Ambassador William Fletcher Warren Oral History Interviews, Vol I

Notice
This is a transcription of an interview for the Oral History Program at East Texas State University, Commerce, Texas. A draft of this transcript was edited by the interviewee but only minor emendations were made; therefore, the reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
Scholars and researchers may utilize short excerpts from this transcription without obtaining permission if proper credit is given to the interviewee, the interviewer, and the University. For extensive use of this material, permission must be obtained from the University.

This material may not be reproduced by any party except East Texas State University . However, to further the goal of thorough research, copies of unrestricted interviews may be obtained at cost by contacting the Oral History Office, East Texas State University , Commerce , Texas 75428 .

Opened February, 1974
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

[1]

PARHAM: Ambassador Warren, if you would, tell us something of your background: who your people were, and when you were born. I notice on the wall of your study, here, a certificate indicating that you are a member of the Society of the Sons of the American Revolution.

WARREN: Thank you. My name is William Fletcher Warren, known in the Foreign Service and locally as Fletcher Warren. I was born March 3, 1896, about a mile and a quarter southwest of Wolfe City [Texas]. I got the membership in the S.A.R. through my great, great, great grandfather, Isaiah Warren, Sr., who was born about 1749 and died September 11, 1848. He had a son, Blake Warren; Blake Warren had a son, Isaiah Warren III, I'll call him; and Isaiah Warren III had a son, Abraham Warren, my grandfather, who came from North Carolina by way of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to near Rehobeth Cemetery, a mile and a half or two miles northeast of Wolfe City. There was no Wolfe City, of course,

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then. Abraham Warren's wife was Frances Caroline Sims Warren, and they had several children, one of whom was my father Moses Abraham Warren. He was born September 23, 1857, and died June 28, 1951. My mother was Mary Wilson Warren from Wood County. Her father and his family had come to Texas from Oconee County, South Carolina, Walhalla District. As I have said, I was born near Wolfe City, went to the public schools there, graduated in May, 1915, and entered the University of Texas in September, 1915. I stayed in the University until January, 1918, and then I succeeded in enlisting in the Quartermaster Corps of the United States Army. I left the University and went to Camp Joseph E. Johnston at Jacksonville, Florida. From there to France and back to the States in October, 1919. I entered the University again in January, 1920, and graduated June 17, 1921. I got the membership in the S. A. R. through my great, great, great grandfather, Isaiah Warren, Sr., who served in the Revolutionary Army. It is not necessary, I'm sure, here to state the names of the other members of my immediate family. That, I believe, answers your question.

PARHAM: I understand that you completed your high school in the Wolfe City area. Would you make a comment on your high school studies and the activities you were involved in?

Warren: I did go to the Wolfe City High School and, as I say, graduated

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in May, 1915. I was valedictorian of my class. I did not take part in sports. In the first place, I was living on a farm. Any time I was not in school, I was doing things on the farm or work that my father had for me to do. I graduated in 1915 and entered the University the same fall. In the University, I did not take part in sports. The only thing I had time for was studying because I was working my way through the University. The first year I waited on tables at the Delta Sigma Phi fraternity house and the second year I was in the University cafeteria waiting on tables. After that I was lucky. A friend of the family's became superintendent of the Texas School for the Deaf. He found me delivering papers one afternoon in Austin and asked me how I'd like to work at the Texas School for the Deaf. I told him that nothing would please me more and he told me when to report. I went over there, [and] he gave me a job as a landscape gardener. At the time I left the Texas School for the Deaf to enter the Foreign Service, I was supervisor of the students making $125.00 a month, [in addition to] room, board, and laundry and had more money than I've ever had since that date. That was in June, 1921. During the period, 1915-1921, I served in the United States Army for almost two years. On graduation from the University, I went to Washington. Ten days later I took the Foreign

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Service examination and was fortunate enough to pass. I went back to the Texas School for the Deaf and stayed until I was notified in November to report for duty on December 1, 1921, to the State Department in Washington. I did that and thereupon began my Foreign Service career. After receiving notice of my appointment, Mrs. Warren and I were married at Eagle Lake, Texas, on November 24, 1921. She went with me to Washington when I reported for duty and went with me on every assignment that the Department gave me.

PARHAM: Did you meet Mrs. Warren at the University of Texas?

WARREN: Mrs. Warren was a student at Rice University. We met during the summer of 1920. The only time in my school career I went to summer school. That summer I went because I had lost two years in the military service. That [same] summer, she went to Texas for six weeks for the first summer school session. That's where we met.

PARHAM: You were married the next year?

WARREN: Yes, in 1921, that's right.

PARHAM: I note that you took the Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Texas. What was your major, and could you give us some comment on the studies you pursued there at the University?

WARREN: I majored in economics and mirrored in government, although

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I had as many government courses as I did economics courses. I met several very interesting professors in the University of Texas. One was Professor Miller--E. T. Miller--who was an authority on financial phases of economics. I met C. [Caleb] Perry Patterson who became known throughout Texas as a professor of history [government]. I met Max Handman--Max Sylvius Handman--who was, as we would call him today, professor of social sciences [sociology]. And I met Albert Benedict Wolfe, the outstanding professor at that time in Texas in economics. All of these men helped me, but especially Perry Patterson, the history professor, and Dr. Miller, the economics professor.

PARHAM: Now, you mentioned that you worked at the Texas School for the Deaf. One account lists you as supervisor of students. What duties did this entail?

WARREN: Well, you see, the deaf students had to be supervised in the usual sense of the word. For instance, they had to be escorted to the dining room and when they came out, they left in formation and were escorted to their classrooms or wherever they should go. They were with the supervisors when they were not under direct instruction from their teachers. And so, that is what a supervisor did. They had a real job in supervising these students, some of them who were just in the first grade and some of them who should have been out of school and back where they came because they were larger in

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size and weighed more than I did. But at that time, it was possible to bring enough influence so that the school had kept on some of them that should not have been there the last two or three years of their attendance. It was an interesting job and it was one in which I should have known the sign language. I didn't know the sign language. I knew some--a few--of the signs, but I knew enough and my assistants knew enough so that we could handle the youngsters properly and keep them in line.

PARHAM: Looking back on your studies at the University of Texas, were there any particular courses which you found later to be exceptionally useful to you that you would perhaps recommend to a student today?

WARREN: Considering my Foreign Service career, I think I did not take a single course that I could not recommend to a youngster who was thinking of the Foreign Service today. For instance, I had Latin, three years; I had Spanish; I had French; I almost had Czech which changed my career in that I didn't have it; I had government; economics, including labor under Dr. W. M. W. [Walter Marshall William] Splawn, who was later on [a member of] the Interstate Commerce Commission in Washington. I had international law under Judge [Egbert Raileyl Cockrell, I think it was, from Ft. Worth, who taught at T. C. U. I had geography in one

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form or another. I had enough mathematics, which I detested, to be able to pass that part of the Foreign Service examination. I can give you a transcript of the courses--the list of courses and even the grades that I made--if you are interested.

PARHAM: Yes, that would be most interesting. You mentioned a Judge Cockrell, who taught at T.C.U. Was he a visiting professor at the University of Texas?

WARREN: Yes, at summer school--the summer school when I met my wife. I think it was Cockrell. It's a good Fort Worth name and I haven't had the occasion to think of the man's name in a long time, but I'm pretty sure it was Judge Cockrell. Any rate, he was a fine old gentleman and he taught us international law that summer.

PARHAM: Can you give us some understanding of your military service? You mentioned where you went to camp in Florida and then went to France.

WARREN: Yes. As I have not stated here, I had left the University in April, 1917, to go to the first officers' training camp at Leon Springs [Texas]. Then, as now, I only have one good eye [the left one]. But I thought, maybe, that if I got down there and if the military worked on it, I could get glasses and be all right. Well, I stayed there ten days. After about two or three days--as soon as they had had an

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opportunity to examine me carefully--my captain told me, "You'll have to go to San Antonio and get yourself fitted with glasses then everything will be all right." Well, I went to San Antonio to the oculist he recommended. He examined me and he said, "Warren, we can't do a thing for you." I returned to the camp, discouraged, and I said, "Well, I won't say anything. Maybe they'll forget about it." That showed how little I knew about the military, you see. Well, on the ninth day he called me in and said, "Warren, how about your glasses?" .I told him the truth. He said, "Well, son, we can't use you here. Why don't you go on back to the University and take up your studies where you left off." So, I did. It was Saturday when I left. I had a check in my pocket for whatever it was for ten days service. They took me to San Antonio in a military conveyance and dropped me there. It was Sunday morning. I couldn't cash the check; I couldn't get breakfast. I walked the streets for a long time. And then I walked from downtown San Antonio from about the Alamo out to Fort Sam Houston. I got out to Fort Sam Houston, and because it was Sunday, of course, I couldn't cash the check. I turned around and walked back downtown. I didn't have any money in my pocket. I got downtown. I went into a Greek restaurant and from that time on I've been for the Greeks. I saw the Greek

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owner of the place and he looked me over. And he said, "You have this check?" "Yes." "Yours?" "Yes." "How do you happen to have it?" I told him. "Well," he said, "You look like an honest man to me. I'm going to take a chance." He cashed my check and I ate with him. Then that afternoon I caught a train out of San Antonio headed for Wolfe City. When I got up to Wolfe City I found that all my friends--my close friends--were in the military, and I wasn't. I wanted to be there just as bad as they did. One of the men that I had been there [at Leon Springs] with was Lynn Landrum. Later he made the Dallas News and had his column for years and years. Another man that I was with was John Booge from D'Hanis. We went down together. We left the University in the afternoon and went down to San Antonio and reported the next morning. John, he got to France like I did, but he didn't come home.

Well, after I got to Wolfe City, I stayed there during the summer months and worked on the farm with my dad, and when September came I went back to the University. Then I went home for Christmas. When I got home for Christmas, I had a good friend--I won't name him, but he was a friend of the family and he had known me from the day of my birth, and he was married to a distant relative of mine--he knew that I had been trying to get in [to the armed forces]. He said, "Fletch, why don't you come up to my office? I have something

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I want to show you." I went up there and he had a big chart that had the alphabet on it, you see. He said, "Look that over." I sat there and looked it over and looked it over and I stared at the big letters. He said, "All right, now you go along." I went along and I got back to the University and I tried the Marine Corps, the Navy, the Coast Guard, the Infantry. There wasn't a separate Air Force then, but there was a way that you tried to apply and I tried that. I couldn't get in any. Finally, I thought I would try for the Quartermaster Corps. I went in and they gave me the chart. Well, my left eye was as good as anybody's in the world. Then I told them, I said, "My right eye is not very good." They said, "Well, try anyway." I remembered the first two or three lines and I read them off and they said, "That'll do; that's all right." By that time they were much more relaxed [about their physical requirements for enlistments], so they passed me. There were about eighteen of us on January 12, 1918, who left Austin on the H. & T. C. [Houston and Texas Central Railroad] for Houston. That was the only time I have ever seen snow on the ground in Houston up to then. They shipped us out the next morning to [Camp] Joseph E. Johnston [Florida]. I entered there and stayed there maybe a month--yes, a little over a month.

I had no profession, you see, I was just a student.

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They had the other students--one would be an accountant or a stenographer. They had stenographic companies in the Quartermaster Corps, they had bookkeeping companies, they had all this and that, but I didn't fit into any of it. So they put me on the detail that cleaned and swept up the streets and did K.P. [kitchen police]. So I worked on that. Well, I had been doing that along with several of my friends for about a week or ten days when the headquarters got a request from France "Send us"--whatever the number was--"twenty-four quartermasters just as quickly as you can." Here they were training these bookkeepers and these accountants and all, and they weren't about to send them. So, they just called in the cleaning detail, and they took eighteen of us off and sent us to France. I got to France months ahead of the boys who were in those companies. I was already a sergeant, as I remember, by the time most of them got over there. So, it was the biggest break I had. We first landed at Brest, then went to Gievres, then from Gievres to Blois, and then we were [permanently] assigned. We were sent back toward Bordeaux to near Bassens, to St. Sulpice, Izon, Gironde. I got down there and it proved to be the biggest quartermaster camp we had in Europe. I stayed in that area until September 8, 1919, when I was returned to the States. I then went to Camp Root, Little Rock, Arkansas--Logan Root, I think it was [Camp

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Albert Pike at Little Rock, Arkansas]--and mustered out on October 1, 1919. I came back to Wolfe City. I spent the fall with my father, helped my brother haul cotton seed and did some other things. On January 1, I was back in Austin, [and] reentered the University in the junior class.

PARHAM: Then your military training, per se, was rather negligible as to drilling, and you had no combat training?

WARREN: No combat training; and if it is not inappropriate, I'll tell one thing about that. [That group of us at Camp Johnston] we were a detachment; we were not a company or anything. We were just a detachment. We didn't even have a head. There was someone put in charge when we traveled. At one time, for a little while, I was in charge., Once, when we were in the casserne at Blois, everybody had to get out there to march before the brass and they said, "Don't take that bunch, that detachment, out there. They can't do it." Well, sir, they got us out there and started us off [marching] down the court. They forgot--or somebody failed [to give us commands for directions]--and we just walked and walked right on until we walked right into the wall!! Just ran right into the wall!!. I can hear that officer now, "Get those Goddamned quartermasters off of here!" We never had to drill again. Never did! After that I never drilled again in my life. And so, then they sent us to St. Sulpice. As you say, I had the

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minimum of military instruction and had the maximum of non-combatant service.

