Creator: Ralph Smuckler, Jeff Charnley

Subjects: Anniversaries, Sesquicentennial

Date: September 26, 2000

Format: Text/pdf

Original Format: Word Document

Resource Identifier: Smuckler, Ralph.pdf

Collection Number: UA 3

Language: English

Rights Management: Educational use only, no other permissions given. Copyright to this resource is held by Michigan State University and is provided here for educational purposes only. It may not be reproduced or distributed in any format without written permission of the University Archives & Historical Collections, Michigan State University.

Contributing Institution: University Archives & Historical Collections, MATRIX, Office of the Provost

Relation: Sesquicentennial Oral History Project

Contributor: MSU Archives and Historical Collections

Text File: Download

Transcript: RALPH SMUCKLER

September 26, 2000

Jeff Charnley,
interviewer



Charnley: Today is September 26, the year 2000. We're in Washington, D.C., at the home of Ralph and Lillian Smuckler. I'm Jeff Charnley interviewing Ralph Smuckler for the MSU [Michigan State University] Oral History Project for the sesquicentennial to be commemorated in the year 2005.
Dr. Smuckler, do you give us permission to tape-record this interview today?

Smuckler: I certainly do.

Charnley: I'd like to start first with some questions about your personal and educational background. Where were you from and where did you go to school?

Smuckler: I went to school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Washington High School was my alma mater. After some months, actually, I was in the Army for a while, when the war ended, I came back and attended the University of Wisconsin, did a Ph.D. in political science there, and finished up the year I came to Michigan State. My dissertation was almost finished, and I moved to the university in East Lansing.

Charnley: Had other members of your family gone to the University of Wisconsin?

Smuckler: The only members of my family that ever went to a university went to the University of Wisconsin.

Charnley: So there was a tradition.

Smuckler: My father was a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. Had it not existed, he probably never would have gone, but he was a very bright student in a small town in northern Wisconsin, and he was offered by his uncle or his cousin or somebody to be supported at the university, but at that time Wisconsin was free, and he went and he worked, and he made his way. And then my sister came along, and she went to the University of Wisconsin.

Charnley: Your World War II experience, would you talk a little bit about that?

Smuckler: Well, I was seventeen when I enlisted in the Army, and I enlisted in the Army at the age of seventeen in order to be sent for special training and education. I went off to the Army Specialized Training Program. I was a part of the reserves in that program for about a year shortly after I was seventeen when, about three months into it, the program was abandoned, and I was sent immediately into infantry basic training down in Texas, went from there to immediate assignment to a division that was heading overseas.
So I celebrated my eighteenth birthday in the Army. I'm trying to remember whether it was--it would have been my eighteenth birthday in the Army in training, actually, and then shortly there upon my nineteenth birthday I was overseas in northern France, fought in the pockets in L____ and St. N_____, finished up safely, was sent then to Austria for--actually, we were in the occupation down in France for a while, and then our division was sent up to Austria and it was broken up, and I was assigned to training as a clerk typist. The Army needed people to keep the records, and for some reason they picked me out and sent me off to that school, which was in St. W______, and I ended up at the age of twenty having earned enough credits for overseas service to come home. That was good, because Lil and I got married shortly thereafter, within three weeks, and went off to the University of Wisconsin to get educated under the GI Bill, which was a great thing for all of us.

Charnley: What was Wisconsin like at that time at the end of the war with the return of all the vets?

Smuckler: The place was swarming, as was East Lansing, with veterans. We were lucky. Once reason we got married so quickly was that we had a place to live in Madison as a married couple. We had an apartment that we were able to locate, that Lil was able to locate before I got home, and we were already engaged and got married and went to live in Madison. It was a lively place, a lot of excitement, a lot of GIs who had been all over the world.

Charnley: Your bachelor's degree, what field was that in?

Smuckler: That was in economics. It was a multi-disciplinary degree for international affairs, and I became interested in international service as a result, I think, of my work not only during the fighting but also in the occupation in Europe. I took a strong interest in it and came back to study international affairs. Wisconsin had a multi-disciplinary degree, which involved geography, economics, and political science, and it was a good degree. I majored in economics in that track and then went on from there to a Ph.D. in political science within the international interest.

Charnley: Was there anything that you saw in the occupation that maybe directed you? What was it that you did that caused you to pick that field?

Smuckler: Well, at one point, after being trained as a clerk typist, I was sent to Vienna and served there for about three months in General Clark's headquarters in G-3, which was the intelligence section, and that sounds very glorious. I was then nineteen years old. It was so glorious because they gave me a jeep, and as the jeep driver, I presided also over the message center, and that meant I made the rounds of all the embassies that Clark was dealing with and took messages and picked up things and all that kind of stuff. So I got to know Vienna and I got to know the embassies pretty well. I think that sort of sparked my interest. I saw a lot of these Foreign Service guys around. I never talked to any of them. At that time I don't even think I had the dignity of a PFC. I was a private at that time. So I think the whole war experience said to me that I wanted to be active in the world.

Charnley: Did you have language other than English at that time?

Smuckler: I studied some French before I left for my initial stay at the university. I went to the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee waiting for actually coming into service. I was seventeen at that time, and I had about three months before they pulled me into the AST. I studied French. I studied a lot of French over the years. I never got anything less than an A, and I took enough French courses to get a major, spent a lot of time in French literature study as well as French language study, and when I got over to Vietnam later and had to use it--this is some years later--I couldn't speak it, and that frustrated me. It made me think a good deal about how we teach languages.

Charnley: Interesting. When you first came to Michigan State, how was it that you ended up at Michigan State?

