{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/jm23b5xf7f/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Interview with Justin McMahan, May 16, 2022"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/212/original/LOHI_aviarybanner2.jpg?1741032082","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2022-05-16 (created)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Interviewer"]},"value":{"en":["White, John"]}},{"label":{"en":["Interviewee"]},"value":{"en":["McMahan, Justin"]}},{"label":{"en":["Description"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eJustin McMahan relates his exposure to the EastWest Institute and how it shaped his life, from encountering John Mroz as a teenager with his father at Aspen Group meetings, to meeting John Mroz as a young adult and leaving his job at a Big Four accounting firm to work for EWI, to his later career and international experience. He talks about EWI's work in the early 2000s, especially in relation to China, and his own career choices between Wall Street and the U.S. State Department. He also reflects on John Mroz's unique leadership qualities and the importance of Track-II diplomacy. \u003c/p\u003e (abstract)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Contributing Institution"]},"value":{"en":["College of Charleston Libraries"]}},{"label":{"en":["Media Type"]},"value":{"en":["Oral History"]}},{"label":{"en":["Subject - Personal or Corporate"]},"value":{"en":["Ahtisaari, Martti","Aspen Institute","Citibank (New York, N.Y.)","EastWest Institute","Mroz, John Edwin","Russell, George F."]}},{"label":{"en":["Subject - Topical"]},"value":{"en":["Corporate culture","Decision making","Entrepreneurship","Institution building","International relations","Non-governmental organizations","Track two diplomacy"]}},{"label":{"en":["Subject - Geographic"]},"value":{"en":["Balkan Peninsula","China","Serbia"]}},{"label":{"en":["Language"]},"value":{"en":["English (primary)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Type IMT"]},"value":{"en":["video/mp4"]}},{"label":{"en":["Rights Statement"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eCopyright © College of Charleston\u003c/p\u003e"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date Digital"]},"value":{"en":["2023-01-25"]}}],"summary":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eJustin McMahan relates his exposure to the EastWest Institute and how it shaped his life, from encountering John Mroz as a teenager with his father at Aspen Group meetings, to meeting John Mroz as a young adult and leaving his job at a Big Four accounting firm to work for EWI, to his later career and international experience. He talks about EWI's work in the early 2000s, especially in relation to China, and his own career choices between Wall Street and the U.S. State Department. He also reflects on John Mroz's unique leadership qualities and the importance of Track-II diplomacy.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e"]},"requiredStatement":{"label":{"en":["Attribution"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eCopyright \u0026copy; College of Charleston\u003c/p\u003e"]}},"provider":[{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus","type":"Agent","label":{"en":["Lowcountry Digital Library"]},"homepage":[{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/","type":"Text","label":{"en":["Lowcountry Digital Library"]},"format":"text/html"}],"logo":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/212/original/LOHI_aviarybanner2.jpg?1741032082","type":"Image"}]}],"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/174/054/small/McMahan_Justin_May2022%282%29.mp4_1674673515.jpg?1674673515","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - McMahan_Justin_May2022_(2).mp4"]},"duration":3182.64,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/174/054/small/McMahan_Justin_May2022%282%29.mp4_1674673515.jpg?1674673515","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-cofc.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/174/054/original/McMahan_Justin_May2022_%282%29.mp4?1674673510","type":"Video","format":"video/mp4","duration":3182.64,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["Transcript of Interview with Justin McMahan, May 16, 2022 [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JOHN WHITE\n\nOkay, good afternoon. I am John White. Today is May 16th, 2022. This is for the EastWest Institute's oral history project at the College of Charleston. And now if my interviewee would introduce himself and give his name, date of birth, and place of birth, we'll get started with the questions.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=6.0,28.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nSure. Hi, John. It's good to see you. My name is Justin Edward McMahan. Last name is spelled M-C-M-A-H-A-N. My date of birth is January 12th, 1976 and my place of is the city of San Francisco.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=28.0,48.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/3","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JOHN WHITE\n\nWell, thank you for taking the time to talk with me this morning. We're very excited about this project here at the College of Charleston. And the first thing I thought I would ask about is how did you first hear of the EastWest Institute?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=48.0,62.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/4","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nSo I first heard of the EastWest Institute through my dad. My dad, he is very much retired now, but he was a businessman and so we would have people at the house who would come over and they were also business people. And then once in a while, he would take me to meetings of a group called the Aspen Group, which I am still involved with today, including this morning. And there was a co-chairman, I think he was, he was definitely senior in the Aspen Group. And this is a small group of about 25 businessmen, today there are business women as well. His name was George Russell and he was a very well-known person in the business community. And my dad was friends because they were in this group with George and George also had a very close relationship with John Mroz and with the EastWest Institute. He was, while I was there, which is between 2004 and 2006, he was the American co-chairman because there was a European co-chairman as well.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=62.0,140.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/5","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nAnd so I would go to these Aspen Group meetings with my dad and John would sometimes be there and he would speak to us. And then we would finish and I would say to my dad, \"God, dad, this guy is so interesting. He's so much more interesting than all of the business people who you bring over to the house or who I meet at your office on a given day.\" And he said he agreed with me and he said, \"Yeah, I've been close with John.