PARHAM: What did your duties consist of?

WARREN: Well, for instance, I say that 115 is my lucky number. One-fifteen was the [number of the] warehouse of which I was the storekeeper in St. Sulpice during World War I. I had the most desirable warehouse--by chance, it had nothing to do with Fletcher Warren; it was just by chance--in the depot. I had chocolates, cigarettes, cigars, fruits, preserves--all the "goodies" that the Quartermaster Corps had. I had a warehouse about the size of any military warehouse you've ever seen, and it was loaded to the gunnels. The stuff would come in to me at any time, day or night. I slept right there in the warehouse. There were fifteen or twenty other warehouses for other goods. We would unload them and then shoot the cars right back. I would keep them [the goods] there, and kept a record of them, and they would give me an order-for supplies, chocolates, or whatever it was--to go to Bordeaux or Issurtil, or any place in France. When there was a battle going on up front, we were on duty twenty-four hours a day. Shipping in and out.

PARHAM: Did you have any trouble with pilferage, or loss?

WARREN: They had marines to watch [guard] the quartermaster [warehouses]. There was pilferage.

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PARHAM: You had Frenchmen working for you?

WARREN: We had Vietnamese--Annamese--working for us. We [also] had boys--colored boys out of the cotton fields of Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. They were the stevedores we called in. We had stevedore companies, and they did the heavy work. As I said, I was a storekeeper and the other men in my detachment were storekeepers or something similar. The goods would come in and we would stack them up properly, enter them in our books, and then let them go out as was ordered. We didn't have Frenchmen working for us. I never had Frenchmen working for me that I recall, but I did have Annamese.

PARHMAN: Now, you went to Washington in 1921, I believe you said, to take the examination for the State Department.

WARREN: That's right.

PARHAM: What was the examination like in those days, do you recall? Was it written for so many hours?

WARREN: Yes. There was two days of written examinations, followed then by a physical examination. If you passed the physical examination, you went up for the oral examination. If you passed the oral examination before a board of ranking State Department officials, then you were in the service.

PARHAM: Were there very many in your group, or do you recall?

WARREN: Yes, I believe there were twenty-three in my group. There

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was one other [man] from Texas. His name was Walter H. Keese. He and I had been in the same government classes in the University and we went to Washington on the same train. "K"--Keese--coming before Warren, Keese went in to the examination ahead of me. That is, he was called before me. I've always said that fate was in my favor. It's enough to make any youngster nervous to go in for that exam. Keese was ahead of me, and I had the opportunity to watch him and to study the questions and the [members of the] board while he was going through his examination. So, by the time it came to me, I had collected myself and was able to do better than I would have done had the situation been reversed. Keese didn't pass; I did. Keese went back two years later and passed. That adds to my belief that I needed to watch and observe in order to be able to pass it, and that is what he did on his second try and he made it. But he didn't stay in the service. He went back to Houston and got into the insurance business. There were others in my class. I'll mention some of them.

PARHAM: Please do.

WARREN: First, I'd like to mention a man from Illinois whose name was Edward Prindle Lowry. He had been a cadet at West Point, an enlisted man in the United States Army, a colonel in the Lithuanian Army, and a colonel in the Persian Gendarmerie. He entered World War I as a private and came out a major..

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They let him out of West Point because he was color-blind. He went out to the Philippines and served in the Philippine Constabulary. But that is a long story and one of the most fascinating stories I ever heard in my life. By the way, when he took the examination, he was secretary to General Enoch H. Crowder. He took the examination in Havana and he passed the same examination that Fletcher Warren passed. Another man, Raymond Davis, [slipped and] fell down the stairway at a Prague hotel in Czechoslovakia and was killed. By the way, Ed Lowry fell down the stairway of a hotel in Mexico City and was killed after one of the most remarkable careers you could think of. Another was John Muccio who was ambassador to Korea [in 1950-51]. Another one who was in the service with me, went out to India, became ill, and died in Fitzsimmons General Hospital in Denver. I'll let you ask me that question later about who the men were in my group. I'll give you their names later when I've had a chance to review them because it makes my story go too slow. But it was a very good group. Nearly all of them did very well in the service. None of them did better than Muccio, and none of them would have done better than Lowry if he hadn't fallen down that staircase in Mexico City. Perhaps the best known member of the class was the youngest member of the class. His name was Willard Leon Beaulac. He was from Rhode Island and had a special knowledge of Spanish,

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and I believe French since his family was, I understand, originally French-Canadian. I heard his mother was Spanish. He was the first man to receive a Foreign Service diploma from the University of Georgetown in Washington, D. C. He had a distinguished career in Latin America. I recall that he served in Tampico, Mexico and as ambassador in Paraguay, Colombia, Argentina, and perhaps some others. He had also had a lot of service in the Department of State [in Washington]. He retired from the Foreign Service and is still living in Washington, D. C.

PARHAM: You spell his name B-E-A-U-L-A-C?

WARREN: Right, Willard L. Beaulac.

PARHAM: Out of all this group--the class--how many of them would you say served in Latin America? Was it just by chance that two of you did, or were there more that served in the European area?

WARREN: Then, as now, most Foreign Service officers chose European assignments because it was known that living conditions were better. They had heard about European nations all of their lives. All of us have some roots in Europe. Few of us have roots in Latin America. The stories about Latin America, then, were no more attractive than the ones we hear today. So, I can't tell you now what percentage of those went to Latin America, but I'll try to give you that the next time we discuss

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this. I'll try to get a complete list of my friends and their first assignments. Then I can tell you whether they had long experience in Latin America. or whether most of them served in Europe and Asia.

PARHAM: Now, after you passed the examinations and were accepted by the State Department, what sort of training did you receive? Was it long?

WARREN: That is an interesting question and it is very pertinent. We had two weeks training. We had a consul general, because all of us had taken the examinations for the Consular Service, who in two weeks time made us familiar with the accounting procedure--the forms that would be used in our consular offices--and who showed us how to find what we needed to know. [This] rather than try to teach us what--at this day and time--they would think that they had to tell you and send you off to your post with that knowledge. We were only told what the working tools were and they left it up to us to find the answers, generally, when we got to our posts. And in two weeks time did it.

PARHAM: Did you stand examinations of any type during those two weeks?

WARREN: Only the oral examinations that we would get in questions from the consul general [teaching us], who was an old-timer, and he had never had any instruction. He had just been sent out to his post and he thought he was doing pretty well by us,

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you see. And now, you know about the Foreign Service Institute [in operation today]. Other than that two weeks—and it wasn't strictly teaching in the usual term of the word--I never had one hour of instruction at the expense of the United States government. When I got into the Foreign Service, I was supposed to know enough to be a Foreign Service officer, and the government was going to add two things—opportunity and experience--and that's what it did.

PARHAM: All of you who were accepted into the State Department and took this training, you were scheduled, then, to go on to assignments?

WARREN: Right. For instance, my assignment was Havana, Cuba.

PARHAM: Eventually, or did you know that early?

WARREN: I didn't know that. We finished our two weeks on Friday afternoon. As I remember, we went back on Saturday, [and] they gave us our assignments. We went away for the Christmas holidays. I went down to Casanova, Virginia—Wilhelmina [Mrs. Warren] and I--to see a cousin down there. We came back and went to New York [City] and reported to the U.S. dispatch agent there who put us on board the good ship Monterey, and shipped us off to Havana, Cuba.

PARHAM: Had you been given any sort of a choice, prior?

WARREN: Yes. They asked us--oh, say, three or four days before--where we wanted to go. They told us one day and we were to

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tell them the next. I went home and talked to Wilhelmina. I wanted to go to Germany. I had been in Germany while I was in France as a soldier. I had been to Ehrenbreitstein [on the Rhine River], and I liked it over there and I thought that would be a wonderful place. We talked it over and Wilhelmina said, "Well, I hate to go so far away." You see, this was before planes. "I hate to go so far away as Germany. Can't we get a closer place?" I looked at the map--I knew the map, of course--and I thought it over and I said, "Well, perhaps the closest place would be Havana, Cuba." That was all right with Wilhelmina. I didn't know that Havana, Cuba, was the most expensive post in the world at that time, and you can be sure that Fletcher Warren got Havana, Cuba, quick. That was our first assignment. We got there on January 2, 1922, and it was a fortunate assignment. It was a good beginning because Latin America was a good place to be. I'd like to tell you one little thing.

I was in the University ready to register in September, 1915. I had my high school Latin. I was interested in Latin America, but I was also interested in the fact that the University was going to give courses in Czech. They had a man whom, I presumed, was a Texas Czech, and he was going to give those courses. I was going in to register for Czech for a Slavic language.

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I knew enough about it to know that the language was written in Latin characters. It wasn't like the Russian language or some of the others [which use the Cyrillic alphabet]. Before going in to register, I was sitting out there under one of those mesquite trees on the campus at the University and sitting there thinking it over. And along came a young fellow and his name was [Richard Allen] Knight, from Dallas. He had gone to the Dallas public schools. I naturally knew of the Knight family there. We talked a little bit and he said, "You're registered?" I said, "I'm going in to register right now, in a few minutes." He said, "Well, what foreign language are you going to take?" I said, "I'm going to take Latin and Czech." He said, "My God, Warren, why do you want to take Czech?" He said, "You can't use it anywhere except in Texas or Czechoslovakia. I can't imagine anything sillier than that--to take Czech." Well, I thought about it then. That was just before I went in. So, I went in and I didn't sign up for Czech. Had I gone in and signed up for Czech and had gone to the State Department in 1921 with a knowledge of a Slavic language and would have asked to be assigned anywhere in a Slavic country, I'm sure that I would have gotten it just like I got Havana, Cuba. And I would have spent my life in Russia, and Bulgaria, and all the other Slavic countries instead of spending my life in Latin America. That was just

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the influence of this one boy, whom I thought, "Well, he ought to know a lot more about it than I do. He went to the Dallas public schools and I only went to the Wolfe City public schools." His family was very well to do, and my family--I doubt if they know where Czechoslovakia is. So I let him influence me. Later, this boy made all the newspapers in the country by standing on his head in front of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City as one of the playboys in New
York City. That's the boy I let change my career.

PARHAM: You never regretted it, did you?

WARREN: Oh, no, no.

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Second Interview with Ambassador William Fletcher Warren by Byron A. Parham, Commerce, Texas,
September 10, 1973.

PARHAM: Ambassador Warren, in our last interview, you told us some of your background. When we left off, you had just been appointed to your first station. But before we get you to your first station, would you give us a few comments on how you came to be interested in the Foreign Service?

WARREN: Yes, I'll be glad to do that. I entered the University of Texas in September, 1915, with the idea of doing four years [of] academic work and then taking three years of law. I intended to return to Hunt County or go somewhere else to practice law. I hadn't thought very much about where I'd go after I got my law degree. But World War I came along and when most of my companions got into the military service, I wanted to get in, too. After I succeeded in doing so, I lost, in effect, two years in the University. Consequently, I returned to Austin in January, 1920, and reentered the University and completed my academic work on June 17, 1921. In the

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meantime, the Law Department had changed its rules. One needed four years of law in addition to four years in the academic departments. I was then twenty-five years of age. Four more years of law would have made me twenty-nine, and then [there would have been] four or five years, maybe six years, as a lawyer before I would be making enough to get married. Consequently, I began to think about doing something else other than studying and practicing law. I looked around to see what I could do. Well, the two years in the military service had given me an itchy foot. I loved living abroad, I liked observing foreign people, I liked traveling to places that I probably would never travel to if I became a lawyer. So, I decided that I was going to try to get into the Foreign Service. Two facts influenced me in getting in the Foreign Service--it was the Consular Service that I was interested in at the time because the Diplomatic Service and the Consular Service were not combined. One was a classmate of mine who graduated earlier than I did, John D. Hickerson, from Crawford, Texas. He'd had a professor at the University of Texas by the name of William Ray Manning, and Manning had interested Hickerson in the Consular Service. Hickerson went to Washington, took the examination, and during the last six months, as I remember, of my studies in the University, he came by on the way to his new post at Tampico, Mexico, as

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vice consul. Well, that made me even more desirous of getting into the Foreign Service. And, too, I had met Wilhelmina, who is now my wife, and I couldn't see asking her to wait six or eight years before I could ask her to marry me. So, I decided that I was going to move in on this Foreign Service job if I could. One other factor in connection with that was that during my service in Bordeaux [France], I had seen an American consulate, and I saw the important position which a consul had with respect to the military people who were acting in his consular district. All these factors caused me to apply to the Department [of State] for designation to take the consular examination. I did so and I was fortunate enough to pass. After I passed in June, 1921, I stayed at the Texas School for the Deaf until November of that year when I got a telegram from the Department advising me that I had been appointed a Vice Consul of Career, Class III--lowest thing in the career service--and was to report for duty in Washington on December 1, 1921.

PARHAM: This was three years before the Rogers Act which combined the Consular and the Diplomatic Corps into what we today call the Foreign Service. This was still a period of considerable influence through political affiliation. In the examinations--either written or oral--was there any indication, or were you asked whether you had any political affiliation then, or not?