Smuckler: A very good offer. Actually, it's a funny story. My dad, because he never had to support me at the university, Lil worked and I worked and we had the wonderful GI Bill, so my dad and mother, who had saved for my education, ended up having about 3,000 dollars in the bank that they didn't need, I mean I didn't need, and they gave it to us as a gift in the form of a new car. And with a new car, I was, oh, at the top of the ladder in graduate school. I only had it for about six months, for the last year, actually, of graduate school in Madison.
During that last year the political science convention occurred in Minnesota, the APSA meeting, and we loaded six of us, with me driving, and we went in my splendid Olds 98 to Minneapolis, and there Michigan State was recruiting. I wasn't looking for a job yet, because I hadn't quite finished, but some of the guys brought me into the Michigan State session where Ed Weidner, a bright, young, able guy who was new on the faculty and trying to organize a Governmental Research Bureau in political science, was speaking, and then later he set up a series of interviews with anybody that wanted to meet with him.
Well, I went in and met with him, and so did a number of other Wisconsin graduates. Ed himself had attended Wisconsin at one time, a long time before, and had already established a reputation before being hired to Michigan State, a reputation at Minnesota and UCLA. He was only about five years older than I was, but he was established in the field. I don't think he served in the war, but in any case, he was there, interviewed me, and lo and behold, a matter of months later I started getting phone calls, and that was it. They made me a good offer. I was offered a salary of 4,500 dollars, which I think was about the best offer that anybody got in political science at Wisconsin that year.

Charnley: When was your first trip to campus?

Smuckler: He invited me over. There was a position open in the Governmental Research Bureau and in political science, introductory politics, and Herb Garfinkle, from the University of Chicago, was also interviewed for that position, and Herb was selected for the straightforward position. I was then asked to take a position open for a year in international politics because they saw me as having a special interest, which I did have, and the training.
So I took the position for a year, but I never left. After that there was one thing or another, always in political science, until I moved into the international program.
I think the Governmental Research Bureau was the main attraction when I first went, that plus the fact that Jim McAmee [phonetic], my major professor at Wisconsin, said, "Michigan State's a good place to go. They made you a good offer. You should take it." So I did. Had no reservations at all.

Charnley: Did the university or the federal government provide that funding for the Governmental Research Bureau at that time, do you remember?

Smuckler: That was the university, state of Michigan, yes.

Charnley: When did you meet John [A.] Hannah for the first time?

Smuckler: Let's see. I didn't meet him until--well, I'd see him in big meetings, but an instructor in political science doesn't meet the president except under special circumstances, and I didn't really meet him until I came back from Saigon. That would be in 1956, early, January of '56. I came back in December of '55. No, wait a minute. I've got a year off here. We went over in '55, came back in December of '56. In January of '57 I met him. Okay. During the year I was back, yes. The international program that I was being recruited into by Glen Taggart and by Hannah was sort of the apple of his eye, I got to see him very often after that. He was a strong influence on my own role at the university.

Charnley: What was Glen Taggart's position at that time?

Smuckler: Glen had just been appointed in late '56 to be the first dean of International Programs. He was also a professor in sociology, and I think a part of the Extension Service. But Glen had joined the university a year or two after I did, I guess, in the early fifties, and he already knew Hannah--Hannah was one of those that recruited him there--because of his having served in the USDA, and Hannah was, of course, active in USDA affairs.

Charnley: When you first got to campus, what were some of the early courses that you taught?

Smuckler: I taught municipal government, state and local government, introduction to political science--Poly Sci 7, it was--and a U.S. and world affairs course, which was the apple of my eye. That's the one I wanted to teach. I think I did all right in the others, but I had never taken a course in municipal government. I avoided it. I never took a course in state and local government. I avoided it. But there I was, using Ed Weidner's textbook in teaching those courses. I had seventy-five, eighty students. It wasn't a lecture session; it was a class where I'd meet with them three times a week and try to get to know some of the students. It was not an easy teaching assignment, because the first year I taught twelve credit hours each term. One term I went up to fifteen hours. That was half-time. The other half was the Government Research Bureau.

Charnley: And in your spare time what did you do?

Smuckler: In my spare time I dreamed of teaching the world affairs course, which I did. Leroy Bennett, who was then on leave to work at the U.N. and who vacated the position that I was appointed to for one year, had been teaching in the international field directly, and then he left after a year, and I moved into the international field.

Charnley: How did you first meet Wesley Fischel [phonetic]?

Smuckler: Wes was my office mate right from the very beginning in political science.

Charnley: And where was political science housed at that particular time?

Smuckler: We were in the basement of Morrill Hall, and it was sort of the center of things in the sense that Morrill Hall had a number of major departments housed in it. Economics was there. Some of the Arts and Letters departments were over there.

Charnley: Why don't we talk a little bit about the Vietnam project and how MSU got involved, or how you were involved in that project. I know it'll be coming out in your book and that sort of thing, but maybe if you could, in a nutshell, talk a little bit about that.

Smuckler: I'd like to talk about it, because there's a hell of a lot of foolishness that's said about it, in my judgment, foolishness. Wes Fischel was a Far East hand, he was a Japanese language specialist during the war and had been over in the Far East and had met various people. He knew an Okinawan whose name escapes me, who is a political scientist and who eventually became the head of one of the universities in Japan. He knew a Thai professor of political science who became president, I think, of [unclear] University in Thailand.
Another person he knew as a man by the name of Go Din Diem [phonetic], and Diem was Vietnamese, he was a strong Roman Catholic, he had a brother who was a bishop, and the family was well known as a Catholic family. Wes wanted to, at some time, do a little study of the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in the Southeast Asian setting. He had a friend in Thailand. He had Diem in Vietnam.
Vietnam, after a few years we all became aware of the fact that France was hanging on in Vietnam and that the war was going on and on. West invited Diem to come and visit Michigan State. I don't know if Wes did it. I think the Governmental Research Bureau invited him, and at that time Diem was, I think, in one of the seminaries on the East Coast. So he came out for a few days, and I had numerous contacts with him, being in the same office as Wes. He gave forth at several seminars describing some of the things that he felt his country needed, and that was about it. He went back home, and Ed Weidner and Wes talked a lot about how they might develop some kind of an aid program.
That was a period in which the University of Michigan's work in the Philippines was well known to us because it was in public administration, and that was a part of our department, and we knew some of the people who'd been out to the Philippines for the University of Michigan, and the Indiana University people were getting involved in Thailand, although that came along a little later. They were exploring it a bit later. Universities were getting engaged in technical assistance. Michigan State at that point had several projects, one of them in Colombia in agriculture, one of the first of the Point Four programs under the [Harry S.] Truman Point Four programs.
We had a major involvement in Okinawa, which Milton Melder certainly helped to develop. The American Council on Education had asked us to get active there, and Melder put it together in behalf of Hannah. So we had two projects. Colombia was pretty much unknown to me because that was agriculture, and in those days and, unfortunately, over many years, if you were in agriculture, you were over there, if you were in social science, you were over here, and if you were in arts and letters, you didn't talk to either of them. The university was united only by the parking problem.
We didn't know what was going on in Colombia, but Ed Weidner knew quite a bit of what was going on in Okinawa because Guy Fox from our department went out there among the first, and Milton Melder was at that point chairman of our department in the early period, the first year I was there. Therefore, we knew a lot about Okinawa, and it was that kind of formula that prevailed in the discussions with Diem in the early time.
But I became involved because, having met him in the university then once he became president after the fall of the French at Dien Bien Phu, once he was president, he invited Michigan State, Fischel, to immediately send out all this kind of stuff. I, as an active member of the department, was asked to be one of the Michigan State team members. That was in late '54, early '55. We ended up going to Vietnam in 1955 about--I think we left on July 4 for Vietnam.

