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Ukraine is far better off with an historically strong and deep relationship with the United States, and the West - and monetary compensation to boot — than she would have been by trying to gain operational com mand and control of the nuclear arms inherited from the Soviet Union... with all the costs, risks, and uncertainties that would have entailed. Great nations, like great people, keep their prom ises. Ukraine should get maximum credit and benefit for acting responsibly. I quietly do my best to make it so. The other work I do — tonight’s focus — is in col laboration with the White House, including the Office of the First Lady, the Office of Public Liaison, and the National Security Council, on matters of special interest to Ukrainian-Americans. This has ranged from contri buting thoughts or words for Presidential statements such as the one I cited in Kyiv to helping with some presentations at last year’s TWG Annual Leadership Conference to working closely this spring with Melanne Verveer, Marilyn DiGiacobbe, Victoria Reznik, Carlos Pasqual, Chip Blacker and others in planning and shap ing the White House commemoration of the tenth anni versary of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster. That Mayday event — hosted by the First Lady with such dignity, intelligence and grace — will live on in my memory as a kind of postcard, at once mournful and joyous. So much man-made pain and destruction — yet so much good will since, and cause for hope. The Week ly’s reporting has been fair and full, so I won’t belabor words or matters already part of the public record. But I do want to make one point to those who might be temp ted to greet unprecedented White House attention with the cynical yawn, “Eh. Nice words.” Well, words matter. My whole life story shows that. And at the level of the President’s written message, the First Lady’s moving remarks, and the Vice President’s impassioned policy statement, words have greater stay ing power and ripple affects than any of us today can concretely imagine. All three ambassadors at the event — Ambassador Shcherbak, and the Ambassadors of Belarus and Rus sian — requested the texts of the remarks to send back to their capitals. The U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine has the transcripts in hand as well. And most of the United States key foreign policy officials also attended. These diplomats and policymakers all recognized that the event’s greatest import was not political, but geo-poli tical. My friend Alex Kuzma, coordinator of Chornobyl Challenge ’96 and the volunteer community’s spokes man at the event, called just a few days later to report that his private sector donations had already leaped upward as a result. My own hunch (and for now it’s just that), is that White House event — augmented by the First Lady’s release of her May 1 syndicated column, “We Must Not Forget the Children of Chornobyl,” to more than 100 papers here and abroad — ultimately will leverage between a million and a billion dollars of additional help to deal with Chornobyl’s aftermath. So you see, the White House Chornobyl commemo ration was far more than mere words. It signified a use of the White House bully pulpit I was thrilled to support — as a Ukrainian-American ... and as an ordinary taxpayer. ★ * * * How did I get to work on such consequential and satisfying matters? Ten words are definitive: Chicken Kiev, as Americans call it. Hard work. Good work. Excel lent luck. Influential references. Oh, and did I mention Chicken Kyiv? Picture me as senior associate at Covington & Burling, droning away at some crossword puzzle of a legal problem whose inevitable consequence was whether Corporation A or Corporation В would get to keep the money. Then I realized that I should take my disgust with George Bush’s Chicken Kiev policy toward Ukraine — one friend dubbed it “stability uber alles” — and do something constructive with all my bristling energy: Namely, to help replace George Bush with Bill Clinton. I was fortunate to play an exceedingly minor role in that — with much help from people like Melanne, and Adrian, and Chuck Santangelo, who now works on Ukrainian and other projects at AID. But it got me a chance — to work on the civil rights transition reports Iryna mentioned, with a Covington partner who soon became the Solicitor of Labor. And that got me an audition, alongside ten or so more expe rienced hopefuls, to be speechwriter for the Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich. Which somehow, thank God, I won. Here I’ll launch right into my advice for others who might follow. And I’ll weave in my suggestions on how we, as a community, can continue to build our effec tiveness — freely admitting that they are tentative rules of the road, not mandatory or universal principles. One: Be flexible, resilient, and seize the day. In 1993 I was a passionate budding writer — not anybody’s idea of an expert on labor issues. And Robert Reich warned me up front he wasn’t sure he’d be able to “delegate his voice,” as he put it. But half a year later — after he’d found that he just couldn’t give up something so near his heart — he felt sufficient respect for my work and affection for me to do something about it, to his unend ing credit. So the White House was contacted, and I ultimately found myself able to choose from several other speechwriting jobs in the Administration. ACDA was easily the most obscure choice, but — because it held the promise of collaborating with John Holum — Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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