John B. Ritch III
John B. Ritch III | |
---|---|
4th United States Ambassador to the United Nations International Organizations in Vienna | |
In office November 22, 1993 – January 1, 2001 | |
President | Bill Clinton |
Preceded by | Michael H. Newlin |
Succeeded by | Kenneth C. Brill |
John B. Ritch III (born March 13, 1943)[1] is a former American diplomat experienced on the congressional side of US foreign policy and in international business. After an early career as a captain in the US Army (1968–1972) and a staff adviser on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1972–1993), he was appointed by President of the United States Bill Clinton to serve as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations International Organizations in Vienna, a position he held from 1993 to 2001. Thereafter, as a business executive from 2001 to 2012, he headed the London-based trade association that encompasses the worldwide nuclear energy industry.
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Early life and education
[edit]Ritch was born into a Navy family during World War II and grew up in the postwar years in locations on the East and West Coasts associated with the military career of his father, a 1939 graduate of the Naval Academy. Ritch's grandfather, a Montanan, one-time cowboy, and longtime friend of famed painter Charlie Russell, was among the new state's first historians, known for his nostalgic poetry and beguiling reminiscences about the fast-disappearing West.[2]
Ritch III attained a moment of national fame at age 10 by winning a local contest in Bremerton, Washington (home of Puget Sound Naval Shipyard) that offered a bicycle to the top collector of used shoes for war refugees in Korea. On April 19, 1953, dominating the front page of New York's Sunday News (then the nation's major tabloid) was "Johnnie Ritch" sitting atop a mountain of 10,000 pairs of shoes piled dockside in Bremerton for shipment to Korea. Ritch alone had gathered 1,325 pairs by taking a wagon door to door.[3]
After a youth filled with peewee league and school sports, Ritch graduated in 1960 from Traip Academy in Kittery, Maine (a public high school near the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard). Ritch studied for one year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, then entered the US Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1965. There he was an Academic All-American[4][5] and all-N.I.T. in basketball and selected to be a Rhodes Scholar. Ritch received the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference award as the outstanding scholar-athlete of West Point's class of '65.
At Oxford University from 1965 to 1968, Ritch studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at University College. He played on an Oxford University Basketball team that came close, but for a travel mishap, to achieving a perfect slate of three consecutive British national championships at both the university and amateur levels.[6] During that period, Ritch's teammates included future New York Knick Bill Bradley and now-eminent novelist John Edgar Wideman.
Career
[edit]After Oxford, Ritch served as an infantry captain in the US Army from 1968 to 1972, commanding a rifle company on the DMZ in Korea and working in the Pentagon on the staff of the Army Chief of Staff. In 1970, as a goodwill gesture to the Korean Republic, the Army assigned Ritch to spend four months in Seoul as coach of Korea's Olympic basketball team as it prepared for that year's Asian Games.
In 1972, Ritch worked briefly for the new Environmental Protection Agency before joining the then-small and bipartisan staff of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), chaired by legendary Senator William Fulbright.
On the committee, Ritch's first job was to aid chairman Fulbright in gaining Senate approval for two landmarks in US-Soviet arms control: the SALT-I accord and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Early in his work for the committee, Ritch devised the Foreign Relations Authorization Act. For the next 25 years, this annual legislation served not only to authorize appropriations for the State Department budget [7] but also as the vehicle for a series of innovative bipartisan amendments designed to shape the policies and institutions of American diplomacy. Among the laws Ritch designed is the now-longstanding delineation of the authority and responsibility of an American ambassador for all US activities in the country where appointed to serve.
After 1979, when the previously unified SFRC staff was enlarged and bifurcated along partisan lines, Ritch worked on the Democratic side with such noted Senators as Church, McGovern, Pell, Sarbanes, Kerry, Dodd, Moynihan, and, most extensively, with Joe Biden.[8] In that more bipartisan era, Ritch also worked cooperatively with Republican senators such as Aiken, Case, Percy, Mathias, and Lugar.
From 1972 to 1993, under six committee chairmen, Ritch specialized in European and NATO affairs and also, at various times, directed the work of subcommittees on State Department operations, Asian affairs, and constitutional war powers.