Charnley: That was your first time in that country?

Smuckler: Yes. First time in Asia.

Charnley: What were your impressions?

Smuckler: Vietnam is a beautiful country. My impressions were based on--the first day we were there, my family--we had two small children--Lil and I were assigned a storeroom in the hotel for the first night because they had run out of hotel rooms in the Hotel Majestic. So we slept in a basement storeroom that we couldn't lock because there was no wall up to the ceiling. It was just a partial wall. We got through the night all right, and the next day we moved into a regular hotel room. But that night there were mobs in the streets shouting up at the hotel, and for me that was very exciting, but the hotel was saying, "Keep away from the windows." So we had turmoil the first few days. A young political scientist, all kinds of excitement this presented to me.
We had three or four nights like that in which we were being told by our Vietnamese counterparts who were watching out for us in our new office facility and all of this, we were being told that this was a demonstration against the International Control Commission, which had been set up under the terms of the temporary partition, and the International Control Commission had Indian, Canadian, and Polish diplomats on it, and since their staff and some of them were in the hotel and had just had a meeting that Diem's government disagreed with very strongly because it was very limiting on what Diem could do, that is, the decisions made at that meeting were, the mob in the street was an orchestrated mob, as most mobs, as you gradually learn in political science, most mobs are orchestrated in one way or another. This one was orchestrated by Diem's government probably to protest the ICC's decisions, which were not friendly to the Diem government. So we didn't worry about it.
But about the fourth or fifth morning we went up to the dining room where we had breakfast each day. Our little kids, Gary who was then age, I think, maybe six, maybe seven, and Sandy, his little sister who was just two and a half, had befriended the waiters, and the waiters got a hold of us as we came in. They said, "Leave the hotel. Get out of the hotel. Something's going to happen here today."
We had already scheduled Lil to go over and visit Jean Weidner in the house that they had. Ed was chief of party at that point. Lil and the kids, I took them in one of these little Volkswagen taxis, all four of us squeezed into it, and we got out to Jean Weidner's home, and I left Lil and went back to the office to work.
About 11:30, 12:30, there was all kinds of turmoil in the streets, and we began to wonder what was going on, but we learned through a Vietnamese contact of us who came running in about noon saying that the Hotel Majestic is kaput, it's dead. What did that mean? Well, in his language it meant that it was finished, and that was bad because we had Michigan State people in that hotel at that very moment.
So we went running down Rue Catinade [phonetic] to the hotel, and by the time we got there, the hotel, indeed, had been looted. Among other things, the wine cellar had been broken into and the whole first floor, the basement and the first floor was covered with wine, and if you could get through the slippery areas you could get your way to your room, which I did. I went up to our room, which had been broken into, and all of our stuff had been strewn around and a few things had been cut. I gathered everything up in a big sheet off the bed and carried it out like Santa Claus.
Fred [Frederic] Wickert had his family in the hotel. Dorothy Wicker and their two daughters were in the hotel, and Dorothy was able to speak some French, and she sat the invaders down. They were just kids, you know, they're high school kids. They were taking advantage of a situation. That's not what Diem wanted them to do, but there they were. They took over the hotel. John Dorsey's wife, was in the hotel with her two kids, too, and there were a few others like that, and they, too, had been able to calm the kids that were trying to invade enough so that they didn't lose very much.
But Guy Fox, who had moved into the hotel the day he was joining the team, that very day, and had arrived at the airport, found his way to the hotel with his friend whose stuff from Hong Kong was supposed to last him two years, completely wiped out, lost everything.
None of our people were hurt in the process. There may have been a few people roughed up, but not Michigan State people. It was rather terrifying.
So my first impressions of Vietnam are based in part on that experience. Each night from then on, there were bombs going off in the city. Because the hotel was unusable, we were put into an apartment that was supposed to be ready in about three weeks. So it really wasn't ready. It was pretty bad accommodation, but you took what you could get, and the family adjusted to it.
Each night we'd be awakened by the sound of artillery or bombs. One night we woke up and there were a lot of sirens outside our window. We were right on one of the main streets. We looked out and saw the police and some Army vehicles, and they were all working their way to surround and to try to get up the pole to get into the defense of a relay station that was on that post out there, a telephone relay station.
We learned then, the next day, that the reason they were so numerous and so cautious was that several of these relay stations had been blown up that night. And there were bombs going off from time to time even during the daytime. I remember walking down Rue Catinade one day with bombs going off two or three blocks away. I kept telling Lil that because of my experience in the infantry I could tell when something was close and when it was far away, and I knew what incoming artillery sounded like pretty much from the Army, and therefore, you know, I kept calming them down.
One night in particular comes back to mind, and that is that we heard--clearly it was artillery on this occasion, not bombs, and the artillery kept going from about four o'clock in the morning on for about two hours, and I kept telling Lil it's at a great distance and it's probably artillery fire practice, you know, the Army's practicing with artillery.
Well, we learned the next morning that they had been reducing the stronghold held by, I think it was the Bin Swin [phonetic] or one of the other river--what were called in those days pirates, and I think that's really what they were, and they had taken over that stronghold and defeated the opposition at that point. So Lil used to kid me about calling everything practice and artillery practice. "Don't worry." [Laughter] But that was our first impression.
I worked immediately on the library of the National Institute of Administration. I'm leaving out being introduced around to various people, but I had a counterpart immediately at the library. I was a research director for the program, and he and I planned the library and a facility that had been designated for that purpose. Mr. Suu was his name, S-U-U, and he was a nice gentleman who began to educate me about Vietnam.
By the time I left there, a year and a half, two years later, we had pretty much established the library, and then Michigan State provided a training program for librarians, and we set out Mrs. Ella Bowitch, who was our reference librarian in East Lansing. She spent two years there whipping the new library into shape.

