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

they agreed to send me there. Marxism at the time was fashionable in academia, among
both students and professors. But I think it was good for me to go into this environment.
It did expose me to new ideas and other ways of thinking. Many children of émigrés
never escape from the ethnic communities and worldviews of their parents. I knew many
such kids. I started becoming more liberal than my parents while in high school. At
Chicago, I think I developed a good balance in my political views. Basically, I became
suspicious of all political extremism and radicalism, whether right-wing or left-wing. It is
a position I have held all of my life.
Q: While you were at the University of Chicago, did diplomacy cross your mind at all?
PERINA: Never. I always thought I would be a university professor, and I never
imagined that I would go into diplomacy. I never focused on the Foreign Service and
knew little about it. I felt that as a first generation immigrant, I would be an unlikely
candidate to gain entry, pass security requirements, and so on. It was only years later in
graduate school, when Henry Kissinger became prominent in foreign policy, that I first
recognized that being foreign-born did not exclude me from being a U.S. diplomat. That
was the first time I even considered it as an option.
Q: Did the civil rights movement in that period impact at all on you at the University?
PERINA: Well, yes, both in Chicago and later at Columbia. These were periods of
enormous social change in America, and one could not avoid issues like civil rights,
particularly on urban campuses in Chicago and New York. I was a supporter of the civil
rights movement, as were most students on campus. The other big issue was, of course,
Vietnam. It was on these issues that my political views began to diverge from that of my
parents and of the émigré community. Most Czech émigrés supported the Vietnam War
because it was a war against communism. I became very skeptical of the war very
quickly. I remember all of the debates on campus about the draft, student deferments and
so on. All of these things raised my political consciousness, as was the case with much of
my generation.
Q: Were you subject to the draft?
PERINA: Well, first I had a student deferment, while those existed. Then, while I was in
college, there was an experiment with a lottery system based on birthdays, and my
birthday was in the bottom half, meaning I was far from being called up. I was
summoned to take a physical exam later, while in graduate school at Columbia, and I
flunked because of a congenital heart murmur I inherited from my father. So I was put
into a category that would be called up only if the Russians were on Long Island. But I
certainly had friends who were drafted and some who were killed in Vietnam.
Q: You're pushing toward an academic career which obviously means graduate school.
How did you pick Columbia?
PERINA: I applied to a number of schools but received the most financial assistance
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