Career Moves:
Kennedy School Faculty Describe the Ins and Outs of Their Careers
Swanee Hunt Chapter ©2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved., December 11, 2000
I love assignments like this one—sorting through past experiences, hopes, disappointments, serendipitous luck—to glean a few lessons. When Dean Nye asked if I would write about some pivotal personal/professional life experiences leading to my current position at the Kennedy School, I must confess to some doubts. True, I’ve accomplished more in my life than I ever dared dream. But, I reminded him, I’m from a wealthy family, and my ambassadorship was a political appointment of the sort that makes political watchdog organizations like Common Cause cringe. Joe said something mildly encouraging, an intellectual version of “it takes all kinds.” Hence these paragraphs, trying to capture some of the key turning points in my life, with hopes that these descriptions will provide ideas, and maybe even a little inspiration, to the extraordinarily gifted students who may read on.
I suppose every person thinks of his or her life as an uncommon, even exceptional, mix of influences. My oddness was the swirl of deep-rooted Southern Baptist evangelism, an ardent anti-Communist activist father, and ten years at a fine girls’ school called Hockaday, in Dallas, Texas. Those factors were much more important than the Texas oil wealth biographers would immediately name in describing my background. Beyond great comfort, wealth can indeed sometimes leverage access, and often opportunity. But when juxtaposed with a missionary spirit, wealth also buys a heavy conscience and a heavier sense of responsibility for the troubles of the world.
So how to act on that responsibility? Education was not valued in my family. Dad went through third grade; Mom, a lovely, vivacious secretary (and his mistress) from dirt-poor, rural Oklahoma, had a year of college. My heart was set on Radcliffe, but my father was certain all the Ivy League schools were run by Communists. As a child of wealth, I could not qualify for a scholarship, and my father refused to allow me to go to any school but Southern Methodist University, ten minutes from the house. I responded by marrying after my sophomore year (an action my father felt fine about, since he was then 80 and collecting grand and great-grand children; and my husband, a Baptist minister, was a comfort to Dad in his declining years). From marriage forward, I made my way as independently as possible from my family, earning degrees in philosophy, psychology, and theology—and exploring Europe from my four-year home in Heidelberg, Germany.
In the 70s, I became a devotee of Harvard child psychiatrist Robert Coles, inspired by his Pulitzer prize-winning Children of Crisis series, which included, among studies of children in the inner cities, barrios, Indian reservations, etc. an unexpected Volume Five: Privileged Ones. I tried to digest all 60 of his volumes, plus some thousand articles, for my doctoral dissertation (in pastoral care and counseling). That work laid out the method by which Coles gleaned from “observer/participant” relationships his vivid social critique. “The socio-ethical dimensions of empathy,” so apparent in his work, were vitally important for ministry, I asserted. The theme was directed not only to others, but to myself as well. After all, as a twelve-year old at a fundamentalist Christian church camp, I had declared my intention to become a Southern Baptist missionary. If my later work (after I’d left that theological fold) was an unorthodox form of ministry, it still grew out of a sense of mission.
In my late twenties, my husband and I moved to Denver, Colorado, where he and I co-directed a half-way house for mentally ill people. On both sides, my family was riddled with schizophrenia and bi-polar (manic-depressive) disorder. At 30, I tried my hand at systemic reform, spearheading a multi-year initiative that recognized the realities of de-institutionalization and created a city-wide net of care for the chronically mentally ill. In addition, I served as the Minister of Pastoral Care for an urban, experimental, Catholic and Presbyterian ecumenical community—a gathering place for iconoclastic activists that made the Archbishop wince.
For the 16 years I lived in Colorado, I worked on a score of complex initiatives and funded hundreds of organizations tackling tough social problems: teen pregnancy, illiteracy, poverty, violence, public schooling, racial discrimination….. My first husband and I resettled refugees in our home; I organized and chaired Governor Roy Romer’s Coordinating Council on Housing and the Homeless; and I co-chaired both Mayor Federico Pena’s planning initiative for families and children, and Mayor Wellington Webb’s Human Capital Agenda. Meanwhile, my sister, Helen L. Hunt, joined me to create a private foundation, the Hunt Alternatives Fund. She later split off, to focus exclusively on spirituality and women of color. I was inspired and strengthened by our partnership. Meanwhile, in the midst of my passionate activism, my marriage withered—a devastating personal failure.
