Rice University and the 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations

MR. & MRS. C. M. HUDSPETH

18 SUNSET BLVD.

HOUSTON, TEXAS 77005

Rice University and the 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations

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Tommy LaVergne: inside front and back cover, pages i, 3, 14, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33L, 36, 42, 50L, 51, 56L, 71, 76, 78

Geoff Winningham: pages 15, 16, 33R, 35, 38, 54, 55, 56R, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 73, 74

James Yao: pages 11, 18, 21, 41, 43, 46, 50R, 53, 69, 70

John Hill: pages 6, 9

Houston Chronicle: cover jacket, title page, page 80

Greater Houston Partnership: page 12

Designed by Jeff Cox Printed in the United States of America by Brandt and Lawson Printing, Inc., Houston, Texas

Rice University and the 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations By John B. Boles

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For three days in July 1 990, eight leaders of the major industrial- ized nations of the Western world met at Rice University. The event was the sixteenth Economic Summit, an annual meeting that in many ways has supplanted the United Nations as the forum for addressing a wide range of economic, diplomatic, environmental, and human rights issues. Four thousand journalists and supporting staff from around the world came to Houston to report on the deliberations, and Houstonians reveled in the excitement, proud to be the site of a history- making event and curious about how others would respond to their city. Perhaps never before had the people of the city so come together to help sponsor an event, eager to do everything perfectly. The city's hospitality was inexhaustible: its facade was cleaned, polished, and brightened with flowers, banners, and flags, while food and entertainment was lavished on the visitors. Numerous motorcades of presidents and prime ministers disrupted traffic for hours on end, often in the busiest sections of the city during the rush hours, but citizens accepted the considerable inconve- nience with a minimum of complaints. The city enjoyed, even celebrated the summit as it had no other event in its recent history.

Houstonians in general hoped to make a good impression on both the official delegates and the media leaders, seeing the summit as a chance to trumpet the city's economic comeback from several years of deep recession. Perhaps there was a little regret about the arrogance of the late 1970s oil boom, and now, somewhat chastened, the city extended a welcome hand to the world. But no part of the city was more involved in the Economic Summit than the Rice University community — administra- tors, faculty, staff, alumni, students, and friends — for the actual plenary meetings of the summit occurred on the Rice campus. Never had the world's attention so focused on Houston and Rice, and the university, like

the city, saw the occasion as an unrivaled opportunity to make its substan- tial merits better known.

The colorful opening exercises, complete with a 2 1 -gun salute and military honor guards flown in from Washington, D. C, were held in the academic quadrangle of Rice, with elegant Lovett Hall as the back- drop. As the band played each nation's anthem, the television cameras focused on that nation's flag unfurled from masts on Lovett Hall with its ornate brickwork, colored marble and mosaics, and carved arches. After the arrival ceremonies, and after the first meeting of the heads of the delegations in the Founders' Room in Lovett Hall, the delegation leaders walked through the building's impressive Sallyport and into the quad- rangle for what is called the "class photo." Everyone ever associated with Rice felt a special pride in that moment. The campus had never looked better, and those beautiful images of the university conveyed the ethos, the dedication to academic excellence, that have always been the hallmark of Rice. Rice had announced its opening in 1912 with a grand, international convocation of scholars — a summit of the mind — and now once again the world had come to Rice. The summit's being at Rice therefore seemed historically appropriate, and the meeting in Houston was a fortuitous acknowledgement of the city's recent economic rebound. But how had the sixteenth Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations come to be held in Houston and at Rice, appropriate though those locations might have been?

When the first economic summit was planned for the Chateau de Rambouillet near Paris in 1975, it was assumed to be a one- time event. But that first meeting proved to be so useful that world leaders decided to gather again, and President Gerald Ford offered to host the next year's meeting, which eventually was held in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Following that second meeting the economic summit quickly became institutionalized, Canada was added to the origi- nal list of six participating nations (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States), the group came to be called the G-7 nations, and a regular cycle for the hosting of the meetings evolved that followed the sequence of the first seven sites: Rambouillet, San Juan, London, Bonn, Tokyo, Venice, Ottawa, then back to France at Versailles, Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia (in 1983), London, Bonn, Tokyo, Venice, Toronto, and back again to Paris in 1989, beginning the third cycle. (A delegate from the European Economic Community, formerly called the Common Market, was invited in 1977 to participate in subsequent sum- mits, but the European Economic Community: — representing twelve European nations — does not serve as a host.)

American reporters in Paris at the conclusion of the fifteenth summit were understandably curious about where the United States would host the following year's summit, though rumors from the White House had mentioned Texas and San Antonio. When President George Bush held his press conference at the close of the Paris meeting, on Sunday, July 16, reporters asked if the rumors were true about Texas being the site of the 1990 summit. "That's a distinct possibility," the president an- swered. "However, it's too early. No decision has been made." President Bush, obviously in a good mood, went on to quip that "the fact that Jim Baker is from Houston and I'm from Houston and Bob Mosbacher's from Texas should have nothing to do with where the next summit's going to be." Replying to insistent reporters, Bush continued to banter about the selection process, mentioned the upcoming Texas elections, and cautioned

that the fact that Houston was his Texas home would not be used against Dallas's chances to host the summit. This entire interchange was reported on the front pages of Houston's newspapers on Monday, July 17. By the middle of the week the papers were carrying stories about "summit fever," and estimates were being made about the economic benefits that would accrue as a result of a summit. Wild guesses were being offered about feasible meeting sites, eating places, entertainment possibilities, and the odds the summit would go to Dallas, San Antonio, or Houston — or some place in Colorado or California, other rumored sites in what was already being portrayed as the summit sweepstakes. But the talk and planning were not confined to media hype. Hosting an international economic summit would be an enormous coup for any city, the kind of opportunity for which any city would compete. Houston leaders, always aggressive promoters of their city, determined to bid for it both for the intrinsic prestige and for the occasion to showcase Houston as once again a dy- namic, growing, futuristic city.

No one in the Houston business or political establishment had promoted the city as a potential summit site before the newspapers on July 17 reported President Bush's remarks. In the week following those remarks, however, everyone began to talk about the best way to proceed. By Monday morning Mayor Kathy Whitmire, Greater Houston Partner- ship President Lee Hogan, and Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau Acting President Henry H. King were discussing possible strate- gies. On July 19 the Texas House of Representatives passed a resolution urging that the next summit come to Texas, Mayor Whitmire announced on July 22 that she was considering putting together a task force to work on the project, and the Houston Protocol Alliance was touting the city's experience with international dignitaries. In the midst of the excited talk and premature guesses about meeting sites and parties for dignitaries, however, several hard questions had to be answered. Obviously there was the problem of counting chickens before they hatched, but how much of

an effort should be made to attract the summit, and what kind of efforts would be most effective?

Lee Hogan, President and CEO of the Greater Houston Part- nership, parent organization to the Greater Houston Chamber of Com- merce and the Houston Economic Development Council, called an infor- mal meeting in his office on Sunday, July 23, of approximately a dozen Houston leaders who had personal or political access to President Bush and his major advisers. At that Sunday meeting lasting several hours, a number of the advantages of the summit's coming to Houston were discussed, but the major concern was whether George Bush was serious about holding the next summit in Texas. Were those remarks premedi- tated, almost an invitation for proposals, or were .they offered flippantly? When the July 23 meeting adjourned, each person left with an assignment to call people he or she knew in Washington to try to ascertain the nature of the president's remarks; the meeting participants agreed to gather the following Sunday in Hogan's offices in the 1 100 Milam Building to share their information and see if a consensus had been reached. No one actu- ally talked to the president, but practically every other top adviser — certainly those with Texas connections — was contacted, and at the follow- up meeting on July 30 the consensus was overwhelming: George Bush was very serious about Texas and would welcome presentations on various sites.

Of course, no one thought at first that President Bush was considering only a Texas site. Those gathered in Lee Hogan's office knew that in less than two months Secretary of State James Baker would be meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnaze for three days at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to plan for President Bush's early December Malta Summit with President Mikhail Gorbachev. Perhaps the real competition was not Dallas or San Antonio but some scenic Western hideaway. Or perhaps a location— Bretton Woods, site of the 1944 conference that established the International Monetary Fund— in Gover-

nor John Sununu's home state of New Hampshire1. This worry lessened as further discussion led to the realization that no such secluded area had the support infrastructure to facilitate a full-scale summit. Thousands of hotel rooms were needed for delegates and journalists; there had to be a large public airport nearby and a military base for the foreign dignitaries to use; large nurnbers of police had to be available, as well as superior communi- cation and medical facilities. Logic led to the conclusion that the site had to be in or near a major urban area. That decided, the Houston planners were convinced they could and would beat the offer of any other Texas city. The next goal was to devise a plan to persuade the White House advisers and ultimately George Bush that the 1990 Economic Summit should come to Houston.

A two-pronged approach emerged from the offices of the Greater Houston Partnership. The preceding week of telephone calls had revealed that seven people in Washington would be central to the decision process: President Bush, Secretary of State Baker, Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas Brady, Secretary of Commerce Robert Mosbacher, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, Governor John Sununu, and Sig Rogich, Assistant to the President for Special Activities. Accord- ingly, seven special contact teams were put together, each with from three to six members, all of whom knew personally the key decision person they were assigned to contact weekly. By telephone, by letter, and by other means they were to communicate how badly the city wanted the summit, to assure those in Washington that Houston would do a great job of hosting the event, and to make clear what the city was willing to put up in terms of support to attract the summit. This intense, high-level, very personal lobbying played an essential role in tipping the decision toward Houston.

The second prong of the Houston Partnership effort was to organize a number of agencies and companies in the city — Metro, the Greater Houston Visitors and Convention Bureau, Houston Lighting and

Power, Southwestern Bell, the city aviation department, Continental Airlines, and others — into a series of task forces to bring back to the Partnership detailed proposals as to how each group would dispatch its appropriate responsibilities in order to facilitate a successful summit. The task force information was put into the form of a printed proposal outlin- ing the city's hotel facilities, air service, transportation capabilities, secu- rity arrangements, entertainment possibilities, media/communications support, and consular services and describing the city's previous experi- ence with delegations of foreign dignitaries. But the heart of the proposal was a listing, in no ranked order, of six possible sites for the actual work- ing sessions of the summit: the George R. Brown Convention Center, Rice University, the Wortham Center, the Summit arena, the University of Houston, and the Woodlands. This 24-page report, in the form of an unsolicited proposal, along with a cover letter from Mayor Kathryn J. Whitmire, County Judge Jon Lindsay, Henry H. King, Chairman of the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau, and Ben F. Love, Chairman of the Greater Houston Partnership, was sent to President Bush on August 16, 1989.

Several weeks later Lee Hogan of the Greater Houston Partnership telephoned Sig Rogich, who was in charge of coordinating the decision process in the White House. Hogan went over the details of the proposal; Rogich was interested but suggested, off the record, that the Partnership should identify its best site and focus on it, not half a dozen sites with no criteria by which Washington could judge. With this advice, Hogan — a native Houstonian well acquainted with the physical attractive- ness of the Rice campus — quickly decided that Rice was the ideal loca- tion. He asked for and received permission from Charles Duncan and George Rupp, chairman of the board of trustees and president, respec- tively, of Rice University, to advance Rice as the proposed site of the summit in Houston.

Why Rice? For everyone involved in the decision, both in Houston and Washington, the number one asset of Rice was aesthetic. The beautiful wooded campus, with its ornate Mediterranean style archi- tecture, offered a stately, serious ambience that suggested the splendor of previous European summit settings. No place in Texas but Rice had that kind of physical presence. Less important were the fact that George Bush had once been an adjunct faculty member in Rice's Jesse H. Jones Gradu- ate School of Administration and that Secretary of State Baker's grandfa- ther, Captain James Baker, had been the chairman of Rice's board of trustees for fifty years, from 1 89 1 to 1 94 1 . Rice was also conveniently located near good hotels and was accessible from the Brown Convention Center and the Astrodome, which were offered as the headquarters for the media and a hospitality center, and the Texas Medical Center. Because it was virtually a 300-acre island of serenity in the midst of the city, the Rice campus could be made secure with relative ease. For those reasons Rice was put forward, and a detailed color photo album was sent to the White House on September 10. Three days later Lee Hogan went to Washing- ton, met with Charles Hagel (deputy director of the summit, and at the time in charge of summit planning), laid out the rationale for Rice, and got from him a very positive endorsement of the proposed location.

In early October Mayor Whitmire was notified that the city had made the final cut: a formal request for a proposal came from the White House to Houston and San Antonio. Remote sites simply did not have sufficient infrastructure, and locations farther west, by being one or two additional time zones removed from Europe, were not attractive to the European media. The White House request covered a broad range of topics from hotel rates to air connections, and both cities moved quickly to respond as effectively and persuasively as they could. An even more detailed report was prepared, with extensive discussion of such topics as hotel rates, taxi service, welcome packages, security personnel, and catering services, along with floor plans of the Brown Convention Center

and the Astrodomain, and very detailed floor plans of various buildings on the Rice campus. The total report, the size of a hefty book and leather bound, was sent to the White House on November 7 under the name of Mayor Whitmire.

As the White House personnel studied the Houston proposal and that of San Antonio, there followed a series of requests for more specific information and for clarifications. In the several weeks following November 7, Lee Hogan made four trips to Washington, clarifying proposals, adding new details, and arguing on behalf of Houston. Repre- sentatives from the White House (Charles Hagel and Fred Sainz, a staff assistant) visited Houston on November 16 and 17 and inspected various locations including Rice. Following that site visit they went on to San Antonio. Both Houston and San Antonio officials were given opportuni- ties to refine their offers. Rice officials were quite pointed in their offer of the campus on an "as is" basis, although this insistence later caused some tense moments of negotiation. And all the while the seven teams of personal lobbyists organized by the Houston Partnership were continuing their contacts with key decision makers in Washington. A copy of Houston's elaborate proposal was sent to each. Nothing was left to chance.

Word came from the White House that President Bush would make the final decision over the Thanksgiving holidays at Camp David. He had been given briefing books on both Houston and San Antonio by his staff, complete with the most up-to-date data from each city. During this crucial week Lee Hogan was called long distance from Mexico City by Secretary of Commerce Mosbacher, who would be talking via telephone to the president in two hours. Mosbacher was checking on one final detail of the Houston proposal, and he tracked Hogan to a hospital, where Hogan's mother was undergoing an operation. That Mosbacher made the call in those circumstances hinted to Hogan that the decision would be favorable. On the day after Thanksgiving, Novem-

ber 24, President Bush met with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at Camp David to discuss his upcoming Malta meeting with President Gorbachev. Sometime the next day, Saturday, November 25, President Bush decided that Houston would be the site of the next summit meeting. Late that evening, a source in the White House called Lee Hogan and leaked the news. On the following Friday, December 1, 1989, as Presi- dent Bush was en route to Malta to meet with Gorbachev, the official announcement came. The 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations would be held in Houston. The announcement was not more specific, but everyone in Houston simply assumed the plenary sessions would be at Rice University. Frederic V. Malek would be appointed to the rank of ambassador and would be director in charge of all summit preparations.

