Hello, I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1993 and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is an American diplomat. He was born in Honolulu, but his life as the son of a peripatetic soldier has left him, he says, without US roots. That hasn't prevented him from serving his country well, beginning in Africa. And eventually rising to senior positions in the Department of State in Washington. In 1990, he was surprised to be offered the job of ambassador to London by President Bush, the first career diplomat ever to be given the job.

Then earlier this year, he was perhaps even more surprised and delighted when President Clinton asked... Him to stay on. An ambassador here has never before survived a change of presidency. My castaway is then the United States ambassador. To the Court of St James Raymond's sites. Let's deal with the first of those achievements first. It is true isn't it that the US ambassador to London is seen as one of the great plum jobs and usually does go, to put it bluntly, to one of the President's rich supporters. Well, it certainly is seen as a plum job, and it has been not a job to which a career person has ever been appointed. It's not always been accorded to somebody of vast... Wealth. But one of the reasons I was pleased to be able to come to do this job is to at least attempt to demonstrate that one does not have to have great worldly goods in order to conduct the affairs of diplomacy here.

But it does help. I'm told the entertainment budget is quite small. I think it was Alastair Cooke who pointed out once that a former incumbent... ...said the annual entertainment budget just about served 500 people on Independence Day with lemonade punch. There is some truth to that and you have to take a somewhat no frills approach, but it can be done. But why did George Bush appoint you? I wonder why. Well, I have always had, I think, the good judgment never to ask why. And when I learned about the job, it really was a complete, almost a shock. I was in Brussels at the time at a NATO meeting and those can be pretty difficult meetings and I'd finally finished it. And a couple of friends and I went out to dinner that evening in Brussels and as we arrived at the restaurant I had a message to call the Secretary of State. I called Secretary Baker

And he got on the line and I was standing at the bar and using the bar phone and he got on the line and said the president's gonna call you in five minutes to ask you to be the ambassador to the Court of St. James's You mean the one in London? There is only one. And he said yes and I hung up the phone and I called my wife very quickly and Washington told her, she was stunned, I hung up the phone again and sure enough, two or three minutes later the president called at this bar. And he asked me to do the job and basically I said yes and I hung up and as I've said to people the only only person in the bar more astonished than I was the bartender who had been handling all of these Telephone calls from the White House. He didn't believe this was the president of the United States. He did not believe it. He thought there was some guy... I didn't believe it.

And of course I had to keep absolutely quiet and I went through this dinner with my friends. It was very difficult for me not to be preoccupied. You couldn't tell them a thing? I couldn't say a word. And I finally got back to my hotel late that night and went into my room, closed the door and let out a mighty yell. I bet. Punch the air with delight. Let's set sail for this desert island. What's the first record you're going to play? Well, the first record really has to do with my wife who considers it one of her vacations to be certain. Don't get excessively pompous. And this is a struggle for her, as you can well imagine. And we had a conductor come to our house one evening. And he was a little late. And when he came in, I said, what have you Mozart. And I said, Ah, Mozart. I said, For me there's...

There are only two categories of composers. One is Mozart and the other is all the rest, to which my wife interjected. But what about Marvin Gaye? This would make me think about it. Her and it's also incidentally a very good theme song for a diplomat in as much as it is called I Heard It Through the Grapevine. Marvin Gaye and I heard it through the grapevine so you you hear things.

The grapevine and you send them back home. I mean time was when the US ambassador would get on a ship and go home with these snippets of information come back two months later with some kind of arm answer to them. What's your role now, now that, you know, communication is so sophisticated? It has changed the role of an ambassador and in some respects I think has made it even more important. That is that a government has a person on the ground in place who can take this cascade of... Information that we have to deal with daily and somehow distill it into what it means for the United States. But would your distillations, your personal distillations, because I'm sure lots of reports are sent across the Atlantic in various forms all of the time. Would your personal distillations end up on the desk of the President? It's hard to say. Obviously that will depend on the issue, on the President, on its timeliness, its relevance.

