“I entered politics young, impatient, and full of confidence that government could be used to better people’s lives. My faith has not dimmed.”
—Walter F. Mondale
We could hear the sound of guns and rocket blasts from the other side of Tân Sơn Nhất International Airport. The blasts shook the floor and rattled the glasses and plates on our dinner table. It was the fall of 1967, and I was in Saigon for Sutro on assignment from a company doing USAID work a few days before heading to Rome for the official closing of our Ringling Bros. deal. Our job was to have a look at some villages farther north near Da Nang so we could advise the US Office of Navy Research on prospects for developing South Vietnam’s local economies.
Most American reporters never left Saigon. They just relayed whatever they were told at the daily briefings. For months US Army officers, aided by maps and blackboards, had been assuring these journalists and the American people that our military and the South Vietnamese army were winning against Ho Chi Minh’s forces in the North. But hearing and feeling the booming gunfire and rocket blasts that night, sitting there with a geography professor named Campbell from the University of Arizona who was my partner on the project and a marine captain who was going to show us around the next few days, we had to wonder.
The next morning we flew 375 miles to the air base near Da Nang, and then drove out to villages in an army jeep layered with sandbags to cushion us against anything exploding on the road underneath or in front of us. Da Nang was not far from the hot border with North Vietnam, but we had been told not to worry. Our troops had “won the hearts and minds” of people in the villages we were going to see.
As we drove through Da Nang, we saw people huddled together. They had evacuated villages in the countryside and were just hoping to stay alive. When we passed a bus full of these local Vietnamese, the two marines riding with us suddenly pointed their weapons at them. I was stunned. “Why are you doing that?” I yelled. A few days earlier, one of the marines said, someone in a bus tossed a hand grenade into a jeep that killed a couple of their buddies. These guys weren’t taking any chances. If I wasn’t convinced the night before, I definitely knew now that I had reason to worry.
From the top of a hill out in the countryside, we could see North Vietnamese fighters attacking a village about a mile away. What mattered most to the local Vietnamese, we learned, was not ideology, but survival—whether their village was being shelled or soldiers were pointing weapons at them. The war was all around them. When shells rained down, they would seek cover wherever they could, even if only in their simple bamboo and thatched roof homes. On days when combat eased, they would attempt to go back to their daily lives, going to wells for water, working in rice paddies, and so on.
That afternoon, after lunch at the base near Da Nang, we headed out again in the jeep. Suddenly somebody began shooting at us from a rice paddy. I shouted to my companions, “Are we going to see anything different from what we saw this morning?”
“No!” they shouted back.
“In that case,” I yelled, “why don’t we get the hell out of here!” And we did.
During the most recent wars, when Eisenhower, Truman, and Roosevelt were in the White House, they were trusted. People believed they were trying to do the right thing. At that time, I was still young and optimistic. What I saw in Vietnam, though, was all the evidence I would ever need that what government officials say may have little to do with reality and truth.1 Their story that a US victory soon would bring a better life to the Vietnamese was a complete lie. We clearly weren’t winning.
You can’t develop an economy in the midst of all-out warfare, and you absolutely cannot do so if you are on the losing side. That was the basic message in my report to the US government.
After I got back to the States, I was so angry about the government’s deception about Vietnam that I changed my registered political affiliation from Republican to the Peace and Freedom Party.2 I had never actually voted Republican; I registered that way when I was twenty-one because my grandmother was a registered Republican and she was the only one I ever talked politics with. Eventually, I became a Democrat—and I expect all those Eisenhower Republicans of that era by now would be Democrats too—intellectually, and in every other way.
My experiences in Vietnam also prompted me to begin looking seriously at what was happening on the national stage, what our leaders were doing, and what that meant for the world. The United States has incredible influence around the globe. We have some of the greatest minds devoted to solving some of our greatest challenges. But I don’t think we’re using that influence as well as we could be.