But Ambassador Malek had not yet visited Rice, and when he did, on December 14, the visit did not go as smoothly as Houston and Rice officials had hoped. At that time even summit planners were not certain of their needs as to either size, shape, or number of rooms; Rice had received no detailed outline of the needs. Malek had not been involved in the decision process that had culminated in the choice of Houston, and he let it be known during his initial visit that no final decision had yet been made regarding Rice as the site of the actual meetings. This announce- ment surprised Rice officials and the Houston media. Malek wanted to make certain — because he was now in charge of the summit and any problems that might eventuate would be his responsibility — that the Rice choice was the correct one, and he wanted to signal that the final decision on the specific location in Houston was his call. And he did have several legitimate concerns: the holding rooms for the eight delegations were nowhere near equal in size, for example, and access to the Founders' Room in Lovett Hall was limited. At the conclusion of Malek 's visit, the choice of the summit site seemed to be in limbo. Summit officials even inspected several skyscrapers with many empty floors, considering

whether summit facilities could be built from scratch inside the shell of an existing building. Rice officials determined to be patient, answered Malek's concerns, and let him convince himself that Rice was the appro- priate place.

Rice officials wanted to find out more about Colonial Williamsburg's experience in hosting the 1983 summit. On December 19 and 20, Carl MacDowell (overall coordinator of Rice's summit team) and Jane Lowery (newly appointed to help coordinate the community relations aspects of summit preparations) visited Williamsburg and were briefed in detail about the myriad of concerns: facilities, food, protocol, security, communications, the problem of negotiating a budget contract with the government. Also, in response to a request, Fred Sainz, a White House staff person, on December 22 sent Lee Hogan of the Houston Partnership a brief letter outlining the meeting and support room requirements for the summit. These stated requirements later proved inadequate, but at least they gave Houston and Rice officials a better idea of what was involved. The letter called fpr a main conference room for the major plenary meet- ing of approximately 2,500 square feet, two smaller conference rooms for the finance and foreign ministers, holding rooms (waiting rooms or temporary offices) for the eight heads of delegations in close proximity to the main conference room, minimum office space for the assistants to the delegates, dining facilities, a press briefing room near the plenary confer- ence room, a press filing center, and a hospitality area for the media. Now Rice knew better how to respond to Mr. Malek's concerns and on January 9 sent him a detailed proposal for holding the working sessions of the summit on the campus.

Ambassador Malek returned to Rice on January 18, 1990, for a second site inspection. This time Rice was able to show Malek a wider range of rooms, including the reading room in the Maconda & Ralph O'Connor Business Information Center in Herring Hall for the main plenary meetings, with other meeting sites in Fondren Library, office

space there and in Herring Hall, and holding rooms in Herring Hall and Lovett Hall. Rice pushed hard to have at least the opening meeting in the Founders' Room. The Rice presentation was impressive: every question Malek raised was answered satisfactorily, and Malek was absolutely convinced that Rice offered splendid summit accommodations. His decision was announced on January 25 in a press release from the Wash- ington summit office. "With the Summit working sessions at Rice," the release stated, "the leaders will be able to meet in a relaxed and distin- guished environment surrounded by the beautiful campus setting." Am- bassador Malek said that the Rice setting "allows these leaders to do what they need to do — have a series of frank discussions in a dignified but relaxed atmosphere. Rice represents everything good about Houston," he continued. "It is known worldwide academically and is set in photogenic grounds of impressive buildings and beautiful oak trees." And he gra- ciously complimented the cooperation of President George Rupp of Rice and his staff for accommodating the requirements "of an event of this magnitude."

It was clear from the beginning that hosting an international summit "of this magnitude" would involve the entire city, not just Rice officials. Even before President Bush picked Houston, Lee Hogan had asked George W. Strake, Jr., a third generation Houstonian and former chairman of the Republican party of Texas, to chair what would be called the Houston Summit Committee. Strake had been in the initial summit strategy session in Lee Hogan's office back on July 23. As planning was underway, however, President Bush wanted to add someone who could strengthen the committee's fund-raising. Subsequently Kenneth L. Lay, the president of Enron Corporation and head of Bush's 1 988 Texas fund-raising efforts, was named cochair of the committee. Lay was also named to the summit steering committee (consisting of Mayor Whitmire, Judge Lindsay, Hogan, and Strake), made cochair of it, and he helped refashion the Houston Summit Committee into the Houston Host Committee.

The Host Committee was expanded to include approximately 290 leaders representing virtually every component of Houston society: business, education, sports, media, minorities. These persons were orga- nized into four subcommittees with responsibility for special events (chaired by John H. Duncan and Elizabeth Christ), cleaning up the city (Don Fitch and Limas Jefferson), publicity (John Bookout and Ben F. Love), and welcoming delegates and media personnel (W. J. Bowen and Vidal Martinez); symbolically, this last group was labeled the "friendly" subcommittee. Under the direction of Lay and Strake, these committees immediately set to work, with all of them charged to help with fund- raising. Everyone knew that to host the summit would cost money, though no one knew how much. Eventually over $4 million in money and $8 million in in-kind contributions were raised. Elaborate plans were made for conducting a war on trash, and this cleanup campaign recruited an estimated twelve thousand Houstonians who picked up more than four million pounds of rubbish and cleaned up 2,5 19 city blocks.

Neighborhood organizations near Rice got into the spirit of the Host Committee effort by sponsoring a campaign to plant 33,000 scarletta (red) begonias in esplanades, near the various entrances to Rice, and in pots provided at cost to homes in the vicinity. Metro cooperated by . offering free bus service during the summit, even utilizing special new buses partially manufactured in Hungary, which some wit termed glasnost buses. Recognizing in advance that many visitors to Houston in July would comment that the weather was hot, the Host Committee decided to turn that negative cliche into a positive plug by coining the motto "Houston's Hot," then, with a play on words, proceeding to say that yes, Houston's economy was hot and booming again. Old-fashioned hand fans emblazoned with "Houston's Hot" proved to be popular giveaways at the Media Fest held on Saturday before the opening of the summit.

The Houston Host Committee began making elaborate plans not only to provide a proper work environment for the attending media personnel but also to feed and entertain them royally. In addition, the Host Committee completed arrangements for a down-home Texas barbe- cue and rodeo on the Sunday evening before the summit itself actually opened and for a festive "Thank You, Houston" party following the summit for all the volunteers who would have helped make it a success. Both these special events — the rodeo and the thank-you celebration — represented the wishes of President Bush. Consequently the Host Com- mittee efforts were closely coordinated by the expanding staff of summit officials, with Deputy Director Charles (Chuck) Hagel in charge of day- to-day operations. In late March native Houstonian Homer Luther, with almost two decades' experience in arranging major presidential-level special events, was called upon to direct all public (that is, involving President Bush or other heads of delegations) events related to the summit. Shortly thereafter the summit organizers chose as their headquarters the Kirby Mansion, on the western edge of downtown just outside the Pierce elevated. The stately brick home was originally built in 1 892 as a Victo-

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rian design house for lumber magnate John Henry Kirby. Kirby had the house substantially enlarged and remodeled in a Flemish-Gothic style in time for a visit in 1 928 by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was attending the Democratic National Convention held in Houston that year to deliver the nominating speech for Al Smith. The mansion has had a checkered history, and, as a result of the oil recession in Houston during the mid- 1980s and the even more recent savings and loan difficulties, the house is currently in receivership. It nevertheless made a handsome and conve- nient home for the 1990 summit officials.

Very early in summit preparations the planners decided that press operations would be centered at the Brown Convention Center. Early estimates that 5,000 members of the press would attend the summit were only slightly optimistic; but of the 4,000 who did come, perhaps 2,500 were support personnel: cameramen, photographers, television technicians, and so on. Still, the 1,500 actual writing or reporting journal- ists would not be allowed to come to Rice en masse. Instead, the press delegates would choose a revolving group of approximately thirty journal- ists representing a variety of media who were to be bused to the Rice Memorial Center and from there conducted by security personnel to carefully selected and monitored press and photo "opportunities." These pool reporters would then brief their colleagues at the Brown Convention Center. Likewise, CBS was selected to provide the pool television cover- age. This procedure meant that the great majority of journalists would conduct all their reporting from the Brown Convention Center.

The Host Committee reasoned that if the working press were well treated, then the city might expect more favorable coverage. Previ- ous summits had provided the press with adequate food and some ameni- ties, but nothing lavish. For example, at the Williamsburg summit the press had been fed in a large tent erected over the tennis courts of the College of William and Mary. Consequently the press proved to be astonished by the hospitality arranged by the Houston Host Committee.

Dozens of Houston restaurants provided free food that filled a half dozen buffet lines arranged with everything from Japanese cuisine to traditional American dishes to southwestern favorites. Three hundred catering employees made sure no journalist went hungry or thirsty anytime. Hun- dreds of linen-covered tables stretched beyond the food lines, and nattily appointed waiters and waitresses quickly offered tea, coffee, and wine to appreciative media workers. In addition, there was always free coffee, ice cream, cigarettes, toothpaste, and toothbrushes, along with a wide range of other toiletry items. Another special touch was provided by the interna- tional construction company Brown & Root, which organized a press "cafeteria" offering free each day that day's edition of newspapers from around the world. A journalist could file a story one evening to the Los Angeles Times or the Times of London and the very next morning read the story while eating a free breakfast. When observers saw how hard the press worked at covering the summit, they understood why the journalists were so appreciative of what the Host Committee provided at the Brown Center.

Even before the summit began on Monday morning, the press was well disposed toward the Host Committee. Most of the members of the press began arriving Friday and Saturday, July 6 and 7, and the Host Committee sponsored an elaborate Media Fest for Saturday evening. Fifty Metro buses began picking up members of the press in front of the Brown Center, with country music, cowboys, and a live longhorn steer providing a stereotypical backdrop. But the champagne served on the buses sug- gested that this was not an evening to be confused with Sunday night's rodeo. Saturday's occasion was a progressive dinner party at Houston's four major museums. One could begin with Cajun food and music at the Menil Collection, then travel via shuttle buses to rock music and Mexican food at the Museum of Natural Science, then more music and food at the Museum of Fine Art, and conclude with desserts and music at the Con- temporary Art Museum — or go in any other order. The press was over-

whelmed. Several may have remarked snidely that Houston was trying too hard to please, but more representative was Ulrich Schiller of Die Zeit (of Hamburg, Germany). "This is exceptional," he was quoted as saying in the Houston Chronicle. "To eat this food and hear this music and then be able to enjoy a world-class museum is just outstanding." That, of course, was exactly the response the Host Committee had hoped and worked for in planning the extravaganza.

The Host Committee, working closely with the summit officials and the protocol office of the State Department, also helped with arranging hotel accommodations for the various national delegates. Representatives of each of the nations involved in the summit also came to inspect the facilities at Rice, at the Brown Convention Center, and at the hotels selected for their leaders and their support personnel. These visits often proved to be tricky business for both Houston and summit officials because each nation was very protective of its rank and prestige. Accom-

modations had to be approximately equal in size, quality, convenience, and ambience. Inevitably some feathers were ruffled when one delegation wanted the hotel suggested for another nation. The Japanese, for example, preferred the Inn on the Park and so did the Canadians, but because a Canadian firm owned the hotel, Canada got it. The Japanese were eventu- ally made happy at the J. W. Marriott in the Galleria area, however. The British delegation was housed at the Ritz-Carlton, the Italians at the Wyndham Warwick, the Germans at the Doubletree on Post Oak, the French at the Westin Oaks, the representatives of the European Economic Community at the Stouffer Presidente, and the Americans at President Bush's Texas "home," The Houstonian. Each hotel underwent some refurbishment, learned the intricate niceties of international protocol, added appropriate national items to their menus, underwent extensive security checks, and prepared to house not only the heads of the various delegations and their top advisers but also the govemment-away-from-

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home of the several industrialized nations.

President Bush made it clear early in the summit preparations that he wanted his international visitors to get a taste of Texas during their visit to Houston. Local planners had hoped to showcase Houston's fine arts to a world audience, but these hopes were soon dashed for a combina- tion of reasons. No regular performances of the symphony, ballet, or opera were scheduled to occur during the summit meetings, and the expense of mounting special performances was enormous. Moreover, there would be no time in the Monday midday until Wednesday midday formal summit schedule for such performances, and the World Cup of soccer would keep several of the international delegates from arriving before Monday morning.

Then too, summit organizers, responding to President Bush's clear signals, reasoned that government leaders from such cities as Lon- don, Paris, Rome, and Bonn had numerous opportunities to attend high-art

performances. (At the last moment a special, shortened performance of Houston Grand Opera's "Carousel" was staged Saturday afternoon in the Wortham Center for the Bushes and an invitation-only audience of local music students, members of the consulate corps, representatives of the city's performing arts groups, and selected business, civic, and educational leaders.) What the international visitors did not normally see at home were rodeos and country music concerts, and, given the worldwide identi- fication of Texas with the Old West, many of them apparently wanted to see what to some Houstonians was an embarrassing and obsolete stereo- type of Texas culture. But this was to be the president's party, so rodeo it was. Moreover, because the president had long admired the Grand Ole Opry, at his invitation a contingent of Opry stars — Loretta Lynn, Minnie Pearl, Bill Monroe — agreed for only the second time in the Opry's history to take their show on the road. There would be a sprinkling of Texas singers too, but the Texas hoedown following the rodeo would have a

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decidedly Tennessee flavor.

Native Texans could take at least some culinary comfort in the food that would be provided to the rodeo guests, several thousand media people, a group of local volunteers and summit organizers, and, as it turned out. President and Mrs. Bush, Prime Minister and Mr. Thatcher, Prime Minister and Mrs. Mulroney, and Prime Minister and Mrs. Kaifu. One can hardly imagine the jostling among local barbecue chefs that must have preceded the event, but when the 4,812 visitors arrived at the Astroarena on Sunday evening, July 8, they found a genuine Texas banquet provided by Luther's Barbecue. The caterers served 7,200 pounds of brisket, ribs, chicken, and sausage; 3,000 pounds of potato salad, coleslaw, and baked beans; 165 gallons of barbecue sauce; 500 pounds of sliced onions; 650 gallons of iced tea and lemonade; 5,000 slices of carrot cake and cherry cobbler; and, in deference to the uninitiated taste buds of the visitors, only 84 gallons of jalapeno peppers. The whole occasion — barbecue and wild bull riding, armadillo racing and bucking broncos, clog dancing and rope tricks, country humor and the distinctive twang of Bill Monroe's singing — entertained most of the attendees, though Mrs. Thatcher and her British colleagues seemed at best uncertain about the evening. Perhaps the highlight was when a young woman waving an American flag rose out of a giant cowboy boot — Texas kitsch to be sure, but sanctioned by the White House. The world press, fascinated by the goings-on, devoted inordinate attention in both words and photos to this presidential paean to the mythic Texas past.