[Begin Tape 1, Side 2]

Charnley: When the tape ended, we were talking about establishing the library in Saigon.

Smuckler: Yes. It was the National Institute of Administration, to which our whole program was attached. The library was nonexistent until that point. We did put up a pretty good facility, just one small item in the many things that I was involved in in Vietnam.

Charnley: How was it that they made it a family affair? It would seem like if power wasn't consolidated and yet families were invited, do you think that was a mistake in retrospect?

Smuckler: We didn't lose any. A lot of the families--quite an adventure. I think those that were there at the beginning like we were had a substantial adventure as I've been describing it.
Incidentally, I learned a pretty basic lesson in the process, because the French and many of the Americans were saying the Diem government can never amount to anything, it can't keep control of the streets, it's unable to govern, and the Diem people, and I knew what they were saying because it wasn't that Wes was there, but Ed Weidner was chief advisor and was in touch with the presidency, and at that time we had an advisor to the Surete [phonetic], a man by the name of Boudrias [phonetic]. Boudrias used to be right in the middle of discussions that were occurring in the police headquarters, and several of our other police advisors were, too.
We heard from Diem's government that these aren't Vietnamese who are opposing the government; these are the French who are trying to discredit the government. You know, I couldn't believe that the French, our allies, freedom, independence, and so forth, would be doing anything that sneaky as to blow up some of the government buildings and to create havoc on the streets of Saigon. After all, we Western countries don't play the game that way. This must be something else. I didn't know who to believe.
But after a month, about four weeks of this stuff, they caught two bomb-setters driving in a jeep. One of them got out and was planting the bomb at the front of a big bank building in downtown Saigon, plastic bomb. The other one was sitting in the car, sitting in the jeep, when the police caught them. These were two legionnaires who were on the payroll of the plantation owners, loaned to them by the government, and they were trying to do what Diem had described, namely to upset everybody to the point where the Diem government couldn't survive. So it was clearly in the hands of the French, the turmoil that we lived through in that period, other than the initial riot which I described, the initial hotel looting, which the young people themselves took on as a result of the protest that was organized.

Charnley: The informal contacts that were made at that time, for example, did the MSU members of the Vietnam project, did they have contacts at the U.S. Embassy or were you invited to parties or some of those informal things?

Smuckler: There weren't many parties in those days, but there was certainly a lot of informal contact. For one thing, everybody was trying to get established. The Michigan State group was very prominent. We were very large. We became very large. I['m not going to give you the whole history step by step. I'm sort of jumping into the middle of it. But after a couple of years we had thirty people on site, and then we went up to fifty people on site, and we always had ties with the embassy because the ambassador considered what we were doing to be extremely important and wanted to talk from time to time to see what we were doing.
AID, of course, its predecessor being the Foreign Operations Administration, was our sponsor. So what we were doing was, in a very broad sense, supervised by AID. I don't like the word "supervised" because we were on our own, but financed by AID and supported and sustained.
We got into a big hassle the first six months when Ed was out there, Ed Weidner, because our business office could not write piaster checks. That was the currency locally. Yet we had a local payroll. We had well over a hundred people after a year or so on the MSU payroll. These were drivers, there were sweepers in the building, and all that stuff, and interpreters as well. So we had to figure out a way of paying these employees, and we did not have an ability to write checks. For various business and accounting reasons, we did not.
We wanted AID's predecessor--it wasn't AID then--to take over on the payrolling, but there, too, you run into questions when the government hires somebody and pays payrolls and they have to go through certain kinds of procedures and have certain kinds of--there's a different relationship. And when the university did it, they couldn't pay them. So we were in turmoil.
We went to the mat on this issue with the government, with FOA, our sponsors. It was to the point where Weidner was threatening to withdraw the MSU team from the field because we couldn't operate unless we could pay for the things that we were using, including employees.
Finally, after quite a bit of tension, we did get that settled, and it got settled on the basis of Filmet [phonetic], who was then the vice president for business, agreeing to write the checks based on the kind of documentation we had to provide. So we were sending stuff back and forth through the APO system that never should have been. There should have been a simple way of doing it. Somebody should have been able to break through that.

Charnley: And Filmet was here back in East Lansing?

Smuckler: Yes, he was in East Lansing. We get our checks from East Lansing, piasters written out. We cashed them in Saigon in some way. He would only issue the check against a list of receipts and so forth that we would send. We'd get the money, and then we'd write the check locally because we had a bank account there. Well, that's a detail you don't have to worry about, but there were a lot of other relationships.
We had a Police Advisory Group, which was a very sensitive operation. Evidently Hannah had agreed when the National Security Council contacted us--not us, but him--had agreed that we would make use of the recruitment of some intelligence officers to be a part of the training of the Surete, the Surete being the French intelligence security police.

Charnley: For the Vietnamese?

Smuckler: The name came from France.

Charnley: They kept that name.