[26]

WARREN: No, no. They never asked me a question about my political affiliation or my religious affiliation. Not a word was ever asked.

PARHAM: Was this at the end of the period when there was strong partisanship in appointments and entire groups would be dismissed by the incoming, opposing party?

WARREN: That's right. But this had ceased by the time I had got in. If we recall, Mr. Harding was President and I was from a strong Democratic part of the country. My family was Democratic, except my paternal grandfather--he was Republican. At that time, Mr. Wilson was very much in decline. He had been one of my heroes. But despite all of that, I was admitted to the Foreign Service and, as I say, no one ever asked me about my politics or my religious affiliation at any time.

PARHAM: Do you have, at this date, any particular recollection of the oral examination which you underwent?

WARREN: Yes.

PARHAM: I understand that the written part was pretty much standardized, but what about the oral interview?

WARREN: At the oral interview, there were four or five, I guess, very distinguished members of the Department on the board who questioned us. One would question and then he would give the others a chance to ask any questions they wanted to.

[27]

One of my questioners was Wilbur J. Carr, who was Director of the Consular Service. Another was Fred Morris Deering, an Assistant Secretary of State, who was later an ambassador, I think it was, to Sweden. At this stage now, I have forgotten who the others were. But I remember very distinctly those two. As I have said earlier, I had the advantage in that a friend of mine was questioned before me so I had a chance to size up the board and their questioning.

PARHAM: You all sat in the same room together, then? You could overhear?

WARREN: No, we went in five at a time. Five of us, you see, they would question. My friend was ahead of me over here [points to right] and I was down here [points to left] at the foot [of the line]. It seems that my name coming with "W," I was always at the foot of the line. At any rate, Keese was ahead of me and I had the chance to watch him. One thing I caught in the examination was not to be too specific in what I had to say. For instance, they asked me what I was interested in. I said, "Latin America." One of the men before me had said, we'll say, "Chile." Well, then, immediately they concentrated their questions on Chile. Saying that I was interested in Latin America, they asked me questions, and I could speak without speaking in such detail. I was able to make a better answer than I would have had I been confined, say, to Cuba

[28]

or one other country. That was one thing I learned. Another thing that I learned then that served me throughout my service for the Department of State was not to be too dogmatic. I watched what they did to those ahead of me who were dogmatic. I took that into consideration in the way I stated it [my answers]. One story that was current at the time that I took the examination--and I'm sure it influenced all of us--was about a young man who had been taking the examination sometime before us. I don't know whether it was the same examination that we took or not, but at any rate it was a recent examination. The examiner said, "Mr. Jones, what can you tell us about Chilean nitrates?" [The young man answered,] "Well, gentlemen, I don't know [much], but I think they're cheaper than day rates." [Laughter] So, it was an examination by men who were supposed to know and did know their work. Having asked about Latin America, I'm sure that the ones who questioned me knew about Latin America or had questions that they wanted to ask. For instance, as I remember, one of the questions asked me was, "Why do you want to go to Latin America?" Then I gave my answer. That's about all I remember about it except that I was scared to death when I went in there. If you have any other specific questions, I'll try to answer them. I can show you later a copy of the examination—not my particular one, but one arranged for the Foreign Service.

[29]

PARHAM: That would be interesting to see. Now, you left, I believe you said, at the end of December to go to Havana for service as vice consul. According to your record, you served in Havana, Cuba, from 1921 to 1924.

WARREN: Nineteen twenty . . .

PARHAM: And then you were consul from 1924 to '25, at least according to your biographical entry in Who's Who in America.

WARREN: No. That was the period from January 2, 1922, until April, 1925. [Warren's biographical entry in Who's Who in America is incorrect.]

PARHAM: Perhaps this afternoon we can concentrate our talks on your duties as a vice consul--as a new vice consul--and you give us some of your recollections.

WARREN: Yes. As I have said, I was the lowest thing on the totem pole in the way of a career officer, and I was the baby member of the staff when I got to Havana. I was sent to Havana because it was a large post for those days. It had a very distinguished, well-qualified man as consul general, Carlton Bailey Hurst. I reported for duty the same morning we arrived in Havana--that is, January 2, 1922. I might mention, incidentally, as a contrast to the situation that exists today, that no one met us. When I got to the office, later on, I found that they had not expected us and had they expected us they still would not have met us. They just didn't meet

[30]

anyone. They thought that if a man was going out to serve as a vice consul of the United States of America, he ought to be able to get through customs and find where he was going and get there and report for duty without being wet-nursed. So, my wife and I, we got through the customs. Thanks to an American business man there we got a taxi and went to his hotel, and then I went to the office right away and reported for duty. I found that there was a staff--I have the actual list of officers--of about thirty people, all told, starting with the consul general and ending up with file clerks and what not who were Cuban citizens. At that time, the consulate general was divided into several sections of offices. Of course, at the top was the office of the consul general, himself. Another important office was the Marine Office. That was the one that had to do with ships and sailors and sea questions--a very troublesome part of the Foreign Service and yet a very interesting one.

[Next was] the Visa Office, which handled immigrants--foreigners--who wanted to come to the United States. Then there was the Citizenship Office, which had to do with American citizens and their problems in Cuba or wherever the [consular district] office was located. Then there was the Commercial Office, which was the Consular Service's effort to compete with the [federal] Department of Commerce, which

[31]

had wangled its way into Foreign Service activities. And there was the Invoice Desk, which had the duty of certifying the invoices of all goods coming to the United States from that port--the port of Havana--if invoices were required, and they were required on nearly everything because Uncle Sam collected a fee for the invoice. Finally, there was the file room, and I should also mention that there was a reception room at that time where everyone came unless he had been there [to the consulate general] before and knew precisely where he wanted to go. That was the line up in the way of offices, so, you see, I've indicated the subjects covered. The file room was presided over by a Cuban citizen, Mrs. Jimenez, I remember. So, you see that there wasn't much confidential stuff in those days.

Now, my first job was on the Invoice Desk. Havana or Cuba, at that time, had a wonderful trade with the United States in cigars and tobacco. There would be one or two railings a week from Havana to New York or some other American port. The cigar companies would always have shipments of the best Cuban cigars on board, and always, they waited to the last minute to bring in their invoices to have them certified. I was certifying officer, since I was the newest, and this was the work that most people didn't like. Well, they [the tobacco company representatives] would come in and

[32]

they would always want to make the four o'clock sailing, or whatever hour a vessel left. They would want me to take their cigar or tobacco invoices and get them out so they could get them (their products] on board the vessel. Well, the consul general was very firm that we ought to keep up to date and try to keep everything out of the way just as fast as we could. So, I was impressed with the need of getting these invoices on their way. Well, when they came in, these representatives of the tobacco company, they'd always bring me a box or several boxes of cigars as an inducement to me to get the invoices out of the way in a hurry. Well, I started out trying to smoke all the cigars that they gave me and I soon learned that I couldn't smoke [all of] the cigars or the cigarettes. I over-smoked in Havana. I still enjoy smoking, and I still haven't gotten over trying to smoke all those cigars the first six months I was in Cuba. Thank goodness that the others didn't bring in some of the products they were trying to ship to the United States.

PARHAM: Was there a deliberate delay on their part in bringing the invoices in, or was it just tardiness or slowness on their part?

WARREN: Tardiness and slowness and the fact they were living in the tropics.

PARHAM: They weren't trying to put something over on you?

[33]

WARREN: No, no. Not at all. They were decent people, and that didn't enter into it

PARHAM: Please continue.

WARREN: After a period on the Invoice Desk, I went to the Visa Office I can remember there one day that one man on the typewriter--a boy from Alabama, Tisdale Wyatt Bibb--[and I] processed sixty-five visas in one day. I think that was the biggest number I ever had. At $10.00 each, that was, as you can see, $650.00 for a day's work for the two of us. At that time, Mr. [Wilbur J.] Carr was running the [American] Consular Service so well that the fees taken in by the Foreign Service were such that in some years it cost the American taxpayers nothing to operate the [entire] Consular Service--the fees paid for it. And it was his endeavor that we should so operate the Service that it was self-paying. It had a great effect on all the young men who went into the Consular Service. I don't think they ever got away from it. They were always conscious of what it cost to run the Service. I was always glad that I had that [awareness]. Now, that was the period [early 1920's] when we had literally thousands upon thousands--maybe as many as a hundred thousand foreigners, Europeans in Havana--who wanted to immigrate to the United States. That was when I came to appreciate the ties which the U.S. has with the various countries of Europe and how much influence

[34]

the foreign born Americans have on what is done and what can't be done. There were some pleasant angles to it, though. For instance, I remember giving a visa to Mr. Tito Ruffo, the Metropolitan Opera singer. [For years] I had a card picture that he had autographed for me which I gave to a man here in Greenville. Everyone had to come to the office [in our Havana consulate] to get his visa. There was no getting a visa without coming. I can remember one day when the consul general--Consul General Hurst--called me in and he said, "Warren, I want you to take your impression seal and whatever is necessary and go out to the residence of Mr. and Mrs. H. Upmann and give them visas so that they can go to the United States." I went out and found that Mr. and Mrs. Upmann had German passports and that's the only time that I can remember that I ever left the office to give a foreigner a visa. But I went out there because they were friends of the consul general. He had been born in Germany. He spoke German as well as he did English, and he knew this couple and respected them. The Upmann factory is still the most famous factory in Cuba today.

PARHAM: Cigar factory?

WARREN: Yes, cigar factory. That's right. I think they also had cigarettes.

In the Citizenship Office, I came in contact with all

[35]

the American citizens resident in Havana and resident for the most part of my consular district. The district was larger than the city. I came to know a lot about, for instance, one of the men who was registered and a naturalized American by the name of Frank Steinhart, who founded the streetcar service in Havana. Of Jewish descent, he had been a sergeant in the Spanish-American War, stayed in Havana, made his fortune, settled there, but kept his American citizenship. He was registered in my office. Two other men who were registered in my office were Sosthenes and Hernan Behn--the two men who founded the International Telegraph and Telephone Company. I believe both are still living. I can still see the Behn name written in green ink on that registration application. I first learned what pressure the Congressmen were under from their foreign born citizens in connection with immigration by working on the Visa Desk. I also learned a lot about human nature--and also something about Fletcher Warren. We used to have these immigrants come in, and the poor devils, they would have the most ragged passports you've ever seen. They were just hanging together. Well, a fellow came in--a Pole. I'm sure he was a Polish Jew though he didn't tell me he was, but by that time I was pretty good in recognizing nationalities. Well, he came in and I liked this fellow, and he had a name that was about a foot long. I

[36]

looked at that name and at the passport [that] was falling to pieces. He was going to the United States, and you never saw a man that wanted to go more than he did. So, I looked at the name and the passport. The passport was so bad, I could scarcely read it. [As] I looked at it, there was something in the center of the name that reminded me of the English word "sunshine." His [first] name, as I remember, was Pavel--Paul. So when that young man went out, he was documented as "Paul Sunshine." He was tickled to death with his new name and all and he left the happiest man alive. Ever since, nearly every time I've gone to a city, I've looked to see if I could find any Paul Sunshines. I don't know whatever became of him. He may have changed his name, but he went out as Paul Sunshine. This was fascinating work, and you were dealing with human beings and you were helping them to join their relatives in the States, which was for them the promised land.

PARHAM: What requirements back then did they have to meet in order to get an entrance visa to the United States?

WARREN: I can't give you all the requirements now, but I can tell you several things that were required. In the first place, they had to be physically admissible. We had to be satisfied on that score. That was a big thing. Another thing, they had to come from an area for which we had numbers so that we could

[37]

WARREN: give them a number. Say that a man came out of Rumania and suppose we had allowed all the Rumanians to go to the U.S. that could go that year. Then we couldn't . . .

PARHAM: You're speaking of [immigration] quotas now?

WARREN: Yes, yes. Quotas. We couldn't let them go. Those were the main things: that he was physically able, that he was mentally qualified, and that he was from a section for which we still had numbers. Those were the principal things.

PARHAM: Was there a requirement as to a relative in the United States or a prospective job so as to prevent a person from being destitute?

WARREN: No, no. I don't think I ever came across one who didn't have a relative in the United States. They were all joining someone in the United States, in the first place. In the second place, had he told me at some stage of the game that he had one [a job], I would have had to refuse him because he would have been considered as contract labor, you see. So, what I wanted to see was a man who had relatives in the States, whom I was sure would get a job the next day after he arrived and that had enough money to get up there. They usually had steamboat transportation or they had an order showing that all they had to do was go down to the steamship line with a visa to get one.

PARHAM: Were there occasions when you had to refuse someone?

[38]

WARREN :Yes, there were occasions. But, at that early date, there were not as many refusals as there were later on. You see, that was in '22, and we had not become as strict then as we did later on.

PARHAM: Yes, that was before the Immigration Act of 1924.

WARREN: That's right. By '24, I was off of [the] Visas [Desk], thank goodness.

From Visas, then, I went to the Citizenship Office. That is where we handled the Americans and all the problems they had, such as births, marriages, deaths, estates, and discriminations on the part of the Cubans. I can't remember that I ever had a real, bona fide case of discrimination on the part of the Cubans.

PARHAM: Against an American?

