursions from time to time. I remember some specific cases where they would come in generally to tax—in other words, to force village—village people to provide funds to the—to the Viet Cong. And curiously enough, they were very, very rigorous in always providing receipts to every—every family that made a contribution to the VC. I suppose that was so that if some other VC platoon came in, they could show the receipt and they would not be taxed again. I’m not quite sure why they did that, but they did.

                                    In any case, there were several incidents where people refused to pay, and one woman with six children was murdered because she wouldn’t pay the tax. And in another case, a teacher was murdered not because he wouldn’t pay the tax, just because he was a teacher for the government. And in another case, a police officer was killed. In another case, a fellow who—an older man, who had a motorcycle—the motorcycle was burned by the VC as retribution for—for lack of cooperation.

                                    They also set booby traps in a number of areas along roads, dikes and particularly in two small forests that were on the edge of my—of my district, one in the northwest and another in the east, where the—the—the Viet Cong usually traveled by—by boats, by small boats, and they would go from one forest in one province to another forest in another province, taking advantage of the—of the fact that the province forces didn’t coordinate that well among them—among each other so these areas of borders between—forest borders between provinces were relatively safe for the Viet Cong, so they would hide out there, and then they would come in—into the—into the area to do their—to do their taxation and other nefarious activities.

                                    So we did have incursions from time to time. And one of the—one of the projects that one of my sergeants that worked or me was heavily engaged in was deforestation of one of these areas along one of the canals because it was a major travel route for the Viet Cong coming into my district, and they—he—he provided—what do you call them?—chainsaws, a series of chainsaws to the villagers, and he kept the chainsaws running because they would often break down. And he would write instructions on them how to—how to deforest. And when the trees fell down, booby traps would be set off, because the Viet Cong had laced the whole area with booby traps to avoid local forces going in there. But, of course, they knew where the booby traps were. So that was one of the activities.

                                    So does that answer your question?

CAROTHERS:            It does, definitely.

                                    And did—did you find that both the Americans who were there but sort of particularly the—the villagers, right? Because there was this—the big United States program of pacification, and there’s been a lot of talk about how the United States and the military was declaring villages pacified, where, you know, that—that word necessarily completely free of—of Viet Cong incursions—so in an—in an area like Gò Công, did you get a sense that the villagers felt like the—the Viet Cong had been—had been kicked out and that the Viet Cong wasn’t a serious threat, or was there still fear on the part of the local Vietnamese of the Viet Cong? Because I imagine it would be hard to make inroads with the local population and sort of win them over to the—the American and the South Vietnamese side if they didn’t feel that they were protected from the Viet Cong.

KEANE:                      Yeah. Well, a number of aspects I need to mention here. The—in my area—and, again, I cannot speak to Vietnam generally, but in my area the—the populace was pleased with the—the improving standard of living that was taking place as a result particularly of the U.S. work in the agricultural sector. The U.S. funded and implemented a program called Land to the Tiller, whereby huge tracts of land which had belonged earlier, at one point, to the French and also to people, elite Vietnamese in South Vietnam who were allied with the French—they owned huge tracts of land in—in the Delta and as a result were very wealthy. But they were absentee landlords.

                                    This was all expropriated, and we handed out land titles to individual peasant families, who then became landholders. Nearly all of the people, a huge majority of people who worked in my area had their own land. Not much, but they had the equivalent of two or three acres, maybe as much as five, depending on the—on the quality of the land. And on that, they were able to plant rice, and rice was the principle crop, of course.

                                    And with the introduction of miracle rice that had been developed with the United States and the Philippine governments in the Philippines, they were able—the introduction of miracle rice, plus fertilizer and, very critically, water pumps, to be able to pump water out of the canals and streams—they were able to—instead of having only one crop a year during the monsoon season, they were able to get three crops a year of rice off the same land. And that—as a result, you can imagine, they increased their—their incomes by triple or more in some cases, because the yields were higher as well.

                                    And we saw—I saw in the space of just the 20 months that I was there, people—people moving from living in thatched huts with next to nothing to moving into—into very, very nice homes, built of brick with tiled roofs and a very, very nice altar for the family as well as the ancestors who were buried in the back (because they’re all Buddhists there). And the—and buying motorcycles and—and in other ways, the level—and be able to go to school and buy clothes, et cetera, for the kids to send—buy shoes for the kids to go to school. The improvement in the standard of living was—was just  extraordinary in just a short period of time. Those people were quite happy.

