Privilege and Prejudice: The Life of a Black Pioneer by Clifton R. Wharton Jr (review)

It ought take nothing away from Clifton R. Wharton Jr.’s accomplishments to write that, by any measure, he has led a charmed life. That life included a fruitful early chapter in Southeast Asia. Among its many virtues, Wharton’s detailed and engaging autobiography has great value in prodding us to put his activities in the region more than half a century ago into perspective.

Born in 1926 to the first African-American career member of the United States Foreign Service, Wharton spent much of his childhood in Liberia and in the Canary Islands. In adolescence, he studied at the vaunted Boston Latin School and participated in the rich associational life of that city’s historic African-American middle class. At age sixteen, he entered Harvard College as one of only three African-American members of the Class of 1947. He then broke the colour bar at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington. Having landed, with the help of a SAIS mentor, a junior post in an organization launched by Nelson Rockefeller to promote economic development in Latin America, he gained his first exposure to agricultural economics, in which no less a figure than T.W. Schultz recruited him to pursue a doctorate at the Rockefeller-founded University of Chicago.

Wharton continued to focus on economic development in rural Latin America at Chicago, in work that first brought him into contact with Arthur T. Mosher. In 1957, Mosher hired Wharton to join John D. Rockefeller III’s Council on Economic and Cultural Affairs (CECA) and to prepare a study of American universities’ training of Asian students to meet the needs of the farm sector in their home countries. Wharton would continue to work with Mosher at the CECA and the Agricultural Development Council (ADC, the CECA’s name from 1964 onward), above all on the problems of Asian agriculture, till the end of 1969. In 1965 the two men organized a conference on “subsistence agriculture and economic development” that resulted in a long-influential edited volume and testified to Wharton’s stature as a leading American specialist on the agricultural problems of developing Asia (Wharton 1969).

The start of 1970 saw Wharton leave the ADC to assume the presidency of Michigan State University. After eight eventful years in that post, he moved to the chancellorship of the State University of New York (SUNY). A creature of Nelson Rockefeller’s governorship of New York State, SUNY had no fewer than sixty-four campuses. It enrolled more students than any other university system in the United States. And it depended for its funding largely on a state government that was, by the late 1970s and 1980s, financially overextended.

Elected chairman of the board of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1981 and having led SUNY for nearly a decade, Wharton was well prepared for his next challenge: taking over in 1987 as chairman and chief executive officer of the financial giant TIAA-CREF to bring new dynamism to the most important retirement-savings institution for American university faculty. In clear recognition of Wharton’s success in that role and as the culmination of his glittering career, Bill Clinton announced with no little fanfare in late December 1992 his appointment to serve as deputy secretary of state in the incoming administration.

Wharton’s tenure at State was brief. By early November 1993, confronted with a whispering campaign mounted from within the Clinton administration, he had resigned his post. On the instructions of a distant and mediocre secretary, Wharton devoted much of his time as deputy secretary to the reorganization of the department, to rationalization of its budget and to the preparation of a major report on the future of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). While this book does not mention it, Americans outside of the government who were concerned with issues of international development anticipated with varying combinations of interest...