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

student. I was returning from a track meet at Madison Garden in New York where I was
running in 440 relays and 50 yard sprints. I was a sprinter. Suzanne was a blind date at
Smith College. We were married in Little Compton on August 21, 1954 right after my
first year at Oxford. It was her junior year. She spent her junior year in Paris and in
Geneva. After a honeymoon in France, Belgium, Holland and Denmark we lived in
Oxford, in a house on Squitchy Lane, a lovely little house that belonged to a Burmese don
who was at Magdalen and was away on sabbatical. His name was Mynt, Hyam Mynt. It
was an idyllic place to begin married life actually.
Q: You took the Foreign Service exam in 1956 was it, or ‘55?
MILLER: Fifty-five. I guess it was ’55.
Q: After passing the oral, did you have any doubt that this is what you wanted to do?
MILLER: Yes I did have doubts, because I thought very clearly at that time that I wanted
to be a professor in English. Further, I did not want to go into the Foreign Service because
of the taint of McCarthy. So I decided to go on to Harvard for three years of graduate
study. At that time it was an easy decision.
Q: Good heavens. You went to Harvard from what?
MILLER: From ’56 to ‘59
Q: What were you doing at Harvard?
MILLER: I was pursuing a PhD in English literature. English – Renaissance and
American studies.
Q: How did you find Harvard after Oxford?
MILLER: It was wonderful. It was Oxford plus, in a way. It was, for me at that time,
because Harvard for me was bigger in some sense. For me, it had more dynamism and
openness, and it was at that time very experimental. Oxford was set in its ways – and had
been for centuries, with set pieces, based on the long history of the study of particular
subjects. Harvard was also very political, and not only a great mix of people from my
own country, a greater mix than I’d seen before, but also of other countries. The English
department was brilliant. It had wonderful, wonderful teachers who nurtured.
Q: What were you concentrating on?
MILLER: Renaissance literature. Sir Philip Sidney was the subject of my thesis, which
concerns one of the earliest of his works, a novel called The Arcadia, which is something
that he wrote in enforced leisure at the age of 30 years old, when he was in exile from the
court. I think I was drawn to Sidney not only because he was a great poet and writer, but
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