But does he, would he ever ring you up and say, tell me, Ray, what I should be thinking about this? That has not happened with this film. President. It happened before. But it's happened before. So how far then do you stray over as it were from this disinterested reporter role which you've talked about, the disinterested of information and the representative function into the political function? I mean, has the diplomat been forced to become the politician in the end? To an extent. In some respects, although I think they're never really separable, part of your job is not merely to understand the politics of the country in which you happen to live. But really to understand the politics of your own country, not only to represent it. But to understand how to develop an issue within the political limits of Washington.

There are many, many considerations that you have to take account of. If it's trade talks or civil aviation talks or currently, say, Bosnia, what are the limits at home that prevent us from doing this thing but encourage us to do another? And then how can I try to explain that here? Bosnia later on but let's pause there for your next record what is it well my next record is perhaps in recognition of my military upbringing It's a song that was written when the United States entered the First World War. And And it says that we won't come back till it's over over there and that sort of catches the jotty cocky American optimism that sometimes irritates other people, but which I rather like. And it also has...

A kind of lesson to it as well because we've been learning really for the rest of the century that it's never over over there. ♪ Are coming, the drums drum coming everywhere ♪ ♪ So prepare, say a prayer ♪ ♪ Send the word, send the word to beware ♪ ♪ We'll be over, we're coming over ♪ ♪ And we won't come back till it's over ♪

George M. Cohan and over there. You're 52, Mr. Ambassador, and you were born in Honolulu. Were you there then when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor? Yes, we were. My father was stationed there at Schofield Barracks. He was a captain of infantry. And the attack took place the day before my first birthday. And my father took his company. Of soldiers down to the sandy beaches to await the land invasion, which of course never came. And the rest of the family was hustled into a station wagon, an estate wagon, and we were taken into a pineapple plantation to

You don't remember a thing? No, I don't remember, but it's very much a part of the family lore. But your father went on to become a general, didn't he? Yes, he did. Didn't he lead one of the D-Day landings? He led the 1st American Regiment onto the beaches at Omaha. So was it a strict military upbringing? Was he a disappointment? Venerian your dad well a little bit I suppose so he was a West Pointer and the generation Before were all army people too. So there was a lot of military... Jargon in my childhood vocabulary and a lot of military routine. Sometimes he would come in to inspect my room on a Saturday. And he would take a quarter out of his pocket and see if it would bounce on the blanket. The blanket had been drawn so tautly. But it was always done with humour. But your childhood also sounds rather glamorous, not least because of the globetrotting with your father.

And Italy and Iran but you then had a very flamboyant period in New York didn't you? Well I suppose To some degree because my mother died when I was quite young and my father after returning from the Korean War met romantically an actress named Jesse Royce Landis. She was a very glamorous, flamboyant, exuberant, interesting person from a world so wholly unmilitary. And the combination of the two made for a very colorful, exciting youth. But when did you decide in the midst of all of this that the Foreign Service was going to be for you? That you weren't going to go into the military like your father?

Father was posted in Iran. I went over there a couple of summers when I was in the States in school. And I think it's really there that I became so interested in foreign cultures and languages and what America was doing in all these places. And so in that respect, I was very fortunate. I early on concluded that I wanted to go into the Foreign Service and basically stuck with that. Let's have some more music. Well, the next record is, uh... I know Christmas means a lot to most families. It certainly meant a lot to ours and still does mean a lot to my family. And in some respects it's because it is a thing that you can carry around with you and try to recreate almost wherever you are and recreate the little family traditions that go along with it. And one of those traditions is music and

Ever since I was a little boy, I remember this carol, which never fails to move me, and I thought this would be very Because on the desert island I would have to figure out how to celebrate Christmas, and I would have to find colored coconuts to decorate my palm tree, perhaps, and I could listen to this.

