Burton Lee Gerber, age 91

Maddy Fine:

Alright, this is an interview with Burton Gerber, who I’m sitting down with today. Are you doing well today? 

Burton Gerber:

Yes, thank you very much. 

I’m glad to hear it. So, if you don’t mind, I just want to start chronologically at first. So, where were you born and raised?

I was born in Chicago, IL, on July 1933. Lived there until the age of seven when the family of four, including me [his parents, George Gerber (1900-1957) and Pearl E. Smith Gerber (1899-1975), and his older brother Donald A. Gerber (1929-2019)], moved to Columbus, OH. And I lived there, and then I later went to college at Michigan State University in East Lansing, MI. After that, I started work at CIA, interrupted by Army service, back to CIA from ‘55 to ‘95, at which time I retired. I was married in 1958 to my wife, Rosalie [Prokarym Gerber, 1931-1999)], whom I met at CIA [and married two months later]. She died in 1999. In retirement, I’ve been engaged in volunteer activities of various sorts.

Growing up, did you have some inkling that you might go on to serve for the government? 

When I was a boy in Ohio, in Columbus, I was a paper boy for the Ohio State Journal, a daily morning newspaper. About 80 to 100 customers, four or five years. And so, during that time, because I was delivering a newspaper, I was very conscious of what was in the newspaper. I was following the war and world events closely. My parents were, of course, also, so that wasn’t unique to me. But it was unique in the sense that I figured out as a boy that the war would eventually be over. And that after that, there would be a world to work in. And I wanted to be part of that.

I thought that I’d like to get out of a small town. I lived near Columbus, not in the city. And I’d like to get out of a small town and work in something abroad. So, my goal, when I was in high school, was to join the Foreign Service. And I won a scholarship to Michigan State, and it was my choice, to study international relations with that State Department as my goal. And I took the State Department written exam in December of ’54, my senior year in Chicago, where my family had moved back to while I was in college. And I got a good grade in that, and so I knew the next step would be an oral, whenever that would be. In the meantime, I would graduate with an ROTC commission, in any case. 

It turned out in my senior year, in March of ’55, I received a note in my box at the university that someone from CIA wanted to see me. So I did an interview with a gentleman who couldn’t tell me very much about CIA or about what I might do, but was interested in me in terms of a career. I mean, that maybe I’d be interested in a career. At that time, there was very little known [by] the American people about CIA. There were no books or magazines or movies or plays and so forth the way it is now. But I had read two articles in the Saturday Evening Post, a then-weekly magazine, about CIA activity and what was later called covert action in Iran in ’53 and in Guatemala in ’54. And so that’s what I knew of it. And the gentleman said, if I was at all interested to fill out a form, send it in. Don’t call us. We’ll call you.

And so I did fill it in and sent in this basic thing where you put down everything about your life. But when I was 21 years old, I didn’t have much of a life, so there wasn’t much to put down. The day or two before I graduated, they called me and asked me to come the very next week down to Washington for interviews, which I did, and told my parents I was just hanging around East Lansing for a while, which was not true. And so I did the interviews, which included the psychological, psychiatric, and academic kind. I’d say sort of like an advanced SAT. And then I went home, went out to visit my brother, who was a Marine on the West Coast, came back and was getting ready.  I could go in the Army, go to Yale, where I had a fellowship, or go to CIA if they called. And they did call and asked me to come down, and so on August 22nd of ’55, I joined the agency. And that was my career, along with a brief time in the U.S. Army, because I was commissioned as an ROTC graduate. And that’s what I did from 1955 to 1995.

How did you find it, coming to Washington, DC, after growing up in the Midwest?

That was a difference, because I had been raised in the Middle West, [attended] college in the Middle West, and when I came to the agency, excited to be in Washington and having a job that promised me to be very interesting, I was surrounded by most of my young colleagues, who were also young trainees, who were Ivy League, or what I called Little Ivy League, like Williams or Bowdoin, and so forth, graduates. I didn’t know anyone from, there was no one from Michigan State or Ohio State. And so that was a difference, because I realized these people often knew each other through all sorts of activities that they shared through sports or other things on the East Coast, and I was an outsider. I didn’t view that as a disadvantage, but I quickly realized I needed to fit in somehow.

