A Sense of Direction for America
By John Richardson
The Denver Council of Foreign Relations Dinner Meeting 17 Sept 2001

You here in Denver, like all Americans, responded to the disasters last Tuesday with shock, grief, anger and patriotic fervor.

The resulting public support for the war on terrorism not only frees our leaders for victory, but also provides a unique opportunity for a more profound and far reaching achievement.

People everywhere, not just here, want a more secure, peaceful and just world order.

Experience over a half century leads me to believe cooperation toward that goal—worldwide—is now feasible.  That is what I want to talk about tonight.

As a boy at our dining room table near Boston, looking up at the portrait on the wall of my namesake, a 1776 Minuteman at the Battle of Concord and Lexington, I often heard my mother enthuse about Woodrow Wilson’s dream of a powerful League of Nations, and disparage Henry Cabot Lodge, my Father’s cousin, for blocking its realization.

In early 1945, I saw teen-aged boys in German uniforms, emerging from the woods, their hands in the air, mowed down by fellow paratroopers.  That was forgotten a few minutes later when I was blown over backwards by an exploding shell, but, one of the lucky ones, unhurt, I hid in a ditch, sick with terror, as the shells kept coming.  Later, my stateside nightmare came alive.  I was responsible for men lost in a blacked out German city, listening to heavy engines approaching; were they tanks? whose tanks?

I came back from that mercifully brief combat experience with a new aspiration.  Looking out over the troopship rail at the Statue of Liberty on a bright August morning, I began to dream of doing something, anything, about peace and freedom—before the prospect of again holding my gorgeous Southern bride in my arms drove out all else.

Four years later, a Harvard law degree and my father’s friendship with Allen Dulles gave me a job at Sullivan & Cromwell, the Wall Street law firm presided over by his brother, John Foster Dulles, soon to be President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State.  But sixteen hour days left no time or energy to pursue my dream, so I switched a few years later to investment banking—I had a friend at Paine Webber—with shorter hours and more pay.

In 1956, when the first popular uprising to threaten Soviet power in Eastern Europe exploded in Budapest, I was horrified by Washington inaction.  My urge to help prompted a failed effort to airdrop bazookas to the freedom fighters battling Soviet Russian tanks, and then a successful effort to supply Leo Cherne, Board Chair of the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian organization, with a token gift of antibiotics for their wounded.

Cherne took the antibiotics with him on a wild ride through roadblocks to Budapest in the midst of the fighting.  This produced a headline story for the International Rescue Committee, record-breaking contributions, and, for me, an invitation to join the Board where I still serve fifty-five years later.  When the revolt was crushed, with 200,000 Hungarian refugees fleeing to the West, my wife’s anguished reaction led to broadening the family involvement. Fourteen year old Eva Selek became our fifth daughter after a year alone in an Austrian refugee camp.  These Hungarian encounters whetted my activist appetite. So a few friends and I set out to find a way to show American support for another brave European people, the Poles, as they waged a non-violent struggle against the Communist dictatorship imposed by Moscow. After visiting Poland to determine the most urgent humanitarian needs, we persuaded American pharmaceutical companies including Merck, Pfizer and Smith Kline, to provide drugs, and Pan American Airways to transport them, free.  A highlight was the distribution through CARE of polio shots from Eli Lilly to immunize some 300,000 Polish children in the midst of a terrible epidemic.  On each vial of medicine was the message “Gift of the American People.”

Out of that came my job, thanks again to Allen Dulles, by then Director of the CIA, as Chief Executive Officer of Radio Free Europe, a major weapon in the Cold War.  Among other rewards of that job in the 1960’s was the opportunity for insight into political realities on both sides of a global conflict (insight already demonstrated this week in my opinion by the President and his national security team.).

While working for freedom abroad, I was awakened by a friend to the reality of oppression at home—right in our upscale New York suburb, the Village of Bronxville.  When we approached the local clergy for help in starting a fair housing effort, the pastor of the leading Protestant church was horrified.  “Letting in Jews would undermine my congregational base here” was his stated reason for turning us down flat.  We never cracked the local wall of silence, but that involvement led to one of the most thrilling patriotic experiences of my life, as a participant in the huge crowd on the Mall in Washington listening to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.  (I’m reminded of that struggle against bigotry by today’s reports of harassment of Arab Americans.)

Later jobs as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs, as CEO of Youth for Understanding, an international high school home stay student exchange program and as a founding staff member of the United States Institute of Peace contributed both to my education and my convictions.  Most of all, they reinforced my belief in the potential of human solidarity and my conviction that bad governments are usually the primary obstacle.  One-on-one relationships with refugees from Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and totalitarian Communist governments in Eastern Europe helped to shape that conviction, as did an evening sitting on the floor in the dark in besieged Sarajevo during the Bosnian War after a shell destroyed the apartment next door.

