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

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gone AWOL (absent without leave) from the army before deployment to Vietnam. He was not a draft evader because he was beyond the draft. It was a very strange feeling at first because there we met and he was in a sense running from the United States and I was representing the United States. But after a while it really did not influence our personal relationship. We became good friends and still are. He is an attorney in Ottawa but was amnestied many years ago and can visit the U.S. without problem. Q: How about the Canadians you met? I have been told by some people the one thing that binds Canadians together is that they are not Americans and of course, sometimes being an American diplomat there means bearing the brunt of hearing why they're Canadians. PERINA: Right. Well, it is a dilemma because you have to be sensitive to their desire to have a separate identity despite the fact that so much of the culture and the economy is dominated by U.S. influence, as they are the first to recognize. It's always tricky because when Canadians ask you, “Well, how do you like it here?” you don’t want to say, “Well, it's just like home,” even though in many respects it is. But in fact we found the Canadians very hospitable. We had two daughters born in Ottawa, both delivered by the same doctor who delivered Margaret Trudeau’s children, so for that and other reasons it will always be a special place for us. We made Canadian friends with whom we stay in touch to the present day. Q: Did you find any sort of hostility? I think of Québec and the English-French issue. Did you get caught up in that in any way? PERINA: Well, there was some resentment of the U.S., of course. Not so much as a result of the French issue but rather because of our enormous influence and the Canadian wish to develop a separate identity. Unfortunately, some Canadians felt that a Canadian identity could not develop unless U.S. influence was restricted and closed off. I did a little bit of work in the political and economic sections of the Embassy. In the economic section, the main problems were Canadian efforts to restrict American TV broadcasts, to somehow limit American content in books and magazines, and so on. We argued that it would not work, as for the most part it did not. Many Canadians enjoyed American TV programs more than CBC programs. It is very hard to legislate a cultural identity, as some people tried to do. At the same time, I think Canadians are genuinely different from Americans in many respects and do have their own identity. One of my jobs in the political section was to attend question period in the Canadian Parliament. The Prime Minister at the time was Pierre Trudeau, and he was a master of debate. Watching him and Diefenbaker spar in parliament was a pleasure. It was a very civilized political culture. Q: Who was our ambassador at the time? PERINA: I was there with two ambassadors. When I first arrived, the ambassador was William Porter, with whom I overlapped only a bit, and he was then replaced by Thomas Enders. 22
Q: During the Vietnam War, there was quite a bit of tension between Trudeau and Lyndon Johnson. Did you get any sense of that during your time there? PERINA: By the time I got to Ottawa the Vietnam War was basically over. It was no longer as controversial as in years past. So no, I did not get any sense of that. But of course Trudeau was a strong leader, intelligent and unafraid to speak out when he felt like it, so I have no doubt he made some in Washington nervous. Q: Well, then you left Ottawa in late ‘76 or so? PERINA: Exactly, we left in the winter of 1976 with two young daughters in tow. I got a job here in Washington. Everyone was telling me that that was the smart thing to do early-on in a career, to learn how the bureaucracy works. It was a little frustrating because I had joined the Foreign Service to see the world but had not seen much of it yet. But I received what was considered a very good assignment in EUR/RPM, or the regional political-military office of the European Bureau. It was essentially the NATO desk in the State Department. It was a desk for NATO but also for what was then the CSCE, later to become OSCE, which I became very involved in. Q: Can you elaborate? PERINA: Well, the CSCE was the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, a process created by the Helsinki Final Act which was signed in 1975 by 33 European countries plus the U.S. and Canada. The document had a lot of human rights-related provisions, the famous Basket III, and Congress became very interested in their implementation. A joint legislative-executive Helsinki Commission was in fact created on the Hill, and Congress asked for semiannual reports from the President on how Helsinki Final Act provisions were being implemented. My job turned out to be drafting those reports. A friend of mine, Jon Greenwald, drafted the first one, and I drafted the subsequent four. These were actually quite lengthy reports. They ranged from 70 to 100 pages and were basically a tabulation of events in the Eastern bloc related to CSCE implementation, things like treatment of dissidents, human rights violations, freedom of the press, freedom of movement and so on. There was a lot of interest in these reports, and they were attacked by the Eastern bloc countries as soon as they were published, so it was important to be accurate. It was actually a heady experience for a second-tour junior officer to be drafting these long documents that were then released in the name of the President. One interesting tidbit was that the first report I drafted was under Jimmy Carter, who was inaugurated just as I returned to Washington. We had to send the report to the NSC for clearance, and, amazingly, when it came back there were these pencil notations in the margins that we were told came from the President himself. Jimmy Carter had personally read the 70 or so page report. No one could believe it, and I am sure it was a fluke only because he was new to the job. He did not read subsequent reports because his staffers were more experienced and did not pass stuff like this to him. But it was consistent with what we 23
Page 1 and 2: The Association for Diplomatic Stud
Page 3 and 4: Holbrooke visits Albanians Dayton M
Page 5 and 6: throughout the country were execute
Page 7 and 8: capitalists and so on. At that time
Page 9 and 10: taken to an apartment which initial
Page 11 and 12: Q: You said that after Cleveland yo
Page 13 and 14: they agreed to send me there. Marxi
Page 15 and 16: most comprehensive collection of in
Page 17 and 18: Q: What was the background of your
Page 19 and 20: is there from that trial?” I thou
Page 21: word that he was going to come to a
Page 25 and 26: very different interpretations. The
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 45 and 46: phrases “Open this gate, tear dow
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
Page 57 and 58: position in Europe, and really the
Page 59 and 60: Soviet domination. They had histori
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Page 63 and 64: welcoming dinner in a restaurant an
Page 65 and 66: Q: How were you received by the Ser
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Page 69 and 70: Part of the reason that we didn’t
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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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