And I didn’t own a suit in those days, and I saw that they all had suits, so I went downtown to a store that sold men’s suits and bought a suit, because I wanted to be friendly with them, because I knew that these are the people I’d be working with, and I think that worked pretty well. I had friends, often from this kind of group, who went to the East, lived in the East, went to Eastern Colleges. I’m not sure that they knew much about Michigan State, because in those days its reputation primarily was as an Aggie school.

When did you grow out of feeling like an outsider? 

I’m not sure that I completely stopped being an outsider. I’ve always been, and still am, proud of the fact that I’m a Midwesterner, and I think Midwesterners are pretty good people. You just saw that the vice president has chosen a Midwestern governor to be her vice presidential candidate [Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz]. I think there’s a certain spirit in the Midwest, and I try never to lose that. But obviously, in terms of the agency, in terms of my activities here, I fitted in enough to have a very successful career representing the United States abroad.

What was that spirit, that Midwestern spirit? 

I think that Midwesterners, as opposed, or in contrast, maybe, with Easterners, the Midwesterners have a work ethic, have a friendship ethic, have a patriotism ethic that is central to their lives. There’s a lot more friendship and close friendship, I think, in the Middle West. You often hear about Minnesota nice, and that’s the equivalent of how Minnesotans treat each other and treat visitors, and I think that that’s so pretty much where I grew up. There was a feeling there, maybe going back to the spirit that came in the immediate years post-Revolution, when it was the Western Reserve, that these were people who went out there and built their lives in a hostile area, hostile in the sense I’m talking about nature, not Indians. Hostile nature, and they were able to cooperate and get along. I just think that that’s something of what I call a Midwestern spirit.

So I want to ask, did representing the U.S. abroad change how you see the country when coming back later?

Yes, the question is whether in representing the United States abroad, I came to see my own country even in different ways, and I think that’s so. And you’d be surprised to know that often was to the advantage of the United States. Having lived in three communist countries, one Middle Eastern country, and Germany immediately, or not so immediately, but ’58, ’59 to ’65, and still the post-war era, you saw what the superiority of our country was. Superiority in terms of opportunity, in terms of freedom, in terms of the way it’s organized, and the way it is less bureaucratic than any European nation that I visited. I also saw that there were aspects of America coming back after nine years abroad, after that first period of my overseas life, coming back to America and seeing some aspects that you say, why do we do it that way? Everything from traffic to civil liberties for certain minorities, not for the great majority of Americans.

But if you don’t take care of all, you don’t take care of everyone, you’re missing something, and that’s the problem that we’ve had continuously through my life. I was acquainted with that much earlier in my life, in terms of growing up in Ohio in an all-white, all-Christian town, and realizing that that can’t be what all America is. And certainly I learned more about America when I went to college in Michigan and went in the Army. In the Army I was posted, and this was during the period of segregation, I was posted in Virginia, in Southern Virginia. This was a time of segregated bathrooms, segregated drinking fountains, segregated bars and restaurants and so forth. My best friend in the Army was another lieutenant, a Black man, and we could do things together on post, such as athletic stuff or go to a dinner or a movie or something. But if we went off post, we could not go anyplace [together]. We couldn’t go to a restaurant, we couldn’t go to a bar, we couldn’t go to a movie. We could go, and we sometimes did, to places like Jamestown, which was a National Park, and so it was not segregated.

But my experiences in segregation there in Southern Virginia made me, when I came back to Washington, state that I will never live in Virginia, and in all those years I never have. I’ve always lived in D.C., but I will not live in Virginia because of its racial history. And now some people say that’s silly because this is 2024, but I still have that view about Virginia.

But I think it’s important that we address the minority issue, and being in the military and then being overseas, I saw that we had an integrated system. But when I came back to the States, even though by this time in the late ’60s, there had already been the Civil Rights Act, which is being celebrated right now, the 60th anniversary of that. Even with that, there were still things that kept Blacks, particularly, from achieving full opportunity. So that’s one of the things I observed being abroad.