The choir of King's College, Cambridge, singing In the Bleak Midwinter. So Raymond Seitz, you read history at Yale, taught for a couple of years in Texas, and then joined the Foreign Service as you'd planned, dreaming of exotic postings and uncharted territories. Where did they send you? I had told the people that there was no place on earth that was too dangerous or too dusty. Or too disease-ridden that I wouldn't go. I was ready to go anywhere. And there is a tradition in the Foreign Service when you are with an entering class that at the end of a period some senior officer comes and reads out the assignments, the first assignments

Everybody gathers in great excitement. And I remember very well sitting in this room and hearing all these marvelous assignments going on, things like Rangoon and Buenos Aires and Paris and all that wonderful stuff. And of course, my name begins with an S, and so I was pretty far down the list. I finally got around to my name and I heard the words, Mama. And I was, I genuinely was in a moment of suspense in my mind. Based all around the globe, trying to find where this spot was, only to discover it was about 40 miles north of Plattsburgh, New York. York and so that's where I headed. But it did get more romantic in the end I mean you went on to Kenya and the Seychelles And Zaire and so on. But come 1972, which was only six years into your career, you were sent for back to Washington.

And ever since then for the past 20 years or more you've either been in Washington or in London. It's a very unusual pattern, a very unusual pattern. Was it a blow considering your... Well, I must say, you know, every once in a while I say to myself that the career, at least in its itinerary, did not turn out the way I thought it would be. And yet I have had the great privilege, really, of having wonderful jobs, working with wonderful people both in London and back in Washington. For under Kissinger and successive Secretary of State Vance Muskie, Hey, Schultz, which of them have you most... Admired or is that too undiplomatic a question? Very undiplomatic and the answer the answer is George Shultz. Oh really?

I worked very closely with him and I just have an immense affection and admiration for him. He's a man of great depth and great integrity. You've been therefore, as you indicate, over the past... 20 years in a perfect position to observe this so-called special relationship between Britain and the States. It's not a phrase you like though is it? Not that I dislike it, I try to avoid it in as much as I think it can be somewhat misleading and it has a little fluff to it. Sentimentality and that of course has its place but we We are dealing with a world and certainly with a Europe that is changing very, very rapidly. And at the end, the relationship between our two countries is going to be based on what our national interests are. And the degree to which they are coincident, the degree to which they overlap.

And indeed, I mean, do you think it can go on being that special with our moving ever more towards Europe, however reliable? On occasions and also of course because we don't have the threat of the Soviet Union anymore to cement that relationship. Certainly the relationship over the last 50 years has had at its very center the issue of security. The U.S. and the U.K. over all of this period have built up a remarkably intimate relationship in all sorts of activities. Much of that will stand us in very good stead as we deal with this new set of problems that come forward, but some of it will go away. Pickle number four. Creative music really reminds me of how I learned about classical music.

There's not much classical music in my upbringing, unless you count artillery songs and things like that. So it wasn't until I went away to school that this door opened to me. And I went to a small school in upstate New York and I... I remember very well late autumn afternoons when there was a chill in the air and you've been playing the sports in the afternoon and you'd be sort of tired and we'd all be assembled in this room and it would be twilight and progressively... Darker, and one of the masters would play music for us. And this was one of the pieces that I remembered from then and I have played many, many, many times since then, and it's Brahms Violin Concerto in D major.

Part of the second movement of Brahms You about life in the ambassador's official residence, Winfield House in Regent's Park. It was built, wasn't it, by Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress? I'm Barbara Hutton and completed I think in 1938. Didn't you build it for Cary Grant? One of her husbands? No, well she may have, but she was married to somebody else at the time. She only lived in it for about a year. And then the war broke out. And she went back to the United States. And by the time the war was over, her marriage had broken up. Maybe that's where Cary Grant came into it.