WARREN: Against an American. They [the Cubans] could not have been more friendly than they were then. This brought me, as I have indicated, in touch with all the principal Americans in my [consular] district and many of the islands. I began to meet important Americans. The first important American that a I met was Alvin Owlsley, National Commander of the American' Legion, from Gainesville or Denton, Texas. I forget now which one. He came down and made a speech at the American Club in Havana to the Americans. Later, I was on duty in the [State] Department when he was appointed ambassador—

[39]

or [diplomatic] minister, I guess it was then--to Rumania and to Ireland, and I got to know him. After I retired from the Service, I got to know him [better]. He ran for Senator from Texas but was defeated, if I remember correctly, by Tom Connally. He was one of the first important Americans that I met there. Another one, of course, was General Crowder, Epoch H. Crowder, the father of the draft [Selective Service System]. He was upstairs, on the floor above, as the personal representative of the President of the United States.

PARHAM: What do you mean, "personal representative"?

WARREN: You see, at that time we didn't have a[n accredited] minister in Cuba. The state of relations was such that he was simply there as the personal representative of the President. He was followed by a minister, or an ambassador. I think it was a minister. Those are the only ones I can think of at the moment. But there is one thing, this Citizenship Office work brought me a very interesting assignment. One morning, Consul General Hurst called me and said, "Warren, there is an American in trouble down in Pinar del Rio, and his case comes up tomorrow in the court." I forget which little town it was in. "I want you to go down and be present at the trial. You sit there and when you come back, you can tell me if he was treated squarely. Be of whatever help you can be while you are there." I went down. My Spanish was minimal, but

[40]

it was sufficient to get me down there. I can't even remember how I got down there. I found the court and went in. I was able to find out when the trial was coming up, and I sat there. The court realized that I was there as vice consul from Havana. I listened to the Spanish proceedings and [they] came off pretty well, in my own estimate. I thought I understood, and I thought the man got a square deal, and all. When it was over, and [as] I was getting ready to leave, the judge of the court said, "Senor Warren." I answered, "Yes." [He said], "I'm going back to Havana and you can ride with me if you want to." Well, I had been in the Service long enough to know that if the judge of the court asked you if you wanted to ride back with him to Havana, you wanted to ride with him. And I told him in Spanish, "Con mucho gusto." So, I rode back with him in his car from Pinar del Rio to Havana. [As] we drove along, I talked the best I could in Spanish, and he talked in Spanish and spoke slowly. Despite everything, I enjoyed it. As we were approaching town, he asked me, "Where do you live?" I told him, and he took me right by my house where I was living. I thanked him hesitatingly in Spanish and told him how kind he had been to me. Then he said, in English, "Warren, that's all right. Anytime I can do anything for you, let me know." I could have killed him: I came to find out that he had lived many, many years

[41]

in New York City while Cuba was winning its independence. He knew English as well as I did. He had probably gone to a New York school, and he let me go through all of that and didn't tell me [he spoke English] until I stepped out of the car.

Now, let's see, the Commercial Office [was my next assignment]. I never cared for commercial affairs very much, but I had to do my share of commercial work. I remember getting a letter, sent in to me by the consul general, from a man that was almost illiterate. It was a type of letter that ordinarily would be thrown in the wastebasket. It was about some commercial matter. He asked something, say about growing oranges, you see. Well, I [drafted and] sent in something which I thought was about what the letter requested. The consul general sent it back. He kept me at it until, as I remember, I had about twenty pages of as carefully prepared work as I ever did. He would go over it with a fine-tooth comb. He was an editor at heart. But he was teaching me that because a man couldn't write very well, or because he didn't have a letterhead made no difference. He had to get the same kind of treatment that the I. T. & T. [International Telephone and Telegraph] or any other organization would get when they wrote. It was one of my best lessons, and I got it in the Commercial Office. But I got out of that as soon

[42]

as I could. It so happened, the way my career developed, that I never had too much to do with the commercial work of the office. [My next assignment was on] The Marine Desk. That was the one that had lots of heartaches. You could have a stabbing, or a killing, or a desertion; or the captain of a vessel would come in at the last moment and you had to "visa" his crew list. That is, you had to inspect his crew list--every member-and then you had to give a group visa on the thing. If it dealt with shipping, sooner or later it would end up in the Marine Office. So, it brought all kinds of problems, and it brought a lot of cranks, because seamen are like children in many ways. I had a friend who was on the Marine Desk--he became a friend--when I reported for duty in Havana. His name was James V. Whitfield from North Carolina. The next day after I arrived in Havana, Whitfield took me upstairs to introduce me in the legation--or, as we would say today, embassy--and we met a man named Tewkesbury from Massachusetts. Tewkesbury was a Yankee of the "Yankee-est." Afterwards, I visited him in his home in New Ipswich, New Hampshire. He came to be a very close friend. When Whitfield introduced me to Tewkesbury that morning, he said, " 'Tewk,' I want you to meet our new vice consul, Fletcher Warren." He said, "He's from Texas and didn't know that 'Damn Yankee' was two words until he was sixteen years of age." I felt like

[43]

going through the floor. But Tewk just laughed and we talked a little bit and I met all the other members of the embassy. I believe that at this time, Williamson S. Howell from Bryan [Texas] was [also] a member of the staff. At any rate, I met all the members of the staff, you see. There were men there who later became my colleagues after we had one [Foreign] Service. That was the beginning of my contacts with the diplomatic branch of the Service.

Maybe I should mention some of the problems that we had in the consulate general. When I went to Havana in January, 1922, it was at the height of the rumrunners. We set up a special service, you might say, to report on the rumrunners. We would learn when one of those vessels would be leaving the harbor [of Havana] for Key West, or Bimini, or Nassau, or some other place, and we would wire Washington and Washington would advise the consulates over there so that we could [keep abreast and] report on these rum running activities. It was very exacting and it required us, and it taught me how, to get information that was not meant to be had. So, we learned a lot about rumrunners and rum running, and we carried on a constant harassment. Combined with rum running was immigrant smuggling also. For instance, they [smugglers] used to use these little sloops or schooners to go across the

[44]

ninety miles from Havana to the United States and sometimes they would take a load of Chinese. The story was told at the time, and I'm sure it was true [because] these Chinese couldn't get visas to go to the United States since we had no authority to give visas to them. They would put these Chinese in tow sacks, tie them up, have them lying in the boat, then they'd put out to sea and head for whatever their port might be. It might be Florida, it might be Alabama, it might be up the East Coast. If a U. S. government vessel came along, and [the situation looked like] they were going to be intercepted, they would just pick up these tow sacks and drop them overboard. We were conscious of what was going on, and Uncle Sam made, I can say, a sincere effort to do everything he could to stop rum running and to fight the smuggling of immigrants. That was one of the most difficult jobs we had in Havana, one of the most interesting, and one that sort of prepared me for anything else that came later in the Foreign Service.

PARHAM: Did you have direct contact with Washington or did you have to send your messages through a commercial telegraph office?

WARREN: We sent them commercially. At that time we did not have direct contact.

PARHAM: In code or in plain text?

WARREN: Well, it depended on what it was. We sent coded messages and

[45]

we sent "open" messages. I wish we had had then what we later had, that is, the capacity to communicate directly with Washington on such things. But we didn't have it then. I later came to know a consul who was over in Nassau, in the Bahamas. His name was [Harry J.] Anslinger and he made a reputation over there for his work against rum running and smuggling of all kinds. He finally left the Foreign Service and headed up, under the Treasury Department, our work against narcotics. He stayed with it. He's retired. He's been retired about the same length of time as I have [since 1961]. He went back to his native Pennsylvania. I became acquainted with him during this period. He made his reputation. That was the one thing in Nassau that he could tie onto that would attract attention to himself and he did a marvelous job of it. He got a career
out of it.

PARHAM: How did you obtain this information? What were your sources? Was there a fund then for surreptitious information, for bribes?

WARREN: We didn't have a penny. We just had to keep in touch with Cuban officials who were friendly, or with Americans, or shipping sources. That way we got the information that we were able to send off. No, we didn't have a penny to be used in that way. Today, of course, there would be plenty of money for it. But there was nothing, then. Other than rum running and immigrant smuggling, there was another big

[46]

problem that we had, and that was the confidence game. At that time, the confidence men were just raking in millions a year in Cuba from American tourists who would come down. The confidence men had their agents--or maybe some of themselves--on the trains and vessels headed south from New York and Washington to Cuba, and they would locate the good prospects for this confidence game. Then when they got to Havana, someone would meet them and they would tell them who the prospects were, and then the Havana-end of the thing would pick them up and carry on from there. Then they would go back to New York or Washington and come down with another bunch and find out some more. The way they did it, they had betting offices. They'd have a blackboard set up to show the races coming in, and who was winning, and they would have a man there at a telephone telling how the race was going, and all. They'd lure these Americans into betting on the races that were supposed to be out at Hialeah, out west of Havana. They [the Americans] were told that these men were getting their information direct from the racetrack. These tourists would bet on races and, of course, they would win. If they
[the confidence men] knew the man was good for $50,000.00 or $100,000.00 they'd let him win up to the maximum that they thought he could pay. Then he'd want to collect his money, and they'd say, "Fine, you've won on those races. You've

[47]

won on those races. You've got $50,000.00 coming to you. But how do we know that you could have paid us had you lost?" Well, the fellow would say, "Why, I've got the money in the bank in Texas," or wherever it was, you see. They'd say, "Well, do you have it here with you?" And some of them did have it with them. Well, they would say, "Bring it here. Lay it right down here and let us see it, and when we see that you've got the money, we'll pay you." Well, some of them "anted-up" right away, and something would happen to them. They'd be hit over the head or given a drink, and when they came to, their money was gone. The office had been moved, [and] there was nothing there but an empty room. They would move as often as it was necessary, you see. No doubt, they [the confidence men] paid a certain percentage to some authorities. I don't know which ones. But, at any rate, the police were never able to catch them, and I think at times they made a sincere effort. Well, we had watched this. A few [victims] would come in and tell us after it was all over, and we would try to find them [the confidence men] and we couldn't. But we knew that they were raking up a million and a half or two million dollars a year from this source. Well, one day, the consul general got a letter from a banker in Holdenville, Oklahoma--we'll call it Holdenville--and the message said something like this: "Mr. John C. Smith, one of

[48]

the outstanding citizens of our town, left here this morning with $75,000.00 in a satchel which he withdrew from the bank, headed for Havana. I'm afraid he's in the hands of confidence men. Do what you can to protect him." Well, the consul general called in two vice consuls--Smale and Warren. The banker had told him what vessel the man was arriving on. We'll say it was the Governor Cobb of the P. & 0. Line. The consul general told us to go down and meet this vessel. As I remember, as it so often happened, it was on Saturday afternoon. So Smale and I went down to the pier and were down there when the old Governor Cobb came in. Our relations, as I have said before, with the Cubans and with the steamship lines and all the American companies could not have been better. It was wonderful to work in that climate. So, when the vessel touched land, Smale and Warren were put aboard first. We got hold of the man from Oklahoma and told him that the consul general had sent us down and wanted him to come directly to the office. Well, by that time it was almost seven o'clock, and, of course, everything was closed up. He didn't want to, but we persuaded him to go to the [Consulate General] Office with us. There we told him what he was up against. [We told him] that he was, doubtless, in the hands of confidence men, and if he took that $75,000.00 there he'd never see it again after he presented it there. Well, we couldn't convince

[49]

him. This man must have been forty or fifty years of age, and so far as he was concerned, we were just kids. Well, we sat there and talked and talked. Finally, we did convince him that he should put that money in a place of safekeeping. Believe it or not, we called the Royal Bank of Canada and they sent someone down, opened up the vault, and put his $75,000.00 in the bank and locked it up. So, we knew it was safe for that time. We got him to come back on Monday to see the consul general. When he came in and went into the consul general's office and saw that fine-looking old man, the Consul General, sitting there--looking every inch a consul general--why, he was convinced. The next morning--Tuesday morning-- we went with him to the bank. He got his $75,000.00 and we took him directly from the bank to the pier. We put him on board a vessel and stood there until it pulled out. That was the only time that we were ever absolutely sure that we balked the confidence men. But he got back home with his $75,000.OO, thanks to that country banker up at Holdenville who had the gumption [not only] to wire the consul general, but also, to suspect. Because if he hadn't suspected, he wouldn't have done it, you see. And that was the confidence game.

Now, we had often wondered about these men--what they were like, and all--but we could never get a picture or a

[50]

good description of one or anything that would enable the police to follow through. It was most frustrating. They [the confidence men] were just laughing at us, of course. Well, with this in mind, I got a call one day [informing me that] an American had died in a hotel. He had already been buried, I guess. I didn't see the body. I got up there and here was his estate. Here were all the things he had had in a big wardrobe trunk like they had in those days. Being on the Citizenship Desk, I was in charge of the estate. I had to inventory it and see that it was properly disposed of according to law. Well, I went through it, and I've never seen as many wonderful clothes as this guy had. He dressed like a lord. As I went along, I found his American passport. A little later I found his British passport. Then other things made me know that I was handling the estate of one of the confidence men. He had died and died in the hotel. That was in the wild and woolly days.

