Negotiating Survival: Four Priorities After Rio

Richard Newton Gardner was born in Manhattan, New York on July 9, 1927. After military service with the Army News Service in New Jersey, he studied international economics at Harvard College. He received a law degree from Yale University in 1951 and a Ph.D. in economics from Oxford University in 1954. His doctoral thesis became a book entitled Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy: The Origins and the Prospects of Our International Economic Order. He taught international law at Columbia University. In the early 1960s, he was deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs under President John F. Kennedy. He was the American ambassador to Italy from 1977 to 1981 and the American ambassador to Spain from 1993 to 1997. He was an adviser to several Democratic presidential candidates including Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton. He returned to academia between his diplomatic postings, retiring in 2012. His memoir, Mission Italy: On the Front Lines of the Cold War, was published in 2005. He died from congestive heart failure on February 16, 2019 at the age of 91.