I also understood, though, that foreigners who criticize America on race relations are often not really so sincere themselves. Russia, for instance, had the Patrice Lumumba University for Black Africans [named for the former Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They treated black Africans terribly and spoke of them terribly. And that was true in the three communist countries I lived in – Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. And in Germany, there was a strong prejudice. France was probably the least prejudicial country that I was in. But you see that there is prejudice, while [there’s] very little prejudice against Blacks, [France] certainly has a problem with Islam or with Muslim believers.

So I saw enough to see that there were some problems living in America, but overall I saw that the freedom was so much greater. And I don’t just mean freedom that you can say what you want or vote for whom you want, but you can go to the grocery store when you want. In Germany, you can’t. At very strict times, grocery stores can be open. And in America, we sort of let people have the opportunity to move ahead with their own initiatives.

Are you happy with the progress America has made in the years since the segregation you described? And do you feel that we’re more aligned with our values now than we were back then? 

Are we more aligned with our values now? Certainly in 2024, compared to when I lived in the South, which was in the mid-50s, there are still things to do because there are still prejudices that exist. And I guess maybe prejudices are a feature of human beings. I saw in Bulgaria, for instance, complete disdain for the 10% of the population, which is Turkish, and they talked about Turks in vile terms. And I’ve seen that in Iran, where they talk about Arabs in manners that if I use those words about anyone, you would be starkly offended. So prejudice seems to be universal of some sort against the other. The question is, first of all, to provide legal means to give everyone equal opportunity, but also to have systems that encourage togetherness. 

In this regard, I think that we’re making mistakes now because unlike the time of Dr. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.], when he talked about whites and Blacks being together, there now seems to be strong sentiment in many Black instances to be themselves. For instance, Black dorms at universities and Black courses at universities. I’m not talking about a course about Black achievement, but courses restricted to Blacks. There seems to be now a re-segregation, but it’s more voluntary than it was in the past, and I don’t think that’s good. I think you see it in the identity politics that we’ve got to have in this job. We’ve got to have a certain number of people of whatever thing.

I just saw, as you guys were coming up, I was reading an article about women and achievements of women, and those have been greatly enlarged since the days when I was in college, for instance, and that’s a good thing because I always used to say, why do we not have 50 percent of our intelligence force working? But I saw in there this question of whether we’ve got to have a greater percentage of women, blacks, browns, et cetera, in certain jobs, and I don’t think that’s the goal. The goal is to have the best people in certain jobs, so the question is to provide opportunities, but not then to have… number things. So I’m unimpressed with programs that force that. Obviously, I would be uncomfortable with what is commonly called DEI now.

So having lived in many places, what made you decide to settle in D.C.?

Well, as I said, when I came back, when I first was here, before I went in the Army, I lived in the city, and when I came back, having lived in segregated Virginia, I determined that I would live in D.C., and so I was living here. I met my wife at CIA, and she was living here, and we got married and lived here, and then whenever we were back and forth to various countries, we always stayed in D.C., and we lived in Dupont [Circle], Adams Morgan, Kalorama, Palisades for several months when we were between overseas assignments. 

The times when we bought, we bought in Kalorama and then [lived in] a condo, and then after my wife died, I moved to Adams Morgan, and then a condo, and then I moved here. When I decided to come to a senior community, I looked only in D.C. I did not want to go to a suburban one. I think of myself as more of a city person, and this is where I do most of my activities.

What do you think makes D.C. special to you? 

Well, it’s a city. It’s urban. It has stuff going on. I had colleagues when I was first working in CIA, it was in the city down where the Korean War Memorial is now, and all the area across Independence Avenue toward Ohio Drive. So it was a city organization. They later moved to the suburbs, and nowadays most CIA people live in the suburbs. This was a statistic that they shared with us: There’s more CIA employees living in West Virginia than live in D.C., and I think that’s a shame. So I wanted the excitement of the city. I want to hear the stuff going on on the highway. I want to find stuff. When I lived in Kalorama and Adams Morgan and Dupont, I could go to things without a car. I could just walk around. Here I have to have my car because I’m old and I don’t walk very well, so I can’t walk to places. But for a long time in the city, I could – except for driving to work – I could get by walking.

