As part of our 25th anniversary commemoration, we will publish reflections and stories from and about some of our members and directors who were there at the beginning. Their hard work and determination brought the Pacific Council on International Policy to life, turning it into a renowned West Coast organization dedicated to global affairs within a few short years. Throughout 2020, we will release pieces in the “Founders Series,” published here in the Pacific Council Newsroom.

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Early in 1993, at the suggestion of Robert Erburu, chairman of the Times Mirror Company, I called the office of USC’s president, Dr. Steven Sample, whom I did not know, to request an appointment. I told his assistant that I had been invited to take a professorship at an Ivy League university, and that the only contingency that would keep me at USC would be to undertake an initiative that I believed only Dr. Sample could approve in the brief window I had before I would need to respond to the external offer. I also mentioned that Bob Erburu had suggested I request a meeting with Dr. Sample, which was soon set up for later that same week.

After brief introductory pleasantries, I told Dr. Sample that I was considering an attractive offer to join the faculty of Brown University and to direct Brown’s new and well-endowed Watson Institute. The invitation was to connect international studies on campus to decision-makers in business, politics, and the media. Brown expected me to draw upon my own experience, primarily with the Inter-American Dialogue, but also at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and USC’s California-Mexico project.

I said that I was also excited by a competing project, one that no one had proposed to me, and that had literally occurred to me in the middle of the night only a few days earlier: to build in Los Angeles a multi-sectoral, nonpartisan policy forum on international affairs, loosely modeled on the Council on Foreign Relations (where I had been director of studies, and knew that he was also a member). I mentioned that Brown’s Institute, when developed, would be the 10th or 12th such center in the Northeast, but that California—the country’s largest and in many ways most international state—had no comparable institution.

The forum I was imagining would bring together people of leadership quality and stature as well as younger professionals in diverse fields on their way to exercising leadership roles. It would convene both experts on international relations and people with responsibilities for which it was increasingly important to understand global trends and issues.

The Pacific Council I envisioned in the early 90s could help Los Angeles build civic infrastructure that it lacked by focusing on the region’s global ties, population, and interests.

Such an institution could help Los Angeles build civic infrastructure that it lacked by focusing on the region’s global ties, population, and interests. It could help Californians project their perspectives into national policy discussions, debates, and decision-making. The “national interest” should not be defined solely by a priestly tribe residing in the Bos-NY-Wash corridor.

[Author’s note: For a full development of these ideas, see my later book, Global California: Rising to the Cosmopolitan Challenge (Stanford University Press, 2009). That book, drawing upon studies and discussions at the Pacific Council and my own primary research (supported by USC, the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation, and the Public Policy Institute of California) discusses how the citizens of California, a state with the dimensions and power of a nation, are affected by international trends and what they can do, within constitutional limits, to identify and promote their own global interests in a rapidly changing world. My argument prefigured developments that have become much more evident as successive California governments from both parties and their Sacramento colleagues have taken important national and international leadership roles with regard to climate change, emissions standards, immigration policy and immigrant integration, as well as other issues.]

For such a forum to achieve maximum impact would require, I suggested, being organized as a free-standing institution, subject to community-wide governance and situated on neutral ground, not as a part of a single university, corporation, or media firm.

Getting such an organization off the ground and able to expand would require significant resources, which I thought could be raised. I based my confidence on that point in part on preliminary conversations I had conducted over the previous several days with senior officers at two leading foundations that had supported my previous work, and on the likely interest of internationally-connected corporations and foundations in the western states.

Then-USC President Steven Sample agreed that building the proposed nonpartisan, nonacademic policy forum (known today as the Pacific Council), based on the CFR model but adjusted to be appropriate for Los Angeles and California today and in the future, was close enough to USC's mission to justify considerable USC support.

For me to take on the leadership role in launching such a project would require a lot of work, more than I could possibly combine with full-time teaching over the next several years. I did not want to resign from USC to undertake this unpredictable venture full time, without a parachute, and with the first obligation to raise my own salary. I wondered, therefore, whether it might be possible for USC to relieve me of at least half of my teaching responsibilities for a considerable period, in order to devote myself to testing the feasibility of, and hopefully launching, such a forum.

Dr. Sample’s response was crisp. He summarized the issue that I was posing: whether building the proposed nonpartisan, nonacademic policy forum, based on the CFR model but adjusted to be appropriate for Los Angeles and California today and in the future, would be close enough to the mission of the University of Southern California to justify considerable USC support, including a large share of my time and salary, even though the proposed entity would not be subject to USC oversight, but rather governed on a community-wide basis.

Hearing such a sharpened précis made me think he was about to turn it down. I simply said, “I couldn’t have put the question so precisely or directly but, yes, that is what I am asking.”