Domestically, we’re struggling to make progress because of Washington gridlock. We can’t seem to, or aren’t willing to, solve the growing income gap that is eventually going to hobble our economic growth and create social instability. Environmentally, although we’re making progress, we still produce more CO2 emissions than any country but China. We produce far more than all the countries in the European Union combined.3
People like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Bill and Melinda Gates, and other dedicated individuals and organizations are making incredible strides to help solve these challenges. We also have some committed leaders in government—those exceptional centrists like Dianne—who genuinely focus on doing what it takes to improve life for all, not just the few, and who are interested in thinking globally. Finally, we have companies and leaders in the private sector who are looking for opportunities to have a positive impact in their communities, local and global.
They couldn’t choose more inspirational, challenging paths to follow than those taken by Walter “Fritz” Mondale, a person who has served with great compassion and dedication in all these facets of public life.
With the exception of my wife, Fritz Mondale is my ideal for the model public official. He is a liberal in the best sense of the word: a guardian of the public trust, an idealist, a believer in the American government’s duty to “protect the disadvantaged and advance the rights of ordinary people,” as he wrote in his memoir, The Good Fight: A Life in Liberal Politics. He is also one of the most gracious, decent men I have known. The son of a Methodist minister, Fritz has a strong spiritual inner core. “My dad preached what might be called the social gospel—that our faith requires good deeds as well as good words,” he wrote.4
Fritz was one of the new faces in the Democratic Party vanguard after Nixon’s landslide defeat of George McGovern in 1972 and then Nixon’s resignation as a result of the Watergate scandal in the summer of 1973. Fritz’s national prospects surged after his reelection in Minnesota to the Senate in 1972, and he thought he might have a shot at the Democratic nomination for president in 1976. So did I. I was one of his earliest supporters and fund-raisers.
He had denounced the Vietnam War after Nixon took office in 1969 as “a military, a political, and a moral disaster.”5 The war was a tragedy, not only for the fifty-eight thousand US troops and the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese soldiers on both sides who died, and perhaps as many as two million Vietnamese civilians who lost their lives,6 but also for the lost potential of progressive social programs in our country just springing to life that could never get traction.
When Lyndon Johnson escalated the war dramatically with 540,000 US troops in Vietnam by the end of 1967, he didn’t have the foresight to understand how his surge in military spending was planting the seeds for a disastrous retreat for the progressive agenda. Fritz argued that the war was starving federal funding for many Great Society programs he had helped pass into law in the 1960s. As he noted in his memoir, “We authorized dreams and appropriated peanuts.”7
“Whenever you have a war, the first casualty is the idea of social progress,” Fritz said recently. “People just turn that off. That sure happened during the Vietnam War when I was in the Senate. Many programs couldn’t work [with limited funding], which created a sour taste for the public. It still saddens me. Today we’ve got paralysis in Washington, this train-wreck school of politics … that puts pressure on all the progressive things that I want in our society.”
Fritz was also wary of extreme wealth being concentrated in the hands of a few. Any of this sound familiar? History does not repeat exactly, as Mark Twain once suggested, but I do believe it rhymes.
We held the first fund-raiser outside Minnesota for a Mondale presidential bid in my home in Marin County, California. My young daughters, Annette, Heidi, and Eileen, then between the ages of twelve and eight, had been watching quietly from the balcony but suddenly jumped up and pelted Fritz with pillows as he was trying to speak. (Whenever I see him, he asks me how the pillow throwers are doing.)
Testing the waters for a presidential campaign is unrelenting, exhausting work, with many parallels, I think, to organizing and leading a business start-up or to framing or executing the recovery of a struggling business. It requires enthusiasm and patience. But you also have to know when to leave the game if the odds are stacked too high against you. As 1974 came to a close, Fritz surprised many people when he abandoned his campaign. But he soon would be back on the national stage.
When Jimmy Carter won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, I was excited he had picked Fritz as his running mate. After the president narrowly edged Gerald Ford in the November election, Fritz invited me to meet with him and Jimmy as they vetted people for key positions in their new administration.
Perhaps I would have jumped at the opportunity to work in the White House earlier in my life, but Andrea and I had just gotten divorced. I couldn’t see moving to Washington and leaving my daughters behind in California. I also had a pretty good idea of the hectic pace and single-mindedness that comes with working in the White House. “I’ve thought about it. I just can’t do it,” I told Fritz the next day.
