AUTHOR RECALLS HOW PRESIDENT REAGAN BUILT UPON PRESIDENT CARTER'S CRITICAL CHANGES FOR REFUGEES

Hope of the Phoenix

The Reawakening and Rise oF America's Humanitarian Spirit 
from the Ashes of Vietnam
1975-1986

Presidents Carter and Reagan (photo credit: History.com)

Author Jim (James N., Jr.) Purcell remembers when President Reagan took the torch and heartily supported the new Bureau for Refugee Programs at the State Department.  George P. Shultz was President Reagan's Secretary of State after Alexander Haig.

In 1979, President Carter's State Department geared up to establish a new bureau for refugee programs to deal with the continuing and increasingly critical flow of refugees from Southeast Asia after the Fall of Saigon, April 30, 1975--40 years ago. 

Incoming in 1981, President Reagan gave full support to State's growing Bureau for Refugee Programs, today known as Bureau for Population, Refugees, and Migration.  

The author has considered Secretary Shultz to be a professional mentor since 1976, when President Nixon appointed Mr. Shultz to be director of the Bureau of the Budget, now known as the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the author, a young budget analyst, met him at the outset and told his own staff, "This time, we got a good one."  

In 1982, President Reagan appointed Mr. Shultz to the State Department, and he was the author's boss in the Refugee program, where the author served from 1979 to 1986.

April 28, 2015, in the finishing stages of writing Hope of the Phoenix, Jim Purcell is scheduled to visit at the Hoover Institution, not far from San Francisco, to meet with former Secretary of State George P. Shultz .

The meeting with "the boss" will set a cherished milestone for the author.