THE SECRETARY'S OPEN FORUM

As delivered

Thank you. I am very pleased to introduce Ambassador Richard Gardner to you today. I'm grateful that Alan Lang is again putting together a schedule of discussions on cutting-edge issues through the Open Forum. I think this one should be included on that list as a cutting-edge issue.

Ambassador Gardner is a multi-talented person. He is presently a law professor at Columbia University and also is of counsel to the global law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. But these two normally very taxing jobs are not enough to keep him busy. He has also done a number of other things.

He has served the State Department on several occasions. From 1961-65, he was a Deputy Assistant Secretary in the International Organizations Bureau. He served as U.S. Ambassador to Italy from 1977 to 1981. He also served as U.S. Ambassador to Spain from 1993 to 1997. He has an undergraduate degree in economics from Harvard, he earned his law degree at Yale and he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, where he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree in economics.

He is a member of many commissions and boards, and I thought that two are worth mentioning given today's topic. Last year he was a member of the Overseas Presence Advisory Panel (OPAP) that produced the influential OPAP Report. And he presently serves as a public member of the U.S. delegation to the UN General Assembly and is working with Ambassador Holbrooke on a number of issues in that capacity.

In addition to having served as a foreign policy advisor to then-candidate Clinton in 1992 and to Vice President Gore in his bid for the presidency this year, I perhaps should tell you that he is also a very old friend of Secretary Albright. Their friendship dates back to when they were neighbors in Georgetown.

We are here today because Ambassador Gardner is also very much a friend of the Department. He wrote an article called "The One Percent Solution: Shirking the Cost of World Leadership," that, as Alan has mentioned, appeared in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs. In writing this article, Ambassador Gardner took what at times, I realize, can be a very complex and quite technical subject and he translated it into a highly readable and most compelling argument for increased resources for the international affairs budget. At least I thought it was compelling. In it he recommends that the next president tackle this issue early on in the administration and make the case for more resources for what we call Function 150. He has since told me that his article unleashed a mini-avalanche of calls and responses from like-minded individuals and groups who are also concerned about our funding situation.

Not content to rest on his laurels, Ambassador Gardner worked with the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, the Coalition for American Leadership Abroad and others to host a conference on the topic this past Monday at Georgetown. It was well attended by both foreign policy specialists and the press, and has already gotten some helpful press coverage just in the last couple of days. I trust that Ambassador Gardner will expand on both the article and the response to the article and also the conference in his remarks.

There is evidence that good things may be happening to our budget this year. The Foreign Operations Bill was signed and was funded very close to the president's requested level. While the Commerce-Justice-State bill remains in what I call lame-duck limbo, the compromise version that came out of negotiations between the White House and Congress also is a change in that it fully funds our contributions to the UN and other international organizations and provides a great deal of what was requested for the State Department's operations and our security needs. I suspect that much of the credit for this likely outcome goes to the budget surplus. But I think it also reflects the hard work the Secretary has done to promote and protect our budget and the better job I think the Department is doing in reaching out to the public and explaining why we need this money. I also suspect that Ambassador Gardner's article in Foreign Affairs also helped to educate some of the people who needed to hear about and think about our budget dilemma.

Of course, getting the money we have requested from Congress is only part of the solution. The other part is making the argument and securing White House support for a much larger international affairs budget. We should all be grateful that Ambassador Gardner has already given this matter careful attention and is willing to share his work with us today. Please join me in welcoming Ambassador Richard Gardner.

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