Instead of taking a White House job, I offered to work pro bono for the administration. I had an interest in policies that could benefit neglected inner cities. In some cases the scars from racial rioting a decade earlier were still evident. More broadly, inner cities were being starved for resources as millions of people moved to suburbs, and city tax revenues struggled or declined.
One of Vice President Mondale’s oversight responsibilities in the White House was urban policy. I was glad to pitch in one week every month in Washington. For a year, we focused on ways to bolster economic activity in inner cities by designing funding from the federal government in a way we thought would attract bigger investments from business. Our group created the Urban Development Action Grant, and the administration distributed more than $1.2 billion to cities over the next three years.8
Then as now, I was idealistic enough to think I could contribute something to the common good. On these trips to DC, I often saw my old friend Martin Agronsky, who then was hosting his popular weekly syndicated TV program, a roundtable discussion with political journalists that aired for twenty years on public television.9 Ever the cynic, Martin said, “You won’t get anything done here. They just want to use you.” I didn’t understand politics all that well then, but I was confident that neither President Carter nor Fritz had that motivation in my case, and I told Martin so.
I was right about that. Even so, by spending time inside the Beltway and hanging around with one of the best journalists of the day, I learned a lot about how things worked in Washington, especially perpetual crosscurrents and cajoling among government agencies, policy think tanks, and NGOs, whose reports so often shape policies enacted from the Oval Office.
By the millennium, my colleagues and I had—in both the American Himalayan Foundation and the Shanghai–San Francisco sister-city alliance—nearly two decades of evidence on ways that basic management principles enable NGOs to deliver better results for poor people and their communities.
One day, I was chatting about this with Strobe Talbott, a friend and former Time magazine journalist, author, and Clinton administration diplomat. Strobe was in his first year as president of the Brookings Institution, the world’s most respected think tank then and even more so now. Brookings had always been known for its keen analyses of economics, foreign relations, and government. Strobe was in the process of adding two programs: on cities and on global economics and development.
Here is an opportunity, we thought: Bring together, through Brookings, some of the best scholars and government administrators in Washington with successful people in business, philanthropy, and NGOs. Let them dig into key issues in global development for a few days. Let them ask, what really works? In 2004, we began the Brookings Blum Roundtable on Global Development, now an annual three-day conference hosted by Walter Isaacson’s Aspen Institute in Colorado.
These gatherings have examined (among other topics) how the world’s poor will cope with climate change, how collaborating can generate more technological breakthroughs, how to frame aid programs that deliver positive results for people, how to understand the role of the private sector in the post-2015 development agenda, and how to jump-start economic growth in the world’s poorest nations.
Without question, Blum Roundtable proceedings have helped initiate or energize collaborations among entrepreneurs, NGOs, government, think tanks, and philanthropies on several advances in global development. A few examples follow.
Development funds traditionally have been provided separately by various sources: private businesses, government agencies, charitable organizations, and so on. This was cumbersome and inefficient, especially for organizations requesting the funds. “If you want to solve a development program, you need to understand the policy environment and you need to put together entrepreneurs, aid agencies, and multilateral banks,” said Homi Kharas, a Brookings senior fellow. The blended financing idea didn’t originate from the roundtable, but we have helped build awareness among agencies such as USAID.
One example is Power Africa, a program in sub-Saharan Africa, where more than six hundred million people in the region have no access to electricity. Perhaps President Obama’s most important development program, it was organized through USAID and partners such as the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and the government of Sweden to help bring electric power for the first time to sixty million homes and businesses in the region.10
Before he was elected Afghanistan’s president in 2014, Mohammad Ashraf Ghani joined roundtable sessions as an Afghan academic. Other participants have included former and future White House chiefs of staff, secretaries of state, the head of the National Security Council, top administrators of USAID and major private-sector foundations, many ambassadors, and other prominent development specialists from around the world. These public figures recognize that the world’s major challenges in combating extreme poverty increasingly will happen in Africa and in states plagued by wars, such as Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, and eastern Congo. The Blum Roundtable has bolstered development agencies by bringing together leaders such as these who understand the difficult, on-the-ground realities in these regions.