                                    I don’t know that they identified this with the South Vietnamese government. This is the critical aspect, because the—the South Vietnamese government—some of the South Vietnamese government officials were corrupt. Significant numbers of them were corrupt. I mentioned to you earlier about the Viet Cong would—when they taxed people, they would provide receipts. Well, we had an incident, a major taxation incident in my district, where everybody—a significant number of people in the village were taxed, but only one—one-third of the people got receipts. And our conclusion was that this was probably local popular forces, supposedly allied with the government, who were corrupt and were just taxing the people.

                                    So the issue of corruption was a major problem for the South Vietnamese government, and so people’s lives—standards of living improved enormously, but they didn’t necessarily associate that with the South Vietnamese government; they probably associated it with the U.S. presence, oddly—oddly enough, because they could see that we were insisting that—that the schools be built properly, with the right amount of cement and the cement not be stolen and the rebar—the reinforcing rods not be stolen and that there be schoolteachers assigned to schools and that the refugees be resettled and be given the appropriate stipend.

                                    The Americans were doing all these things, and at the same time, the Americans were carrying on this war in these nasty areas in other parts of the Delta and up in the mountains. So it was—generalizations don’t apply to Vietnam. But I’m not surprised that a large number of Vietnamese people, given—given the experience that I had there and the people of my province had with the U.S. presence—was that many Vietnamese people are welcoming to Americans, despite the—despite the terrible hardships and the killings that took place at the same time in different areas of the country.

CAROTHERS:            And do you think that in those areas where the United States’ presence did help substantially raise people’s standards of living—do you think that the programs, the CORDS program in some of those areas succeeded in its mission of, you know, sort of winning over the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese?

KEANE:                      It did in the sense that it won over—probably won over the hearts and minds of many Vietnamese towards the United States, but it didn’t necessarily win over the hearts and minds towards the South Vietnamese government.

                                    I’ll give you a specific example again: There were a number of times when it became obvious to us that the province chief, one of the province chiefs while I was there (there were two different ones) and one of my district chiefs (I worked with four different district chiefs during my two years there, my 20 months there)—one of my district chiefs was corrupt. So it’s [chuckles]—there’s perhaps the associated—I’ll leave it there. I can’t be sure whether the South Vietnamese government won some hearts and minds or not. but—but it wouldn’t surprise me if they didn’t because of the poor record—I mean, the significant amount of corruption that was going on by—by some South Vietnamese officials. Who went unpunished, by and large.

CAROTHERS:            And as—as great as it would have been to win support for the Americans there, it was really the South Vietnamese government that we were aiming to legitimize and support, and it sounds like, given the corruption in the South Vietnamese government, we—we weren’t really able to do that.

KEANE:                      Right. Actually, what happened during my 20 months there—I mentioned that when I first arrived, there were 200 Americans in my province, but we had this so-called Vietnamization program, where the responsibilities that—that we had, as district—as advisers at the province level and the district level—we reduced our presence gradually but sustainably over the whole time I was there, and by the time I—by the time I left in my province we had dwindled from 200 down to ten. There were only ten of us left: the province senior adviser, the province deputy senior adviser, two of us who were—two?—yeah, three of us who were district senior advisers, a few sergeants, and a few other officers, a guy who worked in agriculture, the Filipinos, and—and that’s about it. The Vietnamese had assumed responsibility for all those things that we had trained them to do.

CAROTHERS:            And what did you think about Vietnamization? Did you—you know, was it time to sort of get the Americans out of the country, or was it really opening the door for the South Vietnamese government, with all of its issues, to undo some of the progress that Americans had helped—had helped some of these villages make?

KEANE:                      I think—I think it was appropriate that we had, in places like mine, in reducing the U.S. presence very significantly and turning over responsibility to the Vietnamese—that was the right thing to do. It was the successful thing to do.

                                    In areas that had been, as you used the term, “pacified,” relatively pacified—my province was—was relatively pacified. Even though there were occasionally Viet Cong incursions, it was relatively pacified. And there were a number of provinces like that throughout the country. Others were still—were still having tremendous problems dealing with the Viet Cong.

