Fred Hill
Topic:
Fred Hill had two separate careers – 20 years in journalism and twenty-one in government. At Bowdoin College he majored in government but then wanted to be a professional baseball player, which he did for two adventurous but unsuccessful years in the minor leagues with San Francisco and Philadelphia teams. He wound up with the Baltimore Sun as an investigative reporter and state government reporter in Maryland. In Washington he covered Watergate, followed by stints a Correspondent in Paris and London, from where he covered Western Europe, Africa and parts of the Middle East. He worked the last four years on the editorial page, where he had a weekly column on foreign affairs and local politics. In 1985 and 1986 he was foreign policy director to Sen. Charles MacMathias, Jr., a liberal Republican from Maryland and one of the key forces behind the imposing sanctions against South Africa. Finally, he spent nearly twenty years in the State Department where he developed the department’s policy gaming capability and later ran an office of “Special Programs” that organized policy planning exercises and roundtable discussions for senior officials on a wide range of security, political, economic, and global issues, including a considerable focus on the Middle East and East Asia.
Fred is married and lives in Arrowsic, Maine. He writes a bi-weekly column for the Bangor Daily News.
His topic will be “The Missing Piece in America’s Foreign Policy Puzzle?”