Secretary Rice, Ambassador Lee, Senator Warner, distinguished guests and colleagues, family and friends:
Thank you all for coming.
Let me thank you, Madam Secretary, for your generous words. I am deeply honored that you and the President selected me for this post, and that the Senate confirmed me. You, Secretary Rice, and Senator Warner -- who so honors me with his presence today -- pulled me through. I will do everything in my power to be worthy of your efforts.
Madam Secretary, your presence here today underscores to all of us the determination and vision you have brought as Secretary of State to working with our Korean allies and our other Six-Party partners to achieve a lasting peace on the Korean peninsula, and greater freedom and opportunity for the entire region.
Ambassador Lee.
이 자리에 참석해주셔서 감사드립니다.
I want to pay tribute to Ambassador Lee Tai-sik’s untiring efforts to promote the friendship and alliance between our two countries.
그러한 노력에 대해서 이 자리를 통해서 깊은 감사를
드리고 싶습니다.
I thank the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – the Senators and their staffs – for their counsel and support. My confirmation process took longer than usual, but through it I got to know some of the strongest supporters of the U.S.-Korea alliance, including Senator John Warner. Senator Warner is a Korean War veteran, the only serving U.S. senator with that experience. Senator Warner, your presence reminds us of the service and sacrifice of so many during that terrible – and inconclusive -- conflict. You have reminded me that this year marks the fifty-fifth anniversary of the “temporary” Armistice. That armistice – and the U.S.-Korean alliance -- have provided the essential security shield for the Republic of Korea’s unparalleled economic and political success.
But we have rightly set our sights even higher: toward a denuclearized peninsula, a permanent peace arrangement, and better lives and human rights for all Koreans. Senator, we need your wisdom and support to achieve these goals. I hope I will have the privilege of welcoming you and your colleagues to Korea.
The best moment of the entire confirmation process – with the possible exception of when I was actually confirmed -- was when Senator Ted Kennedy introduced me at my hearing. I was so honored to hear his praise for the work of the Foreign Service, and for his generous recollection of our work together in Northern Ireland. Senator Kennedy’s devotion to public service inspires me and countless others. Thank you, Senator Kennedy.
So many colleagues here at the State Department have helped me prepare for this posting: Sharon Hardy, Tri McCarthy, the entire Korea desk including Jordan Heiber, Jeff Jung, Andrew Ou, and Maureen Cormack. And of course my ever patient Korean language teachers.
공부를 잘 못했지만 열심히 가르처주셔서 감사드립니다.
September marks a special time in Korea, the beginning of autumn, when Koreans exult “chun-go-ma-bi” – the sky is high and the horses are fat. On just such a day thirty-three years ago this month, I got off a train in Ye-san, to start a Peace Corps assignment teaching English in the town’s boys’ middle school. Now for those of you who have never seen a Korean autumn – it really is something. I will never forget my first Korean autumn: the deep green rice paddies ripening into golden waves, persimmon trees and cosmos flowers dotting the dirt paths.
But Korean life was hard, even harsh. Per capita income in Korea in 1975 was $600 – and incredible to recall, less than half North Korea’s official per capita GDP that year. By winter, I was using cut-off gloves to keep my hands from freezing while writing on the blackboard in a frigid classroom packed with seventy 13-year-old country boys, whose breaths condensed in the cold air as they shouted out in unison in English, “Have you ever been to Seoul? No, but my class will go there in the spring.”
There was a sense of new possibilities in the air: more bicycles and then motorcycles on the dirt and then asphalted roads, TV antennas poking out of houses thatched one season, covered in a new metal roof the next. New opportunities – for more education, for better jobs -- were being created and energetically grasped.
In the 1980s I was back in Korea again, this time as a diplomat. Just as an earlier generation of Koreans against all odds turned their country into an economic powerhouse, so did Koreans in the 1980s take Korea across the democratic threshold. In September 1988, twenty years ago this month, what a thrill it was to be in Seoul to celebrate Korea’s democracy -- as Korea hosted those immensely successful Olympic games.
