Alan Wolff is one of four Deputy Directors-General at the World Trade Organization in Geneva, and accessions - that is, responsibility for new and prospective members - is part of his portfolio.  In our last entry, we talked about two speeches Ambassador Wolff gave not long ago.  One was to a group of negotiators from countries seeking to join the WTO and the other was at a conference in Kazakhstan back in September.  The February 11 presentation to 29 negotiators was also the source of today's featured quote.  On Tuesday, we noted that it was a speech that included a reminiscence about Ambassador Wolff's own career, and we promised to share that "tomorrow."  Alas that was a poetic use of the word "tomorrow."  We should have said, "in our next entry."  With apologies for the delay, here is that reminiscence.

ALAN WOLFF
When I was a very young lawyer, I was given the responsibility for the trade law portfolio at the U.S. Treasury, the U.S. equivalent of a finance ministry. It was my second year in the U.S. government. My law school did not have a course on the international trade rules. I knew very little about the rules of the trading system. As a college student, I had only the basic economics course. It was not enough. I wanted to understand the theoretical basis for why trade took place, and I did not know anything about how other countries expected the U.S. to act. So, I enrolled in night school at George Washington University. I was fortunate that the professors were excellent. In the GATT course, one of them was General Counsel of the World Bank (Lester Nurick) and the other was a very distinguished senior international trade lawyer (Walter Sterling Surrey).

During the next year when I got into more challenging problems, I hired the world's best-known GATT expert, Professor John Jackson, as a consultant. He was one of the key individuals who envisaged having a WTO. I became the Office Director at the Treasury for the then current round of multilateral trade negotiations (the Tokyo Round). Three years later John Jackson invited me to be his Deputy General Counsel at the Office of the Special Representative for Trade Negotiations in the Executive Office of the U.S. President. With the Congress, we drafted the basic trade legislation that allowed the US to participate in trade negotiations as a delegation from the U.S. Congress. I got to be lead negotiator on several issues, one was specialty steel. I became Jackson's successor as General Counsel. And when a new President came into office, I moved up to be a senior negotiator for the US government as Deputy Trade Representative.

But it all started with a basic course in what the international trading rules were all about ... .