Barber B. Conable

Barber Conable

Barber Benjamin Conable Jr. (* 2. November 1922 in Warsaw , Wyoming County , New York ; † 30th November 2003 in Sarasota , Florida ) was an American politician of the Republican Party , banker , deputy of the House of Representatives for the State of New York as well as President of the World Bank .

Life

After attending public schools in his hometown of Warsaw, he began studying law in 1942 at the Law School of Cornell University in Ithaca , graduating in 1948 with a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.). During his studies he was president of the Quill and Dagger and a member of the Phi Delta Theta student fraternities. After his military service in the United States Marine Corps (USMC) in World War II with deployments in the Battle of Iwo Jima , he began working as a lawyer in Buffalo after completing his studies and opening his own law firm . At the same time he was an officer in the USMC reserve and returned to active military service as a colonel during the Korean War from 1950 to 1952 . Between 1952 and 1963 he worked as a lawyer in Batavia with his father in a joint law firm .

In 1963 he began a political career as a member of the New York Senate . In the following year he was elected as a candidate for the Republican Party for the state of New York as a member of the US House of Representatives, to which he belonged from January 3, 1965 to January 3, 1985. During his many years of membership in parliament, in particular from 1967 onwards, he gained a reputation as a representative of the Republicans in the influential Committee on Ways and Means , of which he was a minority leader ( Ranking Minority Member ) between 1977 and 1985 . In particular, he was one of the leading experts in tax legislation, as was the case with the Commercial Law in 1974 and the Capital Income Act in 1977 and the Social Security Act. He broke his long-standing friendship with Richard Nixon due to the Watergate affair in 1974. In 1984 he decided not to run again.

In July 1986, he was appointed President of the World Bank by US President Ronald Reagan, succeeding Alden W. Clausen , and held this post until he was replaced by Lewis T. Preston in August 1991.

Immediately after taking office, he began reorganizing the World Bank by demanding that all World Bank employees reapply for their jobs. As early as 1987 he saw an approach to global poverty reduction in environmental protection and therefore advocated the establishment of an environmental department at the World Bank. In his role as World Bank President, he took part in the 1990 Uruguay Round .

Publications

• Congress and the income tax , 1989.
• The Conable Years at the World Bank: Major Policy Addresses of Barber B. Conable, 1986-91 . World Bank, Washington, DC 1991.
• with Richard S. Belous, S. Dahlia Stein and Nita Christine Kent: Foreign Assistance in a Time of Constraints. National Planning Association, Washington, DC 1995.

Background literature

• James S. Fleming: Window on Congress - a congressional biography of Barber B. Conable, Jr. 2004, ISBN 1-58046-128-X .
• Devesh Kapur, John Prior Lewis, Richard Charles Webb: The World Bank: History. 1997, ISBN 0-8157-5234-2 .

swell

• Barber B. Conable in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)
• Barber B. Conable in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
• Encyclopedia Britannica Online
• Barber B. Conable, 81, Dies; Congressman and Bank Chief. In: The New York Times. December 2, 2003.
• Yanek Mieczkowski: Why the Death Notice of Congressman Barber Conable Caught this Historian's Attention. HNN, December 8, 2003.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Announcement of the Proposal of Barber B. Conable To Be President of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development , speech by Ronald Reagan, March 13, 1986.
2. ↑ Bruce Bartlett: BARBER CONABLE AT THE WORLD BANK = NEW HOPE FOR WORLD ECONOMlC GROWTH  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , April 4, 1986.  
3. ↑ ^{a b} We don't pillory anyone . In: Der Spiegel . No. 21 , 1988, pp. 100-108 ( online conversation about Third World Debt and Development Aid).
4. ↑ Samir Rihani: Complex systems theory and development practice . 2002, ISBN 1-84277-047-0 , pp. 118f.
5. ^ NA Khan: Infrastructure for Economic Development. 2004, ISBN 81-261-1794-X , p. 79.
6. ↑ Michael Veseth, Louis Uchitelle: The Rise of the Global Economy . 2002, ISBN 1-57958-369-5 , pp. 119f.
7. ^ Homepage of the US Congress