There are many ways to achieve transformational change in poor countries. Once-favored megaprojects, such as hydroelectric plants or oil-and-gas drilling and production, often require many years and billions of dollars to complete. But smaller projects, such as lower-cost solar power, are easier to finance and can begin operating much faster and in ways local people more easily understand, appreciate, and support. One company at the 2014 roundtable, d.light, says it has reached fifty million people with low-cost, portable solar-power lanterns with a four-hour battery life. And as described in chapter 6, our Latitude Capital Partners, a 2015 roundtable participant, is working to bring hydro and solar energy projects to poor communities without access to efficient power sources.
There might not have been many people at roundtables a few years ago who believed private philanthropy would be an increasingly important player in global development. But that, of course, has changed. “There are many examples now of philanthropic organizations that started in one country, have exploded out to other countries, and are driving this whole business of social impact investing,” Homi Kharas has explained.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the world’s largest philanthropic organization dedicated to global development and certainly the best known in the United States. Outside of this country, the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) and the BRAC are major players. AKDN is a vital supporter of education, economic development, health care, and cultural restoration in Muslim communities in thirty countries. It employs approximately eighty thousand people and has a budget for nonprofit activities of approximately $600 million. BRAC (formerly Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee) has programs in microfinance, education, health care, and other services in eleven countries, reaching 135 million people.
The purpose of the President’s Global Development Council is to help US government development agencies do a better job, borrowing from practices we know are effective in the private sector. We have helped shape ideas for this advisory board, such as the benefits of blended financing, with colleagues at roundtable sessions and at Brookings and have advocated for them at the highest levels of the Obama administration. I outlined the concept, among others, in a paper advising the president after he took office in 2009 on how his administration ought to think about global development. When the council was created in 2012, I was one of the founding directors.
Our goal is to focus more US investments in global development on what we know works best, on where government dollars can be a catalyst for innovations benefiting poor people (such as early-stage and midstage financing), and as the council’s first report says, on programs backed “by rigorous evidence and demonstrable impact.”11
The key point of the president’s development policy, as outlined in a 2010 White House briefing note, is recognizing that our country’s efforts in global development can and should be “a core pillar of American power” and that advancing global development is “a strategic, economic, and moral imperative for the United States.”12 It also is important for our nation’s security. As I emphasized in the Introduction, and repeat here: Wherever we are able to make progress in defeating extreme poverty and building economies, we advance prospects for world peace. Wherever poverty and ignorance continue to exist—and access to dangerous weapons is unchecked—the risk of more conflict and a more dangerous world will continue to threaten us all.
Once you commit to helping people get out of poverty, and if you are serious about this work, it follows that you also want to help them get a political voice, if they don’t already have one. Poverty is not only a socioeconomic condition; it is also a political condition. That became obvious to me during my few days touring those Vietnamese villages of terrified peasant families in 1967. The concept is at the heart of the mission of what may be one of the world’s least known, most important organizations for advancing the cause of global democracy: the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI).
Jimmy Carter partnered with NDI on several elections—monitoring projects dating back to Panama in 1989. And Fritz Mondale chaired NDI from 1986 to 1993, advising groups behind the scenes in Poland and Hungary, among others, on their countries’ transition to democracy after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
If you care about advancing global democracy, then you care about NDI’s work. Building democratic institutions is essential in attracting credible, talented people into government and reducing corruption in countries that succeed in shedding legacies of rigid socialist regimes or dictatorship. I’ve been honored to be a member of NDI’s board for several years and to help Madeleine Albright, President Clinton’s first secretary of state and now NDI’s chairman, and Ken Wollack, an astute diplomat and NDI’s capable president for more than two decades, on many projects.
NDI helps promote fair democratic elections through its global network of trained observers—recently in places such as Myanmar, Nigeria, Honduras, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. NDI and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations13 made important contributions in the legitimate Ukraine elections in 2014 that threw out a corrupt government, strengthened the democracy, and helped stave off Russia’s intrusion in eastern Ukraine. I was in Kiev at the time with Madeleine Albright, and I was in Nigeria and Indonesia as part of the election-observing process with Jimmy Carter and Ken Wollack in 1999.
