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Whether she was founding the first Women’s Foundation in Colorado or serving the homeless, the disenfranchised, or war refugees as US Ambassador to Austria, Swanee has in her own words: “leaned forward into vision and adversity.”
“Zeal has gotten a bum rap,” she says when asked about the title of her autobiography. “We need to feel passion when we wake up in the morning. I saw writing this book as my opportunity to reclaim zeal!”
One man asked her if she realized that using the term “half-life” conjured up visions of radioactivity. But just as she couldn’t be bullied out of her mission to rehabilitate the much maligned word “zeal,” she also could not be talked out of "half-life." Her title is putting the world on notice: She is not only zealous, she is also only at the mid-point of her journey. There’s plenty more to come.
Swanee says that her early life in Dallas unfolded against the sweep of huge social movements: anticommunism (her father was a personal friend of Senator Joe McCarthy) and the emergence of religious fundamentalism as a political force in Twentieth Century America (she calls her mother the Godmother of religious fundamentalism).
Swanee’s father was H.L. Hunt, once featured in Time Magazine with a full page photo and the caption: “Is this the richest man in the world?” In her book, Swanee shows her father to be a complex man, who could be difficult and eccentric, but who also had a talent Swanee calls “positive vision" or "positive illusion,” a gift that he passed on to his children.
“We all have a belief in ourselves,” she says, citing the example of her half-brother Lamar Hunt, who founded the AFL. “Lamar combined positive vision with humility.”
In 1993, Swanee Hunt, the youngest of H.L. Hunt’s 15 children became US Ambassador to Austria. She was an able and innovative ambassador. Driven by compassion, and not ego, Swanee redefined herself.
“The Balkans were ablaze,” she says. “Refugees were streaming across the border.”
Unwilling to stand by and watch the brutal warfare unfold without trying to be a positive influence, Swanee used her good offices to save lives. Today, she cites the growth of intolerance – and the demonizing of others in so many countries around the world – as a troubling trend.
“There are no simple answers,” she says. “We cannot tidy up the world. We must have a world where we can co-exist. We have to find the courage, and the will, to find that one thing - out of a hundred - that we can agree with.”
In person, even in a first meeting, Swanee Hunt is engaging, naturally charming, and personable. Her husband says that she has more best friends than most people have acquaintances. Throughout her life, wherever she has gone, she has always shown a very "relational" style of leadership.
“The distance that we put between ourselves and other people reveals whether or not we are self-confident. If people have not done the inner work, it shows up.”
“I see my role to teach my children and grandchildren to look for what is beautiful in life. We can’t be afraid to look at what is broken.”
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