Do you feel that other cities you’ve lived in had things to offer as well, even though they were sometimes… 

Well, obviously in the United States, the only cities I’ve lived in have been Chicago and Columbus and East Lansing and Southside Virginia and Washington. But Rosalie, my late wife, and I always felt that if for some reason the FBI came to us and said, you have to leave Washington, you can no longer live here, we would pick Chicago. And I still feel that way. I really like Chicago. I lived there as a boy until I was seven, and then I was visiting, so to speak, when I was in college and my parents had moved back there. I like the city. I like the atmosphere. I like the setup, all of those things. It has a high crime rate. And, I mean, in the old days, they used to talk about that during the days of Capone and so forth, and now it’s a different kind of crime. And that has to be fought, and I’m not sure that they’re doing it the best way they should. But if I had to move to another place, it would be Chicago, and not the suburbs. I’m talking about the city.

When you lived abroad, did you enjoy your life there as well, or did your work complicate your enjoyment of those areas? 

Well, I wouldn’t say work complicates enjoyment. Work contributes to enjoyment, and sometimes it contributes positively and sometimes negatively. But Rosalie and I both greatly enjoyed being abroad, and we felt comfortable there. We felt comfortable in dealing with foreigners, in leading a life that was not your basic American life, the kind of life where you have to get by in their society. In three or four of those countries – the three countries are Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union, and the fourth is Iran – we knew that we were in areas that, the first three in the communist countries, they were hostile to the United States, and we were subject to surveillance and controls and so forth that they do. Despite that, we could still find so many great things about the society. Bulgaria was a very difficult place to live in, but the Bulgarian people, if you could get beyond the bureaucrats, were warm and friendly, and we liked it very much. Also, in all those countries— plus Germany, which was not hostile to us— in all those countries, we learned so much more about the world and about history and about how people think and how we can work with them, because it’s true that the United States cannot stand alone. In foreign affairs, it does need alliances. It did have an isolationist policy for a while, but that’s long gone, or I mean the circumstances that allowed it are long gone.

Did living abroad make you more sympathetic to those living in hostile countries?

Well, certainly living abroad made me sympathetic to foreigners living in bad circumstances, and I used to think, for instance, what could these people be like if they had freedom? And I saw that, for instance, in the Soviet Union, when I would travel to Armenia and Georgia and think, these people are strongly entrepreneur-like, and if only they were free of communism what they could do and be. And I saw in these places that there was a deadness about being a Russian, unless you were part of the elite. And I wished that they had opportunities. This is what happened with the breakdown of communism and the Warsaw Pact, and you see the dynamism that’s going on in the former Warsaw Pact countries, except the Soviet Union. 

And you see the desire for freedom in the Ukrainian people, who have always been put down by the Russians to the point that they couldn’t use their own language. And I think I was sympathetic to all that before I went overseas, because I was following world events closely, and everything about the Soviet Union disgusted me. But then seeing it directly, you understand the great value of what America is, and you also understand that people do have a universal ability to strengthen themselves if they’re not held down by a police state— which Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union were, and Iran to a lesser extent. I’m talking about Iran under the Shah. Iran now under the Ayatollahs is terrible.

While living abroad, did you ever feel that you were in danger due to these repressive regimes? 

[Chuckles] Let’s see. The only time that I felt threatened and Rosalie felt threatened was living in Iran, and that was because during the time of the Shah, and there was an outfit called the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, which was anti-Shah and periodically would be assassinating Iranian leaders like generals and admirals and judges and government officials. Then at one time, they tried to kill a CIA officer, and at that point, I began carrying a weapon for the first time since the Army, and the only time since the Army that I did it, because they were a very effective assassin squad. They did kill American businessmen and some American military – six during our time. So that was a time of threat; except for that, that’s the only time. I did not feel that the Russians or the Bulgarians or the Yugoslavs were going to do anything to me. I mean, they would harass me and harass Rosalie, but they wouldn’t do anything physical. 

What would you say to a young person considering getting involved with the intelligence community? 