And she really had not much interest in returning to London, and so she sold it to the US government for one dollar. One of the best deals I think we've ever made. Do you like it? It does its official work extremely well. It's a beautiful house, and it's a very welcoming house, and the functions flow properly in it. But it's certainly big, and therefore it can be a little cool, perhaps. Anyone misses things. Like the privacy and domesticity of life. You've got two older children who are making their lives in Europe. You've got one boy with you. Yes, although he's just started university in Boston, having taken a year off and worked on a game ranch in Zimbabwe, and then worked as a full-time volunteer at the zoo, which

Just around the corner from the... This is in your garden. From Winfield House, that's right. And three dogs. And three dogs. Their wonderful dogs were very close to them too. We had, of course, in the United States, and they came here and had to go into this cruel British habit of putting these... Little helpless animals in quarantine for six months. So to get over our period of bereavement, we got ourselves a third dog. They have perfect dispositions and different characters, each one of them, one of them very much like. To sit in the receiving line as people come through and look them over.

The other follows the hors d'oeuvres, Trey. - Is this the English one or the American one? - Yeah, that's the library. - They were all of them saved from having to cross the Atlantic for the moment, at least earlier this year, when, as I said at the beginning, President Clinton extended you, as they call it. How surprised were you when he did that? - Surprised, I don't think is exactly the word. I was ready to have it go either way. But in any event, when the word finally came through, Very pleased. Well, in a way, in a period that was very unsettling, I must say we took a lot of comfort from those many nice gestures. All those cocktail parties played off, you see.

Record number five? Well, record number five, I think, is a band selected from what I believe is one of the most beautiful presentations of popular music. And it is by Cleo Lane and James Galway, and the tune is called Skylark. Is it a special tune? Yes, it conjures up many romantic memories. No more than that. Very discreet. *music*

And James Galway and Skylark. Let me ask you about your view of us, the... The outsider living on the inside, as it were. You've accused us recently of, I suppose, to-- Of having a lack of self-regard. You said that we seem to be afflicted with an inoperable disease, which causes us to check into a political retirement home, and I quote, to see out our twilight years with grace and gentility and one last glass of port. Do we really look that bad from the outside? Well, it's not so much my image of Britain, but what I saw, perhaps far too frequently, as Britain's image of Britain. This sort of sense of decline and I can't get anything right and somehow not competitive enough in the world. Disconcerting that Britain can often be so down on itself. But our institutions have taken a bit of a battering of late, haven't they? I mean, you must...

But if you look around the world, institutions virtually everywhere have taken a battering or indeed collapsed. So you think we should cheer up about ourselves? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And it really doesn't take much of a geographical survey to conclude that this is a country of immense strength and immense wealth and of, I hope, a very large number of people. Bright future. Next record. Well the next record is something that may not be too well known over here it's by a man named Jim Croce who is sort of a modern folk music writer and singer in the United States. States and this is a song about a young man who is working in a car wash But thinks that he ought to be sort of a big-time executive And he he says don't don't speck to see me with no double martini and that he'll just keep Rub a dub rub

In these cars. Jim Croche and working at the Car Wash Blues. Obviously, Mr Ambassador, one of your major current concerns is...

Anglo-American policy towards Bosnia. Do you share your Secretary of State, Warren Christopher's view that it's a faraway country in a place remote from essential American interests? Well it is. I think what he was trying to signal in making that statement is that we cannot try to address the problems in Bosnia in the same cold war. Context where virtually anything, and this is really quite an indication of how much things have changed in the last three or four years. Three or four years ago, if one person tried to escape across the Berlin Wall, that incident had in it the seeds of escalation right up to full-scale war. That has now completely changed.

And the United States, and I think this is what he was indicating, has to reassess exactly what its interests are and what its priorities are, and without a sense that every battle will be our battle, or every fight will be our fight, and that in fact our interests may diverge from European interests from time to time. All of that said, I think we are very much involved in what is happening. In Yugoslavia and in Bosnia in particular and working very well and sometimes there are difficulties and differences with our allies but on the very well and using NATO and the various institutions. But what you're saying is this, Bosnia, is essentially Europe's problem, not America's, and that's the way you'd like to keep it?

