Former Ambassador, Congressman joins RCC faculty

By John Myers, Internet Photojournalist

Dr. David Funderburk lectures with a map of Romania at right at Richmond Community College in Hamlet, NC

Dr. David Funderburk lectures with a map of Romania at left at Richmond Community College in Hamlet, NC

What do you call David Funderburk? Mr. Ambassador? Congressman? Professor? Doctor?
The newest member of the faculty at Richmond Community College in Hamlet, NC has earned all these titles, and is now "Dr. Funderburk" to his students in history and government classes.
But despite all his impressive credentials, Funderburk says, "Just call me David."
A native of Aberdeen in neighboring Moore County, Funderburk returned to his roots by moving to Pinehurst last March. He taught three courses at RCC and one at Sandhills Community College last year, and is teaching four at RCC and one at SCC this semester. He was named a permanent member of the RCC faculty by the college trustees Tuesday.
Funderburk is taking over the position of retired History Department head Dr. Raymond "Gene" Burrell, teaching two American History courses, Western Civilization and American Government this semester at RCC and Great Decisions at neighboring SCC.

From academia to Ambassadorship

Aside from his scholarly credentials, and they are many, Funderburk has the experiences in government to match, serving as Ambassador to Romania from 1981 to '85 and as a Congressman representing the Second District of North Carolina from 1994 to '96.
Funderburk began his higher education at Wake Forest University with bachelor's and master's degrees in 1966 and '67 in history and government. He taught at Wingate College, now university, from 1967-69 and then joined the faculty of Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas, from 1972-78.
In the summers of 1970 and '71, Funderburk immersed in Romanian language courses at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Washington in Seattle, preparing for a Fulbright Scholarship he won for a year of study in Romania in 1971-72.
He received his Ph. D. Degree from the University of South Carolina at Columbia in 1974 and returned to Romania to live and study during 1975 to '77. He was then head of the history department at Campbell University in Buies Creek from 1978-81.

The road to Romania

He began correspondence with retired U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms after the senior senator from North Carolina wrote him to comment on an article Funderburk wrote on Romania.
That led to a recommendation from Helms and six other Southern senators to President Ronald Reagan to offer Funderburk a position in the Reagan administration in 1981.
Ambassador to Romania was fourth on Funderburk's wish list for government posts "and they told me, 'You're probably too young to be an ambassador,'" Funderburk said.
But at 37 he was named the youngest ambassador ever appointed to that post.
"I had lived there and knew the language. That opened the doors for me," he said.
"It was like being a CEO of a corporation. There were 155 employees" in the U.S. embassy in Romania. But the job had risks no CEO would expect. That was during the height of the Cold War, and radical Arab terrorists were harbored in Romania by the Communist rulers.
"There were some terrorist incidents then. The Jordanian ambassador's kids were attacked one day and there was a large Jewish community also targeted there."

The downfall of a dictator

The Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, also had a lucrative policy of selling Jewish Romanian citizens to Israel and ethnic Germans to West Germany for $12,000 to $15,000 per head, Funderburk said, the modern equivalent of slave trading.
Ceausescu also created an orphan problem there that persists until today, with an estimated 100,000 orphans still remaining in Romania, Funderburk said. The official policy paid Romanians a bounty to have children, but encouraged them to be abandoned after birth into orphanages where they lived in inhuman conditions, he said.
After Funderburk left Romania, Ceausescu was overthrown by a people's revolt in December 1989. He and his wife were shot to death in a public square in Bucharest after a "kangaroo court" of the people tried, convicted and executed them, Funderburk said.
Funderburk wrote a book about his experiences as an ambassador, and also met the Hungarian Calvinist pastor who sparked the public uprising that overthrew Ceausescu.
Laszlo Tokes had been speaking out about the crimes of Ceausescu against the people, and when troops came to arrest him, he linked arms with his church members around the church and they refused to surrender him. Troops opened fire and two or three dozen church members were killed, but Tokes lived and some of the soldiers joined the revolt.
From Tokes' church in the city of Timirosa, evangelical Christians from Baptist, Pentecostal and Adventist churches joined the movement which quickly spread nationwide. "Over the course of a week, boom it was over," Funderburk said.
The spark of revolt against Communism in August 1989 when the Berlin Wall was torn down spread quickly across eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain. By 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed and European Communism died with it.

From Romania to Congress

After his ambassador duties, Funderburk returned to Campbell University for a year in 1985, then began touring as a speaker with Vladimir Sakharov, a former Russian KGB agent who had defected to the West. This odd couple lectured about the Cold War on college campuses and to civic groups from 1986-89, up until the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Funderburk wrote books from 1989 to '93 about history and his experiences as an ambassador, and then was persuaded by a group of supporters to run for Congress.
The Second District at that time included his home county of Moore, and ran as far east as Rocky Mount and Wilson. Funderburk became the first Republican elected from that district in more than 100 years when he won the election in 1994 to go to Congress.
He lost his reelection bid in 1996 to U.S. Rep. Bob Etheridge, who is still serving.
From 1997 until '02, Funderburk worked as a lobbyist for a Washington state law firm with offices in Washington, D.C., working primarily with Indian tribes in Mississippi and Louisiana and with education issues in U.S. territories including Guam, the Marianas Islands and Puerto Rico. He also did some consulting work for R.J. Reynolds International to assist in developing markets for tobacco in Romania, working in Geneva, Switzerland.
He decided to return to North Carolina and teaching in 2002.