I teach, by the way, at Georgetown in graduate school. Now, because of my age, I only feel capable of doing one course one semester. So I do meet with young people on this very issue you’re asking about. I tell people, first of all, how important intelligence is, because keep in mind if there’s an issue, whatever the issue is, the first thing that a president, a general, an ambassador, an admiral, a secretary of state, et cetera, has to ask for is, what’s going on? What are they doing? Why are they doing it? Et cetera. So intelligence is part of that answer.

And so I emphasize to people how important intelligence is, and by that I mean obviously correct intelligence and not false intelligence or misapplied intelligence. I discuss with them what particularly among young people today seems to be a big issue, and that’s the work-life balance. And frankly, I tell people in the intelligence field and in the military field and in most of the foreign service field, work has to come first. And you’ve got to be prepared to sacrifice a lot of those things that some people consider absolutely important. Oh, I’ve got to be home for Thanksgiving, or I’ve got to do this or that. No, because I may need to send you to Ethiopia at Thanksgiving time to do a job. And you have to go if you’re going to be a successful intelligence officer or military officer or State Department officer. So I want people to understand what’s involved in terms of work. It’s also that, okay, if you’re in intelligence or military or State Department, you’re going to spend some of your time overseas. So you’ve got to be ready to do that. Your family has to be ready to do that. Your husband or wife has to be ready to do that. 

And this sometimes creates issues about where can my husband or my wife work, or what can they do and so forth. So you have to be able to work those things out, because I believe, frankly, that work will come before life for success. I saw some people who handled it very well. I saw some others who didn’t. But I think young people often want things too easy for them. And as my wife used to say, you can always do more than you think you can. So push yourself. 

Do young people today seem less likely to make sacrifices for their country, as opposed to your generation? 

I hope not. But that’s certainly an issue that ought to be thought about by young people and by, if you will, middle aged or old people. I think young people have to look at it in terms of what do they want? And what do they expect their country to be? Often, among people who do not go to Eastern colleges, there’s more patriotism shown— I’m not talking about real, but shown— in the South and the Midwest than there is in the East or the Pacific Coast. I would be more comfortable with a graduate of Michigan State than of Harvard, for that reason. 

Not to exclude the fact that I have many friends here, both here in this installation, but in my life in Washington from Harvard. But I don’t know about the present day. I worry about some of the demonstrations that I’ve read about that were going on. Hamas attacked Israel. And Israel has retaliated. In my view, they’ve retaliated disproportionately. But they are fighting for survival. And I have to acknowledge that. But there’s a good bit of Americans who are prepared, without really knowing what Hamas is, to back Hamas. And I think that there is still in this country, more anti-Semitism than we want to acknowledge.

Do Americans have a duty to be educated on foreign policy issues?

I think Americans have a great duty to be educated on foreign policy. And I fear that most are not. It’s almost laughable what people can do in terms of interviewing ‘man in the street’ and asking questions about history or foreign policy. And there’s woeful ignorance. There’s a lot of people who couldn’t define NATO. There’s a lot of people who can’t be sure about why we fought in this or that war, let alone when that war was. I think that some of this is caused by mistakes that U.S. government officials have made. For instance, the invasion of Iraq, which the administration at that time gave about six different reasons for why they invaded Iraq, and probably none of them was valid. And I think that that has caused a lot of cynicism about foreign policy decision-making among the educated people. And among the people who don’t follow much about foreign affairs, it just turns them off. But I think we need to know more about it, because you have to understand that helping the Ukrainians fight against Russia is also defending us. Because if Russia can win there, they’re going to put pressure on the rest of Europe, and that causes us problems.

How do you think the government can work to get Americans interested in world events again? 