Smuckler: Yes. They kept that title. We kept calling it the VBI, Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation. So we had in our midst one person who was seconded from the CIA to the Michigan State group, and it was no big secret to anybody who looked at it. I never looked at it, and he was in the police team. I didn't know any of the police team. The guy who headed it was Howard Hoyt [phonetic], a very able chief of police from Kalamazoo, Michigan. You know, that's quite a jump from Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Saigon, Vietnam. But, nevertheless, Howard was capable and able to do this, and he had a team of four or five people at that time. It grew to eight, and then later it grew to about twenty. So it was a substantial part of the Michigan State involvement.
So since we had these Surete to train, we had a lot of contact with the other agencies that were involved in intelligence work. We were making use of the CIA or DIA or whatever it was that was nominated. Art Brandstetter [phonetic], who was the head of our School of Police Administration, Art would pick and choose among them and hire one or another. The would second them to us. They'd be on our payroll and under our discipline in the sense that when I was chief of party I could have sent any of them home. That we assured ourselves of because we did get rid of one. Not get rid of him, but we shortened his stay.
Because of that function, dealing with the police, we were also dealing quite a bit with the U.S. Embassy people that are interested in that whole array. And at AID they were trying to help us out here and there, but they were completely incapable in the early years of dealing with police administration and Surete-type stuff or any other. We had municipal police. We had rural police, which were the Garde Seville [phonetic]. We likened them to the state police. They're not an exact parallel by any stretch of the imagination, but they were one of three different police forces that we worked with. We never worked with the gendarmes, I mean the Army police. They had their own training mechanism. But we eventually helped the Vietnamese to build up a School of Police Administration, police training, and we worked with all three branches in that context.

Charnley: Was Ralph Turner involved at that time?

Smuckler: He came out later, yes. He was there when I was there for my second tour. He was there as a consultant, as I recall, earlier.
You see, Michigan State, in accepting the obligation to train and prepare the Vietnamese police services, accepted it for all three of the civilian services. I think that's the way it should have been, but it became an overwhelming thing for us, and we, by 1957, had decided to get out of it, I mean reduce it considerably. When I went out as chief of party in early 1958, one of the things I did immediately was to get in with the CIA and negotiate the withdrawal of our role in the Surete and negotiated with AID to be sure they had the capability at that time to pick up on the police.
Now, you know there's been a lot written about that. I mean by that, a lot of people like to chew on that and talk about this undercover activity. Let me tell you that undercover in the field, everybody knew who was working in the intelligence portion of the police division, and everybody knew, including the Vietnamese, because I personally took that up with Go Din Diem before we expanded to include any more than a small handful at the very beginning. Diem knew, his whole government knew, all the Michigan State people in the field knew, AID knew, anybody who hung around the airport knew, because when a new person came in it was always a ritual to be met, and if you were met by one of the wives of the embassy CIA crowd, and they were all known, then people would know that this was a--so the whole business of secretiveness is sort of silly. In fact, the names were read over the radio from North Vietnam.
But, you see, it fit into a nice pattern for people who came along later to try to make use of this secretiveness and so forth. It was understandable, but it was a distortion, a dramatic distortion. Every one of them was required to be under the discipline of--I'm talking about the intelligence people now--under the discipline of the chief advisor and his man, the chief police advisor, and they were. We were told that they could only participate in training activities, but when you're dealing with the intelligence services, you can't really verify what anybody does between ten o'clock at night and two in the morning. We believe that these were all trainees. They reported to us, and they reported on the training that they were engaged in, but it was an interesting period.

Charnley: Were there any other American universities that were doing similar things?

Smuckler: We heard that there were others. Glen Taggart later told me, but I have no first-hand knowledge. The Cornell Southeast Asia Center, I think, was at one time pretty well known as having been writing reports for the intelligence services, but I couldn't verify that. And besides, by the time I left, we were out of that business on the Surete side, and we were largely out of the police administration advisory role.

Charnley: By 1958?

Smuckler: When I left in 1959.

Charnley: How would you describe the political situation in Vietnam?

Smuckler: Very tense to begin with. When you say "political," I would say it was evolving. We were there during two elections, and when I think back on it, those were spectacular developments in the sense that in the midst of all of this and the uncertainty, there was an election held, a referendum, to put Diem in as president, to move Bowdai [phonetic] out, and many Vietnamese that I've talked to really resented that. They had an admiration for Bowdai and the lineage that he represented. But nevertheless, there was a big election, and many of us were out on the streets when the balloting was counted and went over to the polling booths to see what was going on and witnessing the significance of an election actually occurring, a referendum occurring.
Then later there was the election that put in a constituent assembly, and a constitution was then formed, and we participated to some extent in that. By that I mean we brought out an advisor on constitutional law, a man from UCLA who was a consultant to our group and worked with the Vietnamese as they spelled out their constitutional law issues. I forget what his name was, but he was quite prominent.
In any case, we had also the election of the first legislature, and that, too, when you think about it, we're talking about a country that is divided, going through all of this turmoil, all this difficulty, and here it is holding elections. So we observed this kind of political evolution.
There were many positive things happening in that period of 1956. I wouldn't include '55, because in those early months the country was still in turmoil, which I've described. But shortly after '55 wended its way off the calendar, we were able to go out in the countryside quite easily, comfortably. So the country was settling down. There were disturbing reports, by the time I left, of assassinations in the countryside, that the local officials were being singled out if they were loyal to Diem and being killed, and those reports I heard from time to time at the meetings, at the U.S. operations at USAM [phonetic], the AID program headquarters.
There were disturbing reports of the government being nonresponsive, and those came from Americans. You'd hear Americans saying, "Oh, it was never like this back home. We could do this and that," and I can tell you that, on hindsight, especially since I've been writing this book, that I think that this period of lack of understanding of the process Americans were going through probably did as much harm as anything else to unseat the government of Diem later on. I think one could document that. It would be an interesting book. But here you had a bunch of Americans in our group, but mainly from USAM and from all over, looking for something ideal and finding something considerably less and becoming critical. Inevitably it was considerably less than ideal. And you found that kind of griping and nonsense.
Remember, I used to go out in the countryside, and here I'm mixing the '55, '56 time with the '58, '59 time because this was a spread of five years. I was there practically all the time. One year we were back in East Lansing having our third child, who went back with us later. We had Michigan State people, one economist, another economist, who formed very strong views on how inadequate the Vietnamese economic improvement, how inadequate their planning was. As I think back on it, they were really incapable of handling the kinds of issues that they were dealing with, which were really political economy in its rarest form.
Milt Taylor, our tax advisor, went around and wrote a report, finally, went around talking about the progressive income tax, a very uncreative way of trying to deal with Vietnamese tax policy in those days. But he went on record, and I remember him asking to come in and talk with me one day when I was chief advisor about why he had to put up front on the third page of the report a damning reference to this governmental deal. "It'll never be anything until you put into effect a progressive income tax."
I said, "You know, does it have to be said in the take-it-or-leave-it sense or as a report-writer and consultant who has been admitted to the inner circle of information? Can't you say something that would not require Vietnamese readership and Vietnamese leaders to not just cringe, but to take offense and eventually to reject everything else in your report because you're so one-sided on the issue?"
"Ralph, when everything is said and done, you just gotta tell it the way it is."
You know, that's not exactly technical advisor in the best sense, and Milt was a good guy, but he was looking for something that he could never find in the overseas setting. He looked for it in Panama, too, later on under government auspices. And that's only one example, but I single that out because Milton went back and wrote a devastating article about how horrible the government was, how badly it was, how the U.S. was being taken.

