In 1967, Arlen Specter’s mayoralty campaign recruited McCormack to draft a major paper on proposals for improving race relations in Philadelphia.
Following the campaign, McCormack was hired as head of operations research for Philco-Ford in their Southeast Asia headquarters in Saigon, Vietnam.
After the resignation of President Nixon, McCormack served in the Treasury Department as Deputy to the Assistant Secretary for International Affairs and later as a consultant advisor to Ambassador Harald B. Malmgren at the White House Office of the Special Trade Representative on a major commodity policy initiative.
Senator Jesse Helms After the election of Ronald Reagan in 1981, McCormack was named the Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs.
In 1989, newly elected president George H. W. Bush named McCormack to be the Under Secretary of State for Economic and Agricultural Affairs.
After ten years in the State Department, McCormack became a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.
Subsequently, he served as a consultant to a number of American companies and to the managing director of the IMF, Horst Koehler.
[4] After testifying in May 2006 before the Senate Banking Committee on potential problems associated with derivatives and related issues,[5] McCormack was recruited by Merrill Lynch as a Vice Chairman.