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In 1976, long before Rick Barton served as the Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees at the United Nations and later as Assistant Secretary of State for Conflict and Stabilization Operations in the U.S. State Department, he ran for Congress in Maine. He lost.
As he writes in his new book, “Peace Works: America’s Unifying Role in a Turbulent World,” when he started the campaign for Congress, he told voters that, win or lose, he’d be grateful at the end. “My commitment was to thank them at their work places for a week after the election, whatever the result,” Barton writes.
Two days after the election, his alarm clock went off at 5:30 on a dreary November morning. After silencing the alarm, Barton climbed back into bed and told his wife he wasn’t feeling well. “For the only time in our then first year of marriage,” he writes, “she bellowed out, ‘You are blowing it!’ I jumped out of bed, drove to the pay shed at the S.D. Warren paper mill in Westbrook, and started thanking the surprised workers.”
Lessons that Barton learned in Maine stayed with him as he traveled the world, trying to improve people’s lives. As he makes clear in the book, he owes a tremendous debt to his wife, Kit Lunney, and to hundreds of friends and colleagues. “People matter,” he writes, “and relationships fuel progress.”