How can the government make Americans more interested? I don’t know. I mean, part of it would be if you had a—we try to sell democracy abroad through our foreign programs. I think we need to try to sell it to the American people as well, but that would be forbidden by a whole lot of customs and laws. I think that our leaders need to be much more comfortable with talking to the American people about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, and why an investment in Ukraine is an investment for America. I don’t think that President [Joe] Biden, for instance, has come close to explaining why that is. And I think former President [Donald] Trump is dangerous in that regard, because he doesn’t understand the world. He understands himself. He understands power and how to achieve power. But he doesn’t understand what these issues are. And this was true in his first term, or in what may be his only term, and it’s true now in the campaign he’s waging. I don’t know if Vice President [Kamala] Harris is equipped to do this. There’s nothing in her background that convinces me she cares much about international affairs. I think there have been men and women in our life who have been aggressive in that regard. But when it comes to elections, we tend to vote on economics or domestic issues. Very seldom do we get into the issue of foreign affairs.

American education needs to be better. I went to a superb school system. In my day, in this town we lived in in Ohio, we—people obviously paid for a very good education. And people went to private schools only when they had problems. In places like Washington, in places like the East Coast, people go to private schools because it’s considered proper and historic and so forth. Families do that. And it’s also, in some circumstances, to get out of what I think is a really disastrous public education system in some cities. And so I’m not saying I’m against private schools, but I’m saying that we’ve got to get schools which are teaching hard subjects. And there’s a bunch of stuff that goes on now in education that is soft. And if I had children—my wife and I did not have children—if we had had children, I would have put them in Catholic schools because I think there’s a tougher education system. And I think that you’ve got to get tough systems and you’ve got to get international relations taught well. And I don’t think that’s going on in most of public education in America.

I was just reading an article today about the NEA. This is the National Education Association, a teacher’s union. And the NEA’s employees have been on strike against the NEA for something like three months now, asking for better wages and work conditions, not unusual. I used to be a member of the United Auto Workers, so I’m biased toward unions. And so they’re fighting the NEA, which is actually doing all sorts of efforts to break the union, things that if General Motors did against UAW, you’d all be outraged about. But very few of us know what’s going on because the media aren’t telling us.

How did your education shape your personal worldview? 

I guess my education was important in making me think about the ‘other’ a lot, about the people who are different, about the nations that are different, about the religions that are different, and what they can contribute to our lives. I grew up in a family that was not religious, although both my brother and I were, but our parents were not. And so we had to learn on our own, basically, the tenets of our religion and then how to apply that. In doing that, I realized that, hey, everybody has, there’s a God, but that God is for all of us. The education helped me understand that better or expound that better.

Did your religious values that you described just now come into play during your career? 

Yes, religious values have to be part of your life as an adult. First of all, in your life as a child, teenager, and adult, there’s a question about how you conduct yourself and why. There are things that you can do and things that you ought not to do. As the Pope said, that just because you can do it doesn’t mean you ought to do it. It came up very much in my operational life because what I did in CIA is that I was a case officer. What case officers do is recruit foreigners to be spies for America. You could immediately tell me, Gerber, that’s immoral or unethical. I would get into that. I’ve written about this kind of thing. I’ve done essays and parts of a book about that very subject. Just this morning, I’ve been preparing for a talk I’m going to give in September in which I talk about intelligence ethics. 

Intelligence espionage, which is vital for the defense of America, has to be done on an ethical basis. My approach to that comes heavily from my education and from my religion and from St. Thomas and St. Augustine. 

Are there some aspects of espionage you see as unethical, then? 

Well, that’s a very good question. Do I think of some aspects of intelligence as unethical? Yes. If it doesn’t meet the standards of what I have adopted as my outline for ethical behavior, which is just war theory, which begins with St. Augustine, goes through St. Thomas, and gets amended and so forth by others. I think you have to look at just war theory as a basis for what is ethical to do in intelligence, not just in war. One of the first issues that comes up is, can it be ethical? I always had a public school education, but I did go to—not successfully, in other words, I didn’t get a degree— but I did go to graduate school with the Jesuits. In discussing this very thing, it comes to the issue of, is espionage ethical? A priest at Georgetown [University] wrote and opined that the defense of a just political community is ethical, and that espionage is necessary to defend a just political community.

