Page 157 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE LESSONS

nation together and who dreamed of a country in which people were judged
by the content of their character. Great leaders treat everyone with respect
and ensure that what matters most is competence and character.
Like Pfeiffer, many years later Ronald Quincy (WHF 85–86) was a
Fellow at HUD. One of his assignments was to represent the HUD sec-
retary at an interagency effort led by the Department of State to promote
fundamental change in South Africa. This task force was formed at the
direction of President Reagan in 1985 to organize opposition to apartheid,
South Africa’s system of legally enshrined racism.
Quincy’s role was to help organize high-level diplomatic and private
missions to South Africa at a critical time in that country’s history. Halfway
through the Fellowship year, his success led to a transfer from HUD to the
State Department as a foreign policy advisor to the Africa Bureau. On
one key assignment, Secretary of State George Schultz chose Quincy as the
diplomatic escort officer for a mission led by Mrs. Coretta Scott King, the
widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., to South Africa to meet with a cross sec-
tion of that country’s leaders. After her return to the United States, she per-
sonally urged President Reagan to approve sanctions against South Africa.
Through that experience and over two dozen subsequent trips to South
Africa, he developed friendships with leaders such as Bishop Desmond Tutu,
Winnie Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Walter Sisulu that led to an oppor-
tunity to work and travel with Nelson Mandela after his Fellowship year.
Nelson Mandela is today one of the world’s most respected, beloved,
and admired leaders. “I was inspired by his lack of bitterness after spend-
ing twenty-seven years in prison despite appalling atrocities committed
against his fellow citizens and even his own family by the apartheid regime,”
said Quincy. In 1991, Mrs. King hired Quincy as the executive director and
chief operating officer of the Atlanta-based King Center for Nonviolent
Social Change, an organization charged with carrying on Dr. King’s legacy.
One of the projects the King Center undertook after Mandela was released
from prison in 1990 was to work closely with a group of American students
and their South African counterparts to help train over 50,000 South
Africans in the election process, which was a precursor to a much broader
international effort for nonpartisan voter education. Quincy remembered,
“We hosted Nelson Mandela at the King Center in Atlanta as part of this
effort for a couple of days, and then I had the privilege of escorting him
around the United States and then flying back with him to Johannesburg.”

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