The Making of Citizen Thomas Callahan
by Lisa Birzen '03
Thomas Callahan ’84, currently a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the
US Department of State, believes in a liberal arts education. “My father
was class of 1947 at Dartmouth and used to quote to us one of his favorite
professors, a philosophy professor named Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey: ‘The
goal of education is to form the Citizen. And the Citizen is a person
who, if need be, can refound his civilization.’”
Rosenstock-Hussey was a German Jew who had fought in the Kaiser’s army in
WWI. As Nazism took hold in post-Weimar Germany, he emigrated to
America.
“He and my father clicked, I think, because neither of them took anything
for granted. Rosenstock-Hussey had lived through chaos and war. My
father had just completed his tour with the Marine Corps in WWII. My
father’s parents were Irish immigrants and he grew up during the
Depression. They were very poor. By the time I came along, my
brothers and sisters had it pretty good. He didn’t want us to ever take
life for granted.”
Tom Callahan, a Government major at Dartmouth, grew up in Darien, CT, amidst
other values such as “education, hard work and making a contribution to
society.” His father attended Dartmouth thanks to the Marine Corps.
The experience opened up new worlds to him. Neil Callahan ’47 read
voraciously, majored in English and Philosophy, and became friends with Robert
Frost while at Dartmouth. Upon graduation, he chose to return to
Connecticut and start his own contracting business rather than pursue doors
that his Ivy League credentials might have opened.
“My father believed strongly in education and the liberal arts. He
didn’t judge a man by his paycheck or his title. I think I learned from
his example that there are many paths so long as you are righteous and true to
yourself.”
In life, Callahan has been motivated to “lead an interesting life…to be
relevant.” In a profile of him in the June 1984 issue of the Dartmouth
Alumni Magazine, on the verge of his graduation, he was quoted as saying:
“Someone once said, ‘the unexamined life isn’t worth living.’ Well, I
hope I always follow those words.”
And Callahan has remained true to this promise: his professional career has
included business, international relief work, foreign policy oversight in the
House and Senate, executive branch policy toward Africa, and both operational
and policy work in U.S. counterterrorism efforts. At every turn he has
measured his pursuits against the dual yardsticks of interest and meaning.
His father’s love of Dartmouth no doubt influenced Tom’s decision to attend
the College rather than Harvard, Stanford, Middlebury, or Cornell, where he was
also accepted. “I looked carefully at the other schools, but there is
truly something special about Dartmouth. When I visited during my junior
spring in high school, it just felt so right.”
Even before graduation, Callahan’s college career was full of diverse
experiences marked by both academic and athletic honors. He earned
varsity letters all four years as a diver on the swim team - where he was a
walk-on his freshman year, not having competed in high school. He also
rowed freshman crew and earned a letter from the track team during his junior
year.
Callahan was serious about his studies, graduating Magna Cum Laude and Phi
Beta Kappa, but he also enjoyed fraternity life at Dartmouth. He was a
member of Phi Delta Alpha and became its president, as well as serving as vice
president of the Inter-Fraternity Council and chairman of the IFC judiciary
committee. Just before he took the reins as president, Phi Delt was put
on social probation by the administration for a series of behavioral incidents
and infractions by its members. Callahan was faced with the difficult
task of finding a way “to reconcile the house’s objectives with the legitimate
concerns of the Administration.”
In this capacity, he worked closely with Dean of the College Ed Shanahan and
Dean of Students Lee Levison, both of whom helped him figure out how to get the
house “back into the good graces of the College.”
“I learned a great deal from that experience – how to get things done and
how to lead without being obnoxious,” an experience that has undoubtedly served
him well in the leadership positions he has gone on to hold within the various
departments of the United States government. “There are boundaries that
any member of a community must accept and adhere to, but I am skeptical of
overly ambitious social engineering efforts by any college administration when
it comes to a campus of 18- to 22-year-olds. The glue that can be formed
among members of a fraternity or sorority is very durable. Many of my
fraternity brothers and I get back to Dartmouth whenever we can and, despite
our advanced years, we feel quite at home in the Phi Palace. And rather
than resent the intrusion of these old codgers, the current brothers seem to
enjoy our company. I guess there’s no accounting for taste!”
