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“TRIBUTE TO SAMUEL B. OLDEN” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the Senate section on pages S2036 on March 27, 2019.
The State Department is responsibly for international relations with a budget of more than $50 billion. Tenure at the State Dept. is increasingly tenuous and it's seen as an extension of the President's will, ambitions and flaws.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
TRIBUTE TO SAMUEL B. OLDEN
Mr. WICKER. Mr. President, I am pleased to advise the Senate of the accomplishments of a fellow Mississippian, Mr. Samuel B. Olden of Yazoo City, on the occasion of his 100th birthday.
Mr. Olden is from Yazoo City, the gateway to the Mississippi Delta, where he was born in 1919, to a family of Mississippi planters. Throughout his youth, he read widely in the B.S. Ricks Memorial Library, the oldest privately funded public library in the State, which greatly contributed to his personal development and admission into the University of Mississippi in Oxford. There, he received a B.A. and M.A., reportedly conversed with Nobel Prize winning author William Faulkner, and was ultimately recruited to Washington, DC, to serve at the Department of State. Prior to American involvement in World War II, Mr. Olden was sent abroad as the Vice Consul at our embassy in Quito, Ecuador, from 1941 to 1943. Upon his return, Mr. Olden enlisted in the U.S. Navy, serving from 1943-46 at posts ranging from Shanghai, China, to Paris, France.
After the war, Mr. Olden transited the north Atlantic on a Liberty ship. A fellow naval officer noted Mr. Olden's fortitude during this stormy passage. While tending to his ailing father back in Mississippi, he received a letter from Washington asking him to consider defending our Nation's freedom, in a third, essential way. Mr. Olden returned to the District of Columbia, where he was invited to join the newly formed Central Intelligence Group. Commencing in 1947, Mr. Olden spent 2 years in the group's Washington office, followed by 3 years in Vienna, Austria, where he defended freedom and democracy against Communist aggression.
Following a decade in public service, Mr. Olden entered the private sector, where he employed his experience abroad for Mobil Oil. From 1952-1957, he was posted in East and West Nigeria, British and French Cameroon, The Congo, Chad, and Gabon. He joined Mobil's government relations department in 1957 and returned to New York. There, he attained Observer status at the United Nations and strode the halls with Adlai Stevenson and Eleanor Roosevelt. Later, he went abroad once more to serve as general manager of Mobil's affiliates in Tunisia, Algeria, Peru, and Spain.
By 1974, Mr. Olden was fluent in English, French, German, and Spanish. He had connections around the world. And where did he go? He chose to retire to the finest place that he had ever lived: Yazoo City. There, he owned and operated a cattle ranch for 15 years, while continuing to pursue his passion for the study of history. He was twice a board member and was elected president of the Mississippi Historical Society, served 15 years on the State Committee for the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, and founded the Yazoo Historical Society's remarkable museum, housed in the same Triangle Center building where he had attended elementary school. Even in his 90s, he established and helped to fund the Yazoo Memorial Literary Walkway, which stretches between the Triangle Center and the B.S. Ricks Library. The walkway memorializes more than 100 Yazooan authors that include former U.S. House Minority Leader and U.S. Senator John Sharp Williams, literary critic and editor Henry Herschel Brickell, Governor Haley Reeves Barbour, beloved writers Willie Morris, Teresa Nicholas, Ruth Williams, John Langston, and Caroline Langston Jarboe, and educator Henry Mitchell Brickell. His large collection of pre-Columbian ceramics is now on display in the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson and is the focus of Yumi Park's book ``Mirrors of Clay.''
This remarkable man has served his Nation as a diplomat, military officer, and emissary, during wars hot and cold. He served the world in the energy industry as a global businessman of distinction. He returned to his hometown and has continued to serve his State, his university, and his community as a historian, educator, and philanthropist even into the tenth decade of his life. His friends across the Nation and around the world celebrate with him today.
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