John B. Ritch III

Ritch was born into a Navy family during World War II and grew up in the postwar years in locations on the East and West Coasts associated with the military career of his father, a 1939 graduate of the Naval Academy.

Ritch's grandfather, a Montanan, one-time cowboy, and longtime friend of famed painter Charlie Russell, was among the new state's first historians, known for his nostalgic poetry and beguiling reminiscences about the fast-disappearing West.

[2] Ritch III attained a moment of national fame at age 10 by winning a local contest in Bremerton, Washington (home of Puget Sound Naval Shipyard) that offered a bicycle to the top collector of used shoes for war refugees in Korea.

On April 19, 1953, dominating the front page of New York's Sunday News (then the nation's major tabloid) was "Johnnie Ritch" sitting atop a mountain of 10,000 pairs of shoes piled dockside in Bremerton for shipment to Korea.

In 1970, as a goodwill gesture to the Korean Republic, the Army assigned Ritch to spend four months in Seoul as coach of Korea's Olympic basketball team as it prepared for that year's Asian Games.

For the next 25 years, this annual legislation served not only to authorize appropriations for the State Department budget [7] but also as the vehicle for a series of innovative bipartisan amendments designed to shape the policies and institutions of American diplomacy.

After 1979, when the previously unified SFRC staff was enlarged and bifurcated along partisan lines, Ritch worked on the Democratic side with such noted Senators as Church, McGovern, Pell, Sarbanes, Kerry, Dodd, Moynihan, and, most extensively, with Joe Biden.

[17] In 1984, after covertly crossing the Pakistani border to spend time with Afghan resistance forces in the field, Ritch authored a Senate report describing the Soviet army’s brutalities in Afghanistan.

As WNA head, Ritch was an international advocate for expanded use of nuclear power, propounding its role as an environmentally beneficial technology of crucial value in preventing catastrophic climate change.

[21] In 2003, to mark the 50th anniversary of President Eisenhower's Atoms-for-Peace initiative, Ritch conceived and launched the World Nuclear University, sponsor of an annual "summer institute" that each year brings together young nuclear-energy professionals from some 30 nations.

[24] Ritch's publications include pieces in The Atlantic[25] and Prospect[26] magazines, The Washington Post,[27] The New York Times,[28] The International Herald Tribune,[29] World Energy Review,[30] Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,[31] and Arms Control Today,[32] and two law journal articles—on the war and treaty powers of the Constitution—co-authored with then-Senator Joe Biden.