For two decades, while working on hearings, speeches and legislation, Ritch traveled extensively for the committee, often represented the Senate in sessions of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, and was the principal drafter of committee publications on NATO nuclear strategy and the SALT II treaty,[9] US-Soviet relations,[10] the Portuguese revolution,[11] Hungarian communism,[12] the world heroin trade,[13] politics and strategy on NATO's southern flank,[14] the Soviet war in Afghanistan,[15] international failure to defend the Bosnian republic,[16] and Senate responsibilities overseeing the war and treaty powers.[17]
In 1984, after covertly crossing the Pakistani border to spend time with Afghan resistance forces in the field, Ritch authored a Senate report describing the Soviet army’s brutalities in Afghanistan. Some months later, when Soviet authorities balked at allowing Ritch to accompany a Senatorial visit to Moscow, declaring him “persona non grata” in the Soviet Union, the delegation’s leaders (Senators Joe Biden and William Cohen) cancelled the trip. This episode became a minor cause célèbre during a contentious phase in US-Soviet relations. But a year later, after General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, Moscow relented and the ban on Ritch was lifted. [18]
In 1988, Ritch played an active role in shaping the Senate’s response to the Reagan administration’s purported “reinterpretation” of the ABM Treaty, a highly controversial maneuver aimed at supporting Reagan’s “Star Wars” vision by permitting the creation of a weapon the treaty was explicitly intended to prohibit. Acting on Biden’s behalf after the Senator was hospitalized by a brain aneurysm, Ritch worked with other Committee members (and fellow staffer James Rubin) to advance a measure, known as the Biden Condition, that rebuffed the “reinterpretation” by affirming explicitly the normally implicit principle that every US treaty must be interpreted in accord with the Senate’s reasonable understanding of its meaning at the time of ratification. After the Senate attached the Biden Condition to its approval of the US-Soviet treaty on intermediate-range nuclear missile forces (INF), that treaty and the Biden Condition’s enunciation of broad constitutional principle became a part of US law.[19]
A year later, after the Berlin Wall fell, Ritch conceived and helped enact the Support for East European Democracy (SEED) Act of 1989.
From 1993 to 2001, as American ambassador to UN agencies in Vienna during the two Clinton terms, Ritch's main role was representing the US on the governance board of the International Atomic Energy Agency. There he worked with then-IAEA directors Hans Blix and Mohamed Elbaradei on the agency's dual task of monitoring compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and assisting nations in the use of nuclear technologies for medicine, agriculture, industry, and carbon-free electricity generation.[20]
During Ritch’s tenure in Vienna, the US assisted a special IAEA team that located and dismantled Iraq's nuclear program. This multinational achievement was confirmed in 2003 when the second US invasion of Iraq revealed no weapons of mass destruction.
From 2001 to 2012, Ritch was in the private sector as director general of the World Nuclear Association, the London-based trade association for companies that comprise the global nuclear energy industry. The WNA was created in 2001, when Ritch and a few industry leaders undertook to build on the foundation of the Uranium Institute a fully inclusive body for a diverse industry that consists of uranium miners, fuel makers, reactor vendors, electrical utilities, and related professions in more than 30 countries. During Ritch's 12-year tenure, WNA membership quintupled from fewer than 40 companies to nearly 200. This success in recruiting most of the world’s enterprises with a significant role in the generation of nuclear power has positioned WNA to foster cooperation within, and to represent, this key global industry.
As WNA head, Ritch was an international advocate for expanded use of nuclear power, propounding its role as an environmentally beneficial technology of crucial value in preventing catastrophic climate change. As an industry spokesman, Ritch also responded to public alarm over the Japanese accident at Fukushima.[21]
In 2003, to mark the 50th anniversary of President Eisenhower's Atoms-for-Peace initiative, Ritch conceived and launched the World Nuclear University, sponsor of an annual "summer institute" that each year brings together young nuclear-energy professionals from some 30 nations. In 2007, Ritch led WNA in creating World Nuclear News,[22] which now serves as an authoritative internet resource providing comprehensive daily news and analysis on events in the global nuclear industry.
As an American sideline, Ritch has engaged in historic preservation in the nation's capital. Notably, he created John Logan House, once a home and now a tribute to the heroic Civil War commander who went on to found Memorial Day and serve in the US Senate as a champion of civil rights and advancement for newly freed black Americans. Ritch salvaged the building in 1975 when it was derelict and collapsing, then began the research and renovation that yielded a Logan Circle landmark.[23] In the early 1980’s, near Logan Circle, Ritch gained the placement of Wardman Row—seven early-20th-century apartment buildings created by famed developer Harry Wardman—on the National Register of Historic Places; he then began renewal of that block by renovating two of its buildings. More recently, on Capitol Hill adjacent to the Library of Congress, Ritch revitalized a mid-century apartment building now known as The Montana.
