DARTMOUTH'S NEW LEADER
President-Elect Dickey Has Varied, Impressive Record
THE background of experience which John Sloan Dickey '29 will bring to Hanover when he assumes the presidency of the College on November 1 is largely in the fields of law and international relations, both of which have figured prominently in his distinguished record of government service in Washington. He has supplemented this with a deep personal interest in education, especially with relation to Dartmouth and the liberal arts college, and despite his heavy schedule of work for the State Department he has served since last year on the faculty of the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, with the title of Lecturer in American Foreign Relations. His work in economics, public relations, and the cultural aspects of American foreign policy, as well as his brilliant record as a history student at Dartmouth, adds to the variety of experience and accomplishment which has been his in a still youthful career. These activities since graduation from college have often placed him in positions of top responsibility and have given him the opportunity to display a genuine flair for organization and administration, frequently lauded by the older colleagues with whom he has worked.
In Washington, where it is not easy to win plaudits, Dartmouth's president-elect is widely respected and liked, and this is the result not only of his ability and hard work but also of his friendly nature and attractive personality. Liberal and progressive in his point of view, he has worked hard for international accord and world.organization, and at the United Nations Conference in San Francisco earlier this year he won additional honor for himself for his successful handling of the difficult role of public liaison officer for the United States delegation. Cordell Hull, former Secretary of State, under whom Mr. Dickey did a great deal of his State Department work, paid warm tribute to him when it was announced that he had been elected President of Dartmouth College. "I have the highest opinion of Mr. Dickey in every essential respect," said Mr. Hull. "He possesses a high order of intelligence, integrity and industry and is exceptionally well qualified for the high office to which he has been appointed."
At the present time Mr. Dickey, as Director of the Office of Public Affairs, heads for the State Department one of the twelve main-line offices created in the Department's 1944 reorganization. The Office of Public Affairs, which was immediately under Assistant Secretary of State Archibald MacLeish before he resigned, has responsibility "for the formulation and coordination of policy and action regarding informational and cultural aspects of foreign relations, including responsibility for the problems of freedom of information among peoples and for furthering the interchange of scientific and cultural knowledge with other countries." Six divisions within the Office, each under a chief, deal with public liaison, cultural cooperation, translating, international information, research and publication, and geography and cartography. During the period after the resignation of Mr. MacLeish, Mr. Dickey served as the Department's ranking man in the field of public and cultural relations.
The present position held by President-elect Dickey is the latest in a number of varied assignments which he has filled for the State Department off and on since 1934, and more continuously since 1940 when he resigned as a partner in the Boston law firm of Gaston, Snow, Hunt, Rice and Boyd and moved his family to Washington.
His earliest work for the State Department was the result of an association formed during and shortly after his study of law at Harvard. Mr. Dickey graduated from Dartmouth in 1929 magna cum laude, with highest distinction in history, and as a Rufus Choate Scholar and member of Phi Beta Kappa. He undertook his graduate studies at Harvard Law School and while there did part-time work, from 1930 to 1932, in penology with the Massachusetts Department of Correction, handling rehabilitation cases at the State Prison in Charlestown. Upon receiving his LL.B. degree from Harvard in 1932 he was admitted to the Massachusetts bar and joined the Boston firm of Gaston, Snow, Saltonstall and Hunt. The following year he was given leave to serve as
assistant to the commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Correction, dealing with state prison matters in general.
Both in the Harvard classroom and in the Massachusetts Department of Correction, Mr. Dickey had worked under Francis B. 'Sayre, who in 1934 was serving in Washington as Assistant Secretary of State. Mr. Dickey was first called to Washington in 1934 to be assistant to Mr. Sayre and also as- sistant to the Legal Officer of the State Department. During the two years there, at the time of the enactment of the orig- inal Trade Agreements Act, his duties dealt mainly with commercial policy, economic problems, and legal questions. He also served as the Department's liaison officer to Senator Robinson during the World Court debate in the Senate in 1935-
In 1936 President-elect Dickey returned to Boston and became an associate in the law firm from which he had been on leave. Up to 1940, when he became a partner in the firm, he was largely engaged in corporate law, with some trial work in such cases, and in corporate law in connection with investment trusts. This four-year period was twice interrupted, however, by return assignments in Washington. One six weeks' period of leave was devoted to a case contesting the constitutionality of the Trade Agreements Act, and in January 1940 he was back in Washington as special assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, dealing for some months with matters relating to the renewal of the Act. He returned to his Boston law work but late in 1940 he resigned from the firm when he was asked to come back to Washington as special assistant in the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. At that point the Dickeys transferred their permanent residence from Winchester, Mass., to Washington, and the College's newly elected head began the five-year period of government service which will end sometime in October when he prepares to come to Hanover.
While in the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, Mr. Dickey was given the job of planning the program to replace pro-Axis representatives of U. S. business firms in South America, and from his work evolved the blacklist of 1941. In the summer of 1941 he was detailed to the State Department as Chief of the Division of World Trade Intelligence. At the request of the Secretary of State he left the Division in 1943 to become the Secretary's special consultant on matters regarding the renewal of the Trade Agreements Act. After the Act was passed in June 1943, Mr. Dickey was made head of the newly created Office of the Special Consultant, established in answer to the growing need for some form of liaison between the Department and outside groups interested in foreign policy. The office grew rapidly to meet the public's increasing demand for information, and in appreciation of its necessary function the Department decided to extend it. In the reorganization of January 1944, the Office of the Special Consultant was incorporated into the Office of Public Information, later called the Office of Public Affairs, and Mr. Dickey was named director.