He let his interests dictate his course schedule at college. “I found
professors I liked and took more of their classes.” He fondly remembers
literature classes taught by the Russian Department’s Professors Richard
Sheldon and Barry Scherr, as well as the Religion Department’s Professors
Richard Oden and Hans Penner.
Overall, he “had a really good college career,” and left an impression on
administrators not only as a high-caliber athlete and a dedicated student but
also as a down-to-earth, humble individual. When Callahan was a senior,
Dean Levison said, “The one thing that impresses me about Tom is his lack of
ego. He has excelled in many areas but unless you know Tom very well you
would not know.”
Callahan received both the Cardozo and Kramer prizes his junior year and the
Barrett Cup his senior year. These recognitions of all-around achievement
came to Callahan as a surprise. “There were so many outstanding
individuals at Dartmouth in my class who were as deserving of these awards as
I.”
Reaching his senior year, Callahan recalls having little idea about what
should come next. “I went through campus recruiting and got a
few good job offers, but I suppose I was looking for that same gut feeling of
‘rightness’ that I had about the decision to come to Dartmouth. It never
happened.” Callahan turned down his offers from IBM, Merrill Lynch, and
Leo Burnett advertising and went instead to Chicago where he stayed with his
sister Jean (Tuck ’80). He worked odd jobs until he landed a paid
position as deckhand on the 93-foot sailboat Odyssey. He and
other crewmembers sailed it through the Great Lakes, up the St. Lawrence River,
and down the coasts of Canada and the U.S. to Florida.
“I loved learning the skills needed for handling and navigating a large
boat. We saw amazing sights and ran into some horrendous weather off the
coast of Nova Scotia one night that challenged us and nearly killed me.”
From Florida, the ship was sailing on to the Caribbean to do charter work
throughout the winter, and though that prospect was “enormously appealing in
some ways, I recognized that it was probably not a ‘career path’ that I should
get overly accustomed to!”
He reunited with the people at IBM, who “were still willing to give me a
job” and worked at their Burlington, VT location for the next two years.
Still in search of the “gut feel” for work both interesting and meaningful,
Callahan found his way in 1987 to the international relief organization
AmeriCares. During the next four years, both as Special Projects Director
and later as a consultant “trouble shooter,” Callahan organized missions to
Ecuador, Mozambique, Sudan, Ethiopia, Poland, the Philippines, Laos, Lebanon,
and even Iran.
“Bob Macauley, the founder and CEO, put a lot of faith in me. He was
the kind of executive who encouraged people to take the initiative and ‘make it
happen.’ He had little patience for bureaucracy and good intentions that
weren’t backed up by results. He also was a very keen observer of
international politics and foreign policy.”
Callahan went on to Yale Law School, choosing it over other programs for its
reputation for public policy. In his second year, his mother developed a
terminal illness, and he did not finish the program to attain his degree.
“It’s nutty go to through nearly three years of law school and not finish, but
between my mother’s cancer and the growing realization that I did not want to
practice law, I just sort of lost motivation for a while. It can happen,
and you just have to move on. I think it worth mentioning here because
alumni profiles often just herald the high points, and most careers have a few
valleys as well.”
In 1991, he began working in the U.S. Senate, first for Senator Jack
Danforth of Missouri and later on the Committee on Foreign Relations as the
Director for African Affairs. No stranger to travel in foreign hot spots,
Callahan conducted oversight missions to Somalia prior to and during the U.S.
intervention there. He was also the first U.S. official to arrive in
Rwanda after the genocide that caused the US embassy to evacuate and killed
nearly a million Rwandans. “That experience challenged my faith. In
June 1994 when I arrived, there were bodies everywhere. The frenzy of
murder that swept over that country was an evil that is difficult to
comprehend.”