In other entrepreneurship, Ritch co-founded CaliVita International, an overseas supplier and multi-level marketer of American-made vitamin supplements. Since its launch in 1992, the Calivita sales system has attracted tens of thousands of participants and resulted in the export of a large volume of US products to some three dozen European countries.[24]
Ritch's publications include pieces in The Atlantic[25] and Prospect[26] magazines, The Washington Post,[27] The New York Times,[28] The International Herald Tribune,[29] World Energy Review,[30] Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,[31] and Arms Control Today,[32] and two law journal articles—on the war and treaty powers of the Constitution—co-authored with then-Senator Joe Biden.[33][34]
References
[edit]- ^ "John B. Ritch III - People - Department History - Office of the Historian". United States Department of State. Retrieved 2020-03-07.
- ^ In 1915 Ritch and Russell collaborated when Russell contributed watercolors to illustrate the six stanzas of “Shorty’s Saloon,” a Ritch poem describing the atmosphere and action in a fictive watering hole where parched cowhands could complete a long trail drive by carousing with the aid of a dependable bartender. Each stanza ends with Shorty’s reliably uniform query: “What’s yours, Pard?” Ritch first published the poem, in calligraphy under each illustration, as a booklet. It appeared again in 1940 when Ritch published a book of his poetry titled “Horsefeathers.” Today the original illustrations with calligraphy are on display in the permanent collection of the Wichita Art Museum.https://wichitaartmuseum.org/our-collection/collection/shortys-saloon-some-tragedies-mark-those-trails-to-the-past/ https://collections.gilcrease.org/object/tu2009394023
- ^ New York Sunday News, front page, 19 April 1953. https://imgur.com/0nQriIf
- ^ Academic All-American Basketball selection, 1965. https://academicallamerica.com/documents/2018/4/30/1965_MENS_BASKETBALL.pdf?id=2813
- ^ 1965 NCAA Men's Basketball All-Americans
- ^ Oxford University won the national basketball championship of the British Universities Sports Federation (B.U.S.F) in 1965, 1966, and 1967; and the national championship of the Amateur Basketball Association (A.B.B.A.) in 1966 and 1968, being disqualified in 1967 due to a delay in transportation. Oxford won these titles in the 1965-66, 1966-67 and 1967-68 seasons.
- ^ The annual Foreign Relations Authorization Act also included funding authorization for the US Information Agency (whose diverse responsibilities included management of the Fulbright Scholar program and of US libraries abroad) and the Board for International Broadcasting (which funded and oversaw Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty).
- ^ Soviet TV Covers Biden-Gromyko meeting on INF Treaty / Moscow 1988. https://vimeo.com/478230590
- ^ "SALT and the NATO allies : a staff report to the Subcommittee on European Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate". HathiTrust. 1979. Retrieved 2024-05-22.
- ^ "Dangerous Stalemate: Superpower Relations in Autumn 1983: A Report on a Delegation of Eight Senators to the Soviet Union [in August 1983], published September 1983, Unclassified. | National Security Archive". nsarchive.gwu.edu. 1983. Retrieved 2024-05-22.
- ^ "Revolution into democracy Portugal after the coup : a report / by George McGovern to the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate". HathiTrust. Retrieved 2024-05-22.
- ^ "Hungarian Communism Today", SFRC Print, 1978. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b5010684&view=1up&seq=5
- ^ "Heroin: Can the Supply Be Stopped?", SFRC Print, 1972. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.a0000170555&view=1up&seq=1
- ^ "Perspectives on NATO's Southern Flank", SFRC Print, 1980. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951002873532n&view=1up&seq=1
- ^ "Hidden War: The Struggle for Afghanistan", SFRC Print, 1984. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951d00829084i&view=1up&seq=1
- ^ "To Stand Against Aggression: Milosevic, the Bosnian Republic, and the Conscience of the West", SFRC Print, 1993. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000021085475&view=1up&seq=1
- ^ "The ABM Treaty Interpretation Resolution", SFRC Report on S.Res 167, 100th Congress, 1987. The report: (a) summarizes SFRC hearings on the Reagan administration's "re-interpretation" of the ABM Treaty; and (b) explains S.Res. 167 (the "Biden Resolution") as a necessary affirmation of constitutionally based standards for interpreting the ABM Treaty and all other US-ratified accords.
