Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) — Set aside your career trajectory fears and try to do good for others along the way.
That’s what Hoover distinguished visiting fellow David C. Mulford, who served as America’s ambassador to India from 2005 to 2009, told a group of Stanford students at the Hoover Institution on October 22.
Looking back on what he calls his “unusually long and unusually diverse” career, Mulford, chair of Hoover’s Huntington Program on Strengthening US-India Relations, told the students to have belief in their own abilities and not to get concerned if their own life pathway contains some sharp turns or inexplicable contrasts.
The only thing that matters, Mulford said, was to have a goal in mind.
“If you’re going to do something internationally, you should always have a purpose,” Mulford said. “When you go somewhere, you should not be a tourist or a guitar-bearing student entertaining people in the public square. You should have a job.”
Go Places
Mulford wanted to work abroad from an early age, and his own career almost literally touched all four corners of the earth.
He applied for a Rotary International Fellowship after high school, which gave him the chance attend Oxford University. From Oxford, he embarked on a study abroad program under an anthropologist at Cape Town in South Africa for a year, beginning in 1960.
The racist apartheid system had only fully come into place two years before Mulford’s arrival in the country, and its presence in every facet of life there deeply disturbed him.
“It would be very unlikely they would evolve out of that position for twenty-five years at least, I remember saying to myself at the time,” Mulford said of life governed by intensely racist laws in South Africa.
From there, he returned home to Boston to complete a master’s degree at Boston University in its African studies program, where he took a course taught by Dr. Henry Kissinger, who eventually became a lifelong friend.
He was then hired by the Department of Technical Cooperation at the UK Foreign Office to study the first post-independence election in Zambia in 1962.
Spending a year writing a book and a thesis on that election, Mulford, who had been hired reluctantly by the British Crown because he was an American, recounted driving across the Zambian savanna in an old Land Rover to reach distant villages, all while trying to write one thousand “publishable” words per day.
Something about this experience made him less afraid of the staid office settings he’d encounter later on in his career.
“All of this taught me that you have to always be unafraid of anything, and secondly, don’t be too self-concerned with the risks that you face either going to a remote country or going from an organization in the US and then coming back when terms have changed.”
Whether public or private, in the US or abroad, Mulford stressed that what matters is whether your role is making positive change, not details like where the role is located or what sector of the economy it occupies.
Entering the World of Finance
Mulford returned to the United States to serve as a member of the White House Fellowship, in its inaugural class, at the Treasury Department at the tail end of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency.
From there, he headed into the world of private finance as an investment banker at White, Weld & Co.
This jump between public- and private-sector roles has characterized much of Mulford’s life.
But even in the private sphere, chances sprang up to work in foreign locales.
White, Weld & Co. sent Mulford to Saudi Arabia to assist the Saudis with integrating into the global financial system after the OPEC oil shock of 1973. He lived there in solitude for a decade, investing the Saudis’ billions of dollars gained from newfound oil revenues.
After his tenure in Saudi Arabia, Mulford joined the Treasury Department, where he stayed for nearly a decade. As the under secretary for international affairs, in 1989 Mulford developed the Brady Plan, which restructured Latin American debt. This prevented Latin America’s economy from total collapse.
Facing criticism during the Brady Plan effort, Mulford said the experience taught him that sometimes achieving measurable goals is more important than analyzing or criticizing others.
“Never be afraid, never think there is something you can’t do,” he said. “There might be someone who can do things better, but that’s irrelevant if you’re the one getting things done.”
Reaching Out to India
All of this global experience culminated in Mulford’s appointment as US ambassador to India by President George W. Bush in 2003.
“When I got to India, I thought it was going to be one of the most important countries in the world,” Mulford said of his appointment. “In America, there’s not enough knowledge of India and India’s history, and that has to be built.”
He soon became a key part of a wider effort in the Bush administration to bring India into the club of peaceful nuclear states through the US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement, which was ratified by both countries in 2008.
“We surprised the Indians,” Mulford said of the United States’ initial offer to lift all sanctions against India, which were imposed after they detonated nuclear weapons in 1974 and 1998.
The talks to reach the nuclear deal took four years. Mulford and others involved on both sides of the deal spoke in depth about the work it took at an event at Hoover earlier this year.
“I was very impressed with [then–Indian prime minister] Manmohan Singh and still am—it was an intense negotiation that required lots of flexibility and transformation of ideas on both sides,” Mulford said.
But the road to an agreement was bumpy, and the bumps were often caused by each country’s own legislature rather than any disagreements between Prime Minister Singh and President George W. Bush.
Mulford recounted the night of September 25, 2008, when Bush and Singh met at the White House for a private dinner.
That day, the US House of Representatives had voted down Bush’s economic stabilization legislation, meant to buttress the US economy as the specter of the 2008 financial crisis loomed.
But Mulford said Bush took heart from the fact that he got to dine that evening with Singh.
“[Bush] came in and said, ‘I can’t think of anybody in the world I’d rather have dinner with tonight, because you’re a man of peace and principles,’” Mulford recalled Bush saying to Singh.
Mulford encouraged his audience, several of whom are part of the Indian diaspora living in the United States or Indian nationals studying at Stanford, to be part of the movement that brings the two nations closer together.
Throughout his career and especially during his time as ambassador, Mulford said, he has been honored to have helped bring the United States and India closer together, but it was now time for him to pass the torch.
“I am proud to have been a part of that process, of respecting India, listening to Indian people, seeing the country, and doing something really important for its position in the world,” Mulford said.
“I hope all of you take note, see this, and maybe join and be part of this.”
Read Forging Trust with India, Mulford’s book about working to achieve the 2008 US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement, here.
