Alumni who served as United States ambassadors, United Nations advisors and members of multiple presidential cabinets gathered to call students into public service in Filene Auditorium on Wednesday evening during an event hosted by the John Sloan Dickey Center.
The Dickey Center also sponsored a student dinner discussion and subsequent panel titled "Answering President John Sloan Dickey's Call: In the Service of the Nation," to provide inspiration for America's next generation of leaders.
Jonathan Moore '54, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under former President George H. W. Bush and current advisor to the UN on post-conflict reconstruction, expressed pessimism about the current state of the world.
"I and all of these people here today do not feel fulfilled because the fields that we worked in are now in chaos," Moore said privately before the panel. "You would hope that, after working 30 to 40 years in one field, it would have improved."
At the panel hosted later, Moore explained that his pessimism contains an element of hope vested in the next generation of leaders but also does not deny reality.
Ron Spiers '48, a former ambassador to Pakistan and Turkey who also served as an undersecretary general to the United Nations, was inspired to serve his country by the Great Depression and World War II. The other panelists credited John Sloan Dickey, the "insightful" and "far-sighted" president of the College, as their inspiration during their time at Dartmouth.
Prior to Dartmouth, Dickey worked in the State Department and became intimately involved in America's policy transition from isolationism to internationalism. In his 25 years as Dartmouth's president from 1945 to 1970, he commissioned the building of the Hopkins Center, created the Tucker Foundation, started off-campus programs and implemented a diversity program for high school students from the inner-city.
Dickey also expanded Dartmouth's curriculum to create African, Asian and Latin American studies programs at a time when such programs were rare. He also created a "Great Issues" course, prompted by his mantra "the world's troubles are your troubles," which is required of all seniors.
"He made Dartmouth a modern college, and subsequent presidents have built on what he left them," said Eugene Lyons, a professor emeritus and the moderator of the public service panel.
Bill Frenzel '50, Tu'51, a Minnesota congressman from 1971 to 1991 and an advisor to multiple presidents on trade policy and social security, said that veterans comprised two-thirds of his graduating class. Frenzel spoke of Dickey's persistent message to students of the College.
"His advice was to go north, south, east, and west," Frenzel said. "Internationalism was his tune, meant for everybody, not just people going into the foreign service."
Robert Barry '56, former ambassador to Indonesia and Bulgaria, admires Dickey and, in his honor, feels that it is necessary to confront the threat of nuclear weapons. He analyzes the current foreign policy of the U.S. in terms of opportunity cost.
"What opportunities have we lost in the last eight years in confronting the threat of nuclear weapons? I believe they still provide an existential threat to this country," he said.
Barry said as long as countries continue to arm themselves with nuclear weapons, leakage among irresponsible governments may occur, allowing for a nuclear bomb exchange.
Spiers, who wrote the first paragraph of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, said that the U.S. does not pay attention to this agreement, during the dinner discussion before Wednesday evening's panel.
"If I was an Iranian, I would never agree to this. I would not take the possibility of having a nuclear weapon off the table," Spiers said.
During his time as an ambassador to Pakistan, Spiers spent two years trying to persuade the Pakistani government to abandon its nuclear weapons. During that time, he knew that Pakistan would not budge as long as India still held nuclear weapons.
A video-recording of the public service panel discussion will be available next Wednesday from Jones Media Center.