In my early 30s, when I stared at the ceiling at night, it was not only to wrestle with the uncertainties of personal relationships, but also to grapple with the basic question of how to leverage change in an economically unjust American society. It seemed to me that there were a few particularly efficient entry points to change (for example, programs for preschoolers, or job training). But a critical leverage point was women. My experiences growing up in an entrenched patriarchy gave particular personal meaning to that choice as a focus of my effort. I put my shoulder behind the launch of the Women’s Foundation of Colorado, which raised a $10 million endowment and developed an extensive grant program promoting economic self-sufficiency for projects for women and girls. Through years with the Women’s Foundation, I became convinced of the possibility—and value—of women reaching across lines of class, race, and experience to create a solid alliance on behalf of all women and girls. I also was inspired over and over again by the ingenuity of women, often in extremely difficult circumstances, as they created alliances and organizations to strengthen themselves and their communities.
The Women’s Foundation of Colorado was strictly non-political: we had contributions of $50,000 from steadfast Republicans (“I’m so glad this isn’t part of the ‘Women’s Movement’”) as well as stalwart Democrats (“This is great! I’ve been a feminist all my life!”). But separately, at a purely political level, during the 1992 US presidential campaign, two friends and I organized a “Million Dollar Day: Serious Issues, Serious Women, Serious Money,” at which women experts, including Hillary Rodham Clinton and Tipper Gore, assembled. One politico remarked wryly that for a million dollar event, he was surprised I could not get “the candidate.” I responded facetiously, “How embarrassing; I forgot to invite him.”
In 1993, my relationships with the new American president (for whom I had and have huge admiration) and First Lady (primarily based on our mutual interest in these domestic problems) led to my appointment as the ambassador to Austria. I had been slated for Italy, but the “Sons of Italy” (a strong constituent group) flexed its pasta-fed muscles, demanding an Italian-American in the position. (I offered to the director of presidential personnel that I would organize the “Women of America” to support my going to Rome if he wished; he begged me to refrain, and I didn’t have the heart to add to his already tall heap of woes.) Overall, the behind-the-scenes campaign (required for the majority of political appointments) was not only humbling, but humiliating.
I arrived in Vienna in November of 1993, fittingly accompanied by a symphony conductor (Charles Ansbacher)—and two children under 12. Balancing a new field (foreign policy), management of a large embassy (500 employees working in 14 countries), the ongoing maintenance of my Denver-based foundation, frequent single parenting while Charles was conducting all over the world, and the onslaught of mental illness in one of my children was a gargantuan task. Sleep was a luxury. Friends came through, with a one-directional flow of support. Faith in some larger context to ground my commitment was a necessity.
Added to my to-do list were my efforts to address the Milosovic madness that resulted in some 70,000 refugees streaming into Austria from Croatia and Bosnia. Given the exigency of the time, I took the highly unusual step of expanding my activities beyond my bilateral assignment. I argued that the relationship between the United States and Austria was solid; while, a few hundred miles away, the Balkans were crumbling. I could not in good conscience ignore that unutterable hardship. I hosted three international conferences, lobbied the President for military intervention, gathered books for the bombed-out National Library, arranged for trees for the denuded parks. My Balkan activity was more than tolerated by the Austrians; it was anointed.
Within some of the foreign policy establishment, however, this involvement outside my accredited host country was considered bizarre. Indeed, several mid-level officials in the US State Department deemed my involvement in the Balkans troublesome and inappropriate, but they could not argue with President Clinton, who encouraged me privately and publicly. Nor could they ignore the invitations of our ambassadors to Bosnia, first Vic Jakovich, then John Menzies, urging me to come down to Sarajevo to help whenever and however I could.
As a diplomat among international experts dealing with the war, I worked very hard to hold my place. I was a political appointee with a background in domestic, not foreign, policy—a novice among men like Dick Holbrooke, Sandy Berger, Karl Bildt, Jacques Klein, George Joulwan, Tony Lake, Chuck Boyd, Bob Gelbard, John Kornblum, Leon Fuerth, and Carlos Westendorp—each of whom stepped into their Balkan role with decades of foreign policy experience. These were the four-star generals, former foreign ministers and ambassadors, and national security advisors with whom I sometimes went toe to toe with my ideas. I was younger (in my mid-forties), with a soft voice and flesh. I do not underestimate the conscious and unconscious role of gender in professional settings, for the actor and responder alike. Raised in the South as a “steel magnolia,” those encounters took every bit of self-confidence I could muster.
In contrast, among the women of Bosnia, I felt at home. Instead of being drained by our encounters, I was nourished. Although our words often passed through an interpreter, we felt close, sharing so much that crossed cultures: a love of home, a lack of faith in patriarchal politics, an almost desperate concern for our children, an understanding of the relationship of justice to inner healing, and the ability to communicate all this with our eyes or with touch when words failed.
