Jim Donley keeps a map of the world at his Delray Beach home decorated with photos
from his adventures as a Cabinet aide and economic development adviser.
Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
Donley goes climbing in the Balkans in 1989.
He taped an anniversary clipping of John F. Kennedy’s motorcade through Dallas
to a photo of himself conferring with then-Treasury Secretary John Connally
aboard Air Force Two over India in 1972.
Photos provided
By Mary Thurwachter
Jim Donley’s six decades of travel to 100 countries could be fodder for a movie. He circled the globe as spokesman for Treasury Secretary John Connally, worked in the Caribbean for Time magazine, founded an international communications company, climbed the Alps, rode camels in Mongolia and helped poor countries grow their economies — and their vegetables.
But Hollywood hasn’t come knocking on the Delray Beach man’s door just yet, so a PowerPoint presentation highlighting his illustrious life suffices for now.
On April 17, the Palm Beach Chapter of the Circumnavigators, an exclusive club that provides travelers who have circled the world with a forum for intellectual exchange, will converge at the St. Andrew’s Club. Donley, 81, will be the star.
The talk is not open to the public, but the charming globe trotter has given us a peek at his presentation and his storied life.
He has had no interest in being a tourist, he insists. His story explores why he has traveled to so many countries and what he was doing in some of them.
“Note that you will see no museums, castles or cathedrals,” he explains. “I am self-indulgent and, like Forrest Gump, my face keeps popping up in the photos of unlikely places.”
Born in Ohio, Donley was a football and track star at Western Reserve Academy. He joined the Army when he was 19.
“I went to military police school and was assigned to a psychological warfare unit,” he says. As he sailed out of New York Harbor, he saw the Queen Mary cruise in.
“We were sent to Germany to keep an eye on Hungary, but I had my eye on plusher duty,” he says. “I talked my way into a desk job as editor of the 7th Army Sentinel Daily newspaper covering all of Europe. I used that position to come up with ideas for me to travel and cover events such as Grace Kelly’s wedding and the Winter Olympics in Cortina d’ Ampezzo, Italy (in 1956).”
His years in the Army took him to 14 countries in Europe, including some in which he competed on the Army’s track team as a half-miler and javelin thrower in hopes of making it to the summer Olympics.
From the Army, he returned to college, earning a bachelor of arts in development economics from Denison University and a master’s in international business from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
After graduate school, he spent eight years as the managing director of the Caribbean for Time magazine. That episode of his life took him to 15 more countries.
The next chapter took him to Washington, D.C., and around the world aboard Air Force Two as press secretary for Connally. (The former Texas governor had ridden in the limo with John F. Kennedy in 1963 when he was assassinated. Connally also was shot.)
In 1972, President Richard Nixon made his breakthrough trip to China that would lead to a balance of power shift against the Soviet Union. “It represented the U.S. making common cause with China,” Donley says. “Nixon had briefed the superpowers (England, France, Japan, etc.) on the agreements he had made and used Connally, who had political power, to brief the next layer of countries. We also had bilateral trade and economic issues to negotiate.”
Donley traveled with Connally everywhere he went — adding 18 more countries to his list in the process.
Donley’s job was scheduling, protocol, media relations and Treasury Department issues. He brushed shoulders with presidents, shahs, kings and ambassadors.
While Donley visited Kabul, Afghanistan, there was a fellow he hadn’t heard of who pressed for a meeting with Connally. His name was Red Duke, and Donley thought he sounded like some redneck who couldn’t be important enough to warrant a meeting with his boss. But he mentioned the request to Connally anyway.
“Jesus, Jim, are you dumb?” Donley remembers Connally saying at the time. “He saved my life.”
Red Duke was the trauma surgeon who operated on Connally in Dallas the day of the Kennedy assassination.
Dr. James H. Duke was teaching surgery in Afghanistan when Donley met him. As it turned out, Connally and Red Duke spent many hours together in Afghanistan.
Donley left the Treasury in 1974 (he had also served as press secretary to George Shultz) to start Donley Communications in New York City. His clients were international investment banks, accounting firms and law firms.
“I began representing offshore financial centers such as Gibraltar and Mauritius,” he says. “I also followed up on my longtime interest in Eastern Europe and formed a relationship with an Austrian firm, which led me to clients in the U.S.S.R. and satellite countries before the Berlin Wall came down.”
Through relationships he made while working for the Treasury Department, he did work in South Africa. He visited another 14 countries during that time.
In 1990, Donley left his company behind to do nonprofit work in economic development of poor countries.
“My principal early involvement was an organization called Technoserve, which was first a client, then I became an employee, went on the board for 20 years and am now senior adviser.”
"In 1993, I did a different kind of aid work, bringing relief supplies to refugees in Somalia and Ethiopia," he says. "I flew to Mogadishu in an Air Force C5A and then made hops on smaller cargo planes. A week after I left, retreating to Mombasa, Black Hawk went down in Mogadishu."
By 1995, Donley started working with developing mostly rural, poor countries.
“My special interest was agriculture and the development of sub-sustenance farmers into profitable businesses,” he says. In Poland, he worked on quality control with garlic farmers, and in Kenya, with cabbage farmers.
“In Poland, we helped develop the first tubular potatoes to fill the market needs of McDonald’s and Burger King that were expanding their french fry line into Eastern Europe,” he says.
Donley’s longest sustained effort was in Bulgaria, where he lived for two years working for USAID as country director for the International Executive Service Corps.
“Frankly, it was a grim life and hard work with over 100 Bulgarian clients that we advised on adapting from a well-embedded communist economist theory to a market economy. But I loved the country and its people and maintain many of those relationships today.”
He added 22 countries to his tally during his economic development period.
The final episode of his travel life, he says, was for adventure and curiosity, taking him to at least another 15 countries.
He reached the summits of Mount Kilimanjaro and Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps. He went on a safari in Africa, sailed from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland and Labrador and skied all over Europe.
He and his wife, Toddy, rode horses and camels across the Gobi Desert.
But some of his favorite adventure travel excursions were long walks in England, Scotland and Wales.
“All the walks are hilly and take some physical endurance and you carry everything you need on your back,” Donley says.
Today, with all the miles he has logged, Donley has no interest in more travel. He enjoys spending time and talking sports with his grandchildren.
Donley hopes and believes he will leave the world a little better than he found it. He feels lucky to have lived the life he has lived.
After talking about his life, Donley likes to share these fitting lines from The Road Not Taken poem by Robert Frost:
“I shall be telling this with a sigh.
“Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
“I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
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