In Nigeria that year, the favored candidate was General Olusegun Obasanjo. Obasanjo had been Nigeria’s military ruler from 1976 to 1979 before becoming the country’s first head of state to hand over power to an elected civilian government. Jimmy was the US president then, and he admired Obasanjo for leading the transition to a constitutional government.
However, the spirit of democracy didn’t last long after Obasanjo stepped down: A series of military coups followed in the 1980s and ’90s. By some accounts, the military dictator who ruled Nigeria for six years prior to the 1999 election, General Sani Abacha, looted as much as $5 billion from government accounts with his associates before dying suddenly in 1998.14
When we arrived, instead of joining Jimmy’s entourage for vote-monitoring in the capital city of Lagos, I went into the sticks with a group of street-smart observers from NDI and The Carter Center, all in their twenties, including Jimmy’s grandson, Jason Carter.15 From what we witnessed, Obasanjo’s supporters weren’t leaving anything to chance in their effort to regain power. Scenes of open fraud were everywhere.
At one polling place, election workers told us “everyone” had voted a half hour before voting was scheduled to begin. In a place where votes were tallied, the different turnouts for several villages each added up suspiciously to 400—maybe 396 to 4 in one village, and 392 to 8 in another—in favor of Obasanjo, always. In another case, ballots were still in sequential order when they were removed from a ballot box; all were marked by the same fingerprint. The official result was a landslide victory for Obasanjo, with 62.5 percent of the votes.
Obasanjo’s lone opponent, a Yale-educated banker named Olu Falae, showed up the next day in our Lagos meeting room claiming to have evidence of massive fraud and saying that the election had been rigged. Every example he gave matched what I had seen, and I thought he was right. Colin Powell, who would become George W. Bush’s secretary of state in another two years and was part of our group that night, was less sure. Jimmy decided to wait until after we departed Lagos before announcing The Carter Center’s position.
As soon as our plane landed to refuel, Jimmy issued a statement saying there had been too many irregularities—in effect, a rejection of the process. “It is not possible for us to make an accurate judgment about the outcome” of the election, he said. Obasanjo was not pleased. I had also heard that NDI and Carter Center observers who had worked in regions where Falae’s party was dominant had witnessed the same kinds of serious irregularities by Falae’s supporters that I had seen carried out by Obasanjo’s supporters. The center’s conclusion was that all parties had engaged in voter fraud. I was told that even if there had been no fraud, Obasanjo probably would have won anyway.
Things didn’t improve when Obasanjo ran for reelection four years later. The Carter Center refused to send observers that time, but we heard that the extent of the fraud then was far worse.16
NDI also brings together citizens in more than 130 countries who want to create and sustain the basic institutions of democratic government. I have met many of them. Often they are dedicated idealistic thirty- or even twentysomethings who dream of—and are taking action for—a better future for themselves and their families. Opora, Ukraine’s largest nonpartisan elections monitoring group, is an example of this.
Secretary Albright and Ken Wollack took several of us NDI board members to Colombia for a few days in the spring of 2015. After four decades of guerrilla war and narcotics-trafficking violence, Colombia has 3.5 million refugees within its borders, and hundreds of thousands more have fled the country altogether. Rebuilding confidence in Colombia’s government is a huge challenge. But conditions are improving in part because government leaders, working with NDI, have taken steps to make their institutions more transparent.
As NDI and The Carter Center work to spread democracy and support human rights, they also are campaigning in these ways to reduce extreme poverty. As US citizens we also should take pride in the ways that Presidents Clinton and Carter have dedicated so much of their post–White House years to fighting global poverty and improving health care; and also in the leadership of President George H. W. Bush, who teamed with Clinton to head US relief efforts after a devastating tsunami swept across Indonesia and parts of India in 2004.
Working to reduce extreme poverty is a core mission of many organizations noted in this section—the President’s Global Development Council, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Soros Foundation, the Aga Khan Development Network, Brookings Blum Roundtable. To be sure, many other pragmatic, well-managed philanthropies, think tanks, and NGOs share this purpose.