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The backward glance at the Old West was a sentimental interlude in the summit agenda, a meeting being held in a modern city known both for the Johnson Space Center and the Texas Medical Center, where the newest miracles in medical science were commonplace. International television reports from the Brown Convention Center featured the city's stunning skyline in the background, enlivened by eight colorful plastic "light sticks" (designed by architect Jay Baker, a Rice graduate) in the foreground that were artistic representations of the flags of the partici- pating delegations. Rodeos and museum media fests, however novel and entertaining, were preliminary to the real business at hand, a series of high-level plenary meetings to be held on the stately campus of Rice University with its Old World look.

But between the official choice on January 25 of Rice as the site of the plenaries and the arrival on campus of the dignitaries, beginning shortly after noon on July 9, absolutely incredible preparations had to be made. No one in those heady days of late January foresaw the dimensions of the task, and even in retrospect what was demanded and achieved seems as heroic as it sometimes seems ridiculous to Americans with democratic ideals. And yet there were often sound reasons for what on the surface appeared to be rank extravagance. Rice became almost a movie set and a sound stage for events broadcast to the world for three days in July 1990.

Behind all the preparations at Rice lay the university's initial offer of its facilities on an "as is" basis, and the government, being fully aware of these terms since at least November 17 and in receipt of a formal Rice proposal dated January 9, 1990, accepted the offer on February 9. But most of the details of the arrangement still had to be negotiated and agreed upon, with Carl MacDowell representing Rice's interests. The Rice position was very clear: the government could have total access to specified Rice facilities from Saturday evening at 6:00 P. M., July 7, through Thursday morning, 6:00 A. M., July 12. These specified facilities

came to be identified as Lovett Hall and the buildings surrounding the academic quadrangle, the Faculty Club (Cohen House), Herring Hall, the Rice Memorial Center, the six residential colleges south of the academic quadrangle, and much of the stadium parking lot. Under agreed-upon security procedures faculty, staff, and graduate students would have necessary access to laboratories north of the academic quadrangle. This was insisted upon by Rice officials to lessen the inconvenience to the scientific research activities of the university. Except for Monday, Tues- day, and Wednesday, July 9-11, normal summer classes would be held and the library would function as usual. The central activities of the univer- sity, teaching and research, would be disrupted as little as possible.

More difficult to negotiate with the government was the budget. Rice made clear that its "as is" offer stood; whatever the govern- ment wanted to add or change regarding the campus buildings was permitted as long as the government paid for the changes and removed them at the conclusion of the summit. Rice agreed to pay for permanent long-term improvements and to speed up already planned refurbishments such as repairing and painting the ceilings of the cloisters of Lovett Hall and certain landscaping that was part of a long-range scheme to enhance the campus. Yet there was still room for disagreement, and MacDowell and the Rice administration bargained hard to minimize the out-of-pocket expenses to the university.

At times the negotiations became quite tense, leading to pressure on Rice from powerful voices on the Houston Host Committee. The Host Committee offered Rice no funds at all and made it clear that Rice should do no summit-related fund-raising because to do so might harm the Host Committee's efforts; from certain quarters both in Houston and Washington there was the feeling that Rice should be lavish in its support of summit expenses. The Rice position was that the Rice endow- ment was for educational expenses, not to help the federal government stage grand events even though Rice stood to gain substantial publicity as

a result. Where did appropriate hospitality on the part of Rice end and inappropriate parsimony begin? What was a legitimate permanent en- hancement and what was merely summit-related fluff? When White House officials wanted to remodel the bathroom near President Rupp's office because President Bush would spend perhaps fifteen minutes in that office, should Rice assume the cost because the new wallpaper would remain? Ultimately the government paid for the wallpaper. Rice installed a new mirror, and Rice convinced the government that an entirely new commode was an extravagance; a new toilet seat would suffice. In such practical applications the issue of who would pay for what became enor- mously complicated. Was Rice being too tightfisted and stubborn? Were summit officials expecting too much largess? After several months of tough negotiating, pressure from downtown, the involvement of additional Rice administrators, and a renewed commitment to cooperation from everyone centrally involved, a final contract between Rice and the State Department was signed on April 30.

Long before the contract was signed, work was underway on the Rice campus. One obvious need was adequate and backup electrical power. Houston Lighting and Power engineer George I. McDaniel had been involved in the city's planning from the beginning, and he and HL&P engineers quickly ensured that sufficient power was available at each summit site. The Brown Center and the Astroarena were already prepared; portable, quiet-running generators were used to back up existing service at Bayou Bend and the Museum of Fine Arts, where two official summit dinners would be held, and the service to Rice was upgraded. Rice since the 1950s had had two separate 12,470 volt lines serving it from the Garrett Street substation, located at the Y where the Southwest Freeway exits to Louisiana Street downtown. The two separate lines guaranteed continuous service in case an accident disrupted one line. An additional third power source came from the west and served the stadium facilities and backed up power to the Rice Memorial Center (where the

U. S. Secret Service was headquartered). Guards were placed at the Garrett Street substation to protect against possible terrorists, and portable generators were positioned to provide power to television booths built in front of Lovett Hall. Electrical service to the various plenary sites on campus had to be significantly upgraded to handle television lighting and the communication and computer needs of the participants. This required another portable generator placed at the north end of Lovett Hall. In addition, the lighting around the exterior of the campus was increased, particularly at the entrances. HL&P assumed the expenses of this upgrad- ing and complete checking out of the system and all its redundancies. Unlike at the Paris summit, at no time was there a failure of any kind in electrical service for the Houston summit.

Far more extensive upgrading of the telephone communica- tions system at Rice had to be done, provided gratis by Southwestern Bell and supervised by engineer Martin E. Spahn. The existing system was based on a 1 ,500 pair copper cable, with a capacity (almost filled) of 1 ,500 working lines. This system was doubled and significantly improved by installing a fiber optic backbone at Rice. Fiber optic provides better transmission, is more easily expandable, and is much more secure because it is very difficult to tap. It also makes possible state-of-the-art communi- cation of every kind: voice, data, or video transmission. During the summit, university communications continued to be via copper cable, but all summit-related communications were on the new fiber optic system; and soon after the summit, Rice transmissions would shift permanently to the new system, provided at no charge to the university by Southwestern Bell. Not only will this $1.5 million system improve communication locally and give Rice direct data and video transmission capabilities to the Texas Medical Center and the Houston Advanced Research Center, but it will also make it possible for Rice to link up with two proposed and extremely advanced computer networks that will connect Texas area research centers and a national computer system. These networks will

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complement existing linkages between Rice and computers nationwide.

The fiber optic system tied together all the summit sites at Rice, facilitating internal communication (voice, data, video, and an electronic writing tablet system whereby advisers at plenary sessions could communicate via instantaneous transmission of handwritten notes to delegate officials), linked the temporary delegate offices at the university to the hotel accommodations of the various nations, and linked these locations both to the respective government offices back in the home countries and to the contingent of each nation's journalists at the Brown Center. For all practical purposes, the governments of the G-7 nations were being run from Houston for several days, so sophisticated communi- cation facilities were mandatory. The fiber optic system connected Rice via an underground tunnel beneath Main Street to a fiber optic link down Fannin and thence to the Central Office Terminal (the Jackson exchange) on Richmond Avenue between Mandell Street and Montrose Boulevard. Voice and data transmissions were sent from there to New York City and then abroad via an AT&T fiber optic. Rice and the Brown Center were also connected via fiber optics, and then clean video transmissions were sent via fiber optic from there to a satellite uplink facility in far southwest Houston. Houston International Teleport, in cooperation with other facilities of its owner, Satellite Transmission and Reception Specialists (STARS), provided 24-hour live television feeds for its American, Japa- nese, and European customers.

Southwestern Bell was the major provider of telecommunica- tions equipment and service and had over 1,000 personnel assigned to the project for months. Other long-distance providers, cellular telephone companies, and telecommunications specialists were involved, represent- ing a permanent and temporary investment in hardware — phones, fiber optics, switching equipment, cellular and satellite antennae, and so forth — of approximately $50 million. Much of this system was dismantled after the summit and will be deployed elsewhere, but permanent enhancements of the city's communication infrastructure did result, particularly at Rice

with its new fiber optic communication backbone. While the eyes of the world were focused on Houston, the telecommunications system made it all possible.

Much of the summit agenda was staged and timed for television coverage, with special attention given to camera angles, position of the sun and resulting shadows, and photogenic "photo-ops" for trans- mission around the world. This need drove the efforts to facilitate and enhance the television images. A series of glass-walled television broad- cast booths were erected in an arc on the east lawn of Lovett Hall, linked via underground fiber optic cables to local television stations and the satellite uplink. Portable generators made air conditioning possible; from these booths local, national, and international television broadcasts — including interviews with participants like James Baker— were initiated live, with the flag-festooned east front of Lovett Hall serving as a back- drop. Because daytime in Japan is night in Houston, Rice installed power- ful concealed lighting to illuminate the east facade of Lovett Hall to make possible live Japanese broadcasts throughout the night. A small, raised stand for photographers and television cameras was constructed that angled to the north from near the east side of the Sallyport. This stand accommodated press coverage of the arrival of the heads of the delega- tions at curbside in front of Lovett Hall.

Television cameras were also mounted on the roof of the southwest corner of the Physics Building and atop Fondren Library, as well as one on the ground near the cloisters linking Sewall Hall to Lovett Hall. These pool cameras provided television coverage of the opening ceremonies in the academic quadrangle. Two three-tiered raised stands, complete with telecommunication hookups, were also provided for print and television pool journalists in the quadrangle, the larger stand (80 x 12 feet) parallel to Lovett Hall just east of the statue of William Marsh Rice and the smaller one (50 x 12 feet) adjacent and parallel to Sewall Hall. Between this smaller stand and Lovett Hall was a small stand covered with a tent canopy where the spouses of the heads of delegations along

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with the other members of the delegations could sit to watch the opening activities.

Between the larger media stand and Lovett Hall stood the small (22 x 8 feet) president's reviewing stand for the heads of delega- tions, complete with an underground air-conditioning system and an added-at-the-last-possible-moment roof to shield the delegates from the anticipated blazing sun but high enough not to interfere with ever-essential camera angles. Luckily Rice planners had expected last-minute changes and had put a convenient lumberyard on call throughout the weekend. Among the unsung heroes of the entire summit effort were Thomas W. Moffett of Rice and his facilities employees, who performed incredible feats of erecting and tearing down elaborate stands. By 9:00 Monday evening, following the opening ceremonies, all the stands inside the academic quadrangle had been removed and the sod replaced. At times the international media seemed to focus more on the air-conditioned reviewing stand than the substantive events of the summit; that engineer- ing feat exemplified Rice's commitment to do everything possible to guarantee that all summit events on campus would proceed without a hitch. As it turned out, everything performed perfectly, prompting even the taciturn Secret Service men to say they had never worked such a smoothly organized summit. Of course, good things are seldom the result of happenstance. The summit success at Rice was the result of careful planning and dedicated workers, and not just at the management level. The physical plant employees (under the supervision of W. G. Mack) and the custodial and grounds crews (supervised by Eusebio Franco, Jr.) put in extremely long hours and responded with admirable enthusiasm to the additional chores. A genuine esprit de corps developed that no one had completely anticipated but everyone appreciated.

In addition, Rice made arrangements to secure for itself a photographic record of the elaborate summit preparations and the actual plenary sessions. Staff photographer Tommy LaVergne took hundreds of

pictures of every stage of the preparations as well as the opening ceremo- nies, and Geoff Winningham, Rice professor of media and photography, was accorded the status of White House photographer and allowed to take pictures at all the formal sessions. Rice planners intended from the beginning that a selection of these photographs would be displayed at a post-summit exhibition, presented in slide form to various university audiences, and used to illustrate this book.

Thanks to the insistence of Edgar Odell Lovett in 1910 and the design brilliance of architect Ralph Adams Cram, Rice University has long had one of the most admired campuses in America, with perhaps an unprecedented degree of stylistic conformity. Not every building and every siting, however, was equally good, and with two major new build- ings under construction — housing the Shepherd School of Music and the new laboratories of biomedical science and engineering — the Rice Board of Trustees had begun to seek a new landscaping vision for the next half century ("landscaping" meaning sidewalks, roads, signage, every visual aspect of the campus). When the summit was announced for Rice, it simply meant that special landscaping attention also had to be given immediately to those portions of the campus intended to serve as a back- drop for the event. Rice had employed the services of a renowned firm, Sasaki Associates, Inc., of Cambridge, Massachusetts, to develop a total landscaping plan; now parts of that plan would be hastened into realization to fit the summit schedule. White House and summit planners had def- inite requirements that had to be addressed, a process that at times intensi- fied already tense budget negotiations as to who would pay for what.

Both Rice officials and summit planners wanted those parts of the campus visible to delegates and the press to look as beautiful as possible. Under the direction of landscape architect Stuart O. Dawson, selected trees and shrubs were planted that enhanced photo-op back- grounds and simultaneously meshed with the long-range landscaping scheme. Because the heads of the delegations would walk east from

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Herring Hall on Tuesday noon under the oak-canopied road between Baker College and Rayzor Hall and then turn into the Faculty Club for lunch — and this walk was a carefully orchestrated occasion for television and still photographers — Stu Dawson suggested a graceful patio outside the north entrance to the club. Not only would this make a lovely setting for the pre-luncheon procession, but by slightly shifting a sidewalk lead- ing from Lovett Hall it both created a vista through the Lovett cloisters toward the Faculty Club and highlighted a particularly handsome window over which was carved the Rice seal. The courtyard at Herring Hall was also very significantly enhanced with plantings and patio stones.

This kind of permanent improvement of the campus, com- pletely compatible with Cram's original vision of buildings arranged on visually pleasing axials, Rice was happy to fund. After difficult discus- sion, Rice also reluctantly agreed to plant some 50,000 square feet of sod along roads and sidewalks where the green would complement television.

shots. Much of this grass, under thick-foliaged live oaks, predictably had a short life, but White House officials pressed very hard that Rice's offer of its campus implied grassy vistas, at least for the duration of the summit. Though Rice gave in on this issue and even had to resort to painting some of the dying grass green, officials were able to withstand summit planners' desires to enliven and brighten the campus with a profusion of flowers. White House planners thought the campus^ — necessarily devoid of stu- dents during the summit — would have a sterile appearance. The landscap- es' solution was to position over two hundred large terra-cotta pots (most of them 24 inches in diameter), filled with white periwinkles, between the columns of the arches lining the academic quadrangle and arranged in rows in front of Fondren Library and Lovett Hall.

