Raymond Seitz

Speaker 30:00

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.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety three and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

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.

Presenter0:48

In nineteen ninety 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.

Presenter0:57

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.

Presenter1:07

My castaway is, then, the United States Ambassador to the Court of Saint James, Raymond Seitz. Let's deal with the first of those achievements first. It is true, isn't it, that the US Ambassador to London is 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.

Raymond Seitz1:27

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.

Raymond Seitz1:35

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

Raymond Seitz1:48

great worldly goods in order to conduct the the affairs of diplomacy here.

Presenter1:53

But it does help.

Raymond Seitz1:54

Uh

Presenter1:55

Uh I'm sure the entertainment budget is quite small. I think it was Alastair Cook who pointed out once that a former incumbent said the annual entertainment budget just about served 500 people on Independence Day with lemonade punch.

Raymond Seitz2:06

Well, there there is some truth to that, and you have to take a somewhat no-frills approach. But it can be done.

Presenter2:13

But but why did George Bush appoint you? I wonder why?

Raymond Seitz2:17

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.

Raymond Seitz2:32

And those can be pretty difficult uh meetings, and I'd finally finished it, and a couple of friends and I went out to dinner that evening in Brussels.

Raymond Seitz2:41

And as we arrived at the restaurant, I had a message to call the Secretary of State. I called uh Secretary Baker.

Raymond Seitz2:49

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 going to call you in five minutes to ask you to be the

Raymond Seitz2:58

Ambassador to the Court of St. James's.

Raymond Seitz3:01

And I said you mean the one in London?

Presenter3:03

That is any one.

Raymond Seitz3:04

And he said yes, and I uh hung up the phone and I called my wife very quickly in 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.

Raymond Seitz3:17

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

Raymond Seitz3:24

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.

Presenter3:30

He didn't believe this was the president of the plan.

Raymond Seitz3:32

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.

Presenter3:35

Yeah.

Presenter3:42

You couldn't tell them a thing.

Raymond Seitz3:43

You couldn't tell him a thing. I couldn't say a word. And I finally got back to my hotel late that night and uh went into my room, closed the door and let out a mighty yell.

Presenter3:54

Punch the air with delight. Let's set sail for this desert island. What's the first record you're going to play?

Raymond Seitz4:01

Well, the first record really has to do with my wife, who considers it one of her vocations to be certain I don't get excessively pompous.

Raymond Seitz4:10

And this is a struggle for her, as you can well imagine.

Raymond Seitz4:14

And we had a uh

Raymond Seitz4:15

A conductor come to our house one evening.

Raymond Seitz4:19

And he was a little late, and when he came in, I said, What have you been working on? and he said, Mozart.

Raymond Seitz4:24

And I said, ah, Mozart. I said, for me, there are only two categories of composers. One is Mozart, and the other is all the rest.

Raymond Seitz4:34

to which my wife interjected,

Raymond Seitz4:36

But what about Marvin Gaye?

Raymond Seitz4:40

This would make me think about her, and it's also, incidentally, a very good theme song for a diplomat, inasmuch as it is called I Heard It Through the Grapevine.

Speaker 44:56

Wait a minute.

Speaker 44:58

None of all want you be my

Speaker 45:02

On a hurry through a great fire

Speaker 45:06

Oh, I'm just a mother loose, my mother

Speaker 45:11

Yeah.

Presenter5:16

Marvin Gaye and I heard it through the grapevine. So you you hear things through 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 answer to them. What's your role now, now that communication is so sophisticated?

Raymond Seitz5:35

It has changed the role of an ambassador and in some respects I think has made it even more important.

Raymond Seitz5:41

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.

Raymond Seitz5:52

and somehow distill it into what it means for the United States.

Presenter5:56

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?

Raymond Seitz6:08

It's hard to say. Obviously, that will depend on the issue, on the president, on its timeliness, its relevance. But does he.

Presenter6:14

But does he would he ever ring you up and say, Tell me, Ray, what I should be thinking about this?

Raymond Seitz6:20

That has not happened with this President.

Presenter6:22

It happened to be formula.