\" And so we fast forward a little bit, my dad took me to New York a few times when I was a teenager. We would have lunch or have dinner with John there. And I remember one time in particular at a restaurant on 3rd Street in New York, and John would talk about the work that we were doing or that the Institute was doing on the Israeli Palestinian conflict. And also on some of the Russian, because this is after the Soviet Bloc, so the Russian-U.S. Track II diplomacy.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=140.0,210.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/6","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nAnd then we finished that dinner and I said, \"John, I want to work for this guy one day.\" So fast forward a little bit further and I moved to New York. I transferred with Ernst \u0026 Young, who I was working for at the time in April 2001. And from then on, I would say like every six months I would call John or email him and ask him to have dinner with me. And usually he said, \"Sorry, I can't do it.\" Oftentimes it was because he was in Moscow or traveling to some other crazy place. But he did do it. And so there was one time in 2003 where he said, \"Are you free for dinner on such and such a night?\" And this is probably like September or something of 2003 and I was working for Johnson \u0026 Johnson. I was consulting to them in Pennsylvania and I just thought to myself, this is my chance. I got to go see this guy.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=210.0,272.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/7","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nSo I drove roughly two hours into New York for dinner to meet John. And we had dinner across the street from his place on 62nd and Broadway, where I subsequently went to many times. And he said to me that his deputy, or chief of staff, or basically it was the guy who worked for him, his guy who he would lean on to do a lot of different things on the operational side, on the programmatic side, and on the development side, and he said that it was a two year program and that it was... I don't know. He kind of pitched it to me as like a different kind of PhD. And so I said, \"Okay, I would like to apply for that.\" And so we had a couple more calls and then he said, \"Okay, I'm going to introduce you to some other people.\" And so they interviewed me and also I met with Ryan Crider, who was his deputy before me, who I stayed friends with for a long time.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=272.0,340.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/8","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nSo I met him for a beer one night and then he kind of gave me a little bit of the backstory and what it would be like for me. And I said, \"Okay, I want to do this.\" So then I started interviewing with some of the other VPs and that included Don Brown, our CFO, Dan Puls, close friend of mine today, Head of Development, Vazil Hudak, our Head of Security based in Brussels, and Mathias Mossberg our Head of Middle East Work based in New York. And so I had all those interviews and eventually I got an offer and I accepted it. And so it was the first job that I'd ever left and the only one actually in my career, and this was leaving Ernst \u0026 Young to go to EWI. And they said, \"When do you want to start?\" And so it all just kind of worked out that I started on my birthday, which is January 12th. So I started on January 12th, 2004, and thus began two and a half years of a life changing experience that I'll never forget.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=340.0,406.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/9","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JOHN WHITE\n\nSo your story seems really similar to everyone else we're interviewing in the sense that John Mroz seemed to just enthrall people, that once they met him and began talking with him, they just wanted to work with him, to do things with him, and be part of this Institute that he founded. What was it about him that made working with him and with EastWest so appealing to you at such a young age where you would sort of move from a really promising career with an incredibly well known company to working for EWI?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=406.0,446.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/10","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nYeah. I think that your point is a good one about leaving a big six or maybe it was a big four accounting firm at the time for whom I consulted, but I did feel that tremendous urge and belief that I should do that. And in terms of my time, and why, and what I saw in him, it was, I don't know. I think a couple of things. One is that he was really hard on me. He took no BS and he wanted straight answers. And he was, I don't know, probably the busiest guy I ever met in terms of the demands on his time. And so my job was to try and take as much of the demands on his time off of him and take them on myself of which some of those I could do and some of them, I couldn't because they wanted to deal with John only.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=446.0,511.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/11","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nThey wanted to deal with the principal. But throughout that process, he was very hard on me, but by the same token, he was so caring and he was... I mean, he really took care of me in a professional way. And so whether it was in New York and he would ask me to do certain things and I would always try and do them to the best of my ability, to his place when I would go over there because there were some times when I would say, \"I need to talk to you,\" and something had come up and he needed to know about it. And so I would go to his place and I remember that he was, on more than one occasion, he was packing for Moscow where he would go for a couple of weeks.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=511.0,560.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/12","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nAnd so we would kind of talk through what it was and then he would tell me what he thought that I should do. And usually I would say I would just do it and sometimes I would have some other questions and we'd figure it out. And then during my time there, he would say to other people and to me that he was going to internationalize me, which was pretty much true. I mean, in my two and a half years with him we traveled to Turkey, to Russia, to Ukraine, which we can maybe go into a little bit, to China. I was pretty instrumental in the Institute's first foray into China with the Chinese Institute of International Studies, which is like their kind of not for profit arm that reports up to the foreign ministry in Beijing and so I was doing that. To Bulgaria, to Prague, to all of these different places. And I learned about a world of foreign policy and international relations that I really didn't have...","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=560.0,634.