Although at first the abundance of color seemed out of place, even seemed too busy amid the quiet beauty of Lovett Hall, the new look soon became pleasing even to skeptical campus observers. Practically

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everyone agreed that in the televised shots of the opening ceremonies, with President Bush walking the arriving dignitaries through the cloisters from the Sallyport toward the patio at the north end of Sewall Hall, the flowers looked beautiful against the brick-and-granite arches. The 206 flower pots and 5,688 other bedded periwinkles in the quadrangle and at entrances one and two to the campus were paid for by the government, and original plans called for the pots to be removed shortly after the conclusion of the event. At the end of the summit, however, the govern- ment gave the terra-cotta pots with their periwinkles to the university. In several locations Rice rebuilt sidewalks, repaired or in- stalled curbs, had an offending fireplug moved out of an otherwise unobstructed vista, and generally dressed up the campus. Long-term plans included repaving the roads around the inner campus loop, so this project was rushed to completion before the international guests arrived. One major Rice-incurred landscaping expense was totally unrelated to the

summit. During the early spring visits of delegation advance teams, the Rice community began to notice that the thirty trademark Italian cypress trees that adorned the academic quadrangle were turning brown. As a consequence of Houston's record-breaking December 1989 cold spell, the tall, cylindrical trees were dying. Research suggested that similar species of trees would have fared no better, so an effort was begun to purchase new Italian cypresses. But not enough large ones were available any- where in the nation. It seems some giant Las Vegas casino had recently cornered the market, so Rice had to settle for slightly smaller trees. Be- cause apparently the original cypresses had also been weakened by excess soil dampness, a complicated drainage system was constructed to take away water from the root system of the trees at the same time that a watering system was installed at ground level. This extensive plumbing and planting was hurriedly completed before the summit, barely in time for the resodding to look natural.

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All over campus there was an atmosphere of nervous anticipa- tion: Because important company was arriving, we had better clean up and repaint and show our best face. The new paving, however, presented an unanticipated problem. In the June heat the asphalt cured slowly; when it was learned that the heavily armored, four-wheeled limousines weighed approximately 8,000 pounds each, planners grew concerned that the limos would leave deep ruts in the still soft roads. Consequently the roads were sprayed with cooling water at night and special machines were brought in to compact the asphalt and thereby aid its curing. It worked. No limos were mired in the paving, and the freshly black roads, with speed bumps removed, presented a good, shadow-free foreground for the Tuesday photo opportunity of the eight heads of delegations walking down College Way for lunch at the Faculty Club.

Casual visitors to the campus in the late spring might have thought that all the preparations were outside the buildings. That was true until after classes were over and graduation ceremonies were held on Saturday, May 5. But the following Monday evening — after most stu- dents and many faculty left — workers began swarming into Fondren Library and Herring Hall, and to a far lesser extent into Lovett Hall and Sewall Hall, to effect an almost miraculous transformation of the public spaces that would for three days in July become perhaps the most care- fully secured private meeting rooms in America. The summit office in Washington contracted with a local architectural firm, PDR, Planning Design Research Corporation, with Drew Patton supervising, to revamp the existing spaces to fit summit needs and redecorate all the spaces appropriately. As the State Department contract with PDR frankly stated, "Cosmetic appearance of the meeting rooms is of paramount importance for this international event." With that general guideline, PDR set to work transforming Rice offices and library rooms from an academic setting to what was called a setting for world diplomacy.

The four plenary meeting rooms received the most attention.

Following Monday's opening ceremony, the heads of the eight delega- tions would meet privately for two hours in the Founders' Room of Lovett Hall. At this restricted plenary meeting no foreign ministers or finance ministers would be in attendance, although the chief policy adviser of each delegation head would be present. (These chief advisers have, in summit parlance, come to be known as "sherpas," after the Tibetan people who traditionally guided mountain climbers to the summits of the Himalayas, so henceforth that term will be employed here.) Minimum changes were made in this room: rest room facilities were shifted; a cherry and maple veneered oval table, twenty feet by nine feet, was designed (by Wayne H. Braun of PDR) and constructed by the Houston firm of Brochsteins Inc. (headed by Rice alumnus Raymond D. Brochstein); and work stations for the eight sherpas were positioned around the perimeter of the room. Toward the north end of the room and in the north balcony, interpreters booths were constructed. Special lighting was added and telecommunica- tions equipment provided to the sherpa work stations so the sherpas could communicate via handwritten notes on an electronic writing pad to the delegation offices in Lovett Hall. No audio transmissions were to be made from this Founders' Room meeting, although each nation would have closed-circuit television pictures of its leaders to monitor his or her health. The flags of the several delegations hung from the ceiling of the Founders' Room.

Extensive changes were demanded for the two rooms hous- ing the Monday afternoon meetings of the foreign ministers and the finance ministers in the Elder Periodical Room and the Wright Reference Room respectively of Fondren Library. Essentially the rooms were transformed into handsome boardrooms, furnished with equally ornate tables made of the same cherry and maple veneer as the Lovett Hall table. These two round tables, nine feet and eighteen feet in diameter, were also designed by Wayne Braun and built by a Brochsteins subsidiary. Architec- tural Woodwork Corporation. Luxurious leather chairs were provided;

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plants and paintings decorated the rooms, and the'Cullen Rotunda between the two rooms was handsomely appointed with gold-fringed flags of the participating nations hanging from brass footstands. The round reference desk and the card catalogue computer terminals that normally lined the Wright Reference Room were removed, the carpet replaced where the reference desk stood, and the several exits from the room walled over. The entrance toward the rotunda was decreased in size and closed with mahogany doors. Television lights and cameras were installed, with the closed-circuit television signals sent to a bank of screens in an adjacent library room. In front of this line of television screens were closed booths for the fifteen interpreters, three each for five languages; only in this meeting of the eight finance ministers and their eight assistant sherpas were the interpreters not in actual line of vision with the principals whose words they were translating.

More extensive remodeling was done for the Monday

afternoon meeting of the foreign ministers in the Elder Periodical Room. The circulation desk and the stairwell from the basement to the second floor were walled off. Then two-story walls were built so that the mezza- nine no longer overlooked the periodical room, where the foreign minis- ters' table was located. Narrow slots, reminiscent of gun wells in old forts, allowed the translators sitting on the mezzanine to see the foreign ministers below, and the walls hid cameras, computers, and communica- tion equipment. The assistant sherpas sat at four regular library tables forming a square in the middle of which was the round table for the foreign ministers. The periodicals that normally stood on the visible book shelves were replaced with handsome bound sets of British Parliamentary Papers, the Congressional Record, and similar large volumes that gave the room a scholarly yet governmental tone. Temporary blinds about eight feet high were installed in the ample windows of the room, on the east and south sides of the library overlooking both Lovett Hall and Baker

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College, to guarantee privacy and security.

In this room also, as well as in the corridor just to its west, were placed paintings, sofas, tables, plants — giving the whole a look emphatically unlibrary-like. The offices on the northern side of the library that normally house the Computer and Information Technology Institute were emptied of their regular furniture and books, then redecorated with more attractive furniture, leather-bound books, and paintings, and pro- vided as temporary offices for the foreign and finance ministers of the various delegations.

The main plenary meetings of the summit, with the heads of delegations, the foreign ministers, and the finance ministers — twenty-four in all — sitting at one magnificent table forty feet long and ten feet wide, were held in the O'Connor Reading Room of Herring Hall. These full plenary meetings occurred Tuesday morning and afternoon and Wednes- day morning, so most of the official work of the summit took place in

Herring Hall. As with Lovett Hall, eight holding rooms (all elegantly refurnished) had to be provided for the heads of delegations, and sufficient office space provided for other working delegates and advisers. Here too the holding rooms had to be made more or less equal in size and level of opulence, though they ranged in dimension from that of President Bush down to that of President Jacques Delors, the lowest-ranking head of a delegation according to protocol. President Bush's spacious holding room was constructed within a large classroom, with temporary walls to hide a blackboard and other temporary walls to hide lockers in a hallway.

Additional holding rooms were provided by removing the stepped theater seating from several large classrooms, leveling the floors, then constructing partitions down the middle to make equivalent rooms. The walls, though temporary, were complete with chair rails to comple- ment existing finishes; and the resulting rooms were handsomely deco- rated with carpeting, beautiful furnishings including desks, sofas, tables,

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books, desk accessories, and various paintings and knickknacks. When government summit planners realized that someone might look out a window and see the loading dock at Wiess College, jackhammers were brought in to take out the objectionable concrete, a standard Rice pea- gravel sidewalk was installed, dirt filled in the former driveway, sod and azaleas were planted, and the loading dock area was walled in and painted. What had been a utilitarian area became for a short time, Cinderella-like, an attractive swath of grass and shrubbery. All these temporary changes were at government expense, with everything returned to the pre-summit status quo by the time classes began in late August.

Perhaps the most elaborate changes were made to the O'Connor Reading Room. Because it normally houses the business library, a small circulation desk and several offices for reader services flank the entrance. Summit planners deemed this aura of a library inap- propriate for a diplomatic meeting, so walls were erected to shield these areas from view. The O'Connor Room itself was considered too long, so a new wall that reached all the way to the vaulted ceiling was installed. As with the temporary walls in all the buildings, this wall too was held in place by pressure bolts, with foam cushioning so the permanent carpets and ceilings would not be disturbed. High up on the new wall of the reading room the PDR architects positioned a relief map of the world, attractively backlit in blue. Again flags of the participating nations hung from the stenciled ceiling. Sherpa work stations were positioned in the alcoves surrounding the room — all 10,000 books had been boxed up and removed from the library.

But the centerpiece of the room was the huge table, designed, as were all the plenary tables, by Wayne Braun of PDR. This was the most spectacular table of all. The center of the long oval top was of curly maple, a rare pattern favored by early American furniture makers. This particular maple came from a tree cut in Michigan in 1962; for twenty- eight years the craftsmen at Brochsteins Inc. had held this extraordinary

veneer, waiting for a special use. The edge of the table was made of cherry, cut from a century-old tree in Pennsylvania, with the grain radiat- ing outward from the center of the table. The table with its steel frame and weight of almost 4,500 pounds took over 2,300 man-hours to design and construct. This table, costing $175,000, was donated to the State Depart- ment by PDR; the other three tables, made with the same veneers and costing a total of $314,500, were later offered for sale.

These, of course, are not ordinary tables. Each has a built-in . microphone for every delegate, a plug for eaiphones to hear the interpret- ers, and a volume control. The tables are round in shape to ensure equality of seating arrangement — no one would sit at the head of the table. Ac- cording to the architectural firm, the shape also symbolizes a "closed circle of cooperation wherein all members play an important role in keeping the community whole and intact." The tables symbolize, too, the care and enormous attention to detail that marked every aspect of the 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations. This was, in every respect, a world class event, and the rooms at Rice were brought up to a standard of sumptuousness inappropriate for academic uses but expected abroad for meetings of the highest government officials.

Lesser changes occurred in preparing holding rooms in Lovett Hall, in decorating the lobby outside the Sewall Hall Art Gallery (where members of the visiting delegations and their spouses would wait before the opening ceremonies), and in the Faculty Club, where the heads of delegations would assemble when they first arrived at Rice and where they would have a working lunch on Tuesday. Asset Inventory Systems was contracted to keep track of all the Rice furnishings that were moved out and all the new furnishings moved in. In all, a total of 750 items was loaned by 43 sources — furniture showrooms, the Decorative Center, and major corporate offices. For days Cotton Moving and Storage trucks and moving personnel scurried about the campus, moving furniture in and out of buildings. These expenses, too, were met by the federal government.

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Rice faculty and staff handled the inconvenience with a minimum of complaints; after all, even President Rupp had to move out of his office and into temporary quarters in Brown College for several weeks. Presi- dent Rupp's desk — originally President Lovett's desk — proved too big to move out of the office, so it had to remain. The faculty and staff of the Jones School and the Computer Information and Technology Institute — who were completely moved out of their quarters for weeks— were extraordinarily cooperative; they coped with extensive disruption with grace and good humor.

To a casual observer much of this preparation and renovation seemed excessive. Summit officials explained that however democratic American expectations are, foreign government officials expect a level of accommodation far in excess of what one finds in even the most richly

appointed rooms on a university campus. The approximately 600 linear feet of hew walls were also not all simply for decoration; they necessarily concealed interpreters, closed-circuit television cameras, computers, communication equipment, and technicians to monitor the equipment. Drew Patton of PDR and the interior decorators — directed by Angie Patton — sought to change the academic ambience at Rice to one resem- bling the "west wing of the White House"; taking their cues from summit planners, the architects' task was not merely to create an image but rather to meet a requirement for diplomatic interchange. As one summit spokesman from Washington put it, "If you think this is excessive, you should have seen what the French did at Versailles." The federal govern- ment proved quite successful in getting many items and services donated, thus limiting the total cost of the summit to taxpayers. Most Rice ex- penses went toward permanent improvements to the campus and were substantially underwritten by contributions. Almost all the non-capital- improvement costs to Rice were incurred on behalf of several educational components — a lecture series, a symposium, curricular materials, student journalism — that proved a valuable complement to the summit.

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A less obvious kind of preparation involved the proper protocol, the etiquette of diplomacy. Formal diplomatic meetings between representatives of sovereign nations are arranged exactly accord- ing to protocol, which governs every detail down to who arrives in what order (by the rank of office and the length of service in a particular office), the precise angle by which the flags are dipped when the nations are being identified at the opening ceremonies, making sure all the flags are the right shape and hung properly (in the right order and not upside down or backwards) at every occasion, and determining how the leaders are to be saluted. They were to receive a 2 1 -gun salute, the guns being four 75 millimeter towed howitzers mounted on 105 millimeter carriages dating from the Second World War. The howitzers, firing one-half pound powder blanks, were flown in on C-140s from Washington for the summit and positioned in the Faculty Club parking lot.

Not every protocol issue was easy to resolve. There was spirited discussion even among the American officials over whether the red carpet leading from the Sallyport to the reviewing stand was exactly the proper shade of red. Was it wide enough? Was it acceptable for several of the heads of delegations to walk on the bare sidewalk, and for one actually to walk on the grass? The answers to all were finally yes. Small decisions became not only contentious but important for those involved.