I would say that in the first instance I think we probably regard this as essentially a European problem and when this first started I remember describing it in my view as Europe's first regional conflict. It's very difficult to explain in Idaho or Oklahoma the strategic implications of Bosnia and how it affects directly affects American security in saying that then you mean that to lose one American Soldiers life in Bosnia would be difficult to explain in Idaho or Montana to some degree. Yes. Hmm and yet The problem doesn't get sorted out by Europe. Do you foresee a time when the US will feel ultimately it must become more directly involved? I think the US is prepared to become more directly involved. We've already made it very clear that if there is a settlement, we're prepared to put...

Five or thirty thousand troops in Bosnia or in Yugoslavia to support that settlement. And I suspect our contribution would be far and away larger than any other nations. But I don't think that the United States would become directly involved without the agreement and participation of its European allies. I think that would be fundamental to it. Record number seven. Well, record number seven is very important to me because when I was about 37 or 38 years old, I discovered that I was not Fred Astaire. And this came as a terrible blow and a terrible disappointment. And one of the reasons I would want to go to a desert island

is so that I could pretend to be Fred Astaire. Like an unwritten melody, I'm free but free. So bring on the big attraction. My decks are cleared for action. I'm fancy free and free for anything fancy. Fred Astaire and No Strings. How much did your job here change with the presidency, Mr. Seitz? How would you characterize the difference between working for George Bush and working for Bill Clinton? Well, President Clinton, when he was elected and before his inauguration, I think made a very important distinction, which was to say that he felt his mandate was for--

Change at home, but for continuity abroad. It wasn't all plain sailing, was it, when Mr Clinton came to power? No, it started... I mean, here you had had a very long period of time when it was a conservative government in London and a republican government in Washington, and there was a sympathy, obviously, between now Lady Thatcher and President Reagan, and that was very quickly picked up and reproduced. By the Prime Minister and President Bush. So this was a long time, and suddenly a new party, new attitudes, new characters came into Washington. It had been complicated, needless to say, by the stories of a couple of people from conservative central office helping out the Bush campaign, giving nudge-nudge sorts of advice.

Became a public issue. It sort of soured the atmosphere. And a couple of other issues that came along too, Northern Ireland being one of them again. The impression is that that is settling down very well. But did it make your job harder? Yes, it did. Yes, it did. But now you've succeeded. You've succeeded, I mean... Have you? Is it a great job? Have you ever succeeded? I think it's going well now. I think the Prime Minister and the President have gotten on particularly well together, both in Washington and then more recently in Tokyo. Thank you.

That at the end, when you need to get sensible decisions and need to develop a position on one thing or another, it's far more likely than not that the British and the Americans are going to see the thing pretty much the same way. We can never recreate this relationship with any other country. And in each iteration, it tends to revalidate itself. And that's what's so rewarding about it. So now what? The rumor is that having bridged the changeover, you'll be asked at some point in the not too distant future to leave. And a new ambassador may be appointed in 1994 to run for the rest of the Clinton administration. That's likely, is it? Yes, my hunch had been that I would serve around in the spring, and that would make roughly three years

to partake, and that that would give a successor the three-year balance of the Clinton administration. And it takes a long time to get your feet on the ground around here. And so, assuming that happens, we will depart with many regrets. Lots of happy memories. What do you do next, though? What do you do when you've already had the plum job? I'll just have to wait and see what comes along. But there are plenty of things around to do, and they're all interesting. Yes, I'll miss this for sure. Last record. Well, the last record... Is I finally get around to Mozart and this was perhaps the most difficult choice for this program but I have chosen the the second movement of the clarinet quintet in a major.

Part of the second movement of Mozart's clarinet quintet in A major played by members of the Vienna octet. So if you could only take one of those records Mr. Seitz? I think it would have to be the Mozart. What about your book? Well my book I want to say something like Aeschylus or Dante or something like that but I think probably as many many people would choose I would take the Oxford anthology of modern poetry.

And your luxury? My luxuries would be a big box full of family photo albums. Look at them endlessly. Endlessly! LAUGHTER Lots of memories in those photographs. Good memories. Raymond Sights, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you. You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

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