[5] After graduating from Columbia University in 1931, Clift found employment at the New York Public Library in the reference section.

[4][3] Drafted into the army in 1942,[1] Clift eventually found himself working for the Office of Strategic Services where he was named executive director of the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications, reporting to OSS Executive Director Frederick Kilgour, with whom Clift had become acquainted at the Columbia University Library.

[6] "[He] was exposed, for example to the ambitious project known as Armed Forces Editions, a program that introduced hundreds of thousands of GIs to paperback books…"[6] Clift was honorably discharged from the Army in 1945.

While at Yale, he also became a fellow of Trumbull College and developed a position classification and pay plan that became a model for academic librarians.

[1] From May 7 to June 5, 1961, Clift was head of the United States Delegation of Librarians while visiting the Soviet Union under the Cultural Exchange Agreement.