In this capacity one of the most important assignments Dartmouth's president-elect undertook was that of Public Liaison Officer for the U. S. delegation at the San Francisco Conference. His was the job of organizing the consultants of the 42 national organizations represented there, seeing that they had satisfactory liaison with the American delegation, and seeing also that their ideas and suggestions reached Secretary of State Stettinius. It required tact and good judgment, for the good and the bad were intermingled in the proposals of the consultants, and it also required interminable handling of details and administrative problems. Mr. Dickey came out of it with universal commendation, and the State Department's unprecedented use of citizen consultants in the actual formulation of American foreign policy was declared an unqualified success. Mr. Dickey had a large hand in the adoption of this State Department policy as he has had in other Department matters. Last year he was named a member of the State Department's Policy Committee and this year a member of its Coordinating Committee.
The teaching which Mr. Dickey has been doing on the side is also related to his advocacy of greater public knowledge of American foreign policy. As Lecturer in American Foreign Relations at the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington he has been teaching a graduate seminar course on the formulation of American foreign policies and the roles played in this by public opinion, Congress, the Chief Executive, the State Department, and other executive departments and agencies. He also has written articles for the American Foreign Service Journal and similar publications, and has done articles and reviews for legal publications, notably the Cornell Law Quarterly.
President-elect Dickey is a native of Lock Haven, Pa., where he attended high school and where his father, John W. Dickey, now lives. He was the first boy from Lock Haven High School to enter Dartmouth and his brother, Captain Robert French Dickey '32, an Army flight surgeon, followed in his Dartmouth footsteps. Captain Dickey practices medicine in Lock Haven and a sister, Gretchen Dickey, is on the high school faculty there. A younger brother, Donald, is in the Air Corps, and a married sister, Mrs. Donald Stoltz, lives in Lewisburg, Pa.
As a Dartmouth undergraduate, President-elect Dickey partly worked his way through college and engaged in extra-curricular activities, yet found time to compile an outstanding scholastic record. He had managed the football team at Lock Haven High and
at Dartmouth went out for freshman basketball and tennis, in neither of which he won team insignia. He still maintains a lively interest in college sports and has expressed his belief in their value as part of a college education. Other Dartmouth interests included the Outing Club, which had lasting influence as witnessed by his present hobbies of fishing and hunting, and Theta Chi fraternity, of which he was president and Interfraternity Council representative.
Since graduation Mr. Dickey has been actively interested in Dartmouth alumni affairs, serving as assistant class agent for 1929 for five years and as a member of the executive committee of the Boston Alumni Association from 1936 to 1940. He has continued to be a participant in alumni activities in Washington, where his government work has also served to keep him in touch with many Dartmouth graduates and faculty members. The word "Dartmouth" has always been a key to his time and his help, and close friends are aware that the College is one of his deep and emotional interests. In a letter to one of the College's officers he once wrote: "I have two loves—Dartmouth College and international relations. I am happy when the two are brought together."
Mrs. Dickey, the former Christina M. Gillespie of Exeter, N. H., also has affection for Dartmouth and Hanover. Following her graduation from Wellesley she served on the staff of Baker Library, and it thus came about that John Dickey during his junior year first met his future wife. They were married in 1932 and have three children: Sylvia Alexander, 10; Christina Louise, 9; and John Sloan Jr., 4. Mrs. Dickey is the daughter of the late Prof. Walter Hamilton Gillespie of Phillips Exeter Academy, who taught Latin there for many years. The Dickeys are members of the Presbyterian Church.
When the news of John Dickey's election to the Dartmouth presidency broke, a small army of newspaper interviewers descended upon him, and this, coupled with a host of friendly well-wishers and a number, of persons anxious to get his Washington house, made him about the busiest man in Washington for a couple of days. The interviewers described him as "tall and slender," "balding," "very personable," "sincere," "generous," "clear-eyed," and "quick minded"; they commented favorably upon his straightforwardness and his refusal to talk about his policies at Dartmouth until after he had dug into the facts; and they took pleasure in his sense of humor and his unabashed enthusiasm for Dartmouth College. These descriptions varied with the individual interviewers, but one and all felt compelled to write about his warm friendliness, his cooperative spirit, and what one writer called his "human sympathies." Tolerant and open-minded toward views opposed to his own, Dartmouth's new leader does not, however, carry his compromising spirit to the point of abandoning the positions and principles which he believes to be right. He expresses himself clearly and concisely, and is an effective speaker.
President-elect Dickey has avoided the limelight by choice and has preferred to be one of the quiet, industrious, behind-the-scenes men who usually do the work that counts. Now that he has emerged into the public eye, his intimate friends in government, in the law and among Dartmouth men are outspoken in their personal praise and are enthusiastic over the larger opportunity which Mr. Dickey will have as President of Dartmouth College to make effective his exceptional qualities and talents. The high regard of his classmates is exemplified in the tribute replacing the usual 1929 class notes in this issue, and Dartmouth men everywhere, even though they do not yet have full knowledge of their new leader, will take satisfaction in the unanimous conviction of the Board of Trustees, deeply solicitous for Dartmouth's good, that John Sloan Dickey '29 of all the College's sons is best fitted to lead her in the years ahead.
JOHN SLOAN DICKEY '29
DARTMOUTH'S FIRST FAMILY-ELECT which will occupy the President's House after November 1. Left to right, President-elect Dickey, John Jr., 4V4; Christine, 9; Sylvia, 10; and Mrs. Dickey.