In 1995, he began looking for an opportunity that would allow him to live
for an extended period overseas. “You can get a lot from a two-week trip,
but it is not the same as living in a foreign culture for two years.”
With the blessing of his new bride, Kathy Gord Callahan ’86, he accepted a job
with the International Republican Institute, part of the National Endowment for
Democracy, to direct its democracy and governance program in South
Africa. “South Africa in 1996 and 1997 was fascinating. The country
and its various cultures are like an onion, with many, many layers. For
both Kathy and me, it was just an extraordinary experience.”
Enhancing their experience even more, Grace, their first child, was born in
Johannesburg in 1997. Claire, their second daughter, was born three years
later.
Returning from overseas, Callahan became Director of Public Policy and
Government Relations for World Vision, a relief and development organization,
and later joined the staff of the House Committee on International
Relations. He was then offered a position on Secretary of State
Colin Powell’s Policy Planning Staff, a kind of internal think tank for
the department. His first day on the job was September 10, 2001 – one day
before 9/11.
“Our focus certainly shifted after 9/11,” Callahan said. “People say
that 9/11 was a wake-up call, but I disagree. We’d already had wake-up
calls – in 1993 with the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1998 with the
embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, in 1999 with the USS Cole attack, and
with other incidents that didn’t make it into the newspapers. The wake-up
calls were there, but we just kept hitting the snooze button and rolling
over.”
Callahan is still at the Department of State five years later, and he has
performed a variety of interesting roles in that time. While at Policy
Planning, Callahan conducted a security assessment for a ceasefire agreement in
Sudan’s remote Nuba Mountains. “A couple of Army colonels and I flew into
some pretty remote air strips and hiked through dramatic terrain to meet up
with rebels of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. Civil war in Sudan
has continued with only brief interruptions since the country’s independence in
1956. The suffering there has been of biblical proportions, and it
continues today with fighting in Sudan’s western region of Darfur.”
In 2002, Callahan joined the Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic
Security. Working closely with the Coordinator for Counterterrorism,
Callahan helped guide the Antiterrorism Assistance program (ATA) as it
quadrupled in size and took on new missions. “ATA trains and equips
foreign law enforcement and security organizations to prevent and investigate
terrorist attacks. While I was there, we helped establish specialist
counterterrorism units in Indonesia, Pakistan, and Kenya. We established
a Presidential Protection Unit for President Karzai in Afghanistan. And
we set up an anti-kidnapping unit in Colombia. It was tough work, but
extremely interesting and rewarding.”
Last year, Callahan was promoted to a Deputy Assistant Secretary in the
State Department’s Bureau of Legislative Affairs. “Working effectively
with Congress is key to the Department’s objectives. Our bureau’s role is
important, and it’s been wonderful to be able to be home with my wife and two
girls at night and on weekends -- but I must admit that I miss the operational
and policy work of the counterterrorism arena.”
Asked what advice he would give to undergraduates or recent alumni about to
embark on their careers, Callahan said, “Whether you are in government,
business, law, arts, medicine, whatever, I think integrity and character matter
enormously. How you treat others and conduct yourself are habits that are
formed early in one’s life, and they affect everything you do. Second, I
would say that passion and interest are guides that should be listened
to. I believe one can make a living at almost anything if one is
passionate about it and energized by it. I don’t subscribe to the
‘practical’ school of thought that counsels a poet-at-heart to go into
engineering just because he’s good at math and engineering pays better.
There are lots of engineers who are good at math, but only those who are
passionate for the work will excel and feel fulfilled.”
Asked to speculate on what might be next for him, Callahan demurred, saying
that for now he served at the pleasure of the President and Secretary
Condoleezza Rice. As an appointee, he knows that he will be out of a job
by the end of 2008. Whatever comes next, one can be reasonably sure that
Tom Callahan’s pursuits will be both interesting and meaningful, and that he
will continue to take nothing for granted.
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