1 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign ...

Q: Well, you graduated in ’53. How did you feel about what you’d gotten out of it?
MILLER: I valued Williams very much. First, I was grateful because Williams and the
Tyng fellowship enabled me to have a superb university education without any financial
difficulty. Teaching was superb and the teachers encouraged me to go on and gave
valuable guidance and mentoring. I had mixed feelings about the sense of purpose of
some of my own contemporaries, because it was very evident to me, and certainly to the
thoughtful faculty, that as a nation and as a society, we all were in for a long stretch of
difficult times, both and as a nation and as a world. The seriousness of the problems that
were ahead didn’t seem to be in the minds of many of my contemporaries.
What I was going to do with all of this knowledge and foreboding I wasn’t quite sure. The
possibility that I would be drafted was always there as a possible future. I was ready to go
at any point, but due to the peculiarities and the inequities of the whole draft system I
never had to, although I was always on the edge of being taken. In fact I tried to enlist in
the navy, and the navy recruiters wouldn’t let me, because I was in the possible draft
category. It was one of those bizarre circumstances.
The graduation speaker was Governor Christian Herter. He spoke about the challenge of
the Cold War and the role of leadership for educated men and women.
Q: Was he Governor at that point?
MILLER: Yes, it was before he was Secretary of State. That whole sense of difficulty
before us during the depth of the Cold War was intensified because of the McCarthy
paranoia and many of the horrible things that were going on in Europe.
So I was encouraged to go to Oxford and the Tyng …
Q: That’s spelled T-Y-N-G.
MILLER: Yes. The Tyng Fellowship provided for three years funding for almost anything
I might want to do. If you wanted to start a business you could do that, or if you wanted to
go to Antarctica you could have done that, and so on. Anyway, I choose to go to Oxford,
and applied to Magdalen College on the suggestion of several of my teachers: Don
Gifford, Jack Ludwig, Clay Hunt, Jack O’Neill among others.
Q: You’d better spell Magdalen.
MILLER: M-A-G-D-A-L-E-N, I applied to Magdalen, because C. S. Lewis was there and
he would be the tutor. I was accepted, and went, arriving in the fall of 1953.
Q: Before we get to that, I was wondering you were there in ’52. How did the election of
’52, which was Eisenhower vs. Adlai Stevenson, how would you say at college it affected
both you and your fellow students?
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