Charnley: How was that article received in Vietnam?

Smuckler: That article plus one or two others--we had Adrian Jaffey [phonetic], whom you may know. He's in the Arts and Letters arena. Adrian came out, not as a consultant to the project, but because of so many of us being out there, he came out as a Fulbrighter. I remember going up to his apartment with our kids, Lil and I. Adrian was an old friend from East Lansing. He was sort of a curmudgeon, but he was a bright one, and Adrian was telling us about what he was into, how he was having so much trouble at the university and so forth as a Fulbrighter. At one point the toilet flushed because our seven-year-old--I think Gary was about seven then--had gone in to use his bathroom. He said, "Did he flush my toilet?" Adrian almost jumped out the window, he was so upset. He said, "I get one flush a day, and your kid went in there and flushed my toilet." [Laughter] You can see the conditions under which we lived weren't exactly the luxury conditions that some people have described.
In any case, Adrian came back and wrote an article on how terrible this thing was in Vietnam. Milt Taylor wrote an article like that. Frank Child, who was another economist from Michigan State, wrote that kind of an article. They had very negative views. The country was not living up as quickly to their ideals, and they were in no position to judge, but they judged, and they went way beyond their areas of specialization. They talked about politics when really they were economic analysts. They talked about issues in the government that they really knew very little about. But when you're, like all of us, a professor and you come into a juicy situation, you can put an article in The New Republic, we're tempted beyond what we should be to do just that.
In any case, as a result of this, when the contract was up for renewal, we were requested by the government--by this time Al Seely [phonetic], who was head of the business college, was involved heavily because the project shifted. It was always under our International Program Office in the early sixties, but it came into being, incidentally, before the international program was created. It was under political science in the Governmental Research Bureau initially, and later, when our international program dean's office was created, all international projects came under that jurisdiction.
Then later, Al Seely, whose people were heavily involved in the field, insisted on having more control, and Glen Taggart yielded to that desire. That was our general philosophy. If a project's heavily involved in a college, it ought to be administered through that college with certain residual controls staying in the central dean's office. And Seely was out in the field, actually, when Diem unloosed the idea that unless he could have assurances from the university that our people would not write critical articles and publicly denounce him, as they were, unless that happened he would not renew the contract. So there was no way that any of us would have supported the idea that he would have that kind of control over what our people said. He said, "Look, your people are in my files, and it seems to me that they should respect the right of the government to control its own flow of information on such matters."
But we couldn't do it, we wouldn't do it, and the contract terminated. We had requested a final two years at a very reduced level in order to cement some of the good things that we'd seen, and we did accomplish some good things during the period.

Charnley: What were some of those?

Smuckler: Well, I would say the resettlement of the refugees was a very significant development, which would not have occurred, I can say without any hesitation, would not have occurred anywhere near as well or as systematically without our direct involvement. We wrote the plan under which the Vietnamese government operated and under which the AID program operated and which resettled almost a million refugees. I think we had 800 to 900,000 that were unsettled when we started to get into it.
I was out in the field with three or four of us in the team. We went all over the country, developed the plan. Diem and his refugee commission, Bouy Von Luong [phonetic], endorsed it. Well, his name was Luong, but not Bouy Von. In any case, they endorsed it, and they put it into effect, and when I came back a year later, the tense and temporary living arrangements that I saw when I first arrived in 1956 were gone. They'd been put in places where they could be productive.
That movement was criticized by some because they say it was so outside of the ordinary. These were all Catholic refugees, and Vietnam's a Buddhist country. There were references to the fact that some of them were placed in locations which made them sort of buffers between Cambodia and Vietnam. Those criticisms, whether they were partially correct or wrong or whatever, really didn't make any difference. These were human beings who had to be resettled, and they were, and they became productive parts of the economy.
Now when I look at the refugee situation in the Middle East, for example, and think of the horrors of having refugee camps for decades, generations, I realize that what we did in Vietnam, and that was among the first of such developments the U.S. got into in Vietnam, what we accomplished there was a major accomplishment. Well, that was one thing.
Our main goal was to establish a National Institute of Administration, which we did do, and we did it at a substantial level. It became a leader in the eastern region organization for public administration. It began to develop a professional public administration cadre, people, and a good number of them came over to this country for advanced degrees and went back. So an institution, I think, had been built, and that's what we wanted to round out in the final couple of years.
In addition, there was a budget process put in place for the government. We had Marvin Murphy, one of the deputy budget directors in the state of Michigan, and a Michigan State friend, he'd been in and out of Michigan State classes for years. Frank Landers, who was director of the Michigan budget. They came out at various times when Marv was resident there and developed a budget process, making use of primitive IBM equipment. We had counter/sorters instead of IBM full equipment. We had a colleague in Vu Von Tai [phonetic], who became an outstanding administrator, took a high position in the U.N. Development Program later on, came from France to head the budget operation, and we worked with him. Marvin Murphy was close to him and advised him. They were working wonders.
We had visitors from all over the region, all over South Asia and Southeast Asia, coming to see how this was working. So there was a kind of momentum of administrative adequacy that was coming in place. And of course Diem would work eighteen hours a day in his little cubbyhole office in the palace to get things going. He'd read everything that came across his desk, unfortunately, and the government was settling down. It was accomplishing things.
There were public works, which we didn't do, but because the government could function, the public works were getting put in place. The railroad was reestablished up to Hue. Well, a lot of good things that were beginning to happen until the assassinations in the countryside began to catch up and the Diem government was put under so much pressure that Go Din Nu [phonetic], his brother, increased, I would say, the opportunities for corruption in order to maintain a political stability, and the country became much more corrupt by the time Diem was overthrown.