“Good,” Dr. Sample said, “because yes, I do believe that what you describe would be close to the University’s mission and in its interest. If you stay at USC and proceed along these lines, I commit the University and myself to support it in the way you suggest, and others. Some other people around here may express reservations or doubts, but you can count on my commitment and support.”

The still inchoate concept of what was to become the Pacific Council thus took a giant step forward in less than 20 minutes. I was stunned by Dr. Sample’s ability and willingness to make a clear and meaningful decision so quickly and surely.

The still inchoate concept of what eventually would become the Pacific Council thus took a giant step forward in less than 20 minutes. I was stunned by Dr. Sample’s ability and willingness to make a clear and meaningful decision so quickly and surely. This was presumably in part because the emerging program’s mission squared so completely with his (and later Provost Lloyd Armstrong’s) vision for USC.

That evening I wrote up the gist of our conversation. Dr. Sample affirmed that my summary was accurate, and never wavered in supporting the evolving concept. Nor did Armstrong, who shared Dr. Sample’s vision and soon became provost and USC’s point man for this matter. He was a valuable member of the steering committee that helped design the proposed forum, and subsequently, from its inception in 1995, was an active Board member of the Pacific Council, invited at the initiative of the Council, not as an appointee of USC.

The very early support for the Pacific Council project from President Sample, Acting Provost William Spitzer, and College Dean Carol Jacklin made it possible for me to negotiate specific understandings with the director, Robert Friedheim, and the faculty of the School of International Relations (SIR) regarding my reduced teaching load and other issues.

I gained the SIR faculty’s approval, by unanimous vote with one abstention, to remain for a time in my post as director of the School’s Center for International Studies, explicitly free to use its facilities, budget, and staff to incubate the new project, contingent on my maintaining the Center’s historic level of activities: visiting fellows, seminars, conferences, and publications. The incoming Dean of the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, Gerald Segal, soon agreed to make available seed funding to cover full summer salary support for the first year, and permission to draw a full 12-month salary in future years if I could obtain external support to cover the summer period.

Over the course of the next 11 years and beyond, through the feasibility study and planning phase of what became the Pacific Council, the first 10 years of the Council’s development during my presidency, and then the next 15 years, during the brief presidency of Geoffrey Garrett and the extended tenure of Jerrold Green, the Pacific Council and USC have cooperated in many ways.

Sol Linowitz, an eminent Washington attorney and mentor with whom I had worked closely on U.S.-Latin American relations, commented to me in this period that I should expect tensions to arise with some of my colleagues at the working level, as they came to understand that we were building a significant and prestigious venture that neither they nor the University authorities would control.

Gail Harmon, a Washington lawyer whom I had retained to help us develop our bylaws and to qualify for 501(c)3 status as a nonprofit organization, advised—in response to my question whether there was any topic that still needed to be discussed—that she was uncomfortable because my path forward depended on a patchwork of commitments from different parts of the University, not all of them party to every agreement, and not recorded in any one agreed document. She recommended that we try to develop an omnibus accord, based on what had already been agreed.

After a night’s reflection, I told her that what she recommended, although eminently sensible, would require a new negotiation, this time between one USC professor and the University as a corporate entity. The likely results of such a highly asymmetric negotiation would not be optimal, I feared. I preferred to work with the commitments that had been made and recorded, to build good working relationships within the agreed frameworks, and to build facts and value on the ground, leaving for another time a further negotiation between the University and the by then well-established new entity. Ms. Harmon accepted my perspective as valid and continued to provide good counsel through the next few years.

As the project began to grow, obtain resources, add staff and members, and attract attention, tensions with individuals and sectors within the University did begin to appear. The first point of contention, not surprisingly, was about money. The provost had agreed that USC would accept and administer grants on behalf of the new project until we developed our own legal status, and that we would be free to raise support from any source we could reach, without clearing requests nor asking for development assistance from the University’s fundraising apparatus.

Lloyd Armstrong’s valuable participation on the Pacific Council Board continued throughout his tenure as provost. His contribution was supplemented over time by the participation on the Pacific Council’s Board of three successive deans of the Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism: Geoff Cowan, Ernest Wilson, and Willow Bay, who serves today.

I soon persuaded Dr. Dennis Collins, president of the James Irvine Foundation—a large philanthropy limited to supporting California organizations, a strong supporter of USC, and someone I had met in connection with the California-Mexico project—to make a significant grant for our project, about which he was personally enthusiastic. Dr. Collins mentioned that our request would have to be formally submitted by USC within its overall institutional grant request. That meant, of course, that USC would have to give our project some priority among the competing ideas to include in USC’s omnibus request.

The USC vice president for advancement then indicated to me that the University’s request would not include our new claim, because of other priorities. I appealed his decision to President Sample and the provost; they solved the problem, and this important grant went through. The project was soon up and running, with additional support from the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Over the course of the next 11 years and beyond, through the feasibility study and planning phase of what became the Pacific Council, the first 10 years of the Council’s development during my presidency, and then the next 15 years, during the brief presidency of Geoffrey Garrett and the extended tenure of Jerrold Green, the Pacific Council and USC have cooperated in many ways.