- ^ (a) "Soviets Deny Aide Visa; 4 Senators Cancel Trip", Washington Times, April 9, 1985. https://www.scribd.com/document/468792129/Soviets-deny-aide-visa-4-senators-cancel-trip; (b) "Biden, 3 others call off Soviet trip over visa flap", Morning News, April 9, 1985. https://www.scribd.com/document/468791958/Biden-3-Others-Call-Off-Soviet-Trip-Over-Visa-Flap; (c) "Critic is Denied Soviet Travel Visa", USA Today, April 9, 1985. https://www.scribd.com/document/468792401/Critic-is-denied-soviet-travel-visa
- ^ "The INF Treaty", Executive Report 100-15, pp. 87-108, explains in detail the Biden Condition's purpose and role. The principle affirmed by the Biden Condition was originally formulated in a Biden-sponsored resolution, S.Res. 167, drafted after extensive Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings and approved by the committee in 1987. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951d02881482u&view=1up&seq=3
- ^ Fitchett, Joseph; Tribune, International Herald (1996-07-02). "Q & A /John B. Ritch 3d : UN's Nuclear Watchdog Is Sharpening Its Teeth". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-01-31.
- ^ CNN/becky-anderson&john-ritch/18mar2011. https://vimeo.com/440776705
- ^ World Nuclear News (WNN). https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/
- ^ Historical markers at John Logan House on Logan Circle, Washington, DC: (a) "John Logan House". https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=113672 (b) "No Braver Man Than John Logan". https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=153987 (c) "Logan Circle: Mirror on American History". https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=153986 (d) "When Logan Rode the Battle Line". https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=153988
- ^ "John B. Ritch Cofounder and Chairman". CaliVita International. Retrieved 2020-03-07.
- ^ The Atlantic, "Korea", October 1970, Volume 226, No. 4. https://www.scribd.com/document/468593998/Atlantic-Oct1970-Korea-Ritch "Iceland", April 1969, Volume 223, No. 4. https://www.scribd.com/document/468593893/Atlantic-April1969-Iceland-Ritch
- ^ Prospect, "Nuclear Green", March 1999. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/nucleargreen
- ^ Washington Post, "The Key to Our Energy Future", April 26, 2005. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2005/04/26/the-key-to-our-energy-future/98cea67a-f91b-475e-872c-2cd74f916dd4/
- ^ New York Times, "This Uranium Deal Was No Scandal", Nov. 21, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/opinion/uranium-deal-clinton-russia.html; and "It Makes Sense to End India's Nuclear Isolation", April 6, 2006. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/opinion/it-makes-sense-to-end-indias-nuclear-isolation.html
- ^ International Herald Tribune, "The Nuclear Arms Agenda: Top Priority for the President," Nov. 7, 1996. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/07/opinion/IHT-the-nuclear-arms-agenda-top-priority-for-the-president.html; and "Bulgaria's Safe Nuclear Power Deserves Justice", May 29, 2004. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/29/opinion/IHT-an-eu-ultimatum-bulgarias-safe-nuclear-power-deserves-justice.html
- ^ World Energy Review, "Nuclear Power for a Clean-Energy Future", October 2003. https://www.scribd.com/document/469083361/Nuclear-Energy-for-a-Clean-Energy-Future
- ^ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "Arms Control – Now or Never" (co-author with James P. Rubin), December 1988. https://www.scribd.com/document/468595425/Bulletin-Atomic-Scientists-Dec1988-Ritch-Rubin
- ^ Arms Control Today, "The End of the Sofaer Doctrine: A Victory for Arms Control and the Constitution", by Joseph R. Biden, Jr. and John B. Ritch III, September 1988, Vol. 18, No. 7. https://www.scribd.com/document/468692241/A-Senate-Victory-Over-the-Sofaer-Doctrine
- ^ "The War Power at a Constitutional Impasse: A 'Joint Decision' Solution", by Joseph R. Biden, Jr. and John B Ritch III; The Georgetown Law Journal, Volume 77, Number 2, December 1988. https://www.scribd.com/document/468592299/GeorgetownLawJournal-Dec1988-Biden-Ritch-War-Powers-Use-of-Force-Act
- ^ "The Treaty Power: Upholding a Constitutional Partnership", by Joseph R. Biden, Jr. and John B. Ritch III; University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Volume 137, Number 5, May 1989. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/penn_law_review/vol137/iss5/8/