In Memory of a Great Mentor: Strategizing War & Peace

On the anniversary of his death, I am thinking about an old mentor, Ambassador Henry Owen. If alive today, I’m sure he’d have comforting words to impart regarding the state of global affairs. There is hardly a better antidote for fear, after all, than revisiting the great historical challenges our ancestors overcame. It is especially true when conflicts emerge and tensions run high. Henry Owen was a living piece of history, for me, when we spent time together in Washington, DC. Anything I was studying in graduate school at the time, whether the formation of the United Nations, US-Japanese history, or the Paris Peace Treaties of World War II... he always had an intimate connection to historic events and fascinating insights about key leaders and ideas at the heart of the world's essential debates. Henry was in the center of so much of it himself, a premier political and economic strategist, diplomat, and international negotiator held in high esteem by some of the world's most powerful people.

As President Carter’s lead diplomat for International Summits, Ambassador Owen is remembered for his advocacy in elevating Japan’s status as a leading world power to help maintain international peace and cooperation. Earlier in his life, Henry had played a critical role in decisions that brought about an end to WWII as part of the US Navy’s Intelligence team, and deeply understood the price Japan had paid for its role. He also recognized the immense beauty, power and influence of Japan and its culture, which he believed would continue to evolve as a critical force for peace in the world.

Henry strived, until the end, to be active in brokering multilateral energy deals, raising awareness and funding to support the AIDS crisis in Africa, and sparking economic engines wherever he could. He embodied and reflected an ethic I humbly share– which is that economic and commercial networks, engagement and cooperation are some of the strongest forces available to promote global peace and prosperity. On the ground, in local circles, Henry championed similar ideas about mentorship and engagement that cut across socioeconomic and ethnic boundaries. He knew it was important to expose people to different ideas and cultural experiences in the world, in order to increase their empathy and awareness of opportunities to advance. In an imperfect world, and having been a part of deeply controversial decisions in his lifetime, Henry took tough intellectual stances, and he acted.

For as heavy a thinker as he was, especially in the problems he was entrusted with solving, I will always remember him as the charming, absent-minded professor. A gentleman with an officer streak and sense of humor, he had his father’s zest for storytelling, and lent his poetic mind to the telling and re-telling of history in the many circles he traveled. I also recall that the Ambassador was famous for stuffing cookies in the pockets of his suits after lunch at the Metropolitan Club, something his wife complained vigorously about, until the staff began wrapping them up for him to take. Nevertheless, he liked to pretend he was getting away with something.

I like to believe I took a piece of you with me as well, Dear Henry, especially the part that makes you care more about getting things right than who gets the credit, in the end. All of negotiations are but a sorting out of who bears responsibility, and the nobility of being a responsible actor in the world shall endure.

Ambassador Henry Owen’s Obituary, New York Times, 2011

By?Paul Vitello

Nov. 11, 2011

Henry D. Owen, an influential diplomat who helped institutionalize global economic summitry in the 1970s and who was considered an intellectual framer of the elite round table known as the?Trilateral Commission, died on Nov. 5 in Washington. He was 91.

Mr. Owen worked in the State Department as an economic counselor specializing in international affairs under four presidents between 1946 and 1968.

In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed him ambassador at large for international economic summits, an office he used to help organize and regularize the ad hoc series of meetings among industrialized democracies that had begun in the early 1970s after the economic aftershocks of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. Initially known as the Group of 6, the meetings became the Group of 7, then the Group of 8.

With his counterparts in other countries, Mr. Owen set the agenda and sketched the framework for agreements on trade, monetary policy and energy planning signed by heads of state at the Group of 7 meetings in 1979 and 1980, a period of worldwide recession laced with anxiety over the Islamic revolution and the unfolding American hostage crisis in Iran.

Mr. Owen played an important, though largely unheralded, role in establishing an informal discussion group for business and intellectual leaders known as the Trilateral Commission, which was officially founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the foreign policy expert who later became national security adviser to President Carter.

“He had a lot to do with framing the original concept” of the Trilateral Commission, Mr. Brzezinski said in an interview on Thursday. “In his quiet way, he was profoundly influential.”

Among those who have been commission members are Mr. Carter, Dick and Lynne Cheney, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Henry A. Kissinger, Richard C. Holbrooke, Madeleine K. Albright, Robert S. McNamara, Paul A. Volcker, Alan Greenspan and Paul D. Wolfowitz.

The concept behind the commission was to make Japan a full economic and political partner with the United States and Europe. Mr. Owen, who had served with the American occupation forces in Japan after World War II and later as an economist in the State Department specializing in Far East development, admired Japanese culture and advocated acknowledging Japan as a world economic power.

Like Mr. Brzezinski, he believed that informal meetings among Japanese, American and European thinkers and leaders would lead to more tangible and official trade ties. (The Trilateral Commission, later the focus of “world government” conspiracy theories, was also viewed as an effort to further secure Japan’s emerging power on the side of the West in the cold war.)

The commission’s early gatherings, considered by many foreign policy experts as the conceptual forerunners of the global economic summits of today, were organized mainly by Mr. Owen.

Mr. Owen, a soft-spoken man who once bragged that he owned only one necktie, was content to remain largely behind the scenes. “Prominence and influence are in inverse proportions to each other,”?he told?The New York Times in 1978. “The less you are written about in the press, the less other people see you as a threat, and the more attention they pay to your ideas on their merits.”

Henry David Oyen was born on Aug. 26, 1920, in Forest Hills, Queens. He was the only child of Olaf and Sara Oyen. (He simplified the spelling of his surname to Owen as a young man.) His father, a Norwegian who came to the United States at age 3, was a writer of adventure stories. His mother was a writer and freelance reporter.

Mr. Owen studied in Switzerland and in New York, graduating from the Birch Wathen High School, a Manhattan private school, before enrolling at Harvard. He graduated in 1941 and served in the Navy during World War II.

From 1952 to 1968, Mr. Owen worked as an economist in the State Department’s Policy Planning Council, sometimes referred to as the department’s think tank. He was its chairman from 1966 to 1969 and recruited Mr. Brzezinski, then a professor of foreign policy at Columbia University, to work on his staff.

In addition to his son, Mr. Owen is survived by his wife of 55 years, Hertha; another son, Francis; and five grandchildren.

Mr. Owen was director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution from 1969 to 1977. He was later a consultant to investment firms including Salomon Brothers and was co-founder of the philanthropic group?Capital Partners for Education.

Robert D. Hormats, under secretary of state for economic affairs in the Obama administration, described Mr. Owen as one of the great American “sherpas.” A term of art in diplomacy, a sherpa is someone who does most of the necessary work in advance of a summit meeting so that the leader can show up and take credit for negotiating a good deal.