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/13","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nI mean, my folks, I would go on some trips to overseas with my parents when I was younger, but it was nothing like what I learned and what I was subject to at EWI. So I think if I can kind of encapsulate what drew me to him and to the Institute, it was how tough he was on me, how caring he was in a professional way, and also how he really did internationalize me such that I finally left after two and a half years, I was going to be one and a half years. And they said, Don, really the CFO, he said, \"We need you to stay for another year. Can you put off business school?\" And I said, \"Okay.\" And so I did. And then when I was there at Georgetown, because of my experience at EWI, I also applied and was accepted to and went through the master's in foreign service program. And it was really an academic next chapter in my time at EWI. So those are some of the things that drew me to the Institute and to John.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=634.0,700.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/14","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JOHN WHITE\n\nCould you give me a little bit more information about some of these projects that you worked on in the Ukraine and China and sort of how they fit in with the larger mission of the EastWest Institute?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=700.0,712.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/15","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nYeah. So to answer the second part of your question about how it fit into the larger mission, that is a tougher question because John was a man who was asked to do so many things by so many people and not all of those asks and not all of those answers fit into a core mission of the Institute. We had while I was there a number of programs and we had a security program that was really mostly focused on Russia, we had a Middle East program that was Israeli Palestinian stuff that was run by Mathias Mossberg, we had a project in the Balkans, which is if you think of what we were doing in Russia, that was very high level policy work on a Track II level, what we were doing in the Balkans was much more local.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=712.0,780.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/16","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nAnd the best story that I can tell from that work with Sasha [Havlicek] is that between Bosnia and Serbia, those are two countries, they were at war with each other, and then they came to a peace. But one of the things that they wouldn't do is things that were at border, stuff that was at the border. And so there was one thing that Sasha did, that we did as an Institute, and that was work with the fire departments. So there could be a fire in Serbia and the closest fire department might be two miles away in Croatia, but they would go to a fire department that was still in Serbia that maybe it was 20 miles away. And so Sasha worked with a lot of the mayors in those Southeastern Europe countries in order to get them to agree that for important things like fires that could hurt people, hurt kids, that they could just bring the closest fire department, even if it was across the border with a country whom they had been at war with not that long ago.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=780.0,854.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/17","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nSo anyway, so that's a little story about the Balkans work that we did. And something else that I should mention is the leadership function that we had. And we would bring together in our CELA, Central Eurasia Leadership Academy, young people usually in their 30s, I guess, and they were from the five stands, which if you want to quiz me on, I can tell you what those are. The three Caucasus countries. And they would meet usually in one of those countries maybe once or twice during the year and then they would have a final meeting at Koç University in Istanbul, where I went with John because he wanted to meet all these kids or young people, young professionals. And so he would go there and he would speak to them and I got to go too.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=854.0,909.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/18","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nAnd then fast forward that to, so I've been with Citibank in New York and then in Dubai. And then when I came back to the states after that, a couple friends of mine who were familiar with EastWest, and they were familiar with CELA, which is now... Century Eurasia Leadership Academy when I was at EastWest, it was half EastWest and half the Society of International Business Fellows and now it's all Society of International Business Fellows, fine natural evolution. But then when I came back from Dubai, I had people say, \"Man, you've worked around the world, different places, and now you're back and you should go through this. You should go through the SIBF program.\" And that is a small way that I could kind of pay respect and homage to this program that originally I had worked on with John at EWI.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=909.0,967.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/19","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JOHN WHITE\n\nSo could you explain a little bit why sort of EWI was successful in some of these endeavors, like getting fire service, fire departments to work together in a way that governments and formal diplomacy wasn't? What were the real advantages to working through EWI through Track II in your mind, as opposed to sort of traditional diplomats?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=967.0,997.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/20","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nYeah. John, you're really starting off with all the tough questions here. I think that... So John, he started and how he got a name for himself is that during the 80s, there was a lot of conflict intention between kind of the NATO block and the Soviet Bloc. And part of that tension was nuclear tension, which some of us are feeling today a little bit because of the war that's happening in Ukraine. But it was... And let's see, so I guess that was Gorbachev who was in power most of the 80s and then Yeltsin, but was really in the 80s under Gorbachev and then on the U.S. side under Reagan, mostly, and then George H.W. Bush. And John was able to... He would talk to me about... Because I would go to Washington with him fairly often and those were always great visits, great meetings.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=997.0,1070.