JK stood and gave a speech in the Senate the other day—a salute to a longtime Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) staffer, Nancy Stetson. The Providence Journal reported on Nancy and included a bit of the speech as well.

We’d like to share a few bits and say, “Thanks, Nancy, for showing us what is possible.”

When Nancy Stetson came to Capitol Hill, her boss recalled last week, she was “a young and idealistic doctoral student” from Rhode Island who wanted to test an idea.

In an era of presidential predominance in foreign policy, she asked, could Congress make a difference?

After long service as a little-known Senate staffer, Stetson can report that the answer is yes. Yes on prodding a major African nation to forsake the path of racial oppression. Yes on reconciliation between the United States and its onetime foes in a small Southeast Asian country. Yes to easing the afflictions of disease upon millions around the globe.

There’s a footnote to the thesis, too: without the likes of Nancy Stetson, Congress could accomplish few such things. So says her boss, Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass…

<!-more-> She worked on many issues of the day including the push for US sanctions against the apartheid system in South Africa. One area on which she toiled long and hard was the development of diplomatic relations with Vietnam.

Stetson was Kerry’s right hand during the former Navy swift boat skipper’s long campaign for diplomatic actions to heal the wounds of the Vietnam War.

A prerequisite for progress was to resolve the concerns of Americans convinced that many missing U.S. fighters might still be held in Vietnam, years after the end of the war. The work was delicate and painstaking. There were remarkable scenes: Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the former prisoner of war, encountering his former North Vietnamese interrogator; lines of Americans and Vietnamese working together on excavation sites, sifting the earth for any remains of the U.S. missing. In the end, Kerry was able to settle the matter of the missing in action to the satisfaction of most Americans — and along the way accomplish much healing between the two nations.

A signal moment came during a late-night talk on the roof of the Rex Hotel in Saigon, a “kind of seedy” wartime hangout of Kerry’s. There, Kerry and Stetson and Tommy Vallely, a close friend and Vietnam veteran from Boston, hatched a plan. The framework they conceived led eventually to the crucial legislation, signed into law by President Bill Clinton, that lifted the U.S. sanctions against Vietnam.

JK recounted on the floor of the Senate that

This Vietnam Education Foundation and this Fulbright program have been instrumental in helping us to do that. And today, Vietnam is simply a transformed, extraordinarily different country. It was an innovative policy, and it was a master stroke of public diplomacy for which Nancy deserves enormous credit. Without her vision and her perseverance, we would not be able to talk today, in foreign policy, in terms that say that Vietnam is not just a war but a country. It became a country because of this kind of effort and this kind of outreach in the consciousness of Americans.

[...]

In addition to the normalization with Vietnam, Nancy contributed enormously to global health issues and to some of the most significant policies of any industrialized country against diseases of poverty. Her work on malaria, TB, and AIDS, where she fought to significantly increase the U.S. contribution to the Global AIDS Fund, were among her proudest accomplishments. People across the world today literally owe their lives to Nancy’s work.

I remember when we began that effort, Senator Helms was then chairman, and a lot of people said: You are never going to get anything through this committee. Well, with slow and steady work, we not only got it through the committee, we got Senator Helms, to his credit, to be one of the principal cosponsors of this effort.

Together with Senator Frist, we drafted the first original comprehensive plan on AIDS that passed the Senate and which became the centerpiece of how we are approaching particularly Sub-Sahara and Africa today, but really our global efforts to try to deal with this scourge that is growing, I might say notwithstanding those efforts, for lack of global initiative and effort to focus on it.

The Rhode Island paper finished their report with this:

Mr. Clinton’s normalization of U.S. diplomatic ties to Vietnam was the culmination of adventures Stetson could hardly have envisioned as a young scholar from Rhode Island.

“I thought of myself as a kid who got out of school and worked hard and did a good job,” Stetson said. Never did she imagine herself on a Saigon rooftop, brainstorming about the healing of the national wound from the war, or in the Oval Office months later helping to tell a president how it could be done.

“It was a highlight of my life,” she said, to see this harvest of some 15 trips to Vietnam, of her numberless hours of labor on the MIA issues, on the priorities of individual legislators, on the diplomatic spadework in the State Department.

“It also proved my thesis,” Stetson said, recalling the research that first brought her to the capital, “that Congress can make a difference” in world affairs.

It calls to mind Margaret Mead’s wisdom:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people
can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

 

Thanks Nancy and best wishes in your future endeavors.