                             Ultimately, though, as you know, what happened in Vietnam, the U.S. pulled out fully due to domestic pressure: the press, the public, the Congress. And when—and the ultimate takeover of Vietnam by the North Vietnamese was not by the Viet Cong; it was because they sent I don’t know how many—30 or 40 divisions of troops and tanks over the border from North Vietnam and from Laos. And that’s what overran the country ultimately. It wasn’t—obviously, they had the support of the Viet Cong, but there weren’t that many Viet Cong left. The North Vietnamese had to resort to basically conventional warfare, with regular divisions and troops, and the South Vietnamese Army couldn’t—was not up to the—up to the job of defending the country. But it wasn’t—it wasn’t—it wasn’t the insurgency that defeated them; it was the—it was the overrunning by—by North Vietnamese conventional forces.

CAROTHERS:            Yeah, there’s that famous image of North Vietnamese tanks rolling into the--the presidential palace in—in Saigon, in ’75, I guess that was.

KEANE:                      Right.

CAROTHERS:            And so you were—you know, CORDS was kind of a joint military and civilian initiative. What was it like working with the American military as well as other civilians?

KEANE:                      Yes. CORDS was a—an entity. It had about 7,000 members at its peak, of whom about 85 to 90 percent were military, and the rest were civilian: Foreign Service officers, officers of the [U.S.] Agency for International Development, et cetera. And the U.S., of course. And plus these third- —large numbers of third-country nationals, predominantly Filipinos but not only Filipinos.

                                    And the—we worked very well together, is my impression. I certainly—I and the other civilians who were in my province—we were about, mmm, six or seven civilians working with the—under the 91 or so military—we got along fine. And it was a—it was an integrated thing. The province senior adviser was a civilian. His deputy was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. The district senior advisers—two of us were civilians, and two were military. And then the—as I mentioned—oh, there was a fellow who was in charge of what they called new life development, which is rural support, resettlement of refugees, et cetera, et cetera. And then at the district level there were these lieutenants and noncommissioned officers, who provided support to the district senior advisers.

                                    So it was a joint military-civilian entity, and the relations were good. We had to learn how the military worked, but by and large, the military also—many of them, not all—many of the military were able to adapt to working with civilians as well. Not all of them, I must say. But most of them were—that I—that I came across, put it that way.

CAROTHERS:            And so you said most were—most were good at adapting but not all, so what were some of the areas of conflicts between the military guys and the civilians?

KEANE:                      The principal area of conflict, in my experience, not just in Vietnam but where I worked with the military overseas in the Foreign Service, as I say, for 39 years—the principal area of—of difference is that the military has a specific mission to accomplish, and they want to get that mission done quickly and in the most efficient way possible.

                                    The—the role of civ- —the perspective of civilians is to train the local people to get things done themselves when we’re gone, and that’s where the—the nub of differences lie, that frequently the U.S. military will want to do something themselves because it takes so much longer to equip, train and acculturate someone in another culture to get things done in a way that we think is appropriate, rather than just doing it yourself. And the military are happy when they’re doing something themselves, generally speaking. It takes a very special person, like General [David H.] Petraeus, whom you’ve heard of, and others who understand that ultimately overseas, the way things need to be done is to train the locals to do things to get the job done, not just to do it ourselves and walk away. That’s the fundamental difference.

CAROTHERS:            That’s real interesting. That’s really interesting.

                                    And another thing that you brought up a couple of times is the—the presence of a lot of Filipinos in these programs.

KEANE:                      I’m sorry, I couldn’t—I’m sorry, I couldn’t understand you there. Could you try again, Andrew?

CAROTHERS:            Sure. So something else you’ve mentioned a couple of times is the presence of a lot of Filipinos in these programs. How did—

KEANE:                      Yeah.

CAROTHERS:            —how did there end up being a large Filipino presence in these programs?

KEANE:                      Yes. Well, you know, the United States had a large presence in the Philippines for many, many, many years—well, a century. And the United States development programs had been very significant in the Philippines for—ever since the Second World War, the Point Four Program and then the Agency for International Development, the Peace Corps, all kinds of programs in the Philippines. Very significant.

                                    And Filipinos had largely assumed responsibility for many of these programs in the Philippines, and there were a lot of well-trained Filipinos in things like agriculture, fishing, livestock raising, cooperative development—all sorts of different things. And—and so it was much cheaper for the U.S. government to hire—to train Filipinos in the local—in Vietnamese, in the Philippines, or bring them to Vietnam and train them there—train them in the language and then bring them to Vietnam for a long period of time, because Americans could not be assigned to Vietnam for a very long—by and large, for a very long period of time.