There is one other thing I might tell you on this to show you--you've been wondering what a man does in this job. But first, let me say this. Let me tell you about Mr. Lind--the death of Mr. Lind. I never came across any information in any of the studies I had in the University, or in high school, or any of the things that my daddy told me or that I learned at church, or I learned anywhere else that didn't

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help me as a consular and diplomatic officer, because what you are doing is dealing with individuals. You're either trying to find out what they are trying to do officially and what makes them tick and what your government should know in order to deal with them; or, you're dealing with marriages, deaths, births, fights, stabbings, commerce, [or] law. Any human experience is in your yard as a diplomatic officer. So, if you were to take, now, a course on space travel, and you're a diplomatic officer, you could be sure it wouldn't be long until you could use it to advantage. So, anything that you have in the back of your head, if you're interested in human beings, is of tremendous help to you in trying to be a good Foreign Service officer of the United States. Now, back to Mr. Lind. I was on the Welfare Desk.

PARHAM: How do you spell his name?

WARREN: L-I-N-D. He was of Norwegian or Swedish extraction. I don't know which. [But he was] a great, big fellow--bigger and taller than I was [over six feet, six inches]. I don't remember now why he was over there [in Havana]. A lot of people were going to Cuba and Florida in those days. Nevertheless, he was there and he died. The Cuban authorities got him. Evidently they didn't know that he was an American citizen--maybe they didn't find his passport until later.

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I don't know how they finally found him. But at any rate, they got ahold of the body and they put it in a coffin, and the coffin was too little. When I learned about this thing and got out there, here was this great, huge man in this coffin and his feet were sticking out the end of the coffin! I never felt as sorry for a human being in my life Well, I got in touch with his son who was an attorney in Minneapolis. He was a nasty guy. Here I was doing everything I could to protect his interests and look after the remains of his father. He sent me a telegram--he didn't send it to me [personally], but to the consulate general, of course --to Havana and it arrived on Sunday. It disappeared in the elevator. The elevator man was the one who took the messages from downstairs [to the consulate general, upstairs]. Anyway, we never got the message. At any rate, this son, this lawyer, was going to bring suit against the U. S. government because of the way we had handled his father's estate--his father's remains and whatever estate there was left. We finally got the remains of the old gentleman properly encased, closed up so it would pass through the customs and health authorities, and got him shipped back to Minneapolis for burial. That's the reason I told my wife that there's one thing she's got to do when I pass away and that is to see that the coffin is big enough so my head and feet don't

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touch the ends [of the coffin]. I wanted to tell you that [story] because, as a young [consular] officer, it made a big impression on me.

Now let's see if I've got anything else. Oh, yes, one other thing in talking about the Cubans. This, you see, was '22 [1922]. The Cubans had not had many years of independence and they felt indebted to the U. S. Many of them--like the judge I told you about--had served in the United States, had lived here, had been given refuge. They had come to like the United States just like the refugees now do. Today, many of them are American citizens and will never go back, [though] some of them will. They preferred anything American to anything Spanish, or French, or anything else. They liked American music. They had learned a lot about American food. They knew about American laws and American freedoms. They were on our side, and they were as helpful as they could be. When they sent their children away to school, they didn't think of sending them--it was an exception if they did--to London, or Paris, or Berlin, or Madrid. They wanted to send their children to school in the United States. That's how far we've come away from that position since 1922. We couldn't have been treated better than we were. We vice consuls were the lowest things in the Service. We [even] had one of the members of the Secret Service who

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would come in and sit down and talk to us. [He would] tell us what we wanted to know or what he thought he could tell us.

PARHAM: This was the American Secret Service or the Cuban?

WARREN: The Cuban. That's when I came to realize what friendship between two peoples can mean. We have seen--we see now--how far we've gotten away from that. But I wanted to put that in.

Now then, there was one other thing I wanted to tell you about, and then I think this is enough about Cuba, if you agree. Again, as I say, everything always happened on Saturday morning. At this time, we were working five and a half days a week and finished up at one o'clock on Saturday. Well, just before one o'clock, the consul general rang for me and I went in. When he rang, I went, and I went in a hurry. He said, "Warren, I've got a job for you." I said, "What's that, Mr. Hurst?" [He said], "I've just had a telephone call from a brothel down on," we'll say, "Blanco Street,"--and I think it was Blanco Street--"from an American girl down there. She says she's being held there in this brothel against her will. I want you to go get her." Boy: I hadn't been married very long then, and to go into a brothel was something new. So, I called Wilhelmina on the phone and told her that I was going on an errand for the consul general and that I'd get home as soon as I could. Well, the consul general said, "You go get her and then you put her where you are sure that

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she'll be safe until the next vessel goes back to the United States." As I remember, that would be on Tuesday. So, I went down there and knocked on this door, and this fellow opened a peep hole. He looked at me and asked what I wanted. I told him that I was Vice Consul Warren from the American Consulate General and that I was there to see--and I gave the girl's name--and he said very brusquely, "Wait a minute." He closed the door and he went off. He came back after a while and opened up and said, "Come in. Follow me." We went down a corridor, you see, with cubicles on each side. We went down the corridor and we came to this one that was open and here was this girl. She was an American girl--an actress from the States. Well, I've never seen a human being as chewed up--as beaten black and blue--as she was. I asked, "What happened?" Well, she said, "I came into Havana." She told the date. Probably the Friday before. "I wanted to look the city over and have a little vacation. I met this handsome Cuban and he bought me a drink and he offered to take me for a ride. Foolishly, I went for a ride with him and we had some more drinks. After that I passed out. When I awoke, I was here in this place and I've had an awful time here. I want to get out and I want to get home and I never want to see Cuba again." "Well;' I said, "will you go with me?" She said, "Yes, I'll go with you

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anywhere." So, I spoke to the person in charge of this bawdy house and he let me take her out. In a job like that, you know people all over town for everything. We knew a woman who was running, we would call it a boarding house today. Down there they call it a pension. She was just as fine and just as honest as she could be. I took this girl and went over there. I didn't want the girl to go out on the street. I just wanted her to stay right there in that house--not to go out with anybody--until I came for her on Tuesday morning, and then I would take her away. The woman said, yes, she would do that; and the girl said, "I'll certainly do it. I'll do anything you tell me to do." Well, we put her there and she stayed there. She didn't go out on the street and she didn't leave the house. On Tuesday morning, I picked her up and took her to the pier and put her on board the vessel and stood there until the vessel pulled out. I haven't seen her from that day till this, and I've never had a word from her or anything. I got her out and got her safely back to the States. Now, that was one of the unusual things that I was called on to do.

PARHAM: Isn't there a pun or something about being a vice consul?

WARREN: Yes, my wife asked if that is the reason they are called "vice" consuls.

PARHAM: Can you tell us something of your private life activities in

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PARHAM: Havana?

WARREN: Wilhelmina and I were too busy making both ends meet and doing work that I took home at night to have time for any social life. About the only thing . . . It's not social, but there was one thing that we did. We attended the Methodist Church in Havana. We had an American church there, or, we had an American preacher there--Brother Clements. And we went to that church. We were also invited to the consul general's home now and then, and we had visits from the consular inspectors who came to check up on us. They did a splendid job of checking on us, and then we were supposed to call on these inspectors. I knew so little about this thing [consular protocol] that the inspectors came, and we hadn't called on them. I didn't know I was supposed to call on them. One day, one of the senior officers of the consulate general, Arthur C. Frost, who was a consul, called me and said, "Warren, have you been to call on the inspector?" I said, "No, sir, I haven't been to call on the inspector. Was I supposed to call on the inspector?" He said, "He's down here." And he told me the address. As I remember, it was on the Malacon. He said, "You get your wife this afternoon and you go call on him." I said, "What am I supposed to do when I call on him?" God bless him, he smiled and said, "You and your wife go up there and sit down and he may offer you

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a drink. If not, you sit there and talk to him and his wife a while. You have your [calling] cards?" I said, "Yes." Then he said, "Well, you leave a card for you and your wife. That's all there is to it. You just go up there and see them. That gives them a chance to look you over and look your wife over, and see whether you look like suitable material for the Foreign Service. That gives him a chance, as well as Consul General Hurst, to judge you." Well, that made sense. So we went out there and had a very pleasant visit, or call, with this Arthur Garrels, the [visiting inspector] consul general. We came to know a few families, socially, there, just like you would your neighbors. You get to know the people around you. We got to know the Consul General [Hurst] and his wife rather well. They took us to the theater in Havana. We got to know the Frosts, also a member of the staff, and my friend Whitfield--he and his wife. She was from Clinton, North Carolina, where the Warren family came from. We [a11] got to be good friends. Then, there were all the junior vice consuls. Occasionally, some young businessman or young American living in Havana might invite us out. But the social life was the minimum. That didn't become important until after Washington, and I'll tell you about that later.

PARHAM: Did you live in a hotel, or did you live in a residential area of the city with other Americans or among Cubans?

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WARREN: The day we landed [in Havana] there was an American there representing a little hotel which he called the Hotel Handing, the "House of Normalcy." This was in the period of Mr. Handing. The American got us and took us there. Wilhelmina and I stayed there until we were able to find a place where we could board. We finally found a place on the Malacon that was the home of an American named Ruiz, Spanish name. He was down there representing A. Silz, supposedly a meat exporter. Well, we lived very comfortably with them. They treated us wonderfully well. Finally, one day they left us. Somebody told Wilhelmina that the Ruiz's were on a boat that went right in front of the house. By then, we'd been there some time and had made other connections. We found a lady who took young American couples coming to Havana, found [them] a house, fitted it up, and rented it to them. Mrs. Madison found us a place out in the Vedado, near the Japanese Park. That was our first house. That was in--every place we had, had been--in the Cuban section. The House of Normalcy wasn't very far from this Blanco address I mentioned and neither was the Ruiz home. It was within two or three blocks of Blanco Street. But then, we moved out to where Americans were living in the Vedado section. Later, we got a different house and bought our own furniture and were on our way. All that happened in Havana. But we were among the Cubans right along. There was not a

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compound or anything like that. It was good Cuban-American relationships. That was what it was. Does that answer your question?

PARHAM: Fine. Did you have much opportunity to meet other young diplomats of other nationalities?

WARREN: Yes, Yes. I met the British and the Mexican. The Mexican--if I have it straight now, and I think I do--the Mexican consular officer that I came to know had been born on the border. He took Mexican citizenship and his brother [took American citizenship and] was in the United. States Immigration Service in Arizona. So that gave us a tie. Many of the Latin American consular officers were businessmen and were honorary consuls or honorary vice consuls. But I remember the British and the Mexican. I don't remember the French. No, those were the only two I remember now. So, our association was only the association that comes from being in the same business.

PARHAM: So your work, then, in Havana was several years of steady, hard work?

WARREN: Precisely. It was steady and it was hard; it was very tiring. The essence of it was being able to do a lot of detailed work and learning how to get along with fellow human beings.

PARHAM: Did you have periodic vacations?

WARREN: Yes. On the first vacation we came home in '23 [1923].

PARHAM: For how long?

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WARREN: We had two months, I guess it was. We came home. I came to Wolfe City and then went down to Eagle Lake where my brother-in-law lived. I was down there when [President] Warren Handing died. I remember getting the news of Warren Harding's death. I think that was in '23 [1923], if I remember right. That was our first vacation.

PARHAM: Did you pay all expenses in going to Havana and coming home on vacation? What did the government pay?

WARREN: No, no. The government paid our traveling expenses to the post. They didn't pay our expenses on vacation. We paid that. I sent Wilhelmina home. She came home early, as I remember now. Of course, this has been a lot of years, but she came home ahead and then I joined her here. After we got through we returned to Havana for additional service.

PARHAM: Back in this day, if you recall, how much salary did a vice consul of your stature receive?

WARREN: I started out with $2,500.00.

PARHAM: A year?

WARREN: A year. That sounded like an awful lot to a boy leaving the farm here in Texas and the University in 1921. But, as I think I told you on another occasion, we were going to one of the most expensive posts in the world. When we got there they gave us the highest post allowance they gave anyone, which was $1,000.00. So, we got $3,500.00 a year. Every time

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we got a promotion they would cut down our post allowance by the amount of the promotion. By the time I got to be consul, I was getting $3,500.00 and was transferred to Washington.

PARHAM: Of course, this was tax-free in those days, wasn't it?

WARREN: No, I came across my income tax the other day. I think I have it here. [Warren pauses to look for some papers.]

PARHAM: Being out of the country, I didn't know if you paid taxes or not

WARREN: No, no. We paid just like everybody else. [Warren shows a small notebook to Parham.] Down at the last entry.

PARHAM: Notation in a notebook stating: "Income tax, 1924, $12.65."

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Third Interview with Ambassador William Fletcher Warren by Byron A. Parham, Commerce, Texas,
September 17, 1973.

PARHAM: Ambassador Warren, did you have any changes of duties after being promoted to consul in Havana?

WARREN: After my promotion to consul in Havana, I continued on the program, I suppose we could call it, that must have been laid out when I left Washington for my Havana assignment.

