John B. Ritch III (born March 13, 1943) is a former American diplomat whose career includes extensive experience on the congressional side of US foreign policy and in international business. After early service as a captain in the US Army (1968–1972) and then a staff adviser on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1972–1993), he was appointed by President of the United States Bill Clinton to serve as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations International Organizations in Vienna, a position he held from 1993 to 2001. Thereafter, as a business executive from 2001 to 2012, he headed the World Nuclear Association, the London-based trade association that encompasses the worldwide nuclear energy industry. Meanwhile, as a sidelight, in 1992 Ritch co-founded an international company that has attained three decades of success in marketing US-made nutritional products throughout much of Europe.
Early life and education
Ritch was born into a Navy family during World War II and grew up in the postwar years in locations on the East and West Coasts associated with the military career of his father, a 1939 graduate of the Naval Academy. Ritch's grandfather, a Montanan, one-time cowboy, and longtime friend of famed painter Charlie Russell, was among the new state's first historians, known for his nostalgic poetry and beguiling reminiscences about the fast-disappearing West.In 1915 Ritch and Russell collaborated when Russell contributed watercolors to illustrate the six stanzas of “Shorty’s Saloon,” a Ritch poem describing the atmosphere and action in a fictive watering hole where parched cowhands could complete a long trail drive by carousing with the aid of a dependable bartender. Each stanza ends with Shorty’s reliably uniform query: “What’s yours, Pard?” Ritch first published the poem, in calligraphy under each illustration, as a booklet. It appeared again in 1940 when Ritch published a book of his poetry titled “Horsefeathers.” Today the original illustrations with calligraphy are on display in the permanent collection of the Wichita Art Museum.https://wichitaartmuseum.org/our-collection/collection/shortys-saloon-some-tragedies-mark-those-trails-to-the-past/ https://collections.gilcrease.org/object/tu2009394023
Ritch III attained a moment of national fame at age 10 by winning a local contest in Bremerton, Washington (home of Puget Sound Naval Shipyard) that offered a bicycle to the top collector of used shoes for war refugees in Korea. On April 19, 1953, dominating the front page of New York's Sunday News (then the nation's major tabloid) was "Johnnie Ritch" sitting atop a mountain of 10,000 pairs of shoes piled dockside in Bremerton for shipment to Korea. Ritch alone had gathered 1,325 pairs by taking a wagon door to door; and the national wire services had carried the story to newsrooms across the country.New York Sunday News, front page, 19 April 1953. https://imgur.com/0nQriIf
After a youth filled with peewee league and school sports, Ritch graduated in 1960 from Traip Academy in Kittery, Maine (a public high school near the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard). Ritch studied for one year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, then entered the US Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1965. There he was an Academic All-AmericanAcademic All-American Basketball selection, 1965. https://academicallamerica.com/documents/2018/4/30/1965_MENS_BASKETBALL.pdf?id=28131965 NCAA Men's Basketball All-Americans and all-N.I.T. in basketball and selected to be a Rhodes Scholar. Ritch received the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference award as the outstanding scholar-athlete of West Point's class of '65.
At Oxford University from 1965 to 1968, Ritch studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at University College. He played on an Oxford University Basketball team that came close, but for a travel mishap, to achieving a perfect slate of three consecutive British national championships at both the university and amateur levels.Oxford University won the national basketball championship of the British Universities Sports Federation (B.U.S.F) in 1965, 1966, and 1967; and the national championship of the Amateur Basketball Association (A.B.B.A.) in 1966 and 1968, being disqualified in 1967 due to a delay in transportation. Oxford won these titles in the 1965-66, 1966-67 and 1967-68 seasons. During that period, Ritch's teammates included future New York Knick Bill Bradley and now-eminent novelist John Edgar Wideman.
Career
After Oxford, Ritch served as an infantry captain in the US Army from 1968 to 1972, commanding a rifle company on the DMZ in Korea and working in the Pentagon on the staff of the Army Chief of Staff. In 1970, as a goodwill gesture to the Korean Republic, the Army assigned Ritch to spend four months in Seoul as coach of Korea's Olympic basketball team as it prepared for that year's Asian Games.
In 1972, Ritch worked briefly for the new Environmental Protection Agency before joining the then-small and bipartisan staff of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), chaired by legendary Senator William Fulbright.
On the committee, Ritch's first job was to aid chairman Fulbright in gaining Senate approval for two landmarks in US-Soviet arms control: the SALT-I accord and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Early in his work for the committee, Ritch devised the Foreign Relations Authorization Act. For the next 25 years, this annual legislation served not only to authorize appropriations for the State Department budget The annual Foreign Relations Authorization Act also included funding authorization for the US Information Agency (whose diverse responsibilities included management of the Fulbright Scholar program and of US libraries abroad) and the Board for International Broadcasting (which funded and oversaw Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty). but also as the vehicle for a series of innovative bipartisan amendments designed to shape the policies and institutions of American diplomacy. Among the laws Ritch designed is the now-longstanding delineation of the authority and responsibility of an American ambassador for all US activities in the country where appointed to serve.
