Carlton, who has over 30 years of experience dealing with
domestic and international freight transportation issues,
has earned the highest honors for members of the SES: the
Presidential Rank Awards of Distinguished and Meritorious
Executives. He has a B.A. in economics from the University
of Michigan and an M.A. in economics from Wayne State
University in Detroit. He spoke recently with DC VELOCITY’s
group editorial director, Mitch Mac Donald, about his
career to date, his objectives for NITL, and why nobody’s
scoffing at tree-huggers anymore.
QTypically, this interview would start with a question
about the NITL’s legislative “watch list” for 2009, but
as you noted at the group’s annual conference in November, all those concerns
have been eclipsed by what’s going on in
the global economy.
AYes. It’s on everyone’s minds these
days. Everyone just seems to be
begging for someone to fix it. That point
was driven home to me when I traveled
to Beijing about a month after the annual conference. Export loadings out of
Chinese ports are way, way down. It is
part of the shockwave that has gone
through the global trading community. I
think all of us were really quite naïve at
the front end of this economic decline. I
think we all believed that this was a self-contained matter in the housing industry. As for the
Chinese, they had been growing so fast for so long, they
really don’t have a contingency for dealing with this mess.
For them, it’s been all about growth for many, many years.
I don’t think we saw this coming. Well, we see it now.
QWe see it now, indeed—as if we needed further evidence of how interconnected the various industrial
sectors and the various national economies have become.
AIt turns out that the economics textbooks were correct: We really are linked together. You cannot segregate and firewall one business or industry off from another,
or even one country’s economy from another. And it turns
out that the whole thing is lubricated by the credit market.
When that seized up, those pistons just stopped.
The fallout from that has just been extraordinary. It is not
just as if the economy fell off a cliff; it’s as if a trap door
opened and we all just fell through.
QBefore assuming your current position at NITL, you
spent several decades in the public sector. Could you
tell us about that?
AI found myself in the transportation business on the
government side in late 1974. I had been doing some
international trade and trade promotion work at the U.S.
Department of Commerce when I saw an opportunity to
move into the business of international shipping at the U.S.
Maritime Administration, and I took it. I have never regret-ted doing that.
QWhen you went to the Maritime Administration,
what was your initial role?
AAs an economist with the Maritime Administration,
which was part of the Department of Commerce at
the time. Later on, as part of a very small, but I think significant, reorganization, the Reagan
administration engineered a move of the
Maritime Administration to the U.S.
Department of Transportation. I stayed
with that and eventually ended up as,
really, the acting head of the agency for
almost the entire year of 2001. I was the
senior career person in the agency, and
we were without a political head for virtually that entire year.
As you may recall, Sept. 11, 2001, kind
of reset the gyroscope for America. It
greatly slowed the political appointments process, so I was in charge and
dealing directly with Transportation
Secretary Norm Mineta and that team.
QYou mentioned that you started at MarAd as an economist. Was that your educational background?
AYes, I have both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in
economics. It’s called the dismal science, but I never
found it dismal at all. It was, I think, a good preparation for
my career. That, and a bit of advice that I picked up along
the way from an attorney who was a guest lecturer at my
school one evening. You may recall the name: F. Lee Bailey.
QAbsolutely.
AF. Lee Bailey was the premiere bright-lights,
Hollywood type of defense counsel of that era. That
night, someone asked him what single piece of advice he
would give young people on how to succeed. I recall his
answer as if it were yesterday. He said, “Learn the King’s
English.” Obviously, what he was talking about was developing an ability to speak and write well—in particular,
mastering the basics of written composition, where
thoughts become sentences and sentences become paragraphs. He said, “I can virtually guarantee you some level of