I started, as I have already said, in the Marine Office and served there for a while. Then I moved to the office of what we can call American Citizenship, then to the Visa Office. Also, I served in the Commercial Office, and got a look, of course, at the File Room. I became familiar with the filing system in Havana which helped me later on in Washington. Also, I had my share of attention of the Reception Office because all callers came to one office on arriving at the consulate general unless they knew precisely where they were to go. So, after my promotion to consul, I continued in the work in the various offices and by

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the time it was in order for me to have my second leave of absence in the United States, in April, 1925, I had completed a tour of instruction in each one of the offices of the consulate general. The old consul general must have taken a special interest in my case because I was a new career officer that had entered by examination in Washington, had been sent to him from Washington, and he was anxious to make the career consular officers as good as the best anywhere. When he heard that I was coming back to the United States for my second leave of absence, he said to me, "Warren, this time you should go to the Department of State, spend your leave in Washington, and become acquainted with the Department and the officers who are going to determine your career." So, then, I went to Washington after having completed work in each one of the offices of the consulate general.,

PARHAM: After you finished your assignment in Havana, according to your records, you were assigned to the State Department in Washington from 1925 to 1929. Will you please tell us what was the purpose of this assignment and what duties you had in that assignment?

WARREN:I think I said that Carlton Bailey Hurst advised me, when he learned that I was going on vacation, to take my second vacation not in Texas but in Washington, D. C. He told me it would be good for my career. Respecting him very much and,

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wanting to do anyway what my chief suggested, Wilhelmina and I decided to go to Washington. The only thing was that it was a lot more expensive for us at that stage of my career to go to Washington and to the Department than it would have been to go to Texas. So, our friend, the consul down in Matanzas, Jars V. Whitfield, who later became a pioneer in North Carolina on the subject of pollution and who made North Carolina an example for the rest of the Union in working out pollution problems, asked us to come down in April, 1925. He said, "I'll get you on board a sugar boat, and you'll have free transportation to the port of New York." Well, Whitfield never made a promise without intending to carry it out. So, we went down. I learned later that he virtually forced the old captain of that sugar freighter to carry us to New York. We had a wonderful trip up, haunted by the smell of sugar every foot of the way. The captain had us met in New York by a boat that took us off and ashore, and from there we went down to Washington. I went down to Washington as a Foreign Service officer-on leave. I should say as a consular officer on leave, because the two services [the Diplomatic Service and the Consular Service] had not yet been combined. I went back to the Department, back to Room 115 where I had been in the first days of my service, reported for duty, registered in, and then we went to a rooming house out on Columbia Road in

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northwest Washington, run by the family of one of the men in the office in Havana. We stayed there during our sixty-day leave. About the end of that sixty-day leave, I was walking down the corridor of the State Department and someone met me--at the moment I don't remember who it was--and he asked me if I had been to see Mr. Charles C. [Christopher] Eberhardt. He didn't say "Charles C." I say that to give you the full name. I replied that I had seen him when I first came back from Havana. He then told me that I should go back and see him again, and so I did. I got down to his office just as soon as I could and asked to see Mr. Eberhardt. He was in the personnel Office. He said to me, "How would you like to come to the Department for an assignment?" Thinking back on what Consul General Hurst had told me, I knew that he would want me to do that. I said, "Nothing would please me better." So, he told me that I would hear something very shortly. Sure enough, in a few days, around May 20, 1925, I got a letter at our boarding house, and sure enough I was assigned to the Department of State. I went back to the Consular Bureau, saw the Chief of the Consular Bureau, and he said, "I want you to come here to Room 115." That was where the register was located. He said, "You'll have to meet all the officers coming back from the field and those going out, and in addition you'll have to distribute the incoming and outgoing mail for

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the Consular Bureau." I said that I would like that very much. So, I found myself in the office of Herbert C. Hengstler, Chief of the Consular Bureau, who was from Ohio. The office was the equivalent to the administrator of the Bureau.

As soon as my leave was up, which was just a few days later, I reported for duty, and I spent four years to the day, I believe, in the Department working for Mr. Hengstler. I was just across the hall from him and saw him many times each day.

PARHAM: How did you spell his name?

WARREN: His name is spelled H-E-N-G-S-T-L-E-R. Well, that assignment, as Consul General Hurst had told me, and in a sense that he didn't know, was the happiest thing that could have happened to me. I literally saw everybody who came into the Consular Bureau--every consular officer and others who came in to see Mr. Hengstler or to register as a consular officer. It was my duty to register them when they came in. By the end of my four years, because the Department was very small then, I believe that I knew 95 per cent of the people in the Department and in the Consular Service by name, by face, or by signature. I saw all the dispatches. In fact, I saw everything that came in. Those four years I spent in that office gave me an advantage, I thought, over any other man in the Foreign Service. There was, of course, a lot of

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detailed, routine work, but it certainly enabled me to get to know everybody in the Department. I knew them all, from Mr. Carr, Mr. Wilbur J. Carr, the Director of the Consular Service, right down through all the secretaries and even the janitors in the building. It was such a small affair then. It was more like a family or a club than it was a big department. I shall always be grateful to Consul General Hurst for suggesting that I go there and to Mr. Eberhardt for giving me the assignment in that office.

Now, when I reported for duty, Mr. Hengstler told me how to distribute the mail. I had filing slots on my desk, and the mail would go into one of those slots, and I sent it all over the Bureau and to other sections of the Department of State.

PARHAM: Now, this was in the old State Department Building, the Victorian building that was so noted there in Washington?

WARREN: You're right. It's a building that is ugly, and yet, I've never known anybody who worked there for any length of time who was not in love with the old building. They considered tearing it down, but they found that it would cost more to tear it down--it being made of big granite blocks--than it would to keep it, although it was not the most efficient building. It's the one located across West Executive Avenue, across from the White House. Wilhelmina used to park her car on West Executive Avenue, at the end of the day, and

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wait for me until I got through and came out. It is now a part of the Executive Offices of the White House. I believe that is where Mr. [Spiro] Agnew has his office because most of the supernumeraries have their offices in that building. I have a lifelong friend whom Lyndon B. Johnson put in there, and he stayed there the whole time he was with the President. I knew the whole building. There was a basement and a sub-basement. I knew everything from top to bottom about that building, and I loved it. I never go by it but that I feel homesick. My office was on the ground floor, Room 115, in the southwest corner. It was in this building that I used to see [General] John J. Pershing. This building, before it was solely the State Department, was the State, War and Navy Building. I used to see General Pershing in his office. As I remember now, it was on the third floor in what I believe was later the Library of the State Department. Now, I believe, it is the room where the President holds news conferences.

This assignment to the [State] Department gave me the opportunity, as I have implied, to learn the Department and its workings. In those days, it was such a small organization that the experience was one to give a man confidence in the Department. If you had hell breaking loose in Haiti, you knew the man upstairs who was sitting on the [Latin American] Desk. If it was Albania, you would know the man in the

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European Division who was on that Desk. So, one result of my four years in the Department was my faith in it and more confidence in the relationship between the Secretary of State and the President than one gets today when he thinks about the huge organization that is the State Department and the role that the State Department plays that is many times secondary or somewhere else along the line in the conduct of foreign affairs. But at that time, it was a very confidence-inspiring set up, particularly for a young Foreign Service officer just starting out.. So that was a big thing.

Another advantage for me, not having been brought up in the eastern United States, was four years at the seat of the government that gave me the opportunity to see how the government really worked. I never failed to profit from those four years in that respect. Even today. I learned how the American government operates.

PARHAM: This was the Coolidge administration, wasn't it?

WARREN: That was the Coolidge administration, yes. Because Mr. Handing had died, if I remember rightly, in '23 [1923], when I was on my first vacation here in Texas. The next important thing in this assignment was the ability to meet and know the officials of the Department as individuals. Even now, in 1973, I am always pleased and a bit stirred when I think about the ones I came to know. And, if you think it might

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be interesting, I'll tell you some of the big men around the Department at that time.

First, of course, for the consuls, was Wilbur J. Carr. He had whipped the Consular branch into shape, taking it from a bunch of political employees, and had molded it into a career service. He was determined to accept only the highest standards. He took a personal interest in the [entrance] examinations, and I think I have mentioned that he sat on the board at the time I was chosen. He was the one who came to have the influence in the Congress, in my opinion, that enabled the Department of State finally to combine the Diplomatic and the Consular Services. I don't think I am prejudiced in this because I was trying then, as I am now, to see the truth as it was. And I felt at the time that the two services were merged that the Consular Service had more prestige than the Diplomatic branch of the Service because it was under firmer guidance.

PARHAM: From what I have read, this was true. It definitely had a higher reputation.

WARREN: Well, that, too, was my opinion at the time. That goes back to the two men, Wilbur J. Carr and Herbert C. Hengstler, both of them from Ohio. Both I loved. I worked hourly with Mr. Hengstler, and I saw Mr. Carr from time to time so that he knew who I was and what I was doing.

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Another man I met at that time whom I admired very much was Green H. Hackworth, from Kentucky. He had come to Washington, evidently as a clerk in the government, had gone to school there, gotten some courses in international law, and finally got into the State Department as a clerk. And, from that, he worked upward, becoming a solicitor, as they called them then, but today we would call him a legal advisor to the Department. After he finished his career, he also sat on the International Court of Justice at the Hague, and then came back to Washington. He passed away not so long ago. I had great admiration for him. Another man I believe I came into contact with once--but that is not the important thing, the important thing was the influence which he had on the permanent staff of the Department--and that was Alvin A. Adee. He did as much to stylize the reports and the communications of the Department of State, I think, as all of the other officers of the Department put together. When you look at something, let's say, that came out of the State Department before World War II, you're looking at something that bore the imprint of Adee, although he was probably dead at that time. What he said and did determined what expressions and phrases and sentences you could use in Departmental correspondence.

PARHAM:Were there forbidden words, phrases, or sentences, or was

[73]

it just grammar?

WARREN: it went to grammar, and if you used an expression that was slang or anything [of the sort], you could be sure that it would be cut out and sent back to be rewritten. He had some girls, some women there in the Department that were wonderful [syntax editors], who had been trained by him. So, his influence on the style of the Department correspondence would be hard to overrate. I came to know of him and to admire him very much. And, as I say, I had, like the others, to observe and to follow what he said.

Another man that I used to see--I didn't come into contact with him personally, at least I don't remember that I did--was a diplomatic officer, like Adee, named John V. A. MacMurray. He was on duty in the Department when I came there, and he was one of our ace diplomats. I never dreamed it then, but afterward--not immediately, though--I was to follow him as ambassador to Turkey. And John V. A. MacMurray was our authority on the Far East.

PARHAM: Do you mean the Middle East?

WARREN: No, Far East, though I see why you ask me, because afterwards he was ambassador to Turkey just like Joseph C. Grew. They were closer together in Departmental work then than they are today. MacMurray wrote one of the funniest dispatches in the records of the Department of State, and I'm going to

[74]

see if I can get a copy of it to go along with this. It is about Mrs. Gillespie's piano. Mrs. Gillespie was the wife of a Department of Commerce commercial attaché from Texas, and he passed away overseas. They had to send his effects back to the States. And those effects didn't move, at least they didn't move as they should have, because there was trouble about Mrs. Gillespie's piano.

I want another one for you--I'll put this in just so we don't forget it--it was written by our ambassador in Nicaragua. At that time, we sent in each week what we called a "Weeka." In that, you summarized what had taken place during the week, and you could let down your hair if you felt like it. In this case, the ambassador--and he came from North Dakota--wrote a dispatch that is a classic like the one from MacMurray.

And there was another one. I followed a man in Baranquilla, Colombia, named Alfred T. Burri. Burri was, I would say, maybe ten years older than I was, and he had had quite a bit of experience when he went to Baranquilla as consul. At that time we, Uncle Sam, sent a great group of military planes on a goodwill trip through Latin America. Now this was very early; this was before July 6, 1929. Well, they got to Baranquilla and the officers were feeling their oats, and they offended the local authorities. Consul Burri sent

[75]

a telegram to the Department describing how these flyers were going through Latin America like a wild bull of the pampas. And that, too, stands out as one of the outstanding humorous dispatches.

And there is another one that I shall try to get if I can. It was written by the United States minister to Albania. His name was Grant. It stands out as one of the most humorous things that was prepared.

And still another one was by one of our ace diplomats, Ellis 0. Briggs. He wrote a dispatch from Prague about the departure of the Soviet chief representative from Prague. It is outstanding. I'd like to pass that on to you if I can get it. These are samples of diplomatic humor that I think might be worthwhile to put in. I believe they are still talked about in the Foreign Service.

We had another man in the Department who became our authority on the Far East, Stanley K. Hornbeck. He lasted my whole career. I believe he has died since I retired--in the last two or three years. But he was there at the time. I got to know him better than I ever knew MacMurray. Then, there was an Assistant Secretary of State. I don't remember that he was Assistant Secretary while I was there, but he got to be an Assistant Secretary of State, and his field was western Europe. He was the scion of a family that

[76]

had immigrated from New England to Hawaii, and his name was William R. Castle. He ruled the European "roost" with a firm hand. And so, I came to admire him. I might put in parenthesis, here, another thing I learned from this assignment in the Department was that the men who ran their offices with a firm hand made a much better showing than the fellows who just let things take their course. I've always been thankful that I got that experience early in my career before I had my own independent post, and Castle was an example of that. Then, I mentioned last week John Dewey Hickerson from Crawford, Texas, who was partly responsible for my being in the Foreign Service. He was in the University of Texas at the same time I was, and we worked for a short time on the Daily Texan [the student daily newspaper] not as reporters, but getting up at two and three o'clock in the morning to get that paper out onto the streets. Well, Hickerson had become interested in the Foreign Service because of William R. Manning, who had been a teacher in the University and he interested Jack, who must have been one of his star pupils in the Foreign Service. As a result, Jack went to Washington and took the [consular] examinations and passed, and when he came back to Austin, I talked with him about the Foreign Service. I already had an itchy foot. Well, when I got there [Washington], Manning was there, and I came to

[77]

know and like him. He was not the aggressive type at all, but he became an authority on Latin America. I believe he edited a whole bunch of books while he was in the Department of State. He didn't know it, but he had an influence on my getting into the Foreign Service.