In thousands of hours around the table where the fate of the Bosnian people was being discussed and supposedly decided, Bosnian women were systematically excluded by the Bosnian leaders Although they were highly organized into over 40 associations, to my knowledge women were never represented at the policymaking table unless I brought them. Even though (because of war deaths) they represented well over half the population, the opinions of Bosnian women were not sought, nor were their ideas welcomed. This virtual ignoring of a huge segment of the population was a significant flaw in international peace efforts during and after the war.
There were some important exceptions. In the heat of the war, US Ambassador to Bosnia Vic Jakovich urged me to come to Sarajevo to meet with the local women. (Because it was too dangerous to have an embassy in Sarajevo, I hosted our Bosnian embassy out of my embassy in Vienna for about a year and a half. Vic and I had become close associates.) For security reasons, the State Department would not give me permission; amid the chaos of war, they couldn’t afford an injured or kidnapped ambassador. Instead, I stayed closely involved from Vienna, hosting, in the spring of 1994, negotiations that created the Bosnian/Croat Federation. In those weeks, I met scores of Balkan political leaders deciding matters of war and peace, as well as lawyers crafting a new constitution. They were all men.
Finally, on July 4th, 1994, during a lull in the fighting, I flew down to Bosnia in the belly of a cargo plane, strapped in with 50,000 pounds of flour—supplies urgently needed to feed the 200,000 Bosnians trapped in the three-year siege of Sarajevo. I was bringing greetings from President Clinton to hundreds of Bosnians gathering in the embassy garden to celebrate the American “national day.” There, on the patio of the bare US embassy (our flag flew over a building with no furniture or personnel), I met with seven women—all professionals—who poured out dramatic personal stories of hardship and bravery. In a bizarre juxtaposition, they were dressed in pearls and makeup, as they relayed accounts of hospitals with no anesthetics or medicines, and university-level architecture classrooms with no pencils. One woman, a cardiac specialist in stylish high heels, described her octogenarian parents, whom she had not seen for two years. Although they lived only a fifteen-minute walk away, she could not penetrate the barricades. This was the jagged disconnect of their lives: sophisticated, educated women trying to figure out how to cope with the barbarity of war.
The shooting heated up again, and once more my access to the war zone was extremely limited by the State Department. But I could not forget the faces and the stories of that first visit. Back in my embassy office and residence, I hosted women who managed to cross the war lines and find their way to Vienna. I listened to their accounts and reported them back to Washington. Then, motivated by what the women taught me, I leaned against military and intelligence leaders who insisted that this was a religious or ethnic war we ought to just let play out. There was a huge rift within Washington over the characterization of the war, and I lobbied long and hard on behalf of Madeleine Albright’s and Dick Holbrooke’s view that our intervention should have been early and forceful.
At last, within three weeks of the peace signing in December of 1995, Charles and I spent a week in Sarajevo at the invitation of the second US Ambassador to Bosnia, John Menzies. While Charles worked with the remnants of the Sarajevo Philharmonic, which he would conduct for New Year’s Eve, I met with individuals and groups of women all over the war-torn city. I was hollowed out from the pain in those conversations, inspired by the vision of the women, concerned at how their voices suddenly weakened when they were in the presence of men. On December 31st, I sat at the end of the balcony, watching my husband pull the soul of strings long-silenced by the war.
I followed up those December meetings by inviting a dozen women leaders from Sarajevo to come for several days to Vienna, where they stayed in our spacious embassy residence. In that fresh context, they planned various activities they would carry out back home to reconstruct their society. Among those was a conference of women from diverse backgrounds, from all over the divided country. I was asked to keynote the event, which was planned for 200 women leaders. Five hundred showed up.
In these Balkan activities I was encouraged by Michael Steiner, a German diplomat who served as the “number two” in the Office of the High Representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations, set up in Sarajevo immediately after the peace was signed in December of 1995. He was the primary policymaker at that time to take an interest in Bosnian women not as victims, but as a potential force for stabilization. Ambassador Steiner urged me repeatedly to meet with the women emerging from the devastation, connect them somehow with outside funding, and do everything I could to elevate their voices as they called for reconciliation in the post-war society. Following his advice, I contacted the women who had crossed the conflict lines in their quest to find their missing sons, fathers, and husbands. I was impressed over and over by their ability to transform personal tragedy into an insistence on restoring their homeland.
From those encounters, which were life-changing for me, I approached President Clinton, who responded immediately to my suggestion that we elevate the voice of Bosnian women. At his request, Assistant Secretary of State Phyllis Oakley, who oversaw refugee issues, set aside ten million dollars to launch a Bosnian Women’s Initiative. The President’s public announcement of the initiative at the Group of Seven Industrialized Nations (the G-7) in Lyons in July of 1996 was a pivotal moment in publicly solidifying the place of Bosnian women in restoring a peaceful economy. The initiative, run through the UN High Commission on Refugees, has been replicated in Rwanda, Burundi, and Kosovo.