Because it is traditional and diplomatically appropriate, that is to say, required by protocol, four hundred members of the military honor guard were flown to Houston from Washington, D. C. (where they regu- larly meet dignitaries on the White House lawn), boarded at Will Rice, Lovett, and Baker colleges, and asked to perform their ceremonial display of colors and precision marching in the academic quadrangle between the statue of William Marsh Rice and the president's reviewing stand. One hundred and fifty feet of hedges had been carefully removed to create a temporary parade ground, and exterminators had previously

sprayed that and certain other portions of the campus to eliminate ants and other unwelcome insects. One group of the color guard was dressed as colonial militiamen, and their fifes and drums recalled the 1 983 American summit meeting in Colonial Williamsburg. But this martial aspect of the arrival ceremonies was de rigueur protocol, not a demonstration of mili- tary might.

Though to a layperson protocol may seem silly, it in fact smooths the interrelations between important people with important egos and, by virtue of agreed upon procedures, avoids potentially embarrassing disagreements over such minor procedures as who first exits a room. Joseph Reed, U. S. Chief of Protocol, the State Department, was in charge of the protocol details of every aspect of the summit. He and other staff persons spent hours figuratively walking through the summit schedule and training assistants to direct the various delegates to the right meeting room at the right moment. Stand-ins for the delegates, including several Rice students, simulated in advance every aspect of the summit, even arriving by limousine and being escorted through the exact schedule of events to check the timing and facilitate the training of the handlers. Reed's brief- ing book had each detail timed to the minute; every function, practically every movement by President Bush, was in effect choreographed and scripted.

No detail was left to chance, no room was left for a misstep or an awkward moment. Short pieces of tape on the sidewalk beneath the front entrance to the Sallyport indicated by name how the heads of delega- tions were to enter the Sallyport and walk toward the academic quadrangle for the "class photo." When the delegation heads first arrived individually and then were escorted by President and Mrs. Bush through the Sallyport and underneath the cloisters of Lovett Hall to the patio at the east end of Sewall Hall, just at the precise location where the dignitaries stopped, there, on the edge of the step, were four short pieces of masking tape labeled: Mr. Bush, Mr. Guest, Mrs. Bush, Mrs. Guest. At that point the

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Bushes turned and handed their guests over to Chief of Protocol Reed, who escorted them several steps to meet Ambassador Malek, who then walked with them to the Faculty Club as the Bushes walked back through the Lovett Hall cloisters to await the arrival of the next head of delegation. No one at any time ad-libbed a step or comment or pause. Even the phrase "heads of delegations" was dictated by protocol because, techni- cally speaking, only Presidents Bush and Mitterrand were heads of state; the others were heads of government but not heads of state. The Queen is the head of state: Mrs. Thatcher is the head of the government. Hence the correct collective term for the assembled government leaders is head of delegation.

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While many might question some of the remodeling and refurnishing that occurred on the Rice University campus, and certain niceties of protocol seem an arcane throwback to the age of knighthood, no one could doubt the necessity of extraor- dinary security measures. After all, for several hours eight leaders of the Western world would be assembled on one small reviewing stand or in one or two meeting rooms. A would-be terrorist's dream could result in an international nightmare. Consequently no aspect of the summit was more carefully planned than security, and the city of Houston never before, in its history had witnessed such elaborate precautions. Flown in for the occasion were — accordirig to the local newspapers — approximately 400 agents of the United States Secret Service, more than 100 Special Agents of the State Department, perhaps 300 Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, and members of the President's Protective Agency. In addition, 1 ,500 members of the Houston Police Department were assigned to summit activities, plus 425 Harris County deputies, and countless other state, local, and military agents. The Secret Service headquartered in the Ley Student Center at Rice beginning June 8; the Famsworth Room housed their radio communications, but the only exterior indication of what was taking place inside was a satellite dish placed on top of the building. The Secret Service agents and the officers of the Houston Police Department were fed in the R Room, at the south end of the football stadium, by the Rice food service. In addition to the American personnel, each participating nation had personnel from its own security organiza- tions present. Marty Vest, director of the Rice Memorial Center, saw to every need of the Secret Service men and women, and they in turn practi- cally adopted her as an honorary member of their agency.

Not every detail of the security arrangements can be dis- cussed even after the fact, for the various agencies — local, national, and international — charged with the responsibility of protecting visiting heads of delegations do not choose to reveal certain sensitive details of electronic

surveillance and dther kinds of surveillance of individuals whose prior history made them potentially suspect. But what can be told explains why, for several days, Rice University was the safest place in the world for those who were authorized to be there.

Months before the summit was to begin, security personnel began inspecting the facilities at Rice; every hotel housing delegates; the sites of secondary summit meetings such as Bayou Bend and the Museum of Fine Arts, where official dinners were held; the Astrodomain, site of the pre-summit rodeo; the Brown Convention Center; Ellington Field, where the airplanes carrying the heads of delegations landed; and each motor- cade route. Not only were the physical facilities of the hotels checked, but every person who might come into contact with the delegates — maids, waiters, food preparers, clerks — was checked. Food ingredients were inspected. Secret Service agents examined lists of tenants of buildings that lined the various motorcade routes and performed a careful check to see if any persons had criminal records. Several times in advance of the summit the Secret Service agents drove the motorcade routes videotaping every building, house, intersection, and vehicle encountered. These tapes were reviewed to see if anything looked suspicious, and the license plates of the vehicles were run through police computers to see if any of the vehicles belonged to known or suspected troublemakers. Minor changes were made in several of the routes as a result, and the exact times of motorcades were changed many times — even slight variations during the summit from announced schedules — to confuse potential terrorists.

Close watch was kept on several groups who were known to be planning protests during the summit, and specific locations in Hermann Park across from the Rice campus were designated for such protests. Extensive police supervision was provided; members of mutually antago- nistic groups were prevented from interfering with each other or causing violence. The police in full riot gear at the Ku Klux Klan rally on Satur- day afternoon preceding the summit, for example, far outnumbered the

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Klansmen present. Hecklers were watched as well, with one insistent person getting arrested. Security planners had determined that no protest would be censored, but also that none would be allowed to get out of hand.

All the construction at Rice. was inspected before new walls were closed in to ensure that no explosive or listening device was hidden; in fact, on several occasions walls had to be reopened after they were closed because they had not been officially examined. Secret Service agents even dismantled and put back together again the portable air conditioning units that were concealed under the president's reviewing stand to make certain that they contained no bombs. All the buildings on campus were swept for bombs the Saturday before the summit opened. Already the Secret Service, the Houston Police Department's Bomb Squad, and the Fire Department had carefully inspected the network of utility tunnels beneath the Rice campus. After the final sweep, many

manhole covers were tack-welded shut; those portions of the tunnels that had entries from basements were secured with Secret Service locks. The same was done to all the manhole covers along the various motorcade routes. Similarly all mailboxes on the Rice campus and lining the motor- cade routes were removed several weeks in advance so no terrorist could plant an explosive in one or more of them.

The air space above Rice for six miles in every direction was restricted; trauma helicopters from the Texas Medical Center were al- lowed to fly, but not in the direction of Rice, and the traffic helicopters that many Houston drivers depend on were grounded over much of the city. During the summit proceedings several Black Hawk helicopters, temporarily stationed at Ellington Field, maintained aerial surveillance of the campus. In the case of an emergency on the campus involving summit delegates, a rescue procedure was practiced. While two Black Hawks circled low over the campus, two other Black Hawks with armed com-

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mandoes quickly zoomed down almost to ground level to simulate a landing between Herring Hall and the Rice Memorial Center. In the case of a real threat, delegates would have been whisked out of the building and to safety in a matter of minutes. Security agents were also placed atop several Rice buildings and tall buildings in the Texas Medical Center.

Every possible contingency was considered. National Guardsmen unloaded the delegates' luggage onto the tarmac at Ellington Field so that bomb-sniffing dogs could inspect them. Medical planners examined the complete medical history of each of the major participants; specialists in every potential illness or ailment were on standby around the clock, and several emergency rooms were also constantly ready, with all the medical personnel having cleared a security check. Ambulances, helicopters, and other response vehicles were on instant standby. An ambulance was driven in each motorcade just behind the limousine, with a second ambulance available should the first have a flat or motor trouble.

Each delegation included the personal medical doctor of the respective head of delegation, and that doctor observed the delegate head every moment of each plenary session via closed-circuit television without audio. If there had been the least visible indication of a medical prob- lem— a stroke, for example, or heart attack or choking — the monitoring doctor was in instantaneous electronic contact with a standby physician and emergency team at a Texas Medical Center hospital.

Security was tight at every summit related site, but nowhere more so than the Rice campus. The Rice Campus Police had been in- volved in security planning from the very beginning, although always in an advisory or cooperative mode. The Secret Service, along with the Houston Police Department, devised the security plan, but the Rice Campus Police represented the Rice administration in making sure that all Rice personnel understood the procedures and were inconvenienced as little as possible. The Secret Service and HPD were, understandably, little concerned about inconvenience; their sole purpose was to have a secure campus for three days. The first line of that security was approximately 150 Houston police officers standing about 100 feet apart around the entire perimeter of the campus twenty-four hours a day. The streets ringing the campus were made one lane and one way, from Sunset Boule- vard to Rice Boulevard to Greenbriar Avenue to University Boulevard to Main Street. From MacGregor Boulevard (formerly Outer Loop) past the Mecom Fountain, Main Street was completely closed to through traffic. Police officers stood in the closed lanes; at night, temporarily improved lighting courtesy of Houston Lighting and Power eliminated dark areas. The police officers, with a fifteen-minute break every two hours, were on twelve-hour shifts. Coffee and snacks were provided; the Harris County Mosquito Control District did extra spraying in the region to provide a measure of comfort for the foot-weary police officers. All police vaca- tions were cancelled for the duration of the summit; as a result, even with the concentration of personnel on summit events, more police than usual

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patrolled streets throughout the remainder of the city.

Inside the police line there was a no-man's-land under close surveillance. Then, around the perimeter of the inner area of the campus called the Summit Security Zone — roughly from the President's House, Lovett Hall and the academic quadrangle, to Herring Hall and the Rice Memorial Center, extending south to include the Faculty Club and six residential colleges (but excluding the Allen Business Center), then reaching across most of the stadium parking lot — there was extremely tight security by what are called uniformed Secret Service agents. For the even more restricted area actually containing the plenary meeting rooms, Secret Service personnel were practically hand to hand. This portion of the campus was totally off-limits to anyone without highest security clearance. No mail packages or packages conveyed by any vendor could be delivered to offices or departments during the summit period; all such deliveries had to be made to the Rice campus police office and could be picked up at the conclusion of the summit. Even the maintenance and custodial personnel required to be in the Summit Security Zone had to be cleared and accompanied by Secret Service agents. It would have been deadly business for any unauthorized person found to be in this inner sanctum of the summit.

But as secure as the total campus was, Rice officials had worked out in advance exacting procedures whereby necessary Rice faculty, staff, and graduate students could come on campus to perform essential work. Some of the most grueling negotiation with the govern- ment about use of the Rice campus had involved Rice's insistence that much of the work and research of the university had to continue. The business operations of the campus continued in Allen Center; many of the administrative employees were moved to converted dormitory rooms in Brown College; and ongoing experiments in the laboratories had to be tended. Sandwiches were provided in Allen Center to the personnel there, while Sammy's (the campus snack bar) was relocated to the Brown

College Commons for the duration of the summit. A complicated credentialing procedure was employed to control entry to the campus. Everyone who had a legitimate reason to be on campus during the summit period submitted his or her name to the Rice Summit Office. This master list was then processed by the Rice Campus Police. Automobile tags (to be hung from the interior windshield mirror) were sent to the relevant personnel; this displayed tag allowed a person to enter the campus at one of three specified locations.

Once on campus, a barricade of concrete trash barrels re-

■ quired anyone driving to stop. Police and military personnel checked the trunk and interior of the car for weapons or bombs. Then one went to the credentials desk, manned by members of the Rice Campus Police, under an adjacent tent. One's name was checked against the master credential list; once the name was located, one handed in his or her regular Rice identification card and was handed in return an official security badge that allowed one access to what was labeled "the outer perimeter." After clipping this badge to one's clothings one walked through a magnetometer (a metal detector similar to those used at airports) operated by Secret

. Service personnel. Then one could go to those portions of the campus not labeled a Summit Security Zone, which, as described before, consisted of most of the campus except for the Allen Center and the laboratories and colleges north of Laboratory Road — the road between the Chemistry Building and the library. One could not casually walk across campus from, say, the M. D. Anderson Biological Laboratories to Allen Center. Obviously, campus life was disrupted, but given what might have been, the educational life of the university continued to a remarkable degree during summit activities.

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Precisely because it is first and foremost an educational institution. Rice sought in a variety of ways to educate the larger community about summitry in general and the international issues and oppor- tunities facing this summit in particular. Beginning on March 26, 1 990, and continuing for seven Monday evenings, the Office of Continu- ing Studies offered a course entitled "A Global View of the Economic Summit." Utilizing the expertise primarily of professors of political science, economics, and history, the classes gave a broad overview of the historical, political, and economic issues that could be expected to be at the forefront of discussion at the Houston summit and examined the record of past summits, economic and otherwise.

Carl MacDowell, for example, head of Rice's summit office, described the 1983 Williamsburg summit and previewed preparations at Rice. Historian Francis Loewenheim gave a historical sketch of presiden- tial participation in summits from Woodrow Wilson at Versailles follow- ing World War I to George Bush at the 1989 economic summit at Versailles. Political scientist Richard Stoll put the upcoming summit in the context of changing global politics; economist Gordon Smith analyzed the international economic issues of the day; political scientist Fred von der Mehden described the so-called economic challenge of Japan and other newly industrialized Asian countries; and political scientist John Ambler discussed the European Common Market. Extremely popular, the course attracted an audience of several hundred. The series was also videotaped by the public access television station and broadcast several times before and during the 1990 summit.

But of course adults were not the only Houstonians interested in the summit. Schoolteachers in the metropolitan area saw the event as a perfect occasion to teach students about the peoples and cultures of various nations. To facilitate this educational goal. Rice's education department, chaired by Linda M. McNeil, working with several volunteers and four teachers from the Houston Independent School District, prepared

a packet of curricular materials intended for a three- to five-day set of lessons. The lesson plans, designed for third through tenth grade students, emphasized geography, economics, basic information about the summit, and the languages of the participating nations. The materials included maps, flags to color, a summit vocabulary, and other items designed to enhance students' understanding of the event that would surely dominate their city in midsummer. The curricular materials were distributed both to HISD and to suburban schools.