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/21","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nAnd I can maybe tell you some stories about that, but in the 80s, and this is before my time, I was in grade school, John was able to have Track II dialogues between senior American officials and senior officials in the Kremlin. And I don't know exactly what he was able to do, but from a nuclear threat standpoint he was able to get trust, he was able to engender trust both on the U.S. side and on the Soviet side. And that really helped in order to deescalate some of the tension. So if you think about that, so that was with the nuclear issue, which was probably the biggest foreign policy threat issue during the 80s that then went away for 30 years, and now it's kind of back at the forefront, but John was able to do that.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=1070.0,1130.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/22","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nAnd so if he was able to do that, then the Track II stuff that he would do in China, and in the Balkans, and still in Russia then, and we could talk about kind of the 90s and what EWI did then, but he had really cut his teeth on the toughest topic with the toughest people to work with on both sides. And so he was able to kind of carry that trust and apply it to more regional issues, especially around economic development in Eastern Europe, which if I had to break up the EWI history, the 80s, and other people might have different views and they probably had better kind of memories because I didn't work with them then, but my understanding is the 80s was about Soviet, NATO, nuclear, and just security issues. The 90s was about economic development in Eastern Europe and then EWI had offices in Budapest, and in Vienna, and then places like that, because these are countries that used to be communist countries, they were Soviet Bloc countries, and they were trying to transition to democracy and capitalism.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=1130.0,1210.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/23","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nAnd John was able to work with these countries with some of these senior folks on that topic. And then when I was there, so in the 2000s and the aughts, it was a little bit more of a hodgepodge. It was leadership, it was municipal, or just kind of local development, local working together in the Balkans. There was still a security element in Russia and in the West. And so I don't know if I would say it was the same kind of core mandate that we had in the 80s and in the 90s, but those are some of the things that we had up until I left.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=1210.0,1252.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/24","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JOHN WHITE\n\nSo other than John Mroz, was there anyone in particular or multiple people at the Institute who really made a big impression on you that you would say you learn the most from? I mean, are there other people who during this period we should really be highlighting their work in particular who were involved with the Institute?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=1252.0,1277.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/25","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nYeah. So I would say there are the five people. And so look, I was just a staffer and I was John's guy. I was the guy who did... I sort of talked a little bit about what I did for him, but I also supported the five vice presidents. And that was Vazil Hudak, who was from Bratislava, who you've probably interviewed, who I saw three or four weeks ago in South Carolina. He was a security guy. Mathias Mossberg, he was the Middle East guy, peace process. I remember that on my second day at EWI, Mathias, Ambassador Mossberg, he was the Swedish ambassador to Morocco, knocks on my door and he says, \"Would you like to have lunch? Or when can you have lunch?\" And I just thought to myself, that's kind of weird that he would just come, this senior guy, and ask me to lunch.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=1277.0,1337.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/26","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nSo of course I accepted. We go and had a sandwich or something like that at a local deli. And he explains to me after, he said, \"One of the things that you learn in the foreign service is that you always need to be friends with the people who kind of do some of the leg work, the administrative stuff, things like that. And so you're that guy and that's why I asked you to lunch.\" And I'm going to come back to Mathias in one minute, but so Vazil, Mathias, Sasha, who I mentioned in the Balkans, and then Don Brown, our CFO, he was the one I remember John sometimes he would yell down the hall, \"Don, I need to see you,\" because some financial thing had come up. And then Dan Puls, whose career has been... His career has been affected more than me because I ended up working on Wall Street, even though I really wanted to go into the State Department, but that's also another story.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=1337.0,1396.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/27","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nBut so those are the five people from EastWest who I would say really impacted me. And then there are other people on the board, George Russell, certainly, Martti Ahtisaari, he was our European co-chairman. He was the former foreign minister of Finland. He wrote a letter for me to Georgetown. I'll never forget when I would have to write his speeches and things. One time we were in Vienna, it was a board meeting, and I go to give him his remarks to his room, he answers in his PJs, his hair's all crazy. And he says, \"Okay, Justin, thank you.\" Then he looked it through quickly, he's like, \"I'm good.\" And he was and he was great. And he's had a great career. And so he is, and certainly Martti and George. George is not going to be able to be interviewed I don't think, but Martti maybe, he's somebody.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=1396.0,1451.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/28","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nAnd then there's other people like Peter Castenfelt. And I remember John one time, he was in Johannesburg, South Africa, and he says, \"I've got to go. I've got to go talk to Peter.\" This happened a few times. \"I've got to go talk to Peter.\" Peter was in London. And I was like, \"Okay, can't you talk to him on the phone? It's like a 12 hour flight from Johannesburg to London.\" He's like, \"Nope, got to go see him in person.\" So he flies from Johannesburg to London to go to see Peter. But Peter was in Charleston, so I saw him a few weeks ago as well. Peter never really... I was never at the level where he really kind of embraced me, but board members did and George Russell certainly did. So those are some other guys to talk to, that I would talk to.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=1451.0,1497.