In conducting oral history interviews, a useful approach for the interviewer is to submerge his or her own ego and let the spotlight shine entirely on the person being interviewed. The objective is to have the interviewee dominate the session. The purpose of the interviewer is to evoke responses and guide the discussion, rather than to engage in heavy-handed interrogation. To put it in 60 Minutes terms, it’s better to be a Morley Safer-type than a Mike Wallace.
Dr. John T. Mason, Jr., who died in early autumn 1998, founded the Naval Institute’s oral history program nearly 30 years ago. He was well-suited for the role. In personality, he embodied gentleness and kindness. What’s more, he came to the Naval Institute after retiring as an Episcopal parish priest, so he was accustomed to being a sympathetic listener. He was much more likely to make a request or a gentle suggestion than he was to be demanding. As a result, people were inclined to do what he wanted. The rich oral history archive he created is a testament to his success.
At any point in time, each of us is the product of his or her previous life experiences. The background that Dr. Mason brought to the Naval Institute was different from those of his professional colleagues, most of whom had come from careers as uniformed officers in the sea services. Mason, who was born in 1909, was shaped by an Illinois boyhood and early training as a musician. When he reluctantly concluded that he was not destined for greatness in that discipline, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked for a time in a congressman’s office. He went on to receive bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history. During World War II, he worked as an analyst in the Office of Naval Intelligence.
After the war, Mason shifted careers again, this time attending an Episcopal seminary and becoming an ordained clergyman. When he was preaching in Bethesda, Maryland, in the early 1950s, he dated his way through the eligible young women of the congregation before marrying one of them, Elizabeth Branch. She was a career professional, but became a minister’s wife as her husband held various jobs, including chaplain at the University of Maine and priest at a church in New Jersey.
During the New Jersey period, Mrs. Mason resumed her own career, working in the oral history research office at New York’s Columbia University. In terms of U.S. oral history, Columbia is, in essence, the “mother church.” Columbia founded its program in 1948 and set the tone and example for the hundreds of programs that have grown up in ensuing years. In the early 1960s, when Mrs. Mason was assistant director of the Columbia program, she sought to add retired naval officers to the stable of interviewees. So she turned to her husband as an interviewer because of his wartime experience in the Office of Naval Intelligence. He soon settled into a routine of flying to Washington on Sunday evenings, conducting oral history interviews on Mondays, and returning to parish duties later in the week.
Because of Dr. Mason’s manner, he inspired great trust and rapport with the men—most of them senior flag officers— whom he interviewed. The result of that kind of relationship was that men opened up to him—sometimes as they intended, sometimes because they got to talking and were more candid than they planned. The muster list contains a number of names from World War II and after: Robert Carney, Jocko Clark, Donald Duncan, William Fechteler, Thomas Hart, Kent Hewitt, Harry Hill, Thomas Kinkaid, Alan Kirk, Felix Stump, and Harold Train. Mason developed a particularly close relationship with Admiral Hart, who treated him almost as a surrogate son.
In 1969, Roger Taylor, the Naval Institute’s editorial director, had the vision to set up an oral history program for the organization. He made some inquiries and discovered that Dr. Mason was doing for Columbia what Taylor wanted none for the Naval Institute. As a result, Mason retired from the ministry and moved to Annapolis to pursue oral history full-time for the next 13 years. The Institute’s shelves are filled with transcripts of the dozens of oral autobiographies he helped create in that period. Of particular note are special series devoted to Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, Admiral Arleigh Burke, the Polaris program, women of the sea services in World War II, and Vietnam War prisoners of war.
Dr. Mason accomplished something else during his Naval Institute tenure. He inspired in me a desire to do what he was doing, and he instructed me in his methods. Thus it was a considerable honor to succeed him when he retired to Sharon, Connecticut, in 1982. There he and his wife Betty enjoyed a number of years together, after having been separated much of the time while he worked in Annapolis and she in New York City.
I had an opportunity to say a few words when Dr. Mason concluded his tenure in Annapolis. I suggested that a picture of him would go well as an illustration for the word “gentleman” in the dictionary. I said also that I knew of only one unkind thing he had ever done—to set such a high standard for me to try to live up to.