Deputy secretary-designate's confirmation hearing - Clifton R. Wharton, Jr., speech - Transcript

US Department of State Dispatch, Jan 25, 1993

When President Clinton asked me to join his new Administration, I accepted with a sense of honor, of excitement, and a sense of great personal fulfillment.

For more than 2 decades, I have been an executive in higher education and finance--president of a university; chancellor of a multi-campus university system; and head of a very large insurance company and pension fund for employees of colleges and universities, research institutes, private secondary schools, and foundations.

Some might ask how, with that background, I came to be considered for this post. While I am not privy to the thoughts of President Clinton or Secretary of State Christopher on my selection, I should point out that my career did not suddenly begin when I was elected president of Michigan State University in 1970.

The fact is that for some 22 years previously, my full-time career involved technical assistance and foreign economic development. Mr. Chairman, if I may be permitted to forego my usual diffidence, an anecdote may help to clarify the dilemma I face when trying to rebut those who say I have no foreign policy experience. At a recent college commencement where I was privileged to receive an honorary degree, 1 was waiting in the procession line when I was approached by a faculty member. His first comment after congratulating me on the honorary degree was the inevitable question: "How's my retirement money?" His second comment was to say, "I am very happy to meet you because I use your father's book on economic development in my course." When I pointed out to him that my ambassador father never wrote a book on economic development but that he was referring to my book, my faculty friend expressed amazement to learn that I was the same person.

Background

So how did all this begin? In his presentation several days ago, Warren Christopher recalled the great influence on the post-1945 world of our nation's Marshall Plan-surely one of the few shining episodes in the history of relations between nations formerly at war. Perhaps the event that most shaped my own career was my presence in the graduating class at Harvard University on June 5, 1947. As someone who has given more than a few of them, I can tell you that commencement speeches are usually listened to by the boisterous seniors with half an ear, if that. But for my class, the speaker was Secretary of State George C. Marshall himself. The address he gave that day--the address in which he set forth the elements of the Marshall Plan--stands as one of the great turning points in enlightened diplomacy.

Even now I remember key thoughts from his speech:

Our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.

General Marshall knew full well [that] he was laying the groundwork for a great campaign to rebuild war-torn Europe-- physically, economically, and politically as well. He may have been less aware of the effect his words had on one idealistic youngster who resolved, on the spot, to dedicate himself to the inspired and inspiring principles General Marshall had just put before the graduating class. Nonetheless, his words guided my educational and career choices from that moment onward. At Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, I took my masters in international affairs with an emphasis on Latin America-- a specialization that eventually led to 5 years of work on assistance programs in Venezuela, Brazil, and Costa Rica in association with Nelson Rockefeller. Later, when I was studying for my doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago, my mentor was the great Nobel laureate in economics, Theodore W. Shultz, who was then evaluating US technical assistance throughout Latin America. My dissertation was on the impact of technical assistance on agricultural development in Brazil.

When I completed my doctorate, I faced the usual choice [of] what in the world to do with it. My father, a career diplomat who would eventually become our country's first black career ambassador, made no secret of his eagerness to have me follow his footsteps into the Foreign Service. And that was by no means an unappealing possibility.

Yet, 10 years after I heard George Marshall speak at Harvard, his message still filled me with excitement. In Japan and Europe it was now possible to see, in the most vivid and concrete ways, what international assistance and trade could accomplish. And in President Truman's subsequent "Point Four" program, the United States had already embarked on an extension of the original Marshall Plan concept to what were then called the "underdeveloped" nations of the Third World.

To be sure, the Point Four program was undertaken in large part, if not entirely, to contain the expanding communist sphere of influence. Yet Point Four struck me as potentially much more than just a Cold War gambit. Ultimately, I thought it might be, at least, as constructive an element of US foreign policy as traditional diplomacy. And, on that basis, I made my choice.