Charnley: The communists were doing the assassination?

Smuckler: The Viet Cong, who were communists. We always like to think of them--we did at that time. I was part of thinking of them as being southerners who were anti-government, who were pro-independence and who were communist. It turns out many of them were being led by the North in the whole movement. I think the history that has been written since then would show that these were hardly indigenous local people. They were, in many respects, masterminded by a much broader scheme that any of us realized. At one point--

[Begin Tape 2, Side 1]

Charnley: This is tape two.
We were talking about the Viet Cong when the last tape ended.

Smuckler: At one point there was a cache of arms that were uncovered in the basement that nobody knew existed under one of the houses that a good friend of the American community lived in. At one point a bag of hand grenades was thrown over the wall into our front yard, and Lil found them out out there. They fortunately had all been defused. But things were going on all the time we were there which made you realize this was far from a settled situation. It, of course, began to erupt after I was there. The Army began to come in in larger numbers. But Wes told me that the Army, the U.S. Army, would never have been invited to become so strongly entrenched had Diem not been overthrown, and, of course, he was killed in the process, but I don't know the ins and outs of that. I believe that's true. While he was in place, the U.S. military involvement was kept to a minimum.
When I came back in 1958, I think there were about 1,500 Army people. When I left there, maybe 500. So there were 1,500 going up to 3,000 while I was there, and these were heavily committed in Bien Hua and other places where training bases and in military equipment activity which the council, the International Control Commission, knew about. It all changed after Michigan State was there.
I would like to say something about the living conditions, because some of these guys that have come along and taken a look at this talk about Saigon in those days as though it took these Midwestern bumpkins and put them into luxury where they had servants and all of that. That is such a misunderstanding of the conditions of life that existed. It's an understandable misunderstanding.
We had physical examinations of the Vietnamese servants as well as the employees of the MSU group, and I think the disease rate was something in the eighty to eighty-five percent category. We had to fire some of our people because they had galloping tuberculosis. Practically every one of them, or eighty percent of them, probably, had worms of some kind in their intestinal tract, and I would say probably ten to twenty percent had syphilis or some other venereal disease, and we were living and working in the midst of all this without, in the initial two years, any real American medical support at all except if you went off to Clark Field. We had our full share of evacuations because of amoebic dysentery and allergies to parasites of various sorts.
In the end, several of our people died in Vietnam in the early sixties. Some of our police advisors died as a result of--I'm not sure why but they did. One of them was Bud Hanville [phonetic], and I forget what the name of the other one was. So disease was a problem that was not acknowledged by most of the reviewers that went in.
Secondly, when you talk about servants in that setting in which we were living, almost a necessity of life because all the water had to be boiled and because everything else had to be kept in a clean condition far beyond that which you'd have to do in East Lansing, Michigan, and because just getting something done--for example, you could spend your whole day without any Vietnamese language ability in the market buying enough food to serve that night. The conditions of life were such that servants were pretty much required. There were a couple of our people that tried to make their way without servants, but they didn't do very much except maintain their household, and we always felt it was an obligation and a desirable aspect of what we were doing to get to know Vietnamese and to socialize and accept invitations to parties and have an interaction, which the Michigan State people did with many Vietnamese.
In addition to that, the insecurity and uncertainty, the way it weighs on you after a while, never figures in the writing of these Johnny-come-latelys who suddenly use their own standards of judging what's going on, and I really have been irritated and angered by some of the stuff I've seen written. My wife had amoebic dysentery twice; I had it once. We constantly were worried about our kids in that respect, almost had to evacuate one of them to Clark Field. So this was no hayride that we went out on. This was a certain adventure where one thought one could do some good.
In the end, I would say largely because of the ignorance that prevailed in assessing what was going on in Vietnam, we got caught up in a bad situation. There are a lot of avenues one could pursue in that respect, but I hope we're going to talk about the international side of the university. This Vietnam project was only a bubble in that respect. It became the prominent one because of all the anti-Vietnam activity and then the way itself.

Charnley: Would you talk a little bit about your role? You were assistant dean of international programs.

Smuckler: Yes. When I came back from Vietnam--of course, I was in the political science department all the way through, but when I came back, Glen Taggart asked me to be in his office, so I joined him. There were just the two us for a while. [Tape recorder turned off.]

Charnley: Before the break, we were talking about international programs and your role in that as assistant dean. Would you talk a little bit about that and where Michigan State University was involved in the 1950s in its international programs and international study.