                                    So it was much more financially efficient and effective to have—and probably the Filipinos would be able to adapt more easily to—to the life in Vietnam than Americans would. I mean, for one, the climate is more similar, but also they’re—they’re Asians, and Asian looking, even though the culture is different and so on. There are significant—there are major differences betw- —obviously, between Filipinos and Vietnamese, but the Filipinos that I—I met—they were—they were able to adapt themselves, and they lived there for many, many years, working on these development programs.

CAROTHERS:            And it sounds like to an extent we were trying to use development programs that had been quite successful in the Philippines as a model for the development programs that we were trying to execute in Vietnam.

KEANE:                      That’s correct. In addition to the Philippines, also a very successful program in land—land redistribution that started in Taiwan back in the 1940s or ’50s, where Taiwanese landholdings were expropriated by the Taiwan government and handed out to peasants and farm workers for them to own. And it was an extraordinarily successful program in—in Taiwan. In fact, people don’t realize it, but because the Taiwanese were so successful in increasing their standard of living but also, at the same time, saving—saving anywhere to 40 to 60 percent of all the—of all their income from the rice that they produced or the other products they produced—and that money was put into pension funds and to other funds, which were then used as capital to fund Taiwan’s industrialization.

                                 That’s—that’s—that was a shorthand history of Taiwan. Taiwan became a major industrial power because of the savings as a result—the savings from the agriculture by peasants who became landholders and whose production became extraordinary. That was the model for the Vietnamese Land to the Tiller program, and the Filipinos had experience with that as well.

CAROTHERS:            Got it. And was—from your experience, did you find that those programs in Taiwan and in the Philippines were replicable in Vietnam? Because—right?—that’s one of the main critiques of a lot of development programs, is that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. But were the—were the countries similar enough that there was potential for the Land to the Tiller program to be really successful?

KEANE:                      In—in the case of agriculture and—and fishing—because also one of the Filipinos started a fishing cooperative in my—in my district because it was a very rich fishing area, and it was successful—my answer is yes. They are replicable in agriculture and livestock and fishing, is my experience, yes.

                                    I—I can’t speak to other areas as much. But basically when you talk about physical things, I mean, also, for example, road construction—we had a lot of road construction going on and bridge construction and dam cons- —dam repair and all that sort of stuff. Those kinds of things are all pretty similar, because it’s just doing—doing fairly—fairly straightforward things that are—that are physical.

                                    Where things become perhaps a little more complicated would be if you try to do this in—in finance or in insurance or in other areas that are more—that are less related to physical production. But I—I’m just speculating on that case.

CAROTHERS:            Got it. And I—and I imagine that if there had been more attention turned to maybe government reform of the—of the South Vietnamese government, that could have—that could have played a factor as well, because I imagine the corruption within the South Vietnamese government was a fairly large burden on these—on these efforts.

KEANE:                      Yeah. Well, that’s true. The problem is that the South Viet- —my impression is—is the South Vietnamese government retained support of strong political leaders around the country and in Saigon by allowing people to benefit from corruption. So frequently, that’s the case, my experience around the world has been, that governments that do not have strong institutions, like those of western—western Europe, particularly, you know, northern Europe and the United States, Canada, et cetera, where they have strong institutions, we are able to deal with corruption and have corruption punished, generally speaking. The courts work. The legislatures, independent. Corruption is not—is not—is not what greases the skids that makes government work.

                                    In much of the world, sadly, corruption is the grease that makes government work, oddly enough. In other words, people at the top can get people in the lower levels to do what they want and to remain loyal only by allowing some degree of graft, unfortunately. And that was certainly, I think, the case in Vietnam.

CAROTHERS:            Got it.

                                    And when you were—when you were leaving Vietnam—so you—you arrived in March or April of 1970?

KEANE:                      April,  yeah, April of 1970. And I left in—at the end of November 1971.

CAROTHERS:            Okay. And what—what were your thoughts when you were leaving about the—the American effort in Vietnam? You  know, did you—could you—could people tell, and could you tell at that point that the war was not really going in the—in the American and South Vietnamese favor?