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/29","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nAnd what was the other part of your question? Oh, I know what I want to say. Mathias, so ran our Middle East program, so that was 2004 to 2006. I left, I started Georgetown, but then I got engaged in 2007. And so my fiancée at the time, we're talking and we're saying who the hell is going to marry us? And so I said to her, I said, \"What do you think about asking Mathias?\" And she said, \"I would love that.\" So I did. And so he was at this point, he was back in Stockholm, and so I called him or we probably called him together one day. And we said, \"Mathias, we're engaged and we want to get married. And we were wondering,\" we were like, \"Oh, we assume you've never done this before, but would you consider marrying us?\" So then he says, \"Well, actually I have, when you're the ambassador, there are people who are staff and they want to get married and they need somebody to marry them. So usually they go to the ambassador.\"","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=1497.0,1562.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/30","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nSo we were not the first ones for him, I think we were like his third wedding. But he came, we got married in Washington, D.C. He came there from Stockholm with his wife, Ulrica, who I know quite well, with whom I stayed when she was ambassador to Macedonia, stayed with her in Skopje. And so Mathias, he came and married us and we've been close to this day with my wife, Andrea, who's in the house right now. We've taken our kids that we have now to Stockholm. We've stayed with them. Ulrica was the Swedish ambassador to Iran while we were there, she came home. And it's just another example, John would always talk about the EWI family. And at the beginning, I was like, oh God, here we go with family this, but then I totally believe that.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=1562.0,1613.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/31","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nI mean, I am close to these people today and they have done things for me that you're on a very... We're professional colleagues or we were, but now we have a real personal relationship. Oh, and the last thing, Mathias, something happened in Washington where we didn't have our marriage license. So this is like the day before we were supposed to get married, I go down to whatever, one of the government buildings and I say, \"I need a wedding pass.\" And this woman, she was like, \"Get out of here. Not enough time. You're annoying me,\" something like that. So Mathias comes and he comes to meet me, and somehow he just goes in, he talks to her, they talk a little while, and then he turns back to me and he is like, \"It's done, I'll get your wedding license in like 20 minutes or something like that.\"","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=1613.0,1664.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/32","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nAnd I was like, \"How the hell did you do that?\" And he explained to me that it was the same reason why he asked me to lunch on my second day, because he's like, \"You have to be gentle and respectful of the lowest people on the totem pole because at the end of the day, they are the ones who are going to decide if you're going to get in to see the principal,\" and the principal, he was a judge. And he came in and he saw me in Mathias, and he was like, \"Yeah.\" Sorry. And he's like, \"What? Marriage license? No problem,\" signed. But it was the hardest part was getting into his office, which he was able to do. And it was just another great lesson that I take for my days at EWI and that is that don't always think about what you're going to say to the top guy, think about what you're going to say to the bottom guy or girl, because they're the ones who are going to determine whether or not you'll ever get to see the top guy ever. Is that okay?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=1664.0,1728.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/33","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JOHN WHITE\n\nI was curious if you were going to bring up that word, which is a recurring theme that everyone brings up without prompting, which is family when they talk about this organization. Is that something that really just came from John Mroz or was it just this weird alchemy of the people he managed to pull together to form the organization? Because it does seem like, again, without any prompting, every person we've interviewed brings up the notion of the EWI family. And it was certainly a recurring theme of the first convening here at the College of Charleston at the Mroz Institute.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=1728.0,1763.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/34","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nYeah, I think that... So part of that culture that I think at its core emanated from John and what he believed was important, and one of the things that he knew about people is that families, like your nuclear families, those are really important and they are important to me and they're important to everybody who has a family. And John was very good at that. And so when we would have the board meetings that were all over the world and wives were invited and husbands were invited, if the board member was a wife. And I think that the board members, which yes, John was a leader of the group of which we had 85 people or so when I was there between New York, and Brussels, and Moscow, and Prague, and he was a leader, but when you're the head of an organization, you are really at the, not at the mercy, but you're directed by the board.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=1763.0,1838.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/35","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nAnd so a lot of it was the relationships that he had with the board that were... I mean, that had to go well, otherwise there was no Institute. And so part of that relationship and part of the family aspect of that was making sure that husbands and wives of board members were just as welcoming as the board member themselves, himself or herself. And I would say that he was really good at that, something else that he taught me that I try to take in my professional life today. So I think he respected families. He brought the whole family and so... Oh, okay, here we go. Here's a good family story. I had one Aspen Group meeting, it was outside of Vienna, it was in Austria and we were all there.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=1838.0,1893.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/36","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nAnd so all the members and I was the son, I was the kid at this time. And we were talking about, I don't know, it was some kind of economic policy issue. And so he took some, or there were some questions asked and then he said, \"You know what I'd really like to hear? I'd like to hear from some of the next generation in this room.