There are some others that I might mention, but I think that's enough to show you that I was impressed by these men who held responsible positions in the Department during the four years I was there. They made me want to see if I couldn't reach a responsible position in the Foreign Service. I haven't mentioned a man, and there are others, too, to whom I don't feel indebted.

PARHAM: May I interject one name? On another occasion you mentioned him, and I hope you will retell the story of your meeting the Mr. Clark who wrote the famous Clark Memorandum concerning the Monroe Doctrine.

WARREN: Yes, J . Reuben Clark. Yes, I remember him, and he certainly gave me reason to remember him. He had just been appointed, or was being considered for an appointment, in the Department of State. One morning early, I had gone from one of the upper floors of the old State Department Building down to the basement. You could walk in to the State Department Building from the White House on the basement floor and come right in to the elevator. That morning, I was standing

[78]

there waiting for the elevator. Here was this gentleman. It must have been summertime because I can remember he was in light clothing--seersucker or palm beach--and he had on a straw hat that we called a "sailor." I don't know what they call them today. Stiff brim. He was standing there, and he was a fine-looking man. I took a look at him when the elevator came down, stopped, and opened. I waited a second, and when I decided that he wasn't going to get on the elevator, I walked in. When I walked in, he started in at the same time, and we jostled each other. He turned to me and said, "I think you need a course in manners." I said, "I'm sorry, sir. I didn't mean to jostle you. I decided you weren't going to get on the elevator, so I came ahead." He said something like, "Well, I was going to get on." We went up to the first floor and the door opened.
I just stepped back and waited to see if he was going out, and I said to him, "Are you going to get out here?" He said to me, "You go to Hell'."

Well, I got out, and I walked down to [my office in] Room 115. Then, I got to thinking about it, and I beat it right down to the Personnel Office and saw whoever it was in charge. I think it was Edward J. Norton from Tennessee, and I told him what had happened. He said, "Who was the man?" I said, "I don't knave." He said, "All right. Go ahead. Don't worry about it." He was the one who kept the records,

[79]

and if he told me not to worry about it, I had enough confidence in him not to worry, so I went on. But, I thought about this [incident] all the morning, and in the afternoon I went out to the colored man on the elevator. I knew him just like I did all the employees of the Department. I spoke to him. Our relations were very pleasant. I asked him, "You weren't on the elevator this morning, were you?" He said, "No, sir, I was doing something else." Well, I described this man and told how he got onto the elevator that morning and had bawled I me out. I asked the operator if he knew who it was. "What did you say he looked like?" he asked. I described him as best I could. I can see him right now. The operator said, "Why, I think that was Mr. J. Reuben Clark. He's just reporting to the Department today as the Undersecretary of State."

I made some other inquiries, and I decided that it had to be Clark. Now, then, I'm going on my memory. This is something I haven't thought about for many years, and it occurred to me as I was telling it to you. Someone told me at the time, if I remember correctly, that he had just been defeated for the Senate in Utah and had come over to the White House. Evidently he had been given a job at the State Department, and he wasn't in any mood to be jostled by any baby Foreign Service officer. It sure was a surprise to me.

[80]

PARHAM: Did you, by any chance, have any contact with the Secretary of State himself, Charles Evans Hughes?

WARREN: I'm glad you asked that. As you realize, when I started out in 1921, I was the lowest thing on the totem pole. But by the time I had come back to the Department [in 1925], I had gotten three promotions and I was well on my way in the Consular Service. I had reached the rank of consul, and the next big promotion in title would be if I ever became a consul general. I never did, and that was always a disappointment. That was what I set out to be, a consul general, but I never got to be that. And, as you know, at that time Charles Evans Hughes was one of the outstanding statesmen of our country, a distinguished American if there ever was one. He was a graduate of Brown University, if I remember rightly, and a lawyer of outstanding and national recognition. I saw Mr. Hughes, and he was a way up there in the upper realms of another world. I admired him tremendously. But about the only contact I had with him was when he sent me a telegram saying I had been appointed a consular officer of the rank of vice consul of Class III. So I never knew Mr. Hughes, except that everyone was conscious that he was up there on the second floor [of the State Department Building] and that his was the big push behind the Department and what we were attempting to do. But, let me say again that he

[81]

looked like a Secretary of State should look, and he acted like a Secretary of State should act. He had a son that later followed his father, not in the government service,' but [as] a rather outstanding New York attorney. But I never met him either. So, I can't say that I actually knew Mr. Hughes. I've always been sorry that I didn't. But I think I met most of his right-hand men: all of the Assistant Secretaries, and the Deputy Assistant Secretaries, and the experts in the Department.

PARHAM: If I may, I'd like to ask you a few questions concerning life in Washington at this time. Did you and Mrs. Warren rent a house, or did you buy one during this tour?

WARREN: No, no. When we went there, we stayed with a family that was connected with one of the men in Havana. And after we had been there long enough to get our feet on the ground and know that we were financially able, we got a little apartment on Thirteenth Street on the third floor of one of those Baltimore type houses with the kind with the steps in the front. Narrow houses. We began our housekeeping in Washington there. We never bought a house in Washington. Wilhelmina has always thought that we made a mistake [in not doing so]. On a later assignment to the Department-I was there three different times--we found a house in northwest Washington toward Chevy Chase but still in the

[82]

District, and it attracted us very much. I was considering buying it when I spoke to my old friend, whom I had met on the first day I reported for duty in Havana, Charles B. Hosmer. He became one of the anchor men, you might say, of the Consular Service and the Foreign Service. I told him about that. He had been a Maine lawyer and a secretary in the office of Congressman White, later Senator White, if I remember rightly, from Maine. Charlie was older than I was, considerably older, and he said, "Fletch, what in the world do you want with a house in Washington? You'll be going out and you don't know that you'll ever be coming back," and he went on and on. That was a "down East" Yankee estimate of the situation, and I thought he ought to know more about it than a fellow from Texas. So, I didn't buy it. Had I bought it, I would have cleaned up on it, but I didn't. Charlie didn't buy either and he was on duty there just like I was. So, I passed that up. That was a chance that I overlooked. Wilhelmina and I never did buy a house in Washington. But, on my final assignment to Washington, when I was Executive Assistant to Adolf A. Berle, we did buy a house in Alexandria, Virginia, at 308 Duke Street. It's still there, an old, old house almost as old as the Republic. And we loved it. We lived there eighteen months, and then I was assigned abroad again when I was appointed ambassador to Venezuela. So, we sold it, and I'm sorry I

[83]

sold it. Had I kept that house, I'm sure we would have gone back to Washington to live, and I'm glad we didn't do that.

PARHAM: What were the duty hours at the State Department? When did you report for work?

WARREN: They changed the hours from time to time, but as I remember now, it was from nine to five. Those were the official hours. Part of the time, we worked five and a half days a week, and in wartime, six days a week. I don't recall that I was ever there on duty when we had five days a week. They do have it now, as you know. And, also, there were different work hours when you were in the field. After I got higher up, I always went down to the office on Sunday, too. I was on duty that Sunday afternoon when [the attack on] Pearl Harbor occurred. I was actually sitting at my desk when Wilhelmina called me on the phone to tell me that the Japs had attacked Pearl Harbor. I rushed upstairs and found my chief, Mr. Berle, tied up, and Sumner Wells. They were together. Then I rushed downstairs and was present at the press conference telling about the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. As I remember, [Michael] McDermott was the Gerald Warren of that day as he had been for many, many years. Then, I went back up [to my office], and I was on duty until one o'clock, 1:00 A.M., Monday morning. I always felt when I was in Washington--and certainly when I was in the field--that I

[84]

WARREN: was on duty whenever there was anything happening or when I thought something might be going to happen. And, as you know, after you get to be ambassador, you are on duty twenty-four hours a day. So it wasn't anything new.

PARHAM: Did you ever have a Wednesday afternoon off, say, in the summertime? I understand that Washington is a horrible place in the summer.

WARREN: Occasionally, the Washington temperature, because of the humidity, would go over 100° to 102°, sometimes to 105°. Then, they would dismiss the whole Department because it was too hot. We didn't have air conditioning. We would go home and come back the next morning. That did happen. Yes.

PARHAM: Now, during your assignment to the Department from 1925 to 1929, you mentioned being promoted. Were you still working your way up the classes of consul from Class VII to VI, and to V?

WARREN: Yes. We'd have to check this out. I believe I had gotten one promotion when I was consul at Baranquilla in 1929. It's in the record there. But then, we had hard times, and as I remember, I went four and one-half years without a promotion. During the time at Baranquilla I never got a promotion.

PARHAM: That was going to be my next question. You actually left Washington as the depression hit. What are your recollections of the depression as it affected a member of the Foreign Service?

[85]

WARREN: It hit us awfully hard. When the depression broke, I was in charge, as consul, of the office at Baranquilla, Colombia. There was a period, there, like it was here in the States, when we were short of personal funds because the money had to come from the States. But, I thought it wasn't as bad for us in the field as it was for those in the Department [in Washington] or for Americans generally. After all, the local people,[in Baranquilla] looked on me as the representative of the United States government, and they thought that if there was anybody that ought to be safe to deal with, it would be a representative of the American government, even though the whole world was in shock at the time. So, other than the results that came from the Department . . . . They cut down our expenses, our allotments for expenses and all, so that we had less money to work with and to live on. But we [Wilhelmina and I] were able to go ahead though we never exceeded my salary. We lived within our [personal] budget, come hell or high water, and we made it during the depression. We were getting still the amounts specified by law—that couldn't be changed--and we were doing pretty well as compared to the rest of humankind in the United States. So, I never felt as sorry for myself as I did for my country at that time. And we made it, though we had hard times. We were certain that each month we were going to get so much salary,

[86]

and we did get it. Every month, just the same. There weren't many people around that could count on the same salary. Of course, I'm sure the Department cut every angle that it could. If we had a rent allowance, they would cut that down. They cut everything they could. But the salary that was specified by law we got, and the worse the conditions were, the more that money bought. So, it was tough, but it wasn't as tough for us, I think, as it was for my family back here in Texas.

PARHAM: Other than rent allowance, do you recall any other funds that were reduced?

WARREN: Yes. This is a little dangerous because I don't remember the amounts on them, but they allowed us a certain amount of funds for entertaining. But when this [the depression] came, you couldn't count on having so much. If it were June and you were planning for something on the Dia de la Raza in October after the new fiscal year came in, you couldn't count on having it. You didn't know what you were going to have. You had to be very careful. What you could count on were those funds provided for by law because the Department had to live up to that and make their arrangements. So we did have some allowances that they couldn't cut out. They couldn't cut our rent allowance. I'm sorry, let me back up. They couldn't cut our allowance for rent.

[87]

That's different from rent allowance. The government had contracts with local people, and we had to live up to those contracts. And we did live up to them. But anything that was an administrative grant, you couldn't be sure about because they could change that. So, to summarize, the going was rough, but I don't believe it was as rough for us in the field as it was for people on duty in the Department. You didn't get rent allowances in Washington. You got just what Uncle Sam paid you as a salary.

PARHAM: So all funds and allowances were set by Congress, I suppose. The question I am leading to is this: did you ever advise the State Department from the field for the next year as to the possible budget that you would need?

WARREN: Every year. Each year you had to do that. I can remember one year when I was in Baranquilla, which was my first independent post. Wilhelmina and I were in our little house. You saw the picture. We were sitting there and I was working at the dining table. I was preparing my estimates for what I was going to need. I had to show how I had spent the monies that had been allotted to me. I took the sum, whatever it was, and went through the items, one by one, and showed how I much we had spent for doctors' bills, literature, papers, books, and other such things, how much we spent for Coca Cola in order to entertain guests at the house. It was so detailed.

[88]

I was surprised later when my dispatch, after eliminating the place it was from and any word in there that indicated Colombia or Baranquilla, it was printed as a public document by the American Congress showing what the people in the field were up against and how the money was being spent.

PARHAM: This brings up the question of entertainment. This was during the period of prohibition, and you mentioned has much you spent for Coca Cola. Did you . . . ?

WARREN: At that period, the only alcoholic liquor that we had was beer, which was made locally in Baranquilla. At this time we didn't serve liquor at the consulate. And Coca Cola was for people who came to play bridge or to have dinner with us.

[Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed
| Additional Warren Oral History Transcripts]

Adee, Alvin A., 72-73
Agnew, Vice-President Spiro, 69
Alabama, 1, 14, 33, 44
Albania,69, 75
Alamo, 8
Alexandria, Virginia, 82
American Club, 38
Anslinger, Harry J., 45

• • as consul in Nassau, 45
• Argentina, 17
  Arizona, 60
  Arkansas, 14
  Asia, 18
  Austin, Texas, 10, 23, 76

  Baranquilla, Colombia, 74-75, 84-88

  • Warren's service in, 74, 84-88
  Bassens, France, 11
  Beaulac, Willard Leon, 16
  • career in Latin America, l6-17
  Behn, Sosthenes and Hernan, as founders of International Telephone & Telegraph Company, 35
  Berle, Adolf A., 82, 83
  Berlin, Germany, 53
  Bibb, Tisdale Wyatt, 33
  Bimini, 43
  Blanco Street, in Cuba, 54, 59
  Blois, France, 11, 12
  Booge, John, 9
  Bordeaux, France, 11, 13, 25
  Brest, France, 11
  Briggs, Ellis 0., 75
  British diplomats, in Cuba, 60
  Brown University, 80
  Bryan, Texas, 43
  Bulgaria, 21
  Burri, Alfred T., 74-75

  Camp Albert Pike, 12
  Camp Joseph E. Johnston, 2, 10, 12
  Camp Logan Root, 11
  Carr, Wilbur J., 27, 33, 68, 71
  Casanova, Virginia, 19
  Castle, William R., 75-76
  Chevy Chase, in Washington, D.C., 81
  Chile, 27

  • nitrates, 28
  Chinese, 44
  Cigar companies, Cuban, 31-33
  Citizenship Office, in Cuba, 30, 34-35, 38-41, 50, 63
  Clark, J. Reuben, 77-79
  Clark Memorandum, 77
  Clements, Brother, 57
  Clinton, North Carolina, 58
  Coca Cola, 87-88
  Cockrell, Judge Egbert Railey, 6-7
  Colombia, 17
  Commercial Office, in Cuba, 30-31, 41-42, 63
  Confidence game, the story of "John C. Smith" of Oklahoma, 46-50
  Connally, Senator Tom, 39
  Consular Bureau, 66, 67, 68
  Consular Service, 18, 24, 25, 27, 30-31, 33, 65, 67, 68, 71, 80, 82
  • Consular examination, 14-15, 25, 26-29
    Consular inspectors, 57-58
    See Rogers Act and Wilbur J. Carr
  Coolidge, President Calvin, 70
  Crawford, Texas, 24, 76
  Crowder, General Enoch H., father of Selective Service system, 16, 39
  Cuba, 27, 31, 32, 38, 39, 41, 45, 46, 48, 53, 55, 58, 59
  • relations with United States, 53-54, 60
  Cuban Secret Service, 53-54
  Cyrillic alphabet, 21
  Czech language, 6, 20, 21
  Czechoslovakia, 16, 21, 22

  Daily Texan, 76
  Dallas News, 9
  Dallas Public Schools, 21, 22
  Dallas, Texas, 21
  Davis, Raymond, death in Prague, 16
  Deering, Fred Morris, Assistant Secretary of State, 27
  Delta Sigma Phi fraternity, 3
  Democratic Party, 26
  Denton, Texas, 38
  Denver, Colorado, 16
  Department of Commerce, 30-31, 74
  Department of State, 4, 14, 17, 18, 19, 21, 25, 26, 28, 38, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80,

  • • 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87
  • old State Department Building, 68-69, 77
  Department of Treasury, 45
  Depression, the, 84-87
  D'Hanis, Texas, 9
  Dia de la Raza, 86
  Diplomatic Service, 24, 25, 65, 71.
  • See Rogers Act

  Eagle Lake, Texas, 4, 61
  Eberhardt, Charles Christopher, 66, 68
  Ehrenbreitstein, Germany, 20
  Europe, 11, 17, 18, 33

  Fitzsimmons General Hospital, Denver, 16
  Florida, 44
  Foreign Service, 1, 3-4, 6, 7, 17-20, 23-29, 31, 33, 43, 44, 45, 51, 53, 58

  • admission exam 14-15
    budgets and allotments in the field, 85-88.
    early salaries, 61-62, 85-88
    Foreign Service classmates of Warren, 14-18
    problems in consulate general in Cuba, 43-53, 54-56
    training after admission, 18-19
    See Rogers Act and Department of State
  Foreign Service Institute, 19
  Frost, Arthur C., 57, 58
  Fort Sam Houston, 8
  Fort Worth, Texas, 6
  France, 2, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 20
  French-Canadian, 17
  French language, 17

  Gainesville, Texas, 38
  Garrels, Arthur, 58
  Governor Cobb, 48
  Georgia, 1
  Germany, 20, 34
  Gievres, France, 11
  Gillespie, Mrs., joke about piano, 74
  Gironde, France, 11
  Grant, Mr., United States minister to Albania, 75
  Greenville, Texas, 34
  Grew, Joseph C, 73

  Hackworth, Green H. 72
  Hague, the 72
  Haiti, 69
  Handman, Max Sylvius, Professor of Social Science at University of Texas, 5
  Harding, President Warren G., 26, 59, 61, 70
  Havana, Cuba, 16, 19, 20, 21, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 40, 42, 43, 44, 46, 48, 51, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63,

  • 64, 66, 81, 82
  Hawaii, 76
  Hengstler, Herbert C., 67, 68, 71
  Hialeah, 46
  Hickerson, John Dewey, 24, 76
  Holdenville, Oklahoma, 47, 48, 49
  Hornbeck, Stanley K., 75
  Hosmer, Charles B., 82
  Hotel Harding, the "House of Normalcy," 59
  Houston, Texas, 10, 15
  Houston and Texas Central Railroad, 10
  Howell, Williamson S., 43
  Hughes, Charles Evans, 80-81
  Hunt County, 23
  Hurst, Carlton Bailey, consul general in Havana, 29, 32, 34, 39, 41, 47, 48, 49, 54, 57, 58, 63-64, 66, 67, 68

  Illinois, 15
  Immigrant smuggling, 43-45
  Immigration Act of 1924, 38
  Immigration to United States, 33-34, 35-38

  • Immigration Act of 1924, 38
    "Paul Sunshine," 36
    quotas, 37
    smuggling, 43-45
  India, 16
  International Court of Justice,at the Hague, 72
  International Telephone Telegraph Company, 35, 41
  Interstate Commerce Commission, 6
  Invoice Desk, in Cuba, 31
  • cigar companies, 31-33
  Ireland, 39
  Issurtil, France, 13
  Izon, France, 11

  Jacksonville, Florida, 2, 7, 10
  Japanese, 83
  Japanese Park, in Cuba, 59
  Jiménez, Mrs., head of file room in Cuba, 31
  Johnson, President Lyndon B., 69

  Keese, Walter H., 15, 27

  • classmate of Warren, 15
  Kentucky, 72
  Key West, Florida, 43
  Knight, Richard Allen, 21-22

  Landrum, Lynn, 9
  Latin America, 17-18, 20, 21, 27, 28, 74-75, 77
  Latin language, 20, 21
  Leon Springs, Texas, 7, 9
  Lind, Mr., 50-53
  Lithuanian Army, 15
  Little Rock, Arkansas, 11, 12
  London, England, 53
  Louisiana, 14
  Lowry, Edward Prindle, 15-16

  • killed in Mexico City, 16

  MacMurray, John V. A., 73-74, 75
  Madison, Mrs., 59
  Madrid, Spain, 53
  Maine, 82
  Malacon, in Cuba, 57, 59
  Manning, Professor William Ray, at University of Texas, 24, 76-77
  Marine Office [or Desk], in Cuba, 30, 42-43, 63
  Massachusetts, 42
  Matanzas, 65
  McDermott, Michael, 83
  Methodist Church, in Havana, 57
  Metropolitan Opera House, 22, 34
  Mexican diplomats, in Cuba, 60
  Mexico City, Mexico, 16
  Miller, E. T., Professor of Economics at University of Texas, 5
  Minneapolis, Minnesota, 52
  Mississippi, 1, 14
  Monroe Doctrine, 77
  Monterey, 19
  Muccio, John, 16

  • as ambassador to Korea, 16

  Nassau, 43, 45
  New Ipswich, New Hampshire, 42
  New York City, 19, 22, 31, 41, 46, 65, 81
  Nicaragua, 74
  North Carolina, 1, 42, 65
  North Dakota, 74
  Norton, Edward J., 78

  Oconee County, South Carolina, 2
  Ohio, 67, 71
  Owlsley, Alvin, as National Commander of the American Legion, 38

  • senatorial campaign in Texas, 39

  P. & 0. Line, 48
  Paraguay, 17
  Paris, France, 53
  Patterson, C. Perry, Professor of History at University of Texas, 5
  Pearl Harbor, 83
  Pennsylvania, 45
  Pershing, General John J., 69
  Persian Gendarmerie, 15
  Philippine Constabulary, 16
  Philippines, 16
  Polish nationality, 35
  Pinar del Rio, 39, 40
  Prague, Czechoslovakia, 16, 75
  Prohibition, 88

  Rehobeth Cemetery, l
  Republican Party, 26
  Revolutionary Army, 2
  Rhine River, 20
  Rhode Island, 16
  Rice University, 4
  Rogers Act, 25, 43 .

  • See Diplomatic Service, Consular Service, and Foreign Service
  Royal Bank of Canada, 49
  Ruffo, Mr. Tito, 34
  Ruiz home, 59
  Rumania, 37, 39
  Rum running, 43-45
  Russia, 21
  Russian language, 21

  San Antonio, Texas, 8, 9
  Silz, A., 59
  Slavic countries, 21

  • language, 20
  Smale, [first name not given], 48-49
  Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, 1, 2
  South Carolina, 2
  Spanish-American War, 35
  Spanish language, 16, 39-40
  Spanish nationality, 17
  Splawn, Dr. Walter Marshall William, 6
  State, War and Navy Building, 69
  Steinhart, Frank, 35
  • of Jewish descent, 35
  St. Sulpice, France, 11, 12, 13
  Sweden, 27

  Tampico, Mexico, 17, 24
  Tennessee, 78
  Tewkesbury, [first name not given], 42-43
  Texas, 14, 15, 21, 42, 47, 61, 64, 65, 70, 74, 82, 86

  • Texas Czech, 20
  Texas Christian University, 6, 7
  Texas School for the Deaf, 3, 4, 5-6, 25
  Turkey, 73

  United States Air Force, 10
  United States Army, 2, 3, 15
  United States Coast Guard, 10
  United States Immigration Service, 60
  United States Infantry, 10
  United States Marine Corps, 10, 13
  United States Navy, 10
  United States Quartermaster Corps, 2, 10-14
  University of Georgetown, Washington, D.C., 17
  University of Texas, 2, 3, 4-5, 6-7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 20-21, 23-24, 50, 61, 76
  Upmann Cigar Factory, 34
  Upmann, Mr. and Mrs. H., 34
  Utah, 79

  Vedado, in Cuba, 59
  Venezuela, 82
  Vice Consul of Career, Class III, 25
  Vietnamese (Annamese), 14
  Visa Office, in Cuba, 30, 33-34, 35-38, 63

  Walhalla District, 2
  Warren, Abraham, 1

  • as Republican, 26
  Warren, Ambassador William Fletcher,
  • ancestry, l-2
    birth, 1, 2
    boyhood, 3
    as consul in Baranquilla, 74, 84-88
    Department of State assignment, 64-84
    education, 2, 3, 4-5, 6-7, 8, 23-24
    father, 2, 3, 9, 12, 50
    first assignment in Havana, 19-21, 29-62
    first vacation back home, 60-61
    Foreign Service, 1, 3-4, 6, 7, 14-15, 18-20, 23-29
    membership in S.A.R., 1, 2
    military service, 2, 3, 4, 7-14
    marriage, 4
    mother, 2
    promotion to consul, 63-64, 80, 84
    as student of Spanish, 20-22
  Warren, Blake, 1
  Warren, Frances Caroline Sims, wife of Abraham Warren, 2
  Warren, Gerald, 83
  Warren, Isaiah, Sr., 1, 2
  Warren, Isaiah, III, 1
  Warren, Mary Wilson, mother of William Fletcher Warren, 2
  Warren, Moses Abraham, father of William Fletcher Warren, 2
  Warren, Mrs. Wilhelmina, wife of William Fletcher Warren, 4, 7, 19, 20, 25, 30, 54, 57, 58, 59, 61, 65, 68-69, 81,
  • 82, 83, 85, 87
  Washington, D. C. 3, 4, 6, 14, 15, 17, 24, 25, 43, 44, 45, 46, 58, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 72, 76, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85
  "Weeka," 74
  Welfare Desk, in Cuba, 51
  Wells, Sumner, 83
  West Executive Avenue, in Washington, D.C., 68
  West Point, New York, l5, 16
  White House, 68, 69, 77, 79
  White, Senator [Wallace Humphrey, Jr.], from Maine, 82
  Whitfield, James V., 42, 58, 65
  Who's Who in America, 29
  Wilson, President Woodrow, 26
  Wolfe, Albert Benedict, Professor of Economics at University of Texas, 5
  Wolfe City, Texas Public Schools, 22
  Wolfe City, Texas, 1, 2, 3, 9, 12, 22, 61
  Wood County, Texas, 2
  World War I 2, 13, 15, 23.
  • See Warren, William Fletcher, military service
  World War II, 72, 83