KEANE:                      Well, my experience, as you’ve now seen or heard, was a very successful one in my little province. Pacification worked. People’s standards of living had improved. Things were—things were going very well in the right direction. I knew that there were a number of other provinces where that was also true. But I was also fully aware that there were many provinces also, some of them in the Delta, some of them in the Highlands, where the pacification program had not worked, that the Viet Cong were still as active as always and where the government presence was tenuous at very best—the South Vietnamese government presence was tenuous at best. So I thought things were going in the right direction.

                                    What I didn’t know, because it was still 1971, was that there was going to be an accord arranged by—by [President Richard M.] Nixon and by the leaders of North Vietnam that would basically end in the relatively sudden U.S. withdrawal and no more—not much more support for the South Vietnamese government, financial support, because Congress just was no longer willing to provide the financial support to the South Vietnamese government. So, of course, that, then—they were not ready to take respon- —to take full responsibility, as we saw with the invasion in ’75.

CAROTHERS:            Got it.

                                    And before we kind of move on to the—your—your post-Vietnam career and life, are there any other elements of your Vietnam experience that you wanted to touch base on?

KEANE:                      Well, one of them is an issue you’d touched on, and that is the importance of military-civilian relations overseas. We found that when the U.S. civilian and U.S. military are able to work together for common objectives, that it’s always much more successful. “Always” is not the right word, but usually much more successful.

                       Unfortunately, from my perspective, there has been a militarization of U.S. foreign policy, and under [President] George Bush, George W. Bush, as well as under Barack Obama, the—the U.S. foreign policy in places in conflict has largely been military, not—and military oriented, rather than oriented towards nation building, if you will, civilian leadership for long-term outcomes.

                                    And because the U.S. works on a very short timelines, we have—we have very—we have very short patience with dealing with long-term—long-term problems. We want to have quick solutions to problems. That’s just the way we Americans are. And the idea of getting in- —being involved for 15 or 20 or 30 years somewhere to try to turn things around is anathema to a huge majority of Americans, not to mention the U.S. Congress and the funding that it requires, as well as the U.S. military. And sometimes that’s what it takes, as the British proved in Malaysia in the ’40s and ’50s.

CAROTHERS:            Got it. Got it.

                                    And so moving on to your post-Vietnam career, you—it sounded like you continued to work for the Foreign Service once you returned from Vietnam?

KEANE:                      That’s right, and I worked primarily in Latin America, almost exclusively in Latin America, with a few exceptions, from 1972 until—until I retired in—to the end of 2005.

CAROTHERS:            Got it. And did you—how do you think your experience in Vietnam impacted the work that you were doing in Latin America? Were there certain lessons that you drew from Vietnam that helped you, you know, better do your job in Latin America?

KEANE: Definitely. One was knowing how to work with the U.S. military, because we have U.S. military all over the world, and at U.S. embassies we have the U.S. military representatives in the Defense—in the Defense Intelligence Agency or the regular U.S. Army, the [U.S.] Navy, the—the [U.S.] Air Force, et cetera, in many countries. And working with the U.S. military is a critical part of what we do in embassies, and as a civilian I worked very well with the U.S. military, drawing on my—on my experiences in Vietnam. That was important.

                                    The other was the significance of listening to people at the local level in terms of what it is they—they—they really want, being in touch with what the general populace is—has—has an interest in. That’s very important for the United States government to understand, not just—not only understand what the elites have in mind—have an interest [in]—that’s fundamental—one has to understand that because the elites are almost always in charge of governments in—around the world—but—but also to bear in mind what the populace wants. And it’s not al- —it’s not always what one would necessarily assume to be the case. And one has to be on top of that and—and—and fold that into one’s thinking about U.S. interests in—in each country. And how to achieve—how to achieve, maximize the—the chances for achieving U.S. interests in each country.

CAROTHERS:            And do you think in—from your experience in Latin America, did you see, in general, United States policy makers learning some of these lessons from Vietnam and being able to apply those and have greater success?

KEANE:                      In the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, in the beginning definitely not. We had this tremendous experience in Vietnam with the CORDS program and getting involved all the way down to the local level in trying to meet people’s needs and make sure the local government meets people’s needs, and in—in—both in Iraq and in Afghanistan, we—we didn’t apply that in the beginning. It was only applied, in the case of Iraq, after—after the failure of the first—the first phase, when—I think it was Gen. Petraeus, but some generals who were in charge of the U.S. military presence there said, “Listen, we need to talk with the—with the civilians in the U.S. Embassy and the USAID missions, and we need to be sure that we’re not just going in and cleaning out these—these enemy insurgents; we need to establish an adequate government presence that provides services to the people at the local level. That’s what going to ultimately win the conflict.”