\" And of that I remember there was one kid and he worked for Nestle in Switzerland. And most people when they do something like this and they're there, they are speaking and they're going to leave that afternoon, they're not necessarily looking for what a board member or some other senior older person, what their kids think. And he did that. And that was, I think, a reflection of his belief in family, his belief in the next generation, and his belief on what EWI was all about.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=1893.0,1951.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/37","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JOHN WHITE\n\nSo were there setbacks when you were there and what did you learn from those? I mean, what were some of the things that maybe did not go well at EWI?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=1951.0,1961.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/38","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nSetbacks? So if I put on my kind of critical hat, I would say that everything on the programmatic side went pretty well. I think on the operational side, I think there were some staff, by the way, somebody else who you definitely have to interview is Adam Albion, who even knows where he is right now. And this was sort of a joke that when Ryan, when he was telling me about what my job would be like, he's like the hardest question you'll ever have to answer is can you find Adam? Because he ran our leadership academy and he does today in Southeast Asia, but he did it, he lived in, what was it called? The capital of Uzbekistan. And so he was a really hard guy to find, because he was always running around the Stans, which is a hard place to find in general and finding new people for the CELA Academy.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=1961.0,2040.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/39","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nBut I am in touch with Adam now and you guys should be too, you should interview him. And anyway, so back to setbacks, I think that one criticism that I would give is that at any organization, as it grows, every single person has to say what the mandate of the organization or the company is and what their role is and how they add to that. And I'm not sure that everybody would've been able to do that. And part of it, John was traveling all the time. I mean, he was probably gone like two thirds of the time, something like that away from New York. And so that was, I think it was... And he tried when he was in town to bring everybody together and we'd have group meetings and things like that. But I would say that's one kind of criticism that I would levy.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=2040.0,2097.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/40","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nAnother criticism is, and this goes back to the core mandate point, because John was always asked to do all of these things that were not... We didn't identify what is the core mandate. And I think it was clear in the 80s and it was clear in the 90s and it was not so clear in the aughts when I was working for John. We had different groups, we had different programs. We had a security program. We had a leadership program, Balkans program, a China program when I was there. But what is the mandate that ties together all of these things, because from a fundraising perspective, which every not-for-profit has to do if they're going to stick around, but you have to be able to kind of go back to the mandate, what is the core unifying philosophy in the foreign policy arena that kind of drives the growth, both capital growth, and HR growth, and programmatic growth. And I think that we sometimes had a little bit of trouble with that in the aughts. And then succession planning, I would say that was also tough.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=2097.0,2176.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/41","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nJohn would always talk about in some of these board meetings, staff meetings that I would staff and he would say, \"What if I get hit by a bus? Who's going to be the deputy?\" But he didn't really want or there was never anybody who could step into that role who John could say, \"This is my successor. This will be the next head of EWI.\" The one person who was also in Charleston and that's Steven Hines, as far as I know, he is the only Executive Vice President. There was five VPs, I think, when I was there. But Steven was before my time before he became head of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. And he was an Executive Vice President. He was based in Prague. He ran a lot of our 90s program, kind of the transition from communism to capitalism and he was great. So he would've maybe been somebody who could've been a successor, but at least when I was there, there nobody else was identified as when I'm gone, or when I'm retired, or whatever you're going to take over for me. So I put that as another criticism.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=2176.0,2250.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/42","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JOHN WHITE\n\nWas that a result of sort of mission creep and not focusing the organization or is that just a result of the fact that in hindsight no one but John Mroz could keep all of these various threads together? Because it does seem like after he passed that no one seemed to be able to keep everything together in the way that he could.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=2250.0,2275.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/43","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nYes. I mean, yeah that's definitely true, but I am sure, and I bumped into, after I've come back to New York, I would do my summers in New York in 2007 and 2008, and I would stop by EWI and I would see John maybe for a drink, or a lunch, or something like that and then I met some of the other senior people who were potential successors. But John, as amazing as he was, there are, I'm sure, I know that there are other people who could have done, who could have driven, who could have taken the organization to the next level and sometimes nobody can predict the future. I do remember after John got sick and when he was giving a speech in Boston, I believe, and that was kind of the beginning of his lymphoma. And so I think that that's not an excuse and I think that he could have found the right person or the board.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=2275.0,2350.