At the other end of the academic spectrum, the Rice Institute for Policy Analysis sponsored a series of public forums on international defense policy and economics. The Rice forums, partially underwritten by grants from Pennzoil Company and the Hobby Foundation, brought together eight of the world's leading authorities on international affairs to identify and address some of the major issues that the summit participants would have to confront. The forum began on Wednesday, June 27, with a luncheon during which Masamichi Hanabusa, consul general of Japan in New York, spoke on "Japanese Aid to the Third World: Problems and Impacts for U. S. -Japan Relations." That evening the forum hosted a panel discussion on the topic "Debt, Trade, and Investment: How to Build a Secure Economic Future." The three panelists brought a wide range of expertise to focus on issues: Donald T. Regan, former U. S. secretary of treasury and White House chief of staff; Andreas A. M. van Agt, ambassa- dor of the European Economic Community to the United States; and Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Harvard wunderkind of international economics who has helped design the economic programs of Bolivia, Poland, and Yugo- slavia.

The second day of the forum, which was directed by Joseph Cooper of the Rice Institute for Policy Analysis and held in the Grand Hall of the Rice Memorial Center, began with a luncheon address entitled "A New U. S. Policy Concept" by Paul H. Nitze, who has had a distinguished fifty-year career of advising presidents and served as a member of the U. S.

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delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) and the more recent Arms Control Talks at Geneva. The forum closed that evening

\ ith another stimulating panel discussion on the question, "The End of the Bi-Polar World?" The three panelists were Harold Brown, who was Jimmy Carter's secretary of defense; Andre L. Y. Giraud, from 1986 to 1988 the French secretary of defense; and Denis W. Healy, a prominent Labour Party member of the British Parliament since 1952 and secretary of state for defense from 1964 to 1979. Sponsoring such high-level discussion of important policy issues in a forum open to the Houston public has been a Rice practice since its founding, and the Rice Institute for Policy Analysis appropriately contributed to that tradition.

Another educational project perfectly suited for the occasion was the brainchild of the editors of the Thresher, Rice's student newspa- per. Wouldn't it be great. Jay Yates and Kurt Moeller, editors in chief,

nused in the late spring, if a group of student editors from other colleges and universities could come to Houston, work with the Thresher editors, and jointly cover the summit. Yates and Moeller took their idea to Presi- dent George Rupp, who instantly saw the unique educational opportunity and agreed to fund it. After further discussion the proposal was refined to include inviting student editors from the six foreign nations represented at the summit. Consequently sixteen student journalists were chosen — one each from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United King- dom, and ten from representative U. S. colleges and universities: Berke- ley, Carnegie-Mellon, Columbia, Harvard, Notre Dame, Swarthmore, and the University of Houston, University of Miami, University of Michigan, and Washington University. Rice paid their airfare and provided free room and board and office space.

The visiting student journalists, along with a contingent of regular Thresher staff members, were provided summit press credentials. John Davenport, a local television news director, conducted a pre-summit press seminar for the students. President Rupp sponsored a reception for

the student journalists in the Rice Faculty Club on Friday evening, July 6, with many of the regular working press invited to visit with the student journalists. The special summit Thresher staff put out three issues of the Thresher on July 9, 10, and 11. Each visiting student journalist wrote at least one byline article; each foreign student was asked to cover his or her nation's delegation and to prepare background material on the particular issues facing that nation. All articles and editorials were written in En- glish. The entire project was a resounding success; the students learned a great deal and relished the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and the Thresher issues, distributed at the Brown Convention Center, were a hit with the working journalists. One could see members of the press throughout the Brown Center reading the work of the students, and ABC's "Good Morning America" interviewed three of them on its Tuesday broadcast. The point, once again, was that even in the midst of an interna- tional summit and a circus of press activity. Rice seized the opportunity to provide an educational experience for some thirty-four able young student journalists.

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From the first indication that the 1990 Economic Summit of Indus- trialized Nations might possibly come to Houston and, indeed, to Rice University, Rice officials were quick to offer the campus for two very different but interrelated reasons. First, as President Rupp said on many occasions, it was an honor for Rice to participate in a major historic event, albeit as the stage set and the prop manager; and second, the enormous media attention that would focus on Rice as the site of the summit offered a wonderful occasion to make the many merits of the university better known to a local, national, and international audience. But to ensure that Rice realized the potential benefits of this press expo- sure would require as careful planning as the other aspects of the summit. Though government officials would take care that Rice would be suitably prepared as the stage for the summit, Rice itself would have to see to the public relations preparations. That effort began in early December 1989, as soon as it seemed clear that the summit would take place on the campus.

Among the first tasks of the Rice Summit Project Group, coordinated by Carl MacDowell, was to organize a Rice Summit Office, located in the Graduate House. Lou Ann Moore was named project director of university operations to help MacDowell manage the myriad of activities that would take place on campus. Jane Lowery was hired as project director of community relations and charged with the task of helping to formulate a media plan. Cris Pena became the administrative assistant of the summit office. On January 26, 1990, President Rupp announced the organization of a task force charged with the responsibility of facilitating summit activities on campus. The task force consisted of individuals directly responsible for certain functions (Marion Hicks, food and housing; Dow Hudlow, accounting; Tom Moffett, facilities and communication; Bill Noblitt, publicity and media relations; Mary Voswinkel, security; Jim Williamson, scheduling) and others who repre- sented vital constituencies (Allen Matusow, faculty; Spencer Yu, under-

graduates; Robert Schmunk, graduate students). This committee worked closely with Lou Ann Moore and Jane Lowery. Once the scope of Rice's media and public relations opportunities became evident, Jane Lowery's responsibilities expanded and her office was moved to the Allen Business Center. Lowery also coordinated the activities of Rice volunteers, of whom there were many more than there were meaningful jobs to perform. Often times instantly available, campus-wise Rice students' were the most appropriate volunteers to use, but everyone was thanked, warned of the relative lack of opportunities for service, and occasionally sent to the South Main Civic Association to have duties assigned. Most volunteers, however, were essentially held in abeyance on the outside chance that some enormous need might develop at the last moment. Actually at the end the government poured in resources and personnel. Still, many dedicated volunteers did put in long hours that significantly contributed to the success of the summit at Rice. And at practically the last moment, a number of Rice student volunteers were hired either by one of several U. S. government agencies or by the various television networks and news organizations to perform a wide range of tasks that required a familiarity with the Rice campus.

A media task force consisting of President Rupp, Provost Neal Lane, Vice-President Dean Currie, Dean Mary Mclntire, and Carl MacDowell was constituted and met regularly to direct Rice's effort to present itself to a larger public in a way consistent with the university's tradition of understated excellence. Vice-President Currie was given overall responsibility for managing the media and public relations pro- gram, working with Jane Lowery and the University Relations office. By late February a wide-ranging public relations effort was underway, with Rice staff members Kathie Krause and Scott Andrews working with local media and national media respectively. Recognizing both that the summit activities would require a public relations effort greater than the slightly expanded staff at Rice could handle and that it would be helpful to have

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the benefit of a company experienced in national media relations, Rice employed the firm of Fleishman-Hillard — which had a principal who had been actively involved as a White House staffer in a previous economic summit — to help with contacting the national media.

The Rice summit office quickly got underway a variety of public relations projects to educate the media and, through them, the larger public, about the character of the university serving as the summit host. Fleishman-Hillard sent letters suggesting story angles about Rice to a number of national editors, with follow-up calls by a Fleishman-Hillard representative. Fleishman-Hillard also arranged a series of appointments for President Rupp with the editors of such publications as the Wall Street Journal, U. S. A. Today, and U. S. News and World Report in Washington and New York, which gave him an opportunity to discuss the merits of Rice University in the context of American higher education in general. No instant "story" on Rice was really anticipated; rather, the idea was subtly to raise the consciousness of the editors about Rice. Perhaps articles on or mentions of Rice would result in the months ahead. A series of media dinners was organized in Houston, to which a number of local journalists and bureau chiefs were invited to have dinner at the home of President and Mrs. Rupp and meet with a small group of representative Rice faculty and administrators. No hard sell was ever intended; the idea was that the Rice story, once understood, sold itself. Journalists were expected to interview some spokespeople, so Fleishman-Hillard experts provided a training session for administrators and faculty on how to communicate effectively when being interviewed.

Work proceeded also on a carefully designed press packet to be distributed to several hundred selected journalists who would be in Houston to report the summit. This packet — primarily developed by Scott Andrews and later praised by a veteran of the Los Angeles Times as one of the best he had seen — assembled in a gray folder with the Rice seal handsomely embossed on the cover, consisted of five pages of concise

information on "Rice University: An Introduction," "Rice University: A Brief History," "Rice University by the Numbers" (enrollment, average SAT scores, number of faculty, size of endowment, etc.), "Student Life at Rice," and "George Erik Rupp, President of Rice University"; a reproduc- tion of the U. S. News and World Report ranking of Rice as the tenth best national university, with the ranking highlighted; photographs of Lovett Hall and President Rupp; a color map of the campus; a copy of the 1989 Report of the President; and a specially written, color-illustrated booklet entitled Rice University: Setting the Standard that very effectively outlined the history and development of Rice and communicated its character and ethos. This booklet was authored by Jeff Cruikshank; his editorial com- pany also took the photographs and designed the publication. All the materials in the packet, including the booklet, were meticulously re- viewed by Rice's media task force and a special faculty editorial commit- tee consisting of John B. Boles and William Martin and chaired by Dean Mclntire.

Several special services were provided for both print media and television. High quality photographs of Lovett Hall were available for use by print journalists. Because no students would be on campus during the summit, the major television networks were invited to film campus scenes before the spring semester ended. NBC's "Today" show, for example, which during the summit broadcast an interview with the Coun- cil for the Advancement and Support of Education's "Professor of the Year" Dennis Huston, earlier filmed him in a classroom setting for use during the live interview. Rice contracted with Channel 2 locally to take aerial video shots of the campus and the particular buildings housing the plenary meetings on a sunny day. This video was offered to national and international networks as so-called B-Roll, the kind of visual backdrop over which the announcer's voice communicates the story. No aerial views would, of course, be possible during the actual summit, and the weather could be bad several days before the summit. So "perfect" video

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shots were prepared in advance. Cannata Communications Corporation also prepared a video that showed campus scenes, suggested the nature of the university, described the Rice Student Volunteer Program (RSVP), and concluded with brief interviews with a sampling of Rice professors. Kathie Krause and Scott Andrews of Rice's University Relations office also conducted dozens of media tours of the campus in advance of the summit. Never had so many' journalists from so many nations reported on the beauty and quality of the university.

It was recognized at the very onset of summit media planning that with a multitude of opportunities to tell about Rice, some coordination of the message was necessary. A myriad of messages with wildly differ- ing emphases could fuzz the image and confound the communication. A great deal of thought went into developing what came to be called, some- what self-consciously, the "core message." In President Rupp's words," "We are the model for what higher education at its best can be." That

model is the combination of the best qualities of a major research univer- sity and an intimate liberal arts college, where very able students are taught by accomplished professors in small classes. The message was elaborated on by discussing the college and honor system, the develop- ment and enhancement of a number of interdisciplinary research centers and institutes, and the financial accessibility of a Rice education made possible by the university's munificent endowment. Rice has long been a gem of American higher education too little recognized outside the South- west; the summit publicity allowed an opportunity to make its stellar qualities better known nationally and internationally.

For the same reason that the Houston Host Committee sought via the hospitality offered at the Brown Convention Center to cultivate the media, Rice too sought in a variety of venues to promote its story. Volun- teer Tom Smith, Rice alumnus and member of its board of governors, working with Jane Lowery and a large number of fellow alumni, staffed a

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Media Hospitality Center in the R Room at Rice Stadium for more than three weeks in advance of the summit. Refreshments, a chance to relax, printed material on Rice University, a video presentation, and a high-tech HyperCard information system utilizing Macintosh computers with data and visuals on Rice, Houston, and Texas in part prepared by Rice student and staff volunteers was available in the R Room. Similarly furnished hospitality suites were provided in the three downtown hotels housing most of the visiting journalists. Rice alumni volunteers — coordinated by Patti Lewis Everett — welcomed the media at the Hyatt Hotel, the Four Seasons, and the Doubletree with a complimentary continental breakfast, snacks for lunch and after dinner, and a complimentary bar. The Rice core message was dispensed along with the edibles.

A sleek information booth, designed by Jeff Cox of Rice's Office of University Relations, was installed in the Brown Convention Center and staffed throughout the summit activities by a group of volun-

teers supervised by Tom Smith. Here too the press packet, the video, and the HyperCard system were on display; volunteers stood ready to answer questions about Rice; and a group of faculty and staff fluent in French, German, Italian, and Japanese were available to discuss Rice with journal- ists in their native tongue. Rice mementos — T-shirts, reporter's note- books featuring the Rice seal, Rice lapel pins, small Rice Owls for charm bracelets (also perfect for the chain holding the regulation media IDs that had to be worn to gain entry to the Brown Center) — were also immensely popular with the visiting journalists, many of whom turned out to be souvenir hounds: "I'll trade you a CBS pin for a Rice pin" or "I'll give you an NBC cap for a Rice T-shirt" was often heard near the Rice booth. Parenthetically, when the delegation staff and even Secret Service staff left the Rice campus on the final day of the summit, they removed the summit signage bearing the official logos from the walls and took them for mementos.

The Rice Information and Communication Exchange, a library reference service provided to corporations on a fee basis by Rice's Fondren Library, in cooperation with librarians at other area universities and institutions, operated a free information reference center on the third floor of the Brown Center at the entrance to the press filing room. Super- vised by Una Gourlay of R. I. C. E. and Sherry Adams, head librarian of the Houston Chronicle, the reference center provided a variety of com- puter data bank information services to journalists. If a reporter needed background information to complete a story, the trained librarians were able via their data banks to answer practically any information question. The idea, appreciated by the visiting reporters, was to assist those trying to file an accurate story while faced with pressing deadlines.

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Japanese reporters and television networks covered the summit more aggressively than those of any other foreign nation, so it was appropriate that Prime Minister and Mrs. Toshiki Kaifu were the first to arrive in Houston. Their airplane landed at Ellington Air Field — formerly an aviation training field built on the eve of World War II — at 4:30 P. M. Friday, and, as would the other arrivals at Ellington, taxied to a stop at a red carpet laid out in front of the Base Operations Building of the Air National Guard Base located there. In a procedure repeated six times, first representatives of the U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and U. S. Customs boarded the plane. Once they had completed their responsibilities, the visiting nation's staff mem- bers exited the airplane. Then a U. S. protocol representative (and, on most occasions, that nation's ambassador to the U. S.) boarded the plane and accompanied the head of delegation, spouse, and official party down the steps to a series of "arrival greeters." Finally the protocol representa- tive escorted each head of delegation and spouse through a military cordon of troops to an awaiting helicopter for a brief, traffic-hopping trip to the hotel. President and Mrs. Bush arrived at Ellington later that evening at 6:50 P. M. with appropriate fanfare.

