John B. Ritch III

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 longtime friend of famed painter Charlie Russell, was the new state's first historian, known for his nostalgic poetry and beguiling stories 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. On April 19, 1953, dominating the front page of New York's Sunday News (then the nation's major tabloid) was “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 US Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1965. There he was an Academic All-American[2] 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 University Basketball team that came close, but for a travel mishap, to achieving a perfect slate of three consecutive British national championships at both the university and amateur levels.[3] During that period, Ritch’s teammates included future New York Knick Bill Bradley and now-eminent novelist John Edgar Wideman.

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 Army assigned Ritch to spend four months as coach of Korea’s Olympic basketball team as it prepared for that year’s Asian Games.

In 1972, Ritch worked briefly for the new Environmental Protection Agency before joining the then-small and bipartisan staff of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), chaired by legendary Senator William Fulbright.

On the committee, Ritch's first job was to aid chairman Fulbright in gaining Senate approval for the SALT-I nuclear arms accord and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Early in his work for the committee, Ritch devised the annual Foreign Relations Authorization Act, which for the next 25 years served as a vehicle for funding the State Department budget and for a series of bipartisan amendments designed to shape the policies and institutions of American diplomacy. Among the laws Ritch designed is the now-longstanding delineation of the authority and responsibility of a US ambassador.

After 1979, 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, Kerry, Dodd, Moynihan, and, most extensively, with Joe Biden.[4] 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 also, at various times, directed the work of subcommittees on State Department operations, Asian affairs, and constitutional war powers.

For two decades, while working on hearings, speeches and legislation, Ritch traveled extensively for the committee, often represented the Senate in sessions of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, and was the principal drafter of committee publications on NATO nuclear strategy and the SALT II treaty,[5] US-Soviet relations,[6] the Portuguese revolution,[7] Hungarian communism,[8] the world heroin trade,[9] politics and strategy on NATO's southern flank,[10] the Soviet war in Afghanistan,[11] international failure to defend the Bosnian republic,[12] and Senate responsibilities overseeing the war and treaty powers.[13]

In 1984, the Kremlin reacted to Ritch's report on Afghanistan (based upon time he spent with Afghan resistance forces) by declaring him “persona non grata” in the Soviet Union; this travel ban was lifted after Premier Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985.[14]

In 1988, Ritch worked to advance a measure, known as the Biden Condition, that became a legally binding provision in the Senate’s approval of the US-Soviet treaty on intermediate-range nuclear missile forces (INF). Passage of the Biden Condition capped, and brought to resolution, a momentous executive-legislative dispute over how US treaties must be interpreted under the Constitution.[15]

A year later, after the Berlin Wall fell, Ritch conceived and helped enact the Support for East European Democracy (SEED) Act of 1989.

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, industry, and carbon-free electricity generation.[16]

In this period, a special IAEA team located and dismantled Iraq's nuclear program, a multinational success confirmed in 2003 when the second US invasion of Iraq revealed no weapons of mass destruction.

From 2001 to 2012, Ritch was in the private sector as director general of the World Nuclear Association, the London-based trade association of some 200 companies—uranium miners, fuel makers, reactor vendors, electrical utilities, and associated professions—comprising the global nuclear energy industry.

In this role, Ritch was an international advocate for expanded use of nuclear power, asserting its role as an environmentally beneficial technology of crucial value in the prevention of catastrophic climate change. As an industry spokesman, he also dealt with public alarm over the Japanese accident at Fukushima.[17]

In 2003, marking the 50th anniversary of President Eisenhower’s Atoms-for-Peace initiative, Ritch conceived and launched the World Nuclear University, sponsor of an annual “summer institute“ that each year brings together young nuclear-energy professionals from some 30 nations.

As a sideline, Ritch has long been active in real estate, specializing in historic restoration in the nation's capital. Among his projects is John Logan House, a DC landmark that was once a residence of the heroic civil war general who later founded Memorial Day and became a stalwart Senate advocate of far-reaching Reconstruction.[18]

As an entrepreneur, Ritch co-founded CaliVita International, an overseas supplier and multi-level marketer of American-made vitamin supplements. Since its launch in 1992, Calivita has exported a large volume of US products to some three dozen European countries.[19]

Among Ritch's publications are pieces in The Atlantic[20] and Prospect[21] magazines, the Washington Post,[22] the New York Times,[23] the International Herald Tribune,[24] World Energy Review,[25] Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,[26] and Arms Control Today,[27] and law journal articles—on war powers and on the treaty power—co‑authored with then-Senator Joe Biden.[28][29]

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