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/44","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nI mean, I kind of think this is more almost of a board responsibility than a CEO responsibility, I guess it kind of is both. But yes, I mean, there was nothing that was real magic about this. It was a great program. It was a great Institute and there could have been somebody else who could have carried it into the future. And it was, I mean, John died in 2014 and the Institute continued on for another six, seven years, something like that. So it happened, but there was never that person who was able to kind of really be the next chapter in the Mroz legacy.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=2350.0,2394.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/45","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JOHN WHITE\n\nSo when you think about sort of the part that you played in the organization, what do you think was the thing that you are most proud of, of your personal work in EWI? What is it that if you had to hang your hat on one thing, what are you most proud of?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=2394.0,2409.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/46","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nI think I'd have to say China. So China became, and this is something else, this is totally an ability that he had to kind of see the future. In 2004, today you can't open the paper, you can't open the Financial Times, or the Wall Street Journal, or whatever without some article about conflict in China, about supply chain issues in China, about China and Russia and how they're kind of dealing with each other right now. In 2004, not so much and John started to go. And he, and I'll try to remember his name, Ambassador Mong, I believe was the guy's name in Beijing. And he said, \"I want to work with the Chinese. This is the future.\" And he was right. And what did I know? And so that started a working relationship with this woman who worked for Ambassador Mong and she was based in Beijing.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=2409.0,2487.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/47","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nAnd what do all staffers do? What you do is you try and lay the groundwork for a meeting of the principals. That's why they call them sherpas of the State Department, they're the ones who are going to kind of carry everything up until you get to the summit and help you get to the summit. And we had our, I guess, first summit between Ambassador Mong and his team and John and our team, which also included Daniel Bautista, who's gone on to have a great career in Spain and in Europe. And we wanted to start working with them and they had the Chinese Institute for international studies and we had the EastWest Institute. And so we just had a number of calls, a number of with just... Well, those were all calls because we didn't really do Zoom. We did not do Zoom at the time. And then we had the meeting in Beijing and my job was to go early and to go and meet with this woman and make sure... I mean, it was for my career and for her career, right?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=2487.0,2560.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/48","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nWe both had senior bosses and we wanted to make sure this whole thing didn't get screwed up. And so we spent a bunch of time together there in Beijing for around two or three days ahead of the meeting. And then there was the meeting between the principals, between John and Ambassador Mong. And what I remember is that I'm sitting kind of behind him, a little bit to the side, and John is able to go through the entire team and ask them questions about kind of what their role was going to be and how they were going to support Ambassador Mong in working with us in order to have this kind of CNO U.S. working relationship. And what he was able to do by doing that is that he could have just done the whole thing with Ambassador Mong and then his juniors would've left the meeting and they would say, \"Okay, whatever, well, I'll do what I can.\"","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=2560.0,2621.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/49","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nBut he got their individual buy-in a very respectful way, such that instead they left the meeting thinking, wow, this crazy American guy, he's depending upon me and my teammates in addition to our boss and Ambassador Mong. And that was the beginning of an important working relationship for the EastWest Institute that I'm proud of.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=2621.0,2648.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/50","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JOHN WHITE\n\nSo you left the Institute and went to graduate school and went on into, you said, a career on Wall Street. Could you tell us just a little bit about sort of how your personal career sort of benefited and progressed from EastWest?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=2648.0,2666.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/51","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nYeah. So left in 2006, started school, went to Washington. That was part of it too, part of that was the impact of John on me. We would go to the State Department, I would go with him and we would meet with Ambassador Mark Grossman, who I know to this day and then Ambassador Nick Burns. And these guys were the number three at the State Department. So at the State Department you can go, as a career foreign service officer, you can get up to, usually you get up to the three spot, which is Under Secretary for Political Affairs. Then the top two spots, which is the Secretary of State and the Deputy, those are political spots. And so the one person who was a career guy who got, I think he was the Secretary of State, he was Larry Eagleburger, who passed away a number of years ago, John was very close with him and he would joke that Larry would refer to him as Pinko, I don't know, because John was always in Moscow and trying to build trust with the Soviets, which that's what we did, what he did during that time.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=2666.0,2739.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/52","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nAnd so anyway, so I would go with John to do that. And then so I go back to school, while I was there I was like, I want to do more of this. And so I applied to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. I had Martti, he wrote me a letter, one other letter, I believe, but that was probably helpful. I was accepted. And so I went there to get the other master’s and do their joint program. And ended up there for three years, instead of two, and then I was on two tracks, right? One was the Wall Street track and the other one was the State Department track. I went through, I passed all of the exams for the foreign service officer, so I was accepted, I got my top secret security clearance and my health clearance, but I didn't speak Arabic, or Mandarin, or Farsi, or any of these other languages that are impossible to learn and I didn't have any military experience.