The Koreans have a saying,
십 년이면 강산도 변한다
“Even the rivers and mountains change in ten years.”
Well, the past twenty years in Korea surpass even that saying. Korea itself, and the relationship between our countries and our two peoples, continue to change and develop. Many contribute. Ambassador Sandy Vershbow and DCM Bill Stanton, together with the Korean and American employees of the U.S. Embassy, serve now, together with the men and women of U.S. Forces Korea. I am so pleased to see US Forces Korea Commander General Skip Sharp here today – thank you for your presence -- I look forward to serving together in Korea.
Among the former U.S. Ambassadors to Seoul here today are two men I was lucky enough to work for: Jim Lilley during the volatile 1980s in Seoul, and Chris Hill more recently in the also sometimes volatile atmosphere of Washington. Jim and Chris: Thank you. I have benefitted beyond measure from your example and your support. I would not be here today without you.
Madam Secretary, if you would allow me, I want to say a few words about where I come from.
My path to the Foreign Service started in the American Southwest. My grandmother’s family moved west by covered wagon to homestead in New Mexico, and then piled back in that covered wagon just a few hard years later to move to Alpine, Texas so my grandmother and her siblings could attend “a good high school.” I thought of my grandmother when I met Korean rural families ready to sell the family cow to send a child to high school – or to ply the Peace Corps teaching their children with bowls of freshly picked strawberries.
My father’s parents went to work rather than high school, but when my brothers and I spent our summers working on their farm in Animas Creek, New Mexico, our evenings were filled with the stacks of books we borrowed from the public library on our weekly trips to town. I read about a lot of places and a lot of people in those books. So my parents were never surprised at my insatiable desire to see what was over the next hill, and how it took me into the Foreign Service. They never understood how I could bear not to live in the American West, but they did understand America’s place in the world, and they took quiet pride in my own small part in it.
My two brothers – Ken from Montana and Jeff from Arizona – are here today – they’re pretty easy to spot – those tall guys who make me look short. Thanks to our adventures together – retracing the journeys of Lewis and Clark and John Wesley Powell in canoes, on bicycles and on foot, I have always had the best home leave stories of anyone in the Foreign Service. Ken and Jeff, thank you for never leaving me behind, and for sharing all this not only with James and me – but with all those Irish, Korean, Portuguese, Chinese and British friends we brought along.
By the way: If you are planning to come see me in Korea – take note: Bring your hiking boots. Korea’s got some mountains, too.
My son James is here. James was born in Seoul in 1986. By high school he had lived in five countries, and in schoolyards from Belgrade to Belfast he learned early lessons in things like tolerance and respect – and what the world is like when they are in short supply.
Thank you James – for, being such a great kid and a wonderful young man – and for your 24/7 remote tech support to your mom, including at one AM last week when I lost this speech in cyberspace and you retrieved it. I seem to recall it was even longer then.
Madam Secretary, Ambassador Lee, I am returning to Korea at a time when our two presidents have resolved to take the US-Korea alliance to a new level.
The time is right to make the changes in our security alliance that reflect today’s Korea and today’s America, and the ways in which we can work together to build a safer and better world.
We have a free trade agreement that is a model of what two advanced economies each with high labor and environmental standards can work out together.
We have a big job still ahead of us in North Korea. We will have to work even more closely together.
And we have a rich and growing network of people-to-people ties: two million Korean-Americans, expanding exchange programs, and a Visa Waiver Program to implement.
It’s an ambitious agenda, one that will bring our alliance to a new level. I can’t wait to get to Seoul.
끝으로 여러분의 희망과 기대를 저버리지 않도록 힘 닿는 데까지 최선을 다 할 것입니다.
감사합니다.
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| Ambassador Stephens, together with Senator John Warner and Secretary Rice. |
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Ambassador Stephens, together with Secretary Rice, Korean Ambassador to the U.S. Lee, Tae-sik, and his wife, Suk-nam.
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