From the start until well after my presidency, USC furnished the Pacific Council with office space below-market rates in the heart of the campus, twice making available additional space as the Council expanded. It handled the payroll and benefits paperwork for Pacific Council employees, while permitting the Council to choose its own personnel. USC continued through all my years as the Pacific Council’s president to cover my full academic year salary with 50 percent course reduction and continued to cover half the salary of a full-time executive assistant, a right I had negotiated in my initial USC employment contract.

Collaboration between USC and the Council continues, especially with the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism.

As the University’s commitments to the Council grew, and as academic departments understood that the Council would not discriminate in favor of USC faculty in its membership policy or in staffing its projects, issues naturally arose. A disgruntled SIR professor lodged complaints in 1996, alleging that I had misappropriated funds from the Center for International Studies to build the Pacific Council and raising doubts about the relation between USC and the Council.

A thorough examination of the books by the University’s financial office confirmed, however, that I had scrupulously kept my commitments, maintaining and even increasing the Center’s level of traditional activities; had kept careful accounting records of all funds used to develop the Pacific Council; and that the Pacific Council was already adding significant value to the Center, the School, and the University, including improving and funding a visiting fellow being considered for an eventual appointment to USC’s faculty, as well as including more than 20 USC professors and administrators in the Council’s active membership and offering research assistantships, roles as rapporteurs, and internships to numerous USC students.

As the Pacific Council’s space requirements expanded, the deans and the provost fielded complaints from some USC units, prompting Provost Armstrong to suggest that the time had come for a more formal and explicit institutional agreement that could be announced. I agreed, and soon received a proposed memorandum, drafted by the University’s office of the General Counsel, without any prior discussion with me, that reflected the complaints that had been lodged, and was crafted with the apparent intent of limiting the Council’s autonomy.

On receiving this unacceptable proposal, I suggested to Armstrong that it might be more fruitful to begin with a counter-draft that I could prepare that would specify the mutual aims of USC and the Pacific Council in preparing an agreement, as well as suggest procedures and instruments for achieving these. He readily agreed that this approach made sense. He encouraged me to work directly with the new Dean of the College, Morton Schapiro, and his deputy, Michael Diamond, in order to craft such a proposal, agreeable to both parties on the basis of mutual interest and goodwill.

The unique partnership with the University of Southern California has been a strong ingredient in the Pacific Council’s development.

With Gail Harmon’s help I soon provided a text which, with very little amendment, became the inter-institutional agreement, signed and announced by both parties. It confirmed the intent of USC and the Pacific Council to strengthen international studies and debates in close cooperation and affirmed specific commitments toward that end.

This accord led to many years of cooperation on jointly sponsored conferences and seminars; jointly appointed international Visiting Fellows, recruited by and based at the Council and available for occasional teaching and advising; and opportunities for students to be employed by or intern at the Council, serving as research assistants, administrative aides, and rapporteurs, and able to audit some proceedings.

As our negotiations drew to this good conclusion, I asked Ms. Harmon, half in jest, what the Pacific Council chapter in her memoirs would highlight. Without hesitation, she observed that our experience confirmed that “artful ambiguity combined with consistent achievement and political skill can sometimes be better than premature clarity.”

Lloyd Armstrong’s valuable participation on the Pacific Council Board continued throughout his tenure as provost. His successors, Provosts Max Nikias and Elizabeth Garrett, participated, albeit much less actively, on the Council’s Board. Their participation was supplemented over time by three successive deans of the Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism: Geoffrey Cowan, Ernest Wilson III, and Willow Bay, who serves today.

The Council owes a great deal to Steve Sample and Lloyd Armstrong: visionary and self-confident executives, experimental but prudent, community-minded, and focused on the importance of global connections and local partnerships for the university.

The University reclaimed its on-campus space in 2007, and Dr. Nikias, by then president of USC, helped facilitate the Council’s move to downtown Los Angeles that year. Both Geoff Garrett and Jerry Green became professors at USC as part of the institutional accord. Collaboration between USC and the Council continues, especially with the Annenberg School.

The unique partnership with the University of Southern California was crucial in launching the Pacific Council and has made a positive contribution to the Pacific Council’s development over its first 25 years. The Council owes a great deal to Steve Sample and Lloyd Armstrong: visionary and self-confident executives, experimental but prudent, community-minded, and focused on the importance of both global connections and local partnerships for the University and for the region.

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Abraham F. Lowenthal was the founding president and is president emeritus of the Pacific Council on International Policy. He is also the Robert F. Erburu Professor of Ethics, Global Relations and Development, Emeritus, at the University of Southern California.

Learn more about the Pacific Council’s 25th Anniversary and read more stories in the Founders Series.