Smuckler: When I came back from Vietnam, I joined Taggart, and from then on we worked very closely together on international program developments. Michigan State, in my humble opinion, was probably the lead public university in the country in developing an international dimension, which was our goal. When I joined Glen, we had already become active in Colombia and Okinawa, two places. We had an involvement in Turialba that was just coming to a conclusion. That's in Costa Rica, Central America, generally. And we had the Vietnam project. In addition, in 1954 we had started to work in Brazil in the field of business administration.
Then, during that year, 1957, when I was back, the first year I was with Glen, the first year of the international program existence, International Program Office, we were invited by the Ford Foundation to help set up an academy for rural development in Pakistan, which we did. So by the time I came back from Vietnam in late 1959 or early 1960, we were already very active in five countries, with major commitments.
There were other universities at the time also getting engaged heavily. I refer to the public administration involvement by the University of Michigan, but when I was in Vietnam I ran across a University of Michigan team, and they had about three or four people there in Laos working on language. It was a language team of some sort. I forget exactly what they were doing, but they used to come down to Saigon, and we associated with them quite a bit. And then they had somebody actually stationed in Saigon, I believe.
Cornell University had become active in agriculture in the Philippines in a big way. University of Wisconsin was getting active in India. Harvard was in Pakistan and in several other countries in connection with economic development. They were forming a development advisory group. I don't remember exactly what they called it in those early years, but that evolved into their Development Institute that they operate even now. There were many other universities involved.
Michigan State, as I indicated, was probably, among the public universities and even including the private, right up at the top, and I don't just refer to technical assistance. I refer to building the dimension of international studies into the program of the university, the whole program, and that we did with the help of several substantial Ford Foundation grants and with the help, of course, and the commitment of the top of the university and with a number of very strong allies throughout the university, faculty members who really took it very seriously and wanted this to happen.
So with the help of the Ford Foundation and the university's own investment, with what we could develop as a result of the experiences of our faculty abroad--we had as many as a hundred in any one year who were overseas during these early decades--with those advantages, we were among the leaders.

Charnley: Were there many graduate students at that time involved?

Smuckler: A good share of the Ford Foundation funding that we got was used in support of research programs that employed graduate students. Then later, under UCIA, which we helped to form, UCIA being the Midwest Universities Consortium for International Activities, under that umbrella there were competitive grants made to graduate students who were doing dissertations. In various ways, the faculty was our main target, and they brought with them the graduate students, and then later, of course, as we evolved the international and area studies, we had substantial support from Title VI to deal with dissertations abroad under that funding for Africa and for Asia.
That evolved very nicely, because we had as many as four or five, when I was still the dean, grants coming on an annual basis under Title VI. I understand that since I left the deanship about nine years ago, that the number has continued to increase, has gone up to become the lead. I think only two universities in the country have six sustained support arrangements under Title VI for international studies and for area studies. A lot of that channels into graduate student support. I think that there are only two, and Michigan State is one of them.
So, going from a position in which we were, I would say, unheard of in the international studies arena and not taken seriously, the university is now a major competitor on any international studies, international research line, that comes along of interest to the faculty. And that's because the faculty has become very international and because, through one avenue or another, they've been exposed to different parts of the world.

Charnley: At what point was the decision made to bring large numbers, or encourage large numbers, of international students to study on campus? Was that President Hannah's idea? Where did that come from?

Smuckler: I'd have to check data on this, but my recollection is that at no time was Michigan State considered to be the largest, or among the largest, of the foreign student training institutions. When I arrived, we had a small number. I arrived on campus in 1951, and we had a small number of foreign students. I think there were probably three or four hundred.
Hannah was an enthusiast for foreign students. Hannah always talked in terms of people. "Don't tell me about programs. Tell me about the lives of people." He used to bring all the foreign students to his home once a year, and he was a great leader on all of the international things that we were trying to accomplish in those days.
But we made the decision, contrary to most other university in the country, that we didn't want to increase our undergraduate foreign student enrollments. We did not want a larger number. We had maybe 200, 300, 400, as we went into the sixties undergraduates out of a couple thousand or 1,600, whatever the number was in any particular year, foreign students altogether. Our graduate student numbers from other countries increased continually, because that's a matter of control by departments as much as anything else. A department decides who they will accept as a graduate student. The university processes them and all that, but these are departmental decisions. In some cases you can't get a graduate student to come unless you can support him, but in many departments that's not true. They'll come supported by somebody else and gradually find a way into the department.
In any case, the decision we made to keep our numbers of undergraduates low was contrary to the trend in those days. We heard about, participated, in discussions where colleges and universities were going out recruit foreign students because they were a source of higher tuition. They all paid out-of-state tuition, after all. We never had many scholarships to offer foreign students in my years, as much as we tried to find that kind of money. They had to be supported by departments if they were going to be supported. We had no general pot out of which to take much support. We did have some, but not much.
Now, we decided not to have undergraduates for several reasons. One, we were building up institutions abroad. At one time we had a good number of our faculty in Nigeria building up a new University of Nigeria, and we were told by our colleagues that if they couldn't keep undergraduates to study in their country, the best all had to go to the U.S., as would have been their inclination to do, it would have harmed the development of their own universities. We saw that as a reasonable argument.
But beyond that, we also saw that foreign students at the undergraduate level were still pretty young and were having difficulty adjusting in the U.S., especially in a large university. We did not have a good English language studies program in those years. So we had a lot of trouble with undergraduate foreign students in the early years and decided that we didn't want a large number, that we'd admit them at the graduate level or they could transfer from other schools where they would have gone through the initiation, you might say, at the agony of some other institution.
On hindsight, I'm not sure we were right. We probably should have geared up and done the necessary. We did built an English Language Study Center eventually, and that enabled us to do a good job with English language training for foreign students.
What happened was that the admissions office at the undergraduate level became so enamored with keeping them out that we could never get the guy who was in charge to really begin to build up the numbers. That's a highly selective thing, you know, subjective thing, when you being to admit undergraduate foreign students. You have to have a certain sympathy for them, and I think our admissions office lagged.
As we got into the period where the enrollments weren't as high, Lee Winder, our provost, and a number of others decided that we ought to let that number go up. Why not? Furthermore, they would be paying higher tuition, and that wasn't bad either, because we were suffering pretty badly on budgetary matters. So we talked to the admissions officers under the old regime, people that were there, and we began to gradually increase the numbers. This was in the eighties, really, seventies and eighties.
And we gradually, but never very much--even today I believe it's a problem at Michigan State, because even when we decided that by not having undergraduate foreign students we were denying our American students, our Michigan students, a genuine opportunity in the classroom to interact with people from all around the world, even when we made that decision, we couldn't get the numbers up fast enough. We wanted them. We had no money to buy them or to bring them, and we had so many foreign students who were graduate students that our curiosity, so to speak, was satiated.
I knew we were doing the best job in the country with these students because our guys like David Horner and Homer Higbie and Benson and the others were all national leaders in the professional field related to foreig