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=2739.0,2799.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/53","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nSo my score was what it was, but it never got down to me. And so fast forward 12 years and I've just been on Wall Street and so that was in New York, but it also kind of made me, and this is part of my EastWest, part of what that kind of inculcated in me is the global business, global relationships that I wanted to continue to support in myself and in my wife and kids. So we left New York, we went to Dubai to work there. And that was a... Not everybody does that in Wall Street and was like, \"What? Dubai?\" But I did and part of that was a legacy to John and our relationship.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=2799.0,2851.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/54","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nAnd he died in the fall of 2014 and we left for Dubai in January 2015 with my wife and kids. And I mean, I don't know how much they remember about those days, but they will and we talk about it sometimes. But to me, that was part of what I learned about life is short and I had the opportunity to do this. It was work and Citibank where I worked, they were supportive of that. And I never would've done that if I hadn't spent those two and a half years working for John and seeing the way that he treated his board, his staff, his family, his kids, and me.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=2851.0,2900.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/55","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JOHN WHITE\n\nThat actually leads nicely into really I think what's a good last question, because we're getting a little tight on time here.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=2900.0,2907.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/56","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nYep.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=2907.0,2907.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/57","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JOHN WHITE\n\nWhich is, what advice would you give our current students? I mean, one of the reasons that I think the EastWest Institute came to the College of Charleston to sort of build its next life as the Mroz Institute is our commitment to internationalizing the curriculum, to building global leaders. What advice would you give our current students given your experiences, both our international relations students, but also just students across the curriculum who are interested in banking, or finance, or business, or other fields?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=2907.0,2939.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/58","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nSo that question is very apropos to me right now, because I've been asked to be a mentor and to be a partner mentor in a program that we have at Citibank, which is called Black Leaders for Tomorrow. And it is for black colleagues who are a little more junior than me and so we've had one session, which is kind of the introductory session. And the next one, which I'm going to be leading, is about kind of your career and how you should think about it, and what kind of advice would you give given my steps and missteps in my own career. And I think that what I'm going to say and what I would say to the students at College of Charleston or anywhere really is to make sure early on in your career that you are spending time with people who you trust, obviously, but people who have... If you just are focused, so like with my dad, he was just a business guy. It was meeting John kind of by happenstance that really sort of started my career, made it move in another direction and changed my life for the better.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=2939.0,3027.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/59","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nBut what I should have done is been a little bit more proactive in terms of, and I was in this one case, but there were other cases where I'm sure I was not proactive. And I do believe that every junior person in college, early grad school, whatever's the right time, is you should make a list of, I don't know, between 10 and 20 people who you think will have a different view on work, on life, on academia, or whatever it is, than you and the people who you talk to every day. And you should just ask them for a coffee or just a phone call or whatever it is, and then you'll get a broader context. And then you can start to kind of coalesce or just kind of get more focused on the things that you feel are most relevant to you. And then you can start to kind of sort of track out and put together what your career is going to look like.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=3027.0,3099.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/60","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nAnd I'm sure a lot of people who are going through the Mroz Leadership Institute they're thinking about foreign policy, which is great, but who knows, maybe there's something else that they hadn't really thought about that is not foreign policy. And so they go and they have this list of 10 people or something, and they're like, oh, I hadn't thought about that. That's a really good idea. I'm going to investigate that further. And so I think if you do that and you are open minded, which of course is important, and I'm sure all the students at College of Charleston, they're very driven. And I think about some of these folks when I was there and they all seemed to know exactly where they wanted to go. And so maybe they need nothing, but I do think that early on casting a wide net with people who are smart, who have good experience, and can give you a different perspective on life, and on your professional career, and where it's going to go, I think there's value in that.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=3099.0,3164.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/61","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JOHN WHITE\n\nThank you. And I'm going to end the recording here in a second, but before I do, I just want to again, say thank you on behalf of the College of Charleston, the EWI oral history project, and for talking with us today. I look forward to making this part of the archive, but we certainly appreciate your time. Thank you very much.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=3164.0,3181.0"},{"id":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054/transcript/41508/annotation/62","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JUSTIN MCMAHAN\n\nThank you, John. That was great.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lcdl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1894/collection_resources/85853/file/174054#t=3181.0,3182.64"}]}]}]}