ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...

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Seattle with my mother. Q: What do you recall of your time there, your schooling? PERINA: By then I was fairly well Americanized. I went to junior high and the first year and a half of high school in Cleveland. By that time I was a fairly regular American kid. I do remember, however, a very large, active Czech community in Cleveland. My parents became involved in it, and the family’s social life was primarily with other Czechs. It taught me the remarkable strength and resilience of ethnic communities in the United States. Q: What was your father doing then? PERINA: He became what was then called a time study engineer, which would now be a type of efficiency expert for a production line. He worked for a company named Elwell Parker in Cleveland. My mother became a secretary in a company called Gibson Homans, which produced paints and varnishes. Eventually, my father learned to be a tax auditor and got a job with the city of Cleveland. He remained in Cleveland for the rest of his life and retired as the head of the tax collection department for the city of Cleveland. My mother later retired as a procurement officer for the U.S. Air Force. In hindsight, I respect very much how hard they worked in America and how well they did, considering where they started. Certainly they had much more difficult lives than I can even imagine. I reaped the benefits of their emigration from Europe to America. I should mention one thing which proved to be important for my parents in later years, although we had no idea of it at the time. At the time that my parents got their U.S. citizenship in 1956, there was a lapse in the consular agreement between the United States and Czechoslovakia. The old consular agreement had expired and there were negotiations on a new agreement but, in the Cold War environment, they moved very slowly. There was a period of a year or two when there was no bilateral consular agreement. Many years later, after the Communist government in Czechoslovakia finally did collapse, we learned that because of this my parents had never lost their Czech citizenship under Czechoslovak law. Because of this, after the fall of the Communists, my father was entitled to restitution of his property. Indeed, he eventually got his original family house back because he was still considered a Czech citizen under Czech law. No one imagined before 1989 that something like that would ever happen. Q: Were you aware in those days of current events more or less? Were you following the news and that sort of thing? PERINA: I remember certain things being discussed in the family, such as the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. I remember that it sparked this hope in the Czech community that the Communist system was finally collapsing, as many still expected. Afterwards, of course, there was criticism in the émigré community that the United States did not do more to help the Hungarians. 10
Q: You said that after Cleveland you went to Seattle. Where did you live in Seattle? PERINA: After all they had gone through together, my parents divorced in 1961, and I moved with my mother to Seattle, where she remarried. We lived in south Seattle near Seward Park and Lake Washington, and I went to Franklin High School. I had not always been a good student, and I had some difficult years, particularly in junior high school where I received some C’s and once even a D. But then in the 9 th grade I had this realization that I was being categorized as a mediocre student. It made me angry. I became serious about school and got straight A’s from the 10 th grade to the 12 th . I graduated as valedictorian out of a class of some 600 students. I remember my commencement address where I spoke about the lure of travel and exploring other countries. I had a great desire, from high school onward, to see other parts of the world. Q: Did you find particularly from elementary school up through your time in Seattle any types of books that were particularly important to you? PERINA: I began greatly to enjoy travel books and adventure books, and also historical fiction. I also became very interested in Europe, where I felt I had roots. In 1961, when my parents were getting divorced, they sent me for the summer to Europe. They were going through all the court proceedings and thought it better if I would be away. They sent me for the summer to study French in a school in Switzerland. It was my first trip to Europe. I was 16 years old and I traveled alone. It was quite unusual at that time for a 16year-old kid to be sent alone to Europe, and subsequently the Cleveland Plain Dealer even carried an article about it. I went from New York by boat, which at that time was still cheaper than flying, and I think my father got a discount for me through his previous employment with the French Line. I arrived in Le Havre France and then went by train to Paris, Munich, Venice, Milan and Geneva, spending a few days in each city. Then I spent two months learning French in a boarding school in a little Swiss town called Les Diablerets, near Lausanne. It was a formative experience and instilled in me further desire to travel and see the world. Q: I take it that you were for a long time pointed towards attending a university after high school. PERINA: Yes, I was. I always assumed that I would go to a university. I almost always assumed that I would go to graduate school and, I always thought I would end up as a university professor. Q: Do you remember where your family fell politically? PERINA: Well, they were conservative. They were anti-Communist and Republican their whole lives. Most of the post-war emigration from Communist countries was closer to the Republicans than to the Democrats. It was a generational thing. There was an earlier, prewar Czech immigration which was more economic than political, and it was closer to the Democrats. But my parents and most of their friends were Republicans because the Republican Party was seen as being more anti-Communist. 11
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Page 17 and 18: Q: What was the background of your
Page 19 and 20: is there from that trial?” I thou
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Page 23 and 24: Q: During the Vietnam War, there wa
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Page 27 and 28: Q: So you were there from 1979? PER
Page 29 and 30: I will always remember that staff m
Page 31 and 32: was very tough. We did suspend the
Page 33 and 34: line was that a person was made to
Page 35 and 36: there. The Polish economy was nose-
Page 37 and 38: Q: What sorts of issues did you tal
Page 39 and 40: war. But I can tell you that the So
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Page 47 and 48: PERINA: Yes, they did. Jumping ahea
Page 49 and 50: Those plenary sessions I actually w
Page 51 and 52: PERINA: That is exactly right. The
Page 53 and 54: Q: OK, in 1989 you’re going to th
Page 55 and 56: PERINA: This was an issue because o
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Q: That was my impression as well w
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welcoming dinner in a restaurant an
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Q: How were you received by the Ser
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eard, and he functioned as everythi
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Part of the reason that we didn’t
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One of the more interesting people
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Q: So what was happening with Kosov
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Albanians were very anxious to have
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I remember Holbrooke’s first visi
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cannot now remember what finally tr
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Q: And this was not an idle comment
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price for having a very bad leaders
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PERINA: Certainly during the period
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Q: So you took over the Holbrooke r
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PERINA: Not really. We coordinated
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why I believed that it was not wort
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Q: Can you give a brief summary of
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PERINA: Well the American interests
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shorter visits of three to four wee
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Q: How so? PERINA: Well, he felt un
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Q: Still, it strikes me that all of
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As for the European Union, most Mol
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PERINA: Nagorno-Karabakh is the mos
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e called the “Prague Process” w
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we physically crossed the front lin
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were about three-quarters of the po
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down to the Black Sea. Since I was
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PERINA: It is difficult to say. He
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political interests to keep it goin
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a huge personal embarrassment. It l
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clearly followed the advice because
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good governance and so on. In its b
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Deputy Secretary, Richard Armitage,
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PERINA: Relations with Europe were
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End of interview 129
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