After retiring to St. Petersburg, Douglas L. McElhaney put together the first forum in 2013.
By CAITLIN ASHWORTH
USFSP Reporter
ST. PETERSBURG – In 34 years as an American diplomat, Douglas L. McElhaney witnessed a revolution in Portugal, helped negotiate independence for the African nation of Namibia, and served as ambassador in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
When he retired in 2007, he spent four years teaching at the University of Miami as an ambassador-in-residence before moving to St. Petersburg.
It was a homecoming of sorts for McElhaney, 68. As a child, he often visited his grandparents here, and his parents had moved here, too.
“I feel very at home here,” he said.
That explains how an annual conference on national and international issues featuring prominent speakers from the U.S. Foreign Service, academia, the military and the news media began in St. Petersburg in 2013.
The fourth conference will be Feb. 17-19 on the campus of the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, a co-sponsor of the event. More than a thousand people have already signed up to hear from about 60 speakers on 30 panels.
The conference is free and open to the public.
Among the topics: “Russia: imperial aspirations on a beer budget”; “Immigrants: A new wall or a new screen door?”; “Internet earthquake: News in an era when everyone is a reporter and publisher”; and “American jobs: Does anybody want them? Can anybody find them?”
The conference began “when Doug brought the idea to me five years ago, and it’s since taken off,” said political science professor Thomas W. Smith, director of the university’s honors program. “He draws on his Washington rolodex while I tap the academic resources I know.”
The honors program administers the conference with “a lot of help from the community and volunteers,” Smith said.
As a youngster, McElhaney said, he was “curious about the world.”
His father was in the Navy, his mother was a French teacher, and his older sister was a flight attendant for Pan-American. He grew up with an interest in travel and foreign cultures.
In high school, McElhaney said, he got to know foreign exchange students and befriended a Brazilian classmate.
While in college at the University of Michigan in the 1960s, McElhaney stayed with the friend’s family while working for the Brazil Herald, a small English-language newspaper in Rio de Janeiro.
Although his Portuguese was rudimentary, he said, he was able to report for the English speakers in the area and experienced Brazil during a military dictatorship.
“One of the families down the street from where I lived, their son had disappeared and ended up dead in a military hospital,” he said. “He evidently was a campus activist.”
McElhaney earned a master’s in international affairs at Columbia University, then joined the U.S. Foreign Service and moved to Portugal in 1973 to serve as a vice consul stamping visas and passports. That, he said, is the “introduction to international life.”
In 1974, the day after a one-day revolution toppled Portugal’s dictatorship, McElhaney said, he was held up inside the U.S. Embassy in Lisbon for 10 hours while a crowd of demonstrators unsuccessfully tried to break down the doors.
For the next two years, he said, he witnessed the once-fascist dictatorship drastically change to Western ideals. But his time there ended abruptly in 1976.
“They thought I was a spy,” McElhaney said with a laugh. When a newspaper printed his name, phone number and address, he moved out and left the country shortly thereafter.
During his 34 years in the Foreign Service, he also served in Brussels, Rome, Milan, Paris, Sarajevo and Cairo.
In the late ‘70s, McElhaney said, he worked on negotiations that led the independence of the African nation of Namibia. During the `90s, he was the United States’ deputy representative at NATO during the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts.
He served three years as U.S. ambassador to Bosnia-Herzegovina until he retired in 2007.
McElhaney said he got the idea for a conference after attending a similar forum at the University of Colorado at Boulder. That five-day conference, which was founded in 1948, drew 77,000 people last year, according to its website.
The first St. Petersburg conference, which was held in the USFSP building that once housed the Dali Museum, was developed from his “Rolodex and laptop” and drew 300 people, he said.
The conference is a nonprofit and “all speakers come on their own nickel.”
It’s now his goal to make the conference a weeklong event.
For more on the conference, see http://stpetersburgintheworld.com/conference/