Raymond Seitz6:22

But it's happened before.

Presenter6:25

So how far then do you stray over, as it were, from this disinterested reporter role, which you've talked about, the the dist distillation of information and the representative function?

Presenter6:37

Into the political function. I mean, ha has the diplomat been forced to become the politician in the end, to an extent?

Raymond Seitz6:45

In some respects, although I think they've they're never really separable.

Raymond Seitz6:49

Part of your job is is not merely to understand the politics of the country in which you happen to live.

Raymond Seitz6:56

But really to understand the politics of your own country, and not only to represent it.

Raymond Seitz7:01

but to understand how to develop an issue within the political limits of Washington.

Raymond Seitz7:08

And 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.

Raymond Seitz7:20

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?

Presenter7:30

I want to talk to you about Bosnia later on, but let let's pause there for your next record. What is it?

Raymond Seitz7:35

Well, my next record is uh perhaps uh

Raymond Seitz7:38

in recognition of my military upbringing.

Raymond Seitz7:42

It's a song that was written when the United States entered the First World War.

Raymond Seitz7:47

And it says that uh

Raymond Seitz7:49

We won't come back till it's over over there, and that sort of catches the

Raymond Seitz7:55

Jaughty, cocky American optimism that sometimes irritates other people, but which I rather like.

Raymond Seitz8:03

And it also has a kind of lesson to it as well, because we've been

Raymond Seitz8:07

learning really for the rest of the century.

Raymond Seitz8:11

That is never over over there.

Speaker 48:15

Over there, send the word, send the word over there that the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming, the drum flum 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, over there.

Presenter8:44

George M. Cohan and over there. You're fifty-two, Mr. Ambassador, and you were born in Honolulu. Were you there then when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor?

Raymond Seitz8:52

Yes, we were. My father was stationed there at Schofield Barracks. He was a a captain of infantry.

Raymond Seitz8:59

and the attack took place the day before my first birthday.

Raymond Seitz9:04

and my uh father took his company of soldiers down to the sandy beaches.

Raymond Seitz9:10

To await the land invasion, which of course never came.

Raymond Seitz9:15

and the rest of the family was

Raymond Seitz9:18

Hustled into a station wagon, an estate wagon, and we were taken into a

Raymond Seitz9:24

Pineapple plantation to hide.

Presenter9:26

You don't remember a thing.

Raymond Seitz9:27

No, I don't remember, but it's very much a part of the family lore.

Presenter9:31

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?

Raymond Seitz9:33

Yes, he did.

Raymond Seitz9:35

He led the First American Regiment onto the beaches at Omaha.

Presenter9:39

Hm. So was it a a strict military um was upbringing? Was he a disciplinarian, your dad?

Raymond Seitz9:46

Well, a little bit, uh I suppose so. He was a West Pointer and uh the generation before were all army people too. So there was a lot of uh military jargon in my childhood vocabulary and a lot of military routine. Sometimes he would come in to inspect my room on a uh Saturday morning and he would take a quarter out of his pocket and see if it would bounce on the blanket. The the blanket had been drawn so tautly. But it was always done uh with humor.

Presenter10:14

But your childhood also sounds rather glamorous. I mean, not least because of the globetrotting with you with your father. I think you were in Germany and Italy and Iran. But you then had a very flamboyant period in New York, didn't you?

Raymond Seitz10:27

Well, I suppose to some degree, because my mother died when I was uh quite young and my

Raymond Seitz10:33

A father after returning from the Korean War.

Raymond Seitz10:36

Met romantically an actress named Jesse Royce Landis.

Raymond Seitz10:42

She was a very glamorous, flamboyant, exuberant, interesting person from a world so wholly unmilitary.

Raymond Seitz10:51

and the combination of the two made for a very colorful, exciting youth.

Presenter10:59

But when did you decide in the midst of all of this that that the Foreign Service was going to be for you, that you weren't going to go into the military like your father?

Raymond Seitz11:06

When my father was posted in Iran,

Raymond Seitz11:10

I went over there a couple of summers when I was in the States in school.

