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Rick Barton '71 (left) in Bosnia in 1994 with OTI co-founder Steve Morrison.

It's a long way from a management consultancy in Portland, Maine, to provincial villages in Haiti. For three years now, Frederick (Rick) Barton '71 has spanned those distances with a diplomat's aplomb and a businessman's bottom-line instinct as director of the federal Office of Transition Initiatives.

For once, the bureaucratic jargon says what the agency actually does: OTI, an offshoot of the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), designs and implements programs that promote a return to normalcy in strife-torn nations. "We're the venture capitalists of foreign aid," Barton observes. "We don't get bogged down in master plans drawn up in Washington." If that attitude sometimes throws AID and State Department noses out of joint, Barton simply apologizes with a smile--and goes right on doing what his new and unique agency has been empowered to do.

Simply put: when the shooting stops, OTI's teams of specialists move in to try to identify credible, indigenous leaders; set up at least rudimentary infrastructure; and help the former combatants find nonmilitary jobs or job training. In Haiti, for example, by traveling the countryside, arousing local interest in participating in the governing process, OTI helped to decentralize authority and pave the way for a peaceful transition from rule by the military junta to governance by the popularly elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

For Barton, the job and its mission represent a logical extension of his years at Harvard, where, he says, "I majored in community," holding a half dozen posts that ranged from sports editor to arts-festival director. Back in his native Maine, he started a "marketing and organizational development" company and became a force in Democratic politics (including state party chairman). When Clinton AID chief Brian Atwood set up OTI in 1994, Barton's friend and mentor, then-U.S. Senator George Mitchell, helped him get the job.

Barton operates not only in the director's chair but also in the field. He has led teams into politically, and sometimes physically, perilous situations: negotiating with murderers in Liberia ("We deal," he says, "with just about any effective partners we find"), working out of a bullet-ridden ambulance in Bosnia, confronting point-blank the horrors of genocide in Rwanda, and jouncing along more rutted back roads than he can remember. "What we aim for is not to rebuild a postwar society but to give it a start on regaining stability," he says. "Although we offer to help, we don't push. If they say no, that's okay." OTI itself sometimes says no--as it did in Liberia. Barton decided the situation was too volatile, and the so-called leaders too untrustworthy, to permit effective intervention. The agency's probable next destination: Guatemala, where a peace agreement may finally have ended decades of civil war.

OTI is structured for a relatively quick and inexpensive in and out. The maximum stay in any country is two years; Haiti, the most successful intercession to date, cost a mere $6.5 million. Both of those characteristics contribute heavily to the agency's popularity in Congress. So does its narrowly targeted approach. Even conservative Republicans, including sworn enemies of conventional foreign aid, tolerate OTI. "We hope that we exemplify the best of today's foreign assistance," Barton says, "that we demonstrate both its relevance and its positive impact."

~Roger M. Williams

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