You have to have those qualifiers in my book. This is why, for instance, when I talk about espionage ethics to audiences, I ask them, do they see any difference, say, between [Aldrich] Ames, who was a CIA officer who became a KGB spy, and [Adolf] Tolkachev, a Soviet avionics engineer who became an American spy? If people say, no, it’s the same thing, and I say no, because the one was for the defense of a just political community, that’s what Tolkachev was contributing to, the defense of the United States. Ames was working to promote an unjust political community, the Soviet Union.  There’s where I kind of make a distinction, and I elaborate on this in much greater detail in writings and talks. How do you define a just political community? That’s the important part, isn’t it? When the Jesuits first said that to me, I said to myself, okay, how do I define a just political community? I defined it, and you can add or subtract. I just tried it as a community with free and fair elections, the right to dissent, and the rule of law. None of those things exist in the Soviet Union or in today’s Russia, and they don’t exist in Iran, they don’t exist in China, and they don’t exist in North Korea, to name four enemies. And they don’t exist to some extent in Turkey, for instance, or to some extent in India, and so forth. And we’ve got to fight any limitation on it in the United States, because we must remain with free and fair elections, right to dissent, which includes free speech, and rule of law. Curiously – and very few people know this – Thomas Jefferson wrote after he was president that the rule of law is important, but it’s not the most important thing. He said the most important thing is to preserve our nation. And that’s what some people might grab on to, but I think you have to have the rule of law.

Could ordinary civilians learn from your ethical rules outside of an intelligence context? 

Yeah, well, I think, not my rules necessarily, but the whole concept of good ethical behavior and what I just said relates to that. And I said, yes, that’s how I would hope people raise their children, and that’s how I hope our schools teach our children, and that’s how I would like to think our leaders behave, although some don’t.

This is sort of a big one, but are you hopeful about the future of America? 

Yes, I have to be, and I am. I think America does have the ability to provide opportunity for the most people. Not for all, I understand that, but for the most. And I think that, you know, we’re faced with terrible issues right now, one of them being that some people, particularly young people, think that the climate is the big issue. And I realize that, being old, it’s not going to affect me. It’s going to affect you very much. But I think that Americans, the world – but particularly led by America because of the scientific and technology advancements that we have made – is going to find solutions that you and I right now can’t even think about. Because as I look at my lifetime and look at the things that have happened, no one could have imagined when I was a boy and young man, college student, starting out in my career, the kinds of things we would have in this world now. And so I think that’s going to be happening with technology and science in terms of addressing the climate issue. And so I have, I am optimistic about America. I bemoan things often about the culture and tastes of American people, but who’s to say I’m right. But I’m an optimist. You will have a good world. 

Do you have anything else to add? 

I’m not sure about, you know, everything you’re trying to illustrate through your [oral history] program. One of the things that I felt strongly about when I was in the agency, and that was an intense life, was that we do have issues in this country and I am now contributing to solutions. And so as I was contemplating retirement, I felt that now I could turn away from foreign affairs and deal only with American affairs. And so I retired on a Friday and on Monday I got up and shaved and dressed and went to my first volunteer activity. And that was rather minor. I was a docent at the National Archives. But then I had to move beyond that. And the others that I went into, two of them through my church, were being a volunteer in an AIDS hospice. Because this is a time when men, some women, but it was mostly gay men, were dying of AIDS. And I signed up in a hospice run by the Missionaries of Charity, which is the Mother Theresa order. And so once a week I spent time with them, taking care of all their bodily needs, feeding them, giving them medicine, leading them in a rosary if they were volunteered to do it. There was no requirement to take the rosary. Actually, most of our guests were not Catholic. We had Muslims and Protestants more than we had Catholics. And most, by the way, were druggies, some gay. And I did that for 10 years. And that’s probably the best thing I ever did in my life, was taking care of men as they’re dying. Because it brought me closer to God, and it gave me an example of the most marvelous women I’ve ever met, the sisters of Missionaries of Charity, the sisters.

Then the next thing I did, these were all simultaneous, the archives, the Gift of Peace [Hospice]. And then the third thing was a food co-op that had been founded by Catholic Charities and the Order of Malta. And we provided food at reduced cost to low-income people. Most of our clients were Protestants. Because we usually did it through churches, and we did it primarily through Black churches in Prince George’s County and in D.C. And that was important work, to be able to provide these families with better nutrition. And along with it came some nutritional guidance. So those were the things that I spent the first 10 years of volunteer work doing, because I wanted to contribute in a way to America, because I felt I had contributed to American foreign success.