The Friday arrival ceremonies heralded the excitement that was to reign in Houston for almost a week. (Saturday afternoon Bush and Kaifu had a private pre-summit meeting at The Houstonian, Bush's local home.) The Royal Air Force jet carrying Prime Minister and Mr. Thatcher touched down on the tarmac of Ellington at 5:50 P. M. Saturday evening. Later, at 7:00 P. M., Prime Minister and Mrs. Brian Mulroney of Canada landed at Ellington, and President Jacques Delors of the Euro- pean Economic Community came in Sunday afternoon, 2:25 P. M., at Houston Intercontinental Airport, the only head of delegation to utilize a commercial airport and the only one to travel from the airport to his hotel via motorcade.

Meanwhile, back at the Astroarena, the Texas-style barbecue

for members of the press and for the earlier-arriving dignitaries had already begun. Later that evening, at 6:45, the heads of five delegations and their parties had joined President and Mrs. Bush for front-row seats to watch a specially staged 45-minute rodeo. Following the rodeo was a 45- minute abbreviated show presented by the Grand Ole Opry. While the visitors were witnessing a part of what visitors expect to see in Texas, frantic last-minute preparations were underway elsewhere in Houston.

The Brown Convention Center was a beehive of activity as journalists scrambled to get acclimated, the Rice campus was already a totally secure zone, work was ongoing at the University of Houston preparing for the "Thank You, Houston" party that would be President and Mrs. Bush's final summit appearance, and physical plant craftsmen at Rice were feverishly working to build a canopy over the president's reviewing stand that had just been requested several hours earlier. A number of Houston religious communities held special worship services to ' offer prayers for the summit; a citywide ecumenical Service of Prayer for Economic Peace and Justice was held at Christ the King Lutheran Church, adjacent to the Rice campus, with Houston city controller George C. Greanias the featured speaker.

Several hours later West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Prime Minister and Mrs, Giulio Andreotti of Italy, and President and Mrs. Franccois Mitterrand of France were boarding airplanes in their respective nations preparing to fly across the Atlantic. Kohl had been scheduled to arrive Sunday afternoon but delayed his flight to watch his nation win the World Cup; consequently he arrived at Ellington Field at 5:05 A. M. Monday morning. Prime Minister Andreotti, whose nation had hosted the World Cup games, delayed coming until the championship was decided, and President Mitterrand, second to President Bush in the rankings of protocol, arrived last as protocol dictated. Early on Monday morning, 5:15 A. M. Houston time, the Italian plane landed at Ellington, and four hours later President and Mrs. Mitterrand arrived aboard a graceful Air

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France Concorde. Now the cast was complete. Five of the dignitaries had Sunday to rest (the Bushes and Thatchers attended church), recover from any effects of jet lag, and prepare themselves for the meetings that would begin on Monday, July 9.

The arrival of President and Mrs. Bush at curbside, in front of Lovett Hall, on Monday afternoon at 12:30 P. M. to formally open the 1 990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations included a brief cer- emony rich in symbolic meaning for all friends of Rice University. The 1912 opening of Rice had featured an international convocation of schol- ars, whose papers delivered and read both celebrated the state of scholar- ship in the world and announced a new member to the fraternity of institu- tions of higher education. The papers read at the Opening Ceremonies were collected in three magnificent volumes, the Book of the Opening, and inscribed to then President of the United States Woodrow Wilson. Just five years earlier Wilson as president of Princeton University had ■

suggested a young Princeton mathematician, Edgar Odell Lovett, to the Board of Trustees of the Rice Institute for consideration as the Institute's first president. The Trustees of course chose Lovett; he delivered a memorable address at the opening entitled "The Meaning of the New Institution," and went on to outline his vision for Rice that has since guided the university's development. Now, seventy-eight years after that original intellectual summit at Rice, another great summit was about to commence on the campus. Arrangements had already been made to present President Bush with an inscribed set of the Book of the Opening. President and Mrs. George Rupp and members of the Rice Board of Trustees greeted President and Mrs. Bush as they stepped out of their limousine in front of Lovett Hall and symbolically handed over the campus. President Bush graciously accepted the offer, shook everyone's hand, and proceeded to open the 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations, the first ever held at a university.

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Beginning at 1 2:46 P. M., and arriving every seven minutes via motorcade up the long tree-arched allee from the main entrance at Rice to the front of Lovett Hall came the seven heads of delegations in reverse protocol order: President Delors, Prime Minister Kaifu, Prime Minister Andreotti, Prime Minister Mulroney, Chancellor Kohl, Prime Minister Thatcher, and President Mitterrand. President and Mrs. Bush met each of them at curbside, escorted them through the Sallyport, and walked with them through the cloisters of Lovett Hall toward the plaza before the east side of Sewall Hall. There, after posing momentarily for pictures, Chief of Protocol Joseph Reed and Ambassador Malek walked the successively arriving guests to the Faculty Club. As the Bushes walked back toward the Sallyport awaiting the next arrival, other arriving dignitaries rested and conversed in the Sewall Art Gallery, where a special exhibition of NASA photographs of the earth — loaned for the occasion by the law firm of Fulbright & Jaworski and curated by Michael Henderson — suggested the

common purpose of all the delegates.

Shortly after all the delegations had arrived, the spouses and the ministers of foreign affairs and finance assembled on a reviewing stand under a tent canopy in the inner quadrangle. At approximately 2:05 P. M. President Bush and the heads of delegations began walking from the Faculty Club, around the front of Lovett Hall, toward the Sallyport. Just before 2:10 the heads of delegations entered the east side of the Sallyport, paused momentarily as each looked down at the tape and got into his or her preassigned position, then started walking, eight abreast — from left to right, Jacques Delors, Giulio Andreotti, Helmut Kohl, Francois Mitterrand, George Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Brian Mulroney, and Toshiki Kaifu — through the Sallyport into the academic quadrangle. The festive blasts of trumpets and the booming of a 2 1 -gun salute announced the occasion. The arrival ceremonies had begun. Months earlier this ceremony had beeVi planned to be several hours long, but in June President

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Bush, remembering what a July afternoon was like in Houston, drastically abbreviated the ritual to only eight minutes.

The traditional red carpet led from the Sallyport to the air- conditioned, roofed reviewing stand, and rumors indicated that Mrs. Thatcher had had lead weights sewn into the hem of her dress to keep it from billowing as she and the others stood on the stand with cooling air blowing up from beneath. The U. S. Marine Band played the stirring anthems of the participating nations. The U. S. Fife and Drum Corps of the Third Infantry paraded in colonial splendor before the international guests, while honor guards from all branches of the U. S. military stood at brisk attention. Color guards bearing the flags of the seven nations and the European Economic Community were positioned on both sides of the reviewing stand. Following the shortened display. President Bush wel- comed his guests with very brief remarks. "So let us begin, in good faith," he said, squinting into the sun, "to set the stage for the new millennium." He referred to the recent remarkable changes in Europe, then urged his fellow leaders of the industrial democracies to "work toward decisions here in Houston that will bring new stability and prosperity to the world."

Within minutes of the conclusion of President Bush's re- marks, the heads of delegations were walking back toward Lovett Hall, where they rested briefly in their respective holding rooms. Then at 3:00 P. M. the eight heads of delegations assembled in the Founders' Room of Lovett Hall for the first plenary meetings. Pool reporters and journalists visited the room as the heads of delegations entered and found their seats; then the press left and the most private of all the plenary sessions began. At the opposite end of the academic quadrangle the ministers of foreign affairs were assembling at that very moment in the Elder Periodical Room of Fondren Library and the ministers of finance were beginning their meeting in the Wright Reference Room of Fondren. The business of the 1990 Economic Summit had commenced. Not quite two hours later — the sessions cut short in deference to those who had arrived only that morning

after long transatlantic flights — the eight heads of delegations exited the Founders' Room, descended the steps, and walked from the Sallyport toward the president's reviewing stand, stopping just short of it. There the leaders stood at a prearranged location in front of the glorious, sun- drenched west facade of Lovett Hall; this was to be the site of one of two official "class photos." Ten minutes later the Monday session was over; the heads of delegations returned to their holding rooms and, in reverse protocol order, departed the Rice campus for their respective hotels.

Monday evening the various members of the delegations had working dinners at several Houston locations. Secretary of State James A. Baker hosted a dinner for the foreign ministers at Tony's Restaurant; the ministers of finance working dinner took place at the Wortham House, the South Boulevard home of the chancellor of the University of Houston System, and the sherpas and political directors participated in a working dinner in the Massachusetts Room of the Bayou Bend Collection. The heads of delegations held their working dinner in the Dining Room of the Bayou Bend Collection, arriving in two-minute intervals after 7:00 P. M. at the stately, 28-room "Latin Colonial" mansion designed by John F. Staub and built in 1 927 for Miss Ima Hogg and her two brothers, Mike and Will Hogg. Miss Hogg accumulated one of the nation's premier collections of American antiques — furniture, paintings, glassware — and now her home and collection are part of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Arriving via the Lazy Lane entrance, the heads of delegations were met in the beautifully landscaped south gardens by President Bush (Mrs. Bush was hosting another elegant dinner for the spouses of the delegates at the private Buffalo Bayou mansion of old friends Hugh and Betty Liedtke). Following a short stroll through part of the fourteen acres of grounds, the heads of state lined up at approximately 7:25 P. M. on the north lawn of Bayou Bend, with its columned facade as a backdrop, for their second "class photo." After posing good-naturedly, with friendly comments about Houston's warm weather and hospitality, the eight

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entered Bayou Bend's formal drawing room for drinks, a reloeated Gilbert Stuart painting of John Vaughan creating the proper atmosphere. Then the guests sat for dinner in the intimate dining room, two French porcelain vases depicting Washington and John Adams on a nearby table. The menu — tortilla soup with com bread sticks, grilled Gulf of Mexico red snapper as the entree, and dessert of blackberry peach swirl ice cream, sliced peaches, and cookies — was Texan in flavor served in a colonial American setting. After the finish of the working dinner the delegations lingered beyond the scheduled time to look in appreciation at the spectacu- lar holdings of Bayou Bend, then left in protocol order to return to their hotels for a well-deserved rest.

On Tuesday morning Barbara Bush, four other first ladies (Danielle Mitterrand, Mila Mulroney, Livia Andreotti, and Sachiyo Kaifu), and fourteen wives of foreign and finance ministers flew to San Antonio for a whirlwind five-hour visit to the Alamo, Mission San Jose

with its famous "Rosa's Window," and the River Walk. Back in Houston the motorcades began arriving at Rice at 8: 29 A. M. in protocol order; President Bush greeted the heads of delegations as they arrived. Each head went briefly to his or her Herring Hall holding room. Staff persons, who had arrived not by motorcade but by car, parked in the stadium parking lot, then ridden in a shuttle bus to Herring Hall, were already at work (indeed, had worked far into the previous night) preparing the documents for the day's agenda. Each delegation was provided one fax machine, a personal computer with laser printer, and telephones; two copiers were available on the third floor of Herring, and lounges at the east and west ends of the third floor had two televisions — one of which carried the CBS Pool Feed — and daily newspapers and selected weekly periodi- cals from around the world. The Baker College Commons served as the dining hall for all the staff; it offered "continental dishes with a Southwest- em flair" for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the food being prepared during

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the day under contract by Wyatt's Cafeteria and at night by Rice's own food service.

The foreign and finance ministers, along with the sherpas, attended the Tuesday plenary meetings that began at 9:00 A. M. in the O'Connor Reading Room of Herring Hall. The plenary session ended shortly after noon, then, at 12:30 P. M, the heads of delegations left Herring Hall, boarded a shuttle bus for a trip of several hundred feet, exited the bus, and — another carefully arranged photo opportunity — walked eight abreast, unaccountably out of protocol order, toward the Faculty Club where they had a working lunch. The lunch was prepared under the direction of caterer Jackson Hicks, but much of the actual cook- ing was done by the Faculty Club's assistant manager, John Holbert. Club manager Rick Gaido was on hand to supervise the building operations. President Bush noticed him, introduced himself and then introduced Mr. Gaido to Mrs. Thatcher, and asked Mr. Gaido to tell her about the various

courses of study offered at Rice. Before Mr. Gaido finished the list, Mrs. Thatcher interjected "and architecture." She obviously had been briefed that the School of Architecture's building renovation and enlargement had been designed by the eminent British architect, James Sterling. Later, during the actual luncheon, President Bush had Mr. Gaido summoned. "Tell our guests about the size of the Rice endowment," he asked. Mr. Gaido provided the figure to the interested guests. Still later, remarking that somehow, in the midst of all the preparations, note pads had not been provided for the participants in this working lunch, President Bush asked Mr. Gaido if he could bring them some sheets of the Faculty Club's stationery. Mr. Gaido's unexpected involvement served to personalize the summit for him; and many other Rice faculty, staff, and administrators had similar individual experiences that, small in their way, will loom large in each person's memories of the 1990 Economic Summit of Indus- trialized Nations.

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The other participants in the Tuesday plenary session divided into their constituent groups for their own working lunches. The finance ministers ate at a table set up in the Lovett Lounge, outside the Kyle Morrow Room on the third floor of Fondren Library; the foreign ministers, dined in the President's House, on campus; and the sherpas participated in a working luncheon in a private dining room on the second floor of the Faculty Club. Lower ranking staff, as usual, dined in Baker Commons. At approximately 2:45 P. M. all twenty-four delegates and eight sherpas returned to the O'Connor Reading Room in Herring Hall to continue meeting in plenary session. This plenary was originally scheduled to adjourn at 4:00, but the press of the issues under discussion kept the session underway until 5:30, requiring President Bush to push back the formal evening dinner scheduled to begin at the Museum of Fine Arts at 7:00. Before the afternoon plenary concluded, Secretary of State Baker held a press conference at the Brown Center to report on the progress of

the meetings.

The Tuesday evening dinner was a festive, gala affair, much unlike the working dinners on Monday night. A staff mix-up, perhaps caused by the late ending of the afternoon plenary, resulted in President Bush's not having his prepared remarks as he rose to toast the guests, so he ad-libbed that "There is no work here tonight. No communique, no amendments, no language to be corrected. We simply want you to have a very good time at this museum that we in Houston are very proud of." Those informal, genuine remarks marked the tone of the evening. Mrs. Bush and her San Antonio entourage had returned; Vice-President and Mrs. Quayle flew in for the occasion; each nation had a dinner delegation of around a dozen; and there were twenty Houston and Texas guests representing the state, city, and county governments and the leading educational institutions of the city. Charles and Anne Duncan and George and Nancy Rupp represented Rice.

