Courage, Risk-Taking, and Learning From Titans of International Relations
Thomas Holt, F75
Flying home to the United States for Christmas holiday from Trinity College Dublin, where he was an undergraduate student, Tom Holt, F75 sat next to an American man with a home in Ireland and they fell into conversation. Tom was considering law school as well as the London School of Economics for graduate work and shared his plans with his seatmate, who identified Fletcher as a good place of study to combine his interests. This recommendation piqued Tom’s curiosity, so he called the Dean’s Office and scheduled an appointment to find out more. He met with Dean Edmund Gullion who encouraged him to apply, and Tom was admitted.
Tom describes his international geopolitical education at Fletcher as a sort of “mental massage.” During his time as a student, the world was primarily divided into a binary struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. “We inhabited a vastly different universe, and as complicated as that universe was, it was exquisitely simple compared to the dynamic of today. Now having got into Fletcher, and being with people from all over the world, I took to it like the proverbial dog to the bone. It was just a great experience,” Tom recounts.
Several professors made an outsized impact on him, such as Uri Raanan, a Jewish refugee from the Nazis and an expert on European affairs who was an entertaining and wonderful man, according to Tom, and Professor John Roche, who had chaired the United States Information Agency. USIA had run Radio Free Europe during the time before the worldwide web, providing a crucial news source to those behind the Iron curtain. “John sort of referred to himself as a jailhouse lawyer; he had a PhD in a legal discipline, but he wasn’t a lawyer, he wrote about diplomacy, but he wasn’t a diplomat, he wrote about history but he technically wasn’t a historian, so in a sense he was a poster child for everything that Fletcher is,” noting that John had serious political chops and true praxis.
Tom treasures the many friendships he made with fellow Fletcher students, including his close relationship to this day with Charles Bralver, F75, F11P, founder of international management consulting firm Oliver Wyman. Tom also credits Dean Stephen Bosworth as an important influence, getting to know him when Tom became a member of the Fletcher Board of Advisors.
He went on to attend Boston College Law School after graduating from Fletcher and became an attorney in the Washington DC office for the firm of Bracewell and Patterson, representing domestic and international clients, then started his own law firm, Dicara, Selig, Sawyer & Holt, which Tom describes as an exciting and terrifying experience. “Exciting is okay as far as it goes, but exciting and terrifying? That’s really where you want to be!”
After a successful decade, he merged his firm with Kirkpatrick, Lockhart, and Preston Gates (father of Bill), now known as K+L Gates, where he has been a partner with a focus on complex civil litigation, international arbitration, and internal investigations for three decades. “Being part of a global firm is, how my British friends say, ‘right up my street.’”