John B. Ritch III

John B. Ritch III (born March 13, 1943)[1] is a former American diplomat with extensive experience on the congressional side of U.S. foreign policy and in international business. After four years in the U.S. Army (1968-1972) and 21 years as 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.

Early Life and Education

Ritch was born into a Navy family during World War II and grew up in the postwar years in locations associated with the military career of his father, a 1939 graduate of the Naval Academy. Ritch’s grandfather, a Montanan and friend of famed painter Charlie Russell, was the new state’s first historian and known for his nostalgic poetry about the fast-disappearing West.

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) aimed at collecting shoes for war refugees in Korea. The front page of New York’s Sunday News (then the nation’s major tabloid) on April 19, 1953 shows “Johnnie Ritch” sitting atop a mountain of 10,000 pairs of shoes, piled dockside for shipment. Ritch had gathered 1,325 pairs by taking a wagon door to door.

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 U.S. Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1965. There he was an Academic All-American 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 at University College, gaining a Master’s Degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He played on an Oxford basketball team that won two British national championships. (Other Oxford players included future New York Knick Bill Bradley and 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 US Army assigned Ritch to spend three months as coach of the Korean Olympic basketball team.)

In 1972, Ritch worked briefly for the new Environmental Protection Agency before joining the then small bipartisan staff of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by legendary Senator William Fulbright. After 1976, when the SFRC staff was enlarged and bifurcated along partisan lines, Ritch worked on the Democratic side with such noted Senators as Church, McGovern, Pell, Sarbanes, Dodd, Moynihan, and, extensively, with Biden. In that more bipartisan era, he also worked 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 at various times directed the work of three different SFRC subcommittees.

Over two decades, while working on hearings, speeches and legislation, Ritch was the principal drafter of committee publications on NATO nuclear strategy and the SALT II treaty[2], U.S.-Soviet relations[3], the Portuguese revolution[4], Hungarian communism[5], the world heroin trade[6], the Soviet war in Afghanistan[7], international failure to defend the Bosnian republic[8], and Senate responsibilities vis-à-vis the war and treaty powers[9].

In 1984, the Kremlin reacted to Ritch’s report on Afghanistan (based upon time he spent with the Afghan resistance) by declaring him “persona non grata” in the Soviet Union; the travel ban was lifted after Premier Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985.[10] In 1989, after the Berlin Wall fell, Ritch conceived and helped enact the Support for East European Democracy (SEED) Act.

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, and industry. In this period, a special IAEA team located and dismantled Iraq’s nuclear program, a success confirmed after the second U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

From 2001 to 2012, Ritch was in the private sector as director general of the World Nuclear Association, the London-based trade association of over 150 companies in the global nuclear energy industry. There in 2003 he conceived the World Nuclear University, the annual summer program that brings together young nuclear professionals from several dozen nations.

As a sideline, Ritch has long been active in real estate, specializing in historic restoration in Washington, DC. Among his projects is “John Logan House,” once a residence of the revered civil war general and later US Senator, and now a prominent landmark on the circle that bears the hero’s name.

As an entrepreneur, Ritch co-founded CaliVita International, a vitamin supplement marketing company that has been active since 1992 in more than a dozen European countries.[11]

Among Ritch’s publications are articles in The Atlantic[12] and Prospect[13] magazines, the Washington Post[14], the New York Times[15], the International Herald Tribune[16], Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists[17], and two law review articles co-authored with then-Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr.[18]

Personal Life

Ritch and his wife Christina live in Washington, DC and have a home in a small town in Tuscany. They have two daughters, Nina Ritch Boland (Michael) and Alyssa Ritch-Frel (Jan), and three grandsons, Samuel, Vincent, and John (Jack).