The other thing I did was — and I did it for five years in my 60s and 70s — I rode my bike between Raleigh and D.C. five times to raise money for AIDS service organizations. Not to raise money for AIDS research. I figured that’s a big job that foundations and government should do. But here in D.C., for instance, we have Gift of Peace. Gift of Peace is the hospice I worked at. We also have Food & Friends and Whitman Walker that served the needs of persons living with AIDS. And now they’ve gone beyond AIDS. But that was important, because this was dealing directly with those who, this was raising money directly for the people who needed it. And both Food & Friends and Whitman Walker, which still exists, continue their good work. And so what I did – and you have to train if you’re going to ride from Raleigh to D.C., which is 335 miles in three and a half days – you’ve got to train through the year. So I became a very successful long-distance bike rider. And I did that, and I raised money by asking you, you, and you to contribute. And that’s how the money then was given to the AIDS organizations. So that was part of my 10-year plan. And it was after that 10 years was up that Georgetown asked me to come and teach. And so I then began teaching. I am not an academic. I teach, I’m hired because of my background.

I’m just going to wrap it up with one more question. Has teaching imparted any lessons for you? 

Yeah, one of the things I’ve learned from teaching is that I’m learning. I learn from the students. I teach in graduate school, and a class can have, the rule at Georgetown is you can have up to 18 [students]. And I usually have the 18 in my class, sometimes 16 or 17, but always a pretty full class. And these are people who are there by choice. And some of them are military, active duty, some are former military, some are persons already in national security, some are persons who want to be in national security. The program is a master’s degree in security studies, and there’s several different concentrations. And my courses are in, well now it’s just one, I reduced other courses. It’s on intelligence, and it’s in that concentration, because I don’t know anything. I’m not an academic. I don’t even have a master’s degree, although I started. So I learn from them. And I don’t mean learning about what’s their musical choices or what’s their book choices. I learn from them in how they think, and what are the problems that America has, and how are we doing, and what are their concerns for their future. And they are all very much interested in careers. They are interested, some are already married, even with children, some are not. But they are interested in their personal life, and they’re trying to understand how to put that into balance. And they’re trying to understand what they should do if they’re interested in national security, because the good opportunities are State Department, CIA, and the military, as far as I see it. And I encourage all three of those as opportunities for people to undertake. And I learn, because as I express thoughts, I run the class with a good bit of discussion, not me reading text for an hour and a half. But I learn, hey, maybe I ought to rethink such and such issue. So in that sense, I’m learning as well as, I hope, I’m teaching. I do get favorable remarks in the student evaluations, which, by the way, never existed in my day. 

So to finish up, what do you think someone reading this can learn from your life? 

Well, I guess if I wanted someone to learn something from my life, it is to always look to do what you think you need, and to not be held back by what others may think. Neither of my parents went to high school. But my parents were determined that my brother and I would finish high school. I don’t think they knew anything about college. So we each, you know, proceeded on our own about college. My brother via an NROTC scholarship, which is like going to Annapolis, they pay everything. I went on a tuition scholarship to Michigan State with savings. I worked in a car factory on the assembly line. I was a member of the UAW. I did all sorts of jobs like that, you know, to pay for my college. And I did stuff in college. I mean, I was editor of the yearbook and I was a member of a fraternity. It wasn’t that I was sitting around, you know, working and studying. I had a social life and I had an extracurricular life.

And then I had this goal for national security and I went into it. And then when I was there, I realized that all these other people in those days, there were very few of us who came from land grant colleges, [chuckles] Aggie schools. And I realized that these people probably had better education because they went to Harvard and Yale and Williams and Stanford and so on. but I never let that discourage me. I figured that I would just stick with it and I could do better than they can. And I did. I did better than most of those Harvard and Yale and Princeton guys.

Thank you so much for just speaking with us. This has been a great conversation.

Oh, well thank you.

END

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