A decade later - Fundação Luso-Americana

counselor, he retired from the diplomatic
corps, returning to Lisbon shortly after to
set up the Luso-American Development
Foundation and act as the first president of
its Executive Council. He came to lay the
groundwork for an institution that would
signal a new brand of cooperation in a
country that had been marked by Europe’s
longest-lasting dictatorship. Charles
Buchanan, still an administrator at FLAD,
worked closely with Finberg and remains
an unconditional admirer of the former
president’s sense of purpose. “He had a lot
of conviction in his ideas and was very
persistent,” Buchanan recalls. “That’s
because he was hard-working and based
all of his decisions on painstaking work.
Some people thought he was a workaholic,
because he didn’t rest until he had
completed a task or the research he was
doing. He consulted with the experts quite
a lot, and visited dozens of institutions in
an effort to design the best plan for the
Foundation, and to come up with the best
system for managing it.”
To those who were closest to him, his
integrity and precision always stood out.
José Luís Almeida Pinheiro, an advisor who
worked with Finberg at the US Embassy in
Lisbon and helped design the Foundation’s
organizational structure, remembered that
“He would go unwaveringly ahead, say
what he had to say, and follow his established
criteria. It was his belief that the
allocation of positions of power in Portugal
was based on cronyism and party affiliation,
which boggled his mind. Finberg was
a true pedagogue in the way he applied
ethics to how you plan a project. Issues
like there not being conflict of interest and
effective management of public funds were
sacred to him. He used to say that Portugal
was more in need of a meritocracy than a
democracy, and he translated that idea into
the project he laid out for FLAD.”
Em 1986, Portugal had little more than a
decade of experience with democracy and
was just embarking on the adventure of
being a member of the European Community.
But the country was still seriously behind
in terms of the skills that were needed to
develop into a more open, competitive society.
Education, science, technology, regional
development, and support for civil society
and the private sector had become the priorities.
Finberg wanted the more than 100
million dollar endowment to be used very
scrupulously within the space of 10 years
to accelerate the process. But the Foundation
ended up gaining a perpetual status. Though
his ideas on FLAD’s longevity were not borne
out, the functional concept he was instru-
proFiLe
mental in designing
took root. Fernando
Durão, FLAD director of
education at the time
recalls, “He placed a lot
of importance on evaluating
the results. He
designed a lot of very
clear timetables and
made a point of informing
the media of the
projects that were
already underway, and the results of what
had already been done.”
António Correia de Campos, FLAD director
of science and technology at the time,
also fondly remembers “the polished diplomat,
well-versed in European culture, a
person of honor, with a broad vision of
life and the world; very intelligent and
‘ Finberg was a true pedagogue in the
way he applied ethics to how you
plan a project. issues like there not
being conflict of interest and effective
management of public funds were
sacred to him.
democratic, and a man of enormous integrity.”
Like his counterpart from FLAD’s
education department, Campos, currently
a Socialist deputy in the European
Parliament, stresses the crucial role Finberg
played in designing the mechanisms that
gave FLAD’s activities such credibility. “He
believed in cutting down on red tape and
donald Finberg, who laid the foundations for an institution (FLAd) that would signal
a new brand of cooperation.