That same month, I assisted the women survivors from Srebrenica on the anniversary of the horrific massacre that resulted in the disappearance of around 7,000 of their men (and which led to a much-belated US intervention in the war). Ambassador Menzies understood that there was no question of whether or not there would be a commemorative event. After a year of receiving scant aid and virtually no information about their missing family members, feeling forgotten, their pleas for help unheeded, the women had started to organize protests. During a demonstration in Tuzla they threw stones at the windows of the International Red Cross office. The women would find a way to be heard. I stepped in to try to help them harness their grief and desperate worry in a way that would not backfire. Several State Department officials insisted that we should instead stay away from the women because they were “dangerous.” Ambassador Menzies and I countered that our ignoring them was more dangerous.
Responding to the suggestion from other US diplomats in Sarajevo that fresh perspectives were desperately needed in the Balkan political system, I helped organize and chaired a three-day conference to which 40 Bosnian political parties sent several of their most active women. The result was a mandate by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe that three of the top ten candidates on the party lists had to be women. The number of women in parliament jumped tenfold, to nearly 30 percent.
Another collaborator whose support for Bosnian women was clear and unambiguous was General Wesley Clark, who became the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe soon before I left Vienna. Wes was an old buddy of Charles’; both had been White House fellows and had spent years together in Colorado Springs where Charles was the symphony conductor for 20 years and Wes held command posts. In August of 1997, at dinner in Brussels, Wes mentioned he was about to escort US Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison to Bosnia. The senator had been repeatedly calling for the pull-out of US troops, and the SACEUR asked if I might put together a group of women to meet with her the next week, to try to impress on her the importance of the troops to maintain stability. By now my contacts were deep and wide, and we not only put together a multi-ethnic group of 13 women activists from all over the country (flown in by military helicopters) to meet with the senator; we also used the two-day occasion to create the League of Women Voters of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Unfortunately, the senator (whom I recognized as another steel magnolia) seemed unimpressed by what the women were achieving by coming together. She urged them to “just put the past behind them and invite their enemies over to their kitchens for a cup of coffee.” One of the women reminded her that she had been principal of the high school, had had a home, two cars, and a mountain home, but now had no kitchen to which to invite her enemy.
Although much of my focus outside Austria was on the Balkans, I had also followed my husband around Eastern Europe, appearing just in time to applaud his Beethoven and Bernstein in performances that reached from Moscow to Skopje, Krakow to Baku. I usually limited my stay to one day, combining my role as Maestro’s Frau with a meeting with local women leaders, organized by the US ambassador. I added on the “Vienna Women’s Initiative,” inviting to our residence for three days at a time, small delegations of women leaders—from Hungary, Ukraine, Croatia, Bosnia—to explore ways they could strengthen their roles in their countries emerging from Communism. (My father, longdeceased, might have approved.) All those associations resulted in a grand three-day gathering of 320 women leaders from 36 countries, a few months before I departed Vienna. We called it “Vital Voices: Women in Democracy.” The first lady and secretary of state claimed it as their own, and a movement was born, housed for the next four years in the State Department, and now in the process of being spun out into an independent nonprofit organization by the out-going first lady.
Somehow, in the midst of all this hoopla, I was noticed by the Kennedy School (most notably Associate Dean Holly Taylor Sargent, who was determined to change the notoriously strong male-tilt of this institution). The dean asked me to come as a "distinguished fellow.” I replied that my family was ready for a permanent home—and he should realize I wouldn’t give the school any money if I worked there. (I have a rigid policy of not funding my or my husband’s employers.) But I was entranced with the idea that, 30 years after I had begged my father to let me come to Cambridge, I might actually end up there. The dean, Holly, and I measured the risks and the rewards. In the fall of 1997, the Women and Public Policy Program was born.
I look back at the lessons, the hardships, the thrills, the failures, and I realize how consistently I’ve lived by a few home-grown principles:
1) Long-term planning is entertaining and immediately calming, but there’s virtually no chance life will unfold accordingly;
2) My kids are the most precious, rewarding, infuriating, and humbling elements of my life—and I will never fully satisfy them, nor myself, in my mothering while I’m “out there” in the world;
3) One can think creatively, act boldly, and cry inconsolably at the same time;
4) Staying rooted in the “why” is essential when spreading out across the “how”;
5) Life is not a jig-saw puzzle; the pieces don’t fit.
Blessings on the reader. Go, if not in peace, then in purposeful passion.