Those with a hand in creating the National Endowment for Democracy in the eighties (I among them, later becoming Chairman of the Board of Directors) shared a related conviction. American support for the worldwide democracy movement, which has made such huge strides since World War II, is in our national interest as well as a duty owed to freedom lovers everywhere.

More recently, the idea of a long-range strategy to institutionalize democratic collaboration has taken hold.  In June 2000, 107 governments met at ministerial level in Warsaw, Poland to affirm the present reality of a worldwide “Community of Democracies,” agreeing:

1. to foster democracy where it is lacking;

2. to defend democracy where it is threatened; and

3. to form democracy caucuses in international institutions.

I was privileged to participate in a parallel private Warsaw gathering organized by Freedom House with the support of the Soros foundations.  The highlight for me was Secretary General Koffi Annan’s closing speech at the official conference, especially powerful because of its timing one year before he was to run, successfully, for re-election as Secretary General, needing a two thirds majority of member governments, authoritarian as well as democratic.

These are some of his words:

“1 am delighted to associate myself today with a new coalition of democracies, dedicated to expanding the frontiers of freedom and to ensuring that, wherever democracy has taken root, it will not be reversed...The principle of democracy is now universally recognized...I am particularly gratified that this new coalition is meeting to support the founding values of our Organization, as set out in the Charter and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...Indeed, the theme of this conference, “Towards a Community of Democracies” represents my own most profound aspiration for the United Nations as a whole...And yet this meeting is not just a celebration...The work of democracy is never done…too many people are still denied their human rights, while too many democracies remain imperfect and vulnerable to subversion by ruthless leaders...[T]here are many good reasons for promoting democracy.  Not the least of these—in the eyes of the United Nations—is that, when sustained over the long term, it is a highly effective means of preventing conflict, both within and between states.  Certainly, the record shows that democratically governed states rarely if ever make war on one another.  But even more important, in this era of intra-state wars, is the fact that democratic governance—by protecting minorities, encouraging political pluralism, and upholding the rule of law—can channel dissent peacefully, and thus help avert civil wars. Conversely, authoritarian and highly personalized forms of governance, ethnic discrimination, human rights violations and corruption are among the root causes of today’s internal conflicts.  Thus democracy offers us a double promise as an agent of peace as well as liberation...”

I came home from Warsaw resolved to redouble my efforts, through the Council for a Community of Democracies, toward the further development of organized democratic cooperation, at regional and global levels, and within international organizations.  Since then, a fledgling democratic caucus has been started in the General Assembly, the Organization of the American States and other regional intergovernmental bodies have taken up the challenge.  But progress is slow.  Meantime we run frightening risks, from weapons of mass destruction in the hands of rogue states such as Iraq and North Korea as well as from terrorist networks world wide.  Piecemeal approaches based on dated “National Defense” dogma can only be a partial answer.

Management gurus have been telling us for a generation that without a long-range vision and strategy, you’re not likely to get very far.  Lacking thought and debate about what kind of a world we want for future generations, we Americans, along with the rest of humanity, are not likely to get very far either.  We still lack focus on the need to build political institutions responsive to the requirements of our global village.

In addition to the terrorist networks we are now confronting, global corporations compete in largely unregulated global markets; scientific discoveries useful in building weapons of mass destruction are shared globally over the internet; the “CNN effect” produces mass awareness of impending crises, often without effective international response.  We are stuck with a United Nations lacking the capacity to fill the gap—in spite of Koffi Annan, probably the best-equipped, most competent Secretary General ever.  The United States, with a preponderance of military, economic, technological and cultural power unseen since the Roman Empire, has, in the decade since the end of the Cold War, looked like a helpless giant.

The first President Bush was ridiculed when he suggested after the desert war with Iraq that our triumph heralded a “New World Order.”  Our skepticism was justified because we knew instinctively there was no vision, no strategy to make that victory a step toward a better world.  Now we have a second President Bush, aided by an exceptionally experienced and capable national security team, with an unparalleled opportunity to provide that vision, that strategy.

In this era of accelerating change, leadership is crucial in establishing a national sense of direction.  The American people and hundreds of millions of people around the world who share our faith in liberty—including Muslims and Afghans—would gladly work together over the long haul toward a world of sovereign democratic nations, collaborating in pursuit of their common interests and concerns.  These begin with human rights, the rule of law, social justice, free elections and peace, ideals at least as attractive to peoples denied them as they are to us.

It is my fondest hope that President Bush will grasp this extraordinary moment while waging war against terrorism, to provide a sense of direction—yes, a vision—for us now and for generations of Americans yet unborn.