Raymond Seitz11:14

And I think it's really there that I became so interested in foreign cultures and languages and

Raymond Seitz11:21

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

Raymond Seitz11:29

the Foreign Service and basically stuck with that.

Presenter11:32

Let's have some more music.

Raymond Seitz11:33

Well, the next record is uh

Raymond Seitz11:36

I know Christmas means a lot to most families.

Raymond Seitz11:40

It certainly meant a lot to ours and still does mean a lot to my family.

Raymond Seitz11:45

And in some respects, it's because it is a thing that you can carry around with you.

Raymond Seitz11:51

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,

Raymond Seitz12:05

I remember this carol, which never fails to move me.

Raymond Seitz12:09

And I thought this would be very important because on the desert island I would have to figure out how to celebrate Christmas.

Raymond Seitz12:15

And I would have to find uh colored coconuts to decorate my palm tree, perhaps, and I could listen to this.

Speaker 412:35

Oh we

Speaker 412:41

Let's do it as long.

Speaker 412:48

What a like a storm.

Speaker 412:56

Who had all the song?

Speaker 413:01

Snow snow.

Presenter13:23

The choir of King's College, Cambridge, singing in the bleak midwinter. So Raymond cites 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?

Raymond Seitz13:39

I had told the people that there was no place on earth that was uh

Raymond Seitz13:43

too dangerous or too dusty or too disease ridden that I wouldn't go. I was ready to go anywhere.

Raymond Seitz13:50

And uh

Raymond Seitz13:51

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

Raymond Seitz14:01

reads out the assignments, the first assignments, and 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. They finally got around to my name and I heard the words Montreal.

Raymond Seitz14:27

And I was I genuinely was in a moment of suspense and my mind raced all around the globe.

Raymond Seitz14:34

trying to find where this spot was, only to discover it was about forty miles north of Plattsburgh, New York.

Presenter14:35

This is fun.

Raymond Seitz14:41

And so that's where I headed.

Presenter14:42

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 but come nineteen seventy two, which was only six years into your career, you were sent for back to Washington and ever since then, for the past twenty years or more, you've either been in Washington or in London.

Raymond Seitz15:00

It's a very unusual pattern, a very unusual pattern.

Presenter15:03

Was it a blow, considering your your ambitions to

Raymond Seitz15:06

Well, I must say, you know, every once in a while I say to myself that the career, at at least in its uh itinerary, did not turn out the the way I thought it would uh be.

Raymond Seitz15:17

And yet I have uh had the great privilege, really.

Raymond Seitz15:22

Of having wonderful jobs, working with wonderful people both in London and back in Washington.

Presenter15:28

You've worked for under Kissinger and successive Secretaries of State Vance, Muskie, Hague, Schultz. Which of them have you most admired, or is that too undiplomatic a question?

Raymond Seitz15:38

Very undiplomatic, and the answer the answer is George Schultz.

Presenter15:41

Yeah.

Raymond Seitz15:42

I uh worked very closely with him and I just have an immense uh affection and admiration for him. He's a man of great uh depth and great uh integrity.

Presenter15:52

You've been, therefore, as you indicate, over the past twenty years, um 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?

Raymond Seitz16:03

Well, it's not that I dislike it. I try to avoid it, uh inasmuch as I think it can be somewhat

Raymond Seitz16:08

Misleading.

Raymond Seitz16:10

And uh it has a little uh fluff to it and a little sentimentality, and that of course has its place.

Raymond Seitz16:19

But we are dealing with a world and certainly with a Europe that is changing very, very rapidly. And at the end,

Raymond Seitz16:25

The relationship between our two countries is going to be based on what our national interests are.

Raymond Seitz16:30

and the degree to which they are

Raymond Seitz16:33

coincident to the degree to which they overlap.

Presenter16:35

And indeed, I mean, do you think it can go on being that special with our moving ever more towards Europe, however reluctantly on occasions? And also, of course, because we don't have the threat of the Soviet Union anymore to cement that relationship between us?

Raymond Seitz16:50

Certainly the relationship over the last fifty years.

Raymond Seitz16:54

has had at its very centre

Raymond Seitz16:56

the issue of security. The US and the UK.