                                    When that was done, things began to improve in Iraq. However, unfortunately, a lot of it—we pulled the plug on that, beginning in—in 2009, 2010 because Obama just didn’t have—didn’t—didn’t feel that Iraq was a priority to invest what it would take in terms of resources there, including keeping U.S. military and a large civilian presence there for a long period of time in order to turn the situation around, and now we see—now we see the result.

CAROTHERS:            Yeah, which—which has not been—has not been great.

                                    And so in—in Latin America, when you were working there, were you working on similar programs to what you had been doing in Vietnam, sort of rural development, that sort of thing?

KEANE:                      In the beginning, no. I’ll summarize the first three-quarters of my career after leaving Vietnam. In many countries, what I was doing was either standard consular work—that is, assistance to Americans, visa work, commercial—commercial promotion, advancing the interests of U.S. companies overseas, whether it’s investments or—or trade, political analysis. Most of my career I spent on political analysis, analyzing and reporting on political developments in the countries where I was located, and directing counter-narcotics programs in a large number of countries where we had a significant counter-narcotics effort going on.

                                    And then, when I reached a higher level in—in the Foreign Service in embassies overseas, yes, one of the programs, in addition to all the other programs that the United States was operating in these various countries—one of the other programs was Agency for International Development programs related to health care, agriculture, municipal finance, oddly enough. We tried to encourage better municipal finance programs—let’s see, cooperative development, education—those areas particularly.

                                    When I became a senior officer, I was either deputy chief of mission or acting—or acting ambassador in a number of countries, or when I—when—in my last job, when I was ambassador in Paraguay, we had a lot of these programs going on with the Agency for International Development. Oh, also including the environment, protecting the environment. We had a number of programs to—to try to preserve biodiversity in—in the countries where I worked.

CAROTHERS:            Very interesting. And which—did you have work all over Latin America? Which—which countries were you [cross-talk; unintelligible; 2:05:52]?

KEANE:                      Well, I worked—I worked in—yeah, I worked in Peru four years, Argentina four years, Chile four years, Brazil three years, Guatemala three years, Venezuela three years and Paraguay three years. And then Washington ten years on the various programs: Mexico, Central America, and personnel issues—you know, human resources, what they call now, a variety of different things.

CAROTHERS:            Got it. Got it.

                                    And I guess just kind of, you know, wrapping up, get some of your final thoughts, what do you think are some of the main—the main take-aways from Vietnam that we should remember, looking forward?

KEANE:                      We—we should always think of the role of nationalism in—when there is conflict, whether it’s nationalism that is home grown and largely motivated by—by—by the individual nationalist feelings of people and how that is being mobilized by leaders in that particular society. We always have to keep that in mind before we get involved.

We also need to keep in mind the weaknesses of other societies. Other societies are not like ours. They don’t have the institutions that we have at the local, state and national levels. In most countries, they don’t even have it at the national levels. And at the—at the so-called state, which might be province or departmental or local levels, they’ve got virtually nothing in the way of institutions. It’s all—in most countries, the—everything is motivated by and organized along connections, personal and political connections.          It has nothing to do with an individual’s role in an institution.

                                    And that—that can result in frustrating the best-laid plans of someone who comes—who comes from the United States or western Europe, where institutions are strong and they go back hundreds of years and people accept them. That’s not true in most underdeveloped countries or developing countries.

                                    I mean, look at what’s happened just in the last—in the last two months in—in Brazil. You know, Brazil was supposedly—everybody thought it was—it had overcome its underdevelopment and was now the sixth largest economy in the world, a developed country, blah, blah, blah. Well, I mean, its institutions are—are skin deep, and it’s—now it has—I mean, Brazil in the last—what is it?—50 years has had only two or three presidents who have been—elected presidents who have taken over from a previous elected president; in other words, with no—no constitutional interruption. These—these kinds of situations we have to under- —we have to appreciate and understand, cultures are different.

CAROTHERS:            Got it.

                                    Yeah, those are—that’s really all the questions I have, so if there is—if there’s anything else you—you would like to add, go ahead. Otherwise, thank you—thank you so much for—for taking the time to share your experience.

KEANE:                      It’s been a pleasure, Andrew.

[End of interview.]