After 1979, when the previously unified SFRC staff was enlarged and bifurcated along partisan lines, Ritch worked on the Democratic side with such noted Senators as Church, McGovern, Pell, Sarbanes, Kerry, Dodd, Moynihan, and, most extensively, with Joe Biden.Soviet TV Covers Biden-Gromyko meeting on INF Treaty / Moscow 1988. https://vimeo.com/478230590 In that more bipartisan era, Ritch also worked cooperatively with Republican senators such as Aiken, Case, Percy, Mathias, and Lugar.
From 1972 to 1993, under six committee chairmen, Ritch specialized in European and NATO affairs and also, at various times, directed the work of subcommittees on State Department operations, Asian affairs, and constitutional war powers.
For two decades, while working on hearings, speeches and legislation, Ritch traveled extensively for the committee, often represented the Senate in sessions of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, and was the principal drafter of committee publications on NATO nuclear strategy and the SALT II treaty, US-Soviet relations, the Portuguese revolution, Hungarian communism,"Hungarian Communism Today", SFRC Print, 1978. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b5010684&view=1up&seq=5 the world heroin trade,"Heroin: Can the Supply Be Stopped?", SFRC Print, 1972. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.a0000170555&view=1up&seq=1 politics and strategy on NATO's southern flank,"Perspectives on NATO's Southern Flank", SFRC Print, 1980. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951002873532n&view=1up&seq=1 the Soviet war in Afghanistan,"Hidden War: The Struggle for Afghanistan", SFRC Print, 1984. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951d00829084i&view=1up&seq=1 international failure to defend the Bosnian republic,"To Stand Against Aggression: Milosevic, the Bosnian Republic, and the Conscience of the West", SFRC Print, 1993. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000021085475&view=1up&seq=1 and Senate responsibilities overseeing the war and treaty powers."The ABM Treaty Interpretation Resolution", SFRC Report on S.Res 167, 100th Congress, 1987. The report: (a) summarizes SFRC hearings on the Reagan administration's "re-interpretation" of the ABM Treaty; and (b) explains S.Res. 167 (the "Biden Resolution") as a necessary affirmation of constitutionally based standards for interpreting the ABM Treaty and all other US-ratified accords.
In 1984, after covertly crossing the Pakistani border to spend time with Afghan resistance forces in the field, Ritch authored a Senate report describing the Soviet army’s brutalities in Afghanistan. Some months later, when Soviet authorities balked at allowing Ritch to accompany a Senatorial visit to Moscow, declaring him “persona non grata” in the Soviet Union, the delegation’s leaders (Senators Joe Biden and William Cohen) cancelled the trip. This episode became a minor cause célèbre during a contentious phase in US-Soviet relations. But a year later, after General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, Moscow relented and the ban on Ritch was lifted. (a) "Soviets Deny Aide Visa; 4 Senators Cancel Trip", Washington Times, April 9, 1985. https://www.scribd.com/document/468792129/Soviets-deny-aide-visa-4-senators-cancel-trip; (b) "Biden, 3 others call off Soviet trip over visa flap", Morning News, April 9, 1985. https://www.scribd.com/document/468791958/Biden-3-Others-Call-Off-Soviet-Trip-Over-Visa-Flap; (c) "Critic is Denied Soviet Travel Visa", USA Today, April 9, 1985. https://www.scribd.com/document/468792401/Critic-is-denied-soviet-travel-visa
In 1988, Ritch played an active role in shaping the Senate’s response to the Reagan administration’s purported “reinterpretation” of the ABM Treaty, a highly controversial maneuver aimed at supporting Reagan’s “Star Wars” vision by permitting the creation of a weapon the treaty was explicitly intended to prohibit. Acting on Biden’s behalf after the Senator was hospitalized by a brain aneurysm, Ritch worked with other Committee members (and fellow staffer James Rubin) to advance a measure, known as the Biden Condition, that rebuffed the “reinterpretation” by affirming explicitly the normally implicit principle that every US treaty must be interpreted in accord with the Senate’s reasonable understanding of its meaning at the time of ratification. After the Senate attached the Biden Condition to its approval of the US-Soviet treaty on intermediate-range nuclear missile forces (INF), that treaty and the Biden Condition’s enunciation of broad constitutional principle became a part of US law."The INF Treaty", Executive Report 100-15, pp. 87-108, explains in detail the Biden Condition's purpose and role. The principle affirmed by the Biden Condition was originally formulated in a Biden-sponsored resolution, S.Res. 167, drafted after extensive Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings and approved by the committee in 1987. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951d02881482u&view=1up&seq=3
A year later, after the Berlin Wall fell, Ritch conceived and helped enact the Support for East European Democracy (SEED) Act of 1989.
From 1993 to 2001, as American ambassador to UN agencies in Vienna during the two Clinton terms, Ritch's main role was representing the US on the governance board of the International Atomic Energy Agency. There he worked with then-IAEA directors Hans Blix and Mohamed Elbaradei on the agency's dual task of monitoring compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and assisting nations in the use of nuclear technologies for medicine, agriculture, industry, and carbon-free electricity generation.