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The approximately 1 20 diners were seated at a dozen tables, attended by five White House butlers brought in for the elegant repast; local waiters also attended, but they had undergone a six-hour training session on Sunday. The tablecloths were white with raspberry-colored overlays, and the tables were set with china supplied by Tiffany's. A full- sized portrait of Alexander Hamilton by John Trumbull, loaned by the U. S. Treasury Department, hung behind President Bush as he delivered his welcome toast. The dinner, prepared by a trio of chefs — Robert Del Grande, Dean Fearing, and Robert McGrath — began with chilled yellow tomato soup with avocado relish, complemented with miniature butter- milk biscuits, and was followed by hickory grilled veal loin medallions with morels in pan sauce and served with sweet corn pudding, 7-grain rolls and Parker House rolls, salad of Texas lettuce with croutons, walnut vinaigrette dressing, and a selection of American cheeses; the dessert was a cobbler of Texas Cherokee blackberries and peaches with sweetened cream. Among the wines was the medal-winning Llano Estacado Chardonnay from Lubbock, Texas.

At the conclusion of the long dinner during which several guests were reported to have been nodding, everyone adjourned to the Brown Auditorium, where eighty other invited guests joined the dinner guests to enjoy an evening of eclectic entertainment ranging from actress Cicely Tyson to bluegrass performer Ricky Skaggs to singer Marilyn McCoo to comic juggler Michael Davis. A tired group of delegates departed late that evening, but back at Rice, the sherpas and various staff persons stayed up most of the night putting the final touches on the sum- mit statement, the discussion of which had lengthened the Tuesday after- noon plenary.

By the time the heads of delegations, foreign and finance ministers, and sherpas assembled at 9:00 A. M. the next morning, Wednesday, July 1 1 . around the handsomely crafted, 40-foot long oval table in Herring Hall, the final text of the summit-ending "Houston Sum- mit Declaration" had been drafted overnight by the indefatigable delega-

tion staffs. Only formalities remained, and so little of substance was required Wednesday morning that President Mitterrand was able to slip away to the architecture school of the University of Houston, which bestowed on him an honorary doctorate in humanities for his significant achievements in public building in France. It was hoped, too, that he would work with exchange students from the university after his retire- ment from the presidency. An exhibit entitled "Architectures Capitales de Paris" complemented the French president's visit to the University of Houston.

By shortly after 10:00 A. M. the remainder of the delegates . were finishing up at Rice and beginning a motorcade parade from Rice, through downtown Houston where large crowds lined the streets and cheered the passing limousines, to the Brown Convention Center. The motorcades arrived ahead of schedule. President Bush and the delegation heads proceeded to the Assembly Hall on the third floor of the Brown Center. Barbara Bush and a large group of delegation spouses had had a series of individualized tours of the Texas Medical Center earlier in the morning, but they too had come to the Brown Center. President Bush, joined on the stage by the seven other heads of delegations, formally presented the summit's final communique, the "Houston Summit Declara- tion." Speaking for the assembled delegations. Bush stated that "we are enormously heartened by the resurgence of democracy throughout the world," then he cautioned that much additional work and compromise remained to be done on a variety of issues mutually involving the gathered industrial nations and their relationships to the Soviet Union. After in effect declaring the completed summit a success, President Bush ad- journed the meeting. He and the otHer delegation heads held brief news conferences afterwards; the peripatetic Bush was soon off to tour the dining area of the Brown Center and to thank the cooks and food servers. Then it was back to his Texas home in The Houstonian, a quick change into jogging clothes, and a twenty-minute, tension-releasing run through nearby Memorial Park. The 1 990 Economic Summit was over.

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From the beginning of planning for the official summit events, George Bush and summit organizers had also made plans for a giant party to thank the thousands of volunteers and contributors who made the event possible. The "Thank You, Houston" party was held on the campus of the University of Houston, beginning at 3:00 P. M. Wednesday afternoon. Visitors found that portion of the campus as spruced up as the Rice campus had been for its share of summit events. In fact, the University of Houston apparently planted more sod and trees than Rice did, because, like Rice, the University of Houston wanted to make a favorable impression on its visitors. Even the large fountain that had been broken was repaired for the occasion. The whole affair had the festive atmosphere of a down-home county fair midway combined with the international flair of a world's fair. Tents elaborately decorated with the flags and symbols of the various summit nations dispensed that nation's traditional foods. Flags festooned the whole area, with live music of every imaginable kind filling the air. Strolling mimes and jugglers contributed to the celebratory ambience.

One could feast on European delicacies or Texas barbecue cooked over a pit that had a 30-foot-tall replica of an oil well towering above it. The afternoon's heat was battled by more than a hundred electric fans, while persons attending were given hand fans in the shape of Houston's distinctive skyline. Caterer Jackson Hicks, who seemed to be everywhere during the summit — he had supervised the food at the Satur- day evening Media Fest in the museum district, the Barbara Bush spouses' dinner at the Liedtkes, and the formal dinners served on the Rice cam- pus— along with others (Ninfa's, Luther's, Bennie Ferrell, Marthann Masterson, and the University of Houston College of Hotel and Restaurant Management), prepared the food for this final summit bash. All the food was donated, and anonymous contributions reimbursed the University of Houston for all the expenses it had incurred.

In the midst of the public carnival of food and entertainment, two restricted parties were underway. The Bushes themselves hosted a

party for about 140 of the top volunteers in the College of Architecture Building, freshly painted for the summit, while in nearby Farish Hall certain summit volunteers and University of Houston regents hosted a cocktail party for several hundred persons and corporate representatives who had each donated in excess of $10,000 to the Houston Host Commit- tee. At 6:00 P. M. a succession of local musical groups — Die Hofbrau Kapelle, the Asian-American Dance Co., The Gypsies, and Mariachi Los Galliotos and the Grupo Zapata folklore dancers — began to warm up the crowd for the official show. Then at 7:00 the crowd of approximately 8,000 that was gathered before the giant, 1 20-foot-long stage decorated with the Houston skyline, futuristic space scenes, and a stylized version of stars and stripes, heard a star-studded musical and comedic performance. George Bush personally thanked the people of Houston from the stage: "You've shown the world what Houston hospitality is all about," he said to an appreciative audience.

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The show, broadcast live on three local television channels, provided a rollicking good time, with toe-tapping music by Randy Travis and Marilyn McCoo and comedy by Fred Travelena, who pleased the crowd with his impressions of George Bush. Native Houston actress Lisa Hartman emceed the patriotic show, which ended with the fourteen hundred tiny lights on the stage spelling out Houston, then flickering in such a computer-controlled way as to appear to be fluttering in the wind like a flag. Houston had gone all out to make the 1990 Economic Summit a success, and this was a fitting, self-congratulatory way to end three spectacular days of diplomacy and pageantry.

"WE DID IT!" shouted the Houston Post's headline Thurs- day morning, an accurate summation of how many Houstonians felt. Now it was back to everyday business as workers removed the last vestiges of summit equipment from the Brown Center, cleaned up the trash on the U.of H. campus from the previous night's party, and began to turn the meeting sites at Rice from their temporary use as summit sets back into academic rooms. Rice provided a box lunch picnic to all its faculty and staff, offered behind-the-scenes tours of the summit sites, and gave its staff the rest of the day off as a mark of appreciation for the hard work and good cheer everyone had shown during weeks of summit preparations and inconvenience. After the summit was all over, people had time to reflect on what had occurred, to wonder about the significance of the official plenary meetings of the heads of delegations and the impact on Houston of being for several days in the world's spotlight.

The city did get much national and international press cover- age, with stories about its economy coming back as the television screens depicted the soaring downtown skyline. But condescending, almost snickering stories about Houston trying too hard to impress and about the gaucheries of the rodeo competed with positive accounts. Every report seemed to mention the temperature, although, ironically, it had been several degrees hotter in Washington, D. C, than in Houston on Monday,

when the outdoor opening ceremonies were held. Rice University re- ceived wonderful coverage in the local papers and on local television, several positive stories in Texas papers, and glittering references in several foreign newspapers, but the major national newspapers and news maga- zines seldom did more than mention Rice as the actual site of the summit meetings. Nevertheless those worldwide television images of the heads of delegations walking on the campus electrified Rice alumni and friends and filled them with pride. Houston and Rice officials comforted themselves with the thought that the seeds of favorable opinions were planted, and stories, investments, and contributions would come later. Within months these hopes began to appear justified. Perhaps even the Bush Presidential Library would be located in Houston, the most obvious and sensible place, and associated with Rice.

People also realized that the official summit was not the only summit that had occurred in Houston. Meeting simultaneously in the AstroVillage Hotels had been The Other Economic Summit, or TOES, where advocates of the poor, the homeless, the environment, and a variety of other significant causes met to explore the issues of peace and justice. These had been public, not private meetings, and speakers there discussed what was often ignored or avoided by the official delegates huddled at Rice. The proceedings at Rice were restricted, and all that we can know about the substance of the plenaries is what the participants chose to reveal in press conferences and in the communique issued at the end, the "Houston Summit Declaration." What, after all, had the official summit meetings, the focus of all the attention, planning, and expenditures, actually decided?

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The three largest, most time-consuming issues discussed at the 1990 Economic Summit were aid to the Soviet Union to assist President Gorbachev, environmental concerns to limit the industrialized nations' production of carbon dioxide, which pollutes the atmo- sphere, and the controversy over limiting farm subsidies, which the United States and Canada strongly believe distort agricultural exports and world trade. A series of ambiguously worded compromises permitted various sides to claim modest victories, but each of the participating nations was allowed, essentially, to pursue its own policies.

Chancellor Kohl pushed hardest for substantial Western aid for the Soviet Union, while President Bush led the opposition. Bush argued that with Soviet missiles still aimed at U. S. targets and with the Russians still giving Cuba $5 billion in aid annually, it was difficult to defend Western monetary assistance. Kohl and Bush in a private meeting Monday morning and in intense plenary discussions accepted a compro- mise; Germany and other nations could unilaterally give assistance to the Soviet Union and to the new governments in Eastern Europe, and the summit nations acting jointly authorized a task force coordinated by the International Monetary Fund, assisted by four other international lending and development institutions, to study Soviet economic needs and to issue a nonbinding report by the end of the year. So Germany can send money to Russia, the United States will not, and they all agreed to study the matter further. Japan's unilateral aid to the People's Republic of China occasioned little dispute.

The United States was decidedly in the minority as it opposed Europe-led proposals to establish a definite timetable for limiting global emissions of carbon dioxide. The Bush administration — led on this issue by John Sununu — argued that the scientific evidence is inconclusive on the degree to which human-initiated carbon dioxide contributes to envi- ronmental problems. The Bush opposition succeeded in getting the European nations to refrain from insisting on setting up a schedule for

reducing carbon dioxide emissions in return for a proposal that the World Bank initiate a year-long study of ways to protect and preserve Brazil's Amazonian rain forest. At the end of the study, the World Bank research- ers and Brazilian authorities will bring a specific plan to be studied and ratified at the 1991 Economic Summit. Environmentalists were dismayed by this actual decision, though they could perhaps take some heart from the wording of the Houston communique that seemed an oblique refuta- tion of Governor Sununu's position. The first paragraph of the section on the environment stated that "We agree that, in the face of threats of irre- versible environmental damage, lack of full scientific certainty is no excuse to postpone actions which are justified in their own right."

On no issue did President Bush negotiate harder than on the agricultural subsidies that play havoc with U. S. farm exports. While all nations have subsidies of one sort or another, those of the United States and Canada are insignificant compared to those of Europe and Japan. Germany and Japan in particular have very inefficient agricultural econo- mies, but they argue that for social and environmental reasons their system of small farms must be propped up artificially by governmental export subsidies and import restrictions. Despite an intensity of U. S. effort that frankly surprised some European diplomats, no specific final decision was made. The final communique pledged commitment to the goal of the "reform of agricultural policies," "to improve market access," and "to permit the greater liberalization of trade in agricultural products." But actual progress on these matters was left to ongoing negotiation within the procedures of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the Uru- guay Round of discussions on trade restrictions that began four years ago.

More important than any decisions made or not made was the strong consensus on the positive march of democratic ideals in the past year. Every participant in the Houston meetings was aware of the historic transformation that had recently taken place in Eastern Europe, events that gave this first post-Cold War summit a special significance. There was an

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implicit sense that time and history are on our side and a corresponding recognition of the necessity of getting along even if that meant agreeing at times to disagree. As the Italian foreign minister, Gianni De Michelis, put it. "With the West so near to final victory with respect to our struggles over the last 40 years, it would be a criminal form of stupidity to enhance West- West tensions now." It was also clear at the summit that the United States and Russia no longer control the world; just as clear was the emer- gence of the strong economies of Germany and Japan, which the person- alities of Kohl and Kaifu in different ways complemented. Margaret Thatcher commented at one point that "there are three regional groups at this summit, one based on the dollar, one based on the yen, one on the Deutsche mark." Western diplomacy would increasingly have to take notice of that emerging balance of power.

The democratic industrialized powers were determined together to face with hope the coming decade and the imminent arrival of a new century. With that sentiment the eighty-fourth and final paragraph of the final communique read: "We have accepted the invitation of Prime Minister Thatcher to meet next July in London." Thus the modem institu- tion of international summitry will continue as a way to mediate and promote the issues of economic development and democratic progress. The city of Houston and Rice University cherish the opportunity of having been asked to host the 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations. For everyone closely involved, it was an exhilarating moment in the history of both the city and the university.

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Summit Participants

Heads of Delegations:

President George Bush President Frangois Mitterrand Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher Chancellor Helmut Kohl Prime Minister Brian Mulroney Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu President Jacques Delors

Finance Ministers:

Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas F. Brady

Minister of Economy, Finance and Budget Pierre Beregovoy

Chancellor of the Exchequer John Major

Minister of Finance Theodor Waigel and Minister of Economic Affairs

Helmut Haussmann Minister of Finance Michael Wilson Minister of the Treasury Guido Carli Minister of Finance Ryutaro Hashimoto and Minister of International

Trade and Industry Kabun Muto Vice President for Economic and Financial Affairs Henning

Christophersen

Foreign Ministers:

Secretary of State James A. Baker, III

Minister of Foreign Affairs Roland Dumas

Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs

Douglas Hurd Minister for Foreign Affairs Hans-Dietrich Genscher Secretary of State for External Affairs Joe Clark Minister of Foreign Affairs Gianni De Michelis Minister for Foreign Affairs Taro Nakayama Vice President for External Relations Frans Andriessen

Sherpas:

Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Richard T. McCormack

Special Counselor to the President Jacques Attali

Second Permanent Secretary to HM Treasury Nigel Wicks,

CVO.CBE State Secretary, Federal Ministry of Finance Horst Kohler Ambassador of Canada to the United States Derek Bumey Diplomatic Counselor to the Prime Minister Umberto Vattani Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs Koji Watanabe Chief of Staff to the President of the Commission of the European

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