Raymond Seitz17:00

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.

Presenter17:16

Pickle number four.

Raymond Seitz17:18

Well, this bit of music really reminds me of how I learned about uh classical music. There was not much classical music in my upbringing, unless you count artillery songs and uh things like that. So it wasn't until I went to went away to school that uh this

Raymond Seitz17:36

door opened to me, and I went to a small school in upstate New York.

Raymond Seitz17:42

And uh

Raymond Seitz17:43

I remember very well late autumn afternoons when there was a a chill in the air and you'd been playing the sports in the afternoon and

Raymond Seitz17:51

He'd be sort of tired, and we'd all be assembled in this

Raymond Seitz17:55

Room and it would s be twilight and progressively darker.

Raymond Seitz18:00

and uh one of the masters would play music for us.

Raymond Seitz18:03

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 Brahm's violin concerto in D major.

Presenter19:16

Part of the second movement of Brahm's violin concerto in D major, played by David Oustrach, with L'Oquestre Nationale de la Radio Diffusion Francaise, conducted by Otto Klemper.

Presenter19:27

Can I ask you about life in the Ambassador's official residence, Winfield House in Regents Park? It was built, wasn't it, by Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress.

Raymond Seitz19:35

Yes, it was built by Barbara Hutton and completed I I think in 1938.

Presenter19:42

Didn't she build it for Carrie Grant, one of her husbands?

Raymond Seitz19:44

No, n well, she may have, but she was married to somebody else at the time.

Raymond Seitz19:49

She only lived in it for about a year.

Raymond Seitz19:51

And then the war broke out.

Raymond Seitz19:53

And she went back to the United States. And by the time the war was over,

Raymond Seitz19:58

her marriage had broken up. Maybe that's where Carrie Grant came into it.

Raymond Seitz20:02

And she really had not much interest in returning to London, and so she sold it to.

Raymond Seitz20:08

the US Government for one dollar.

Raymond Seitz20:11

uh one of the best deals I think we've ever made.

Presenter20:14

Do you like it?

Raymond Seitz20:16

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.

Raymond Seitz20:26

But it it's certainly uh big and therefore it can be a little cool perhaps, and one misses things like the the the privacy and domesticity of uh of life.

Presenter20:37

You've got two older children who are making their lives in Europe. You've got one boy with you.

Raymond Seitz20:42

Yes, although he's just started university in Boston, having taken a year off and worked uh on a game ranch in Zimbabwe and then worked as a full-time volunteer at the zoo, which is just around the corner from the

Presenter20:54

In your garden. From Winfield House, that's right. And three dogs. And three dogs.

Raymond Seitz20:54

From Winfield House, that's right.

Raymond Seitz20:57

And three dogs. Their wonderful dogs were very close to them. Two we had, of course, in the United States.

Raymond Seitz21:04

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 likes to sit in the receiving line as people come through and look them over. The other follows the hors d'oeuvres tray.

Presenter21:32

Is this the English man or the American one?

Raymond Seitz21:33

Which one?

Raymond Seitz21:34

Yeah.

Presenter21:36

They 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?

Raymond Seitz21:45

Yeah.

Raymond Seitz21:48

Surprise, I don't think is exactly the word. I was ready to have it go either way.

Raymond Seitz21:55

But in any event, when the word finally came through, I was really very pleased.

Presenter21:59

There was also an extraordinary campaign waged this end in to keep you, wasn't there? I mean, The Economist, The Times, Democrats Abroad, The Organisation I mean you must have been very flattered by all of that.

Raymond Seitz22:10

Well, in a way, in a in a period w that was very uh unsettling.

Raymond Seitz22:14

I must say we took a lot of comfort from those many nice gestures.

Presenter22:18

All those cocktail parties paid off, was he?

Raymond Seitz22:19

Yeah.

Presenter22:21

Um record number five.

Raymond Seitz22:23

Well, record number five, I think, i is a a band selected from

Raymond Seitz22:28

what I believe is one of the most beautiful presentations of popular music.

Raymond Seitz22:34

And it is by Cleo Lane and James Galway, and the tune is called Skylark.

Presenter22:40

Is it special to him?

Raymond Seitz22:42

Yes, it uh conjures up many romantic memories.

Presenter22:47

No more than that.

Raymond Seitz22:47

Very discreet.

Speaker 422:55

Uh

Speaker 422:57

Hey Lord.

Speaker 423:01

Have you anything to say to me?

Speaker 423:08

Won't you tell me where my love can be?

Speaker 423:15

Uh

Presenter23:15

Cleo Lane and James Galway and Skylark, let me ask you about your view of us, the uh the outsider living on the inside, as it were. You've accused us recently of um

Presenter23:31

I suppose uh to generalize of having a lack of self-regard. Uh you said uh that we seem to be afflicted with an inoperable disease um 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. Uh do we really look that bad from the outside?

Raymond Seitz23:51

Well, it's not so much my image of Britain, but what I saw perhaps far too frequently as Britain's image of Britain.

Raymond Seitz23:59

This sort of sense of decline and not can't get anything r right and somehow not competitive enough in the world. And I find it disconcerting.

Raymond Seitz24:11

that Britain can uh often be so down on itself.

Presenter24:14

But our institutions have taken a bit of a battering of late, haven't they? I mean, you must

Raymond Seitz24:18

Yes, but if you look around the world, institutions virtually everywhere have taken a battering or indeed collapsed.

Presenter24:25

So you think we should cheer up about ourselves?

Raymond Seitz24:26

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And it really doesn't take much of a geographical survey.

Raymond Seitz24:34

to conclude that this is uh a country of immense strength.

Raymond Seitz24:39

and immense wealth, and of, I hope, a very bright future.

Presenter24:43

Next record.

Raymond Seitz24:46

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. 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 says, don't espec to see me with no double martini, and that he'll just keep rub-a-dub rubbing these cars.

Speaker 425:14

Well all I can do is to shake my head.

Speaker 425:18

Might not believe it is true.

Speaker 425:22

For working at the Send on Niagara Falls is a undiscovered Howard Hughes So baby, don't expect to see me with no double martini and am I eyebrows society news Cause I got them steady depressing Love down my message Working at the Carwash Clues

Presenter25:37

Press and low down my

Presenter25:45

Jim Croce and working at the Car Wash Blues.

Presenter25:48

Obviously, mister 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?

Raymond Seitz26:03

Well, it is.

Raymond Seitz26:04

I think what he was trying to signal in making that statement

Raymond Seitz26:08

Is that we cannot try to address the problems in Bosnia.

Raymond Seitz26:13

in the same Cold War context.

Raymond Seitz26:16

Where virtually anything, I mean, this is really quite an indication of how much things have changed in the last three or four years.

Raymond Seitz26:22

Three, four years ago

Raymond Seitz26:24

If one person tried to

Raymond Seitz26:27

Escape Across the Berlin Wall

Raymond Seitz26:30

That incident had in it the seeds of escalation right up to full-scale war.

Raymond Seitz26:38

That has now completely changed, and the United States, and I think this is what he was indicating.

Raymond Seitz26:45

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,

Raymond Seitz27:03

I think we are very much involved in what is happening in Yugoslavia and in Bosnia in particular.

Raymond Seitz27:10

and working very well, and sometimes there are difficulties and differences with our allies, but on the whole working very well and using NATO and the various institutions.

Presenter27:19

But what you're saying is this Bosnia i is essentially Europe's problem, not America's, and that's the way you'd like to keep it.

Raymond Seitz27:26

No, 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,

Raymond Seitz27:39

as Europe's first regional conflict.

Raymond Seitz27:43

It's very difficult to explain in Idaho or Oklahoma.

Raymond Seitz27:49

The strategic implications.

Raymond Seitz27:52

of Bosnia.

Raymond Seitz27:54

and how it affects uh directly affects American security.

Presenter27:57

In saying that, then you mean that to lose one American soldier's life in Bosnia would be difficult to explain in Idaho or Montana?

Raymond Seitz28:05

To some degree, yes.

Presenter28:07

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?

Raymond Seitz28:15

I think the U.S. 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 25 or 30,000 troops.

Raymond Seitz28:24

in Bosnia or in Yugoslavia to support that settlement. And I suspect our contribution would be far and away larger than any other nation's. But I don't think that the United States would become directly involved

Raymond Seitz28:38

Without

Raymond Seitz28:39

the agreement and participation of its European allies. I think that would be fundamental to it.

Presenter28:46

Record number seven.

Raymond Seitz28:48

Well, record number seven is very important to me because when I was about thirty seven or thirty eight years old,

Raymond Seitz28:54

I discovered that I was not Fred Astaire.

Raymond Seitz28:58

And this came as a terrible blow and a terrible disappointment. And one of the reasons I would want to go.

Raymond Seitz29:03

to a desert island is so that I could pretend to be Fred Astaire.

Speaker 429:07

Like an unwritten melody, I'm free back

Speaker 429:12

So bring on the big attraction. My decks are clear for action. I'm fancy free and free for anything fancy.

Presenter29:34

Better stay and no strings. How much did uh 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?

Raymond Seitz29:45

Well, President Clinton, when uh

Raymond Seitz29:47

When he was elected and before his inauguration, I think made a very important distinction, which was to.

Raymond Seitz29:53

say that he felt his mandate was for change at home, but for continuity abroad.

Presenter30:01

But in that direct relationship of the American administration with Whitehall and with the Prime Minister here, I mean, it wasn't all plain sailing, was it, when Mr. Clinton came to power?

Raymond Seitz30:09

No, it started I mean, here you had had a very long period of time when there 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.

Raymond Seitz30:29

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 the sorts of advice. That didn't help, became a public issue. It sort of soured the atmosphere.

Raymond Seitz30:52

And a couple of other issues that came along too, Northern Ireland being one of them again. But my impression is that that is settling down very well.

Presenter31:00

But did it make your job harder in re-establishing

Raymond Seitz31:03

Yes, it did.

Presenter31:06

But now you've you've succeeded. I mean

Presenter31:09

This is a great intro.

Raymond Seitz31:10

Well, you never succeed. But 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. And what we find, this comes back time and time again in this relationship, is that at the end, when you need to get sensible decisions and need to develop a position on one thing or another.

Raymond Seitz31:33

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.

Raymond Seitz31:45

And in each iteration, it tends to revalidate itself. And that's what's so.

Raymond Seitz31:52

rewarding about it.

Presenter31:54

So now what? The rumour 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, maybe appointed in nineteen ninety four to run for the rest of the Clinton administration. That's likely, is it?

Raymond Seitz32:09

Yes, my hunch had been that I would serve around to the spring and that would make roughly three years give or take, and then 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.

Presenter32:26

Yeah.

Raymond Seitz32:28

And so uh assuming that happens, we will depart with uh many regrets and lots of happy memories.

Presenter32:35

What do you do next, though? What do you do when you've already had the plum job?

Raymond Seitz32:39

I don't know. Uh I'll just have to wait and see what what comes along. But there are plenty of things around to do and they're all they're all interesting. Oh, well yes, I'll miss this for sure.

Presenter32:49

Last record.

Raymond Seitz32:51

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 uh the clarinet quintet in A major.

Presenter34:03

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, mister Seitz.

Raymond Seitz34:13

I think it would have to be the Mozart.

Presenter34:15

What about your book?

Raymond Seitz34:17

But in my book I want to say uh something like uh Aeschylus or uh

Raymond Seitz34:21

Dante or something like that. But I I think probably as many, many people would choose.

Raymond Seitz34:26

I would take the Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry.

Presenter34:30

And your luxury.

Raymond Seitz34:31

My luxuries would be a big box full of

Raymond Seitz34:36

Family Photo Albums.

Presenter34:39

You look at them endlessly.

Raymond Seitz34:40

Envision

Raymond Seitz34:42

Lots of memories in those in those photographs. Good memories.

Presenter34:48

Raymond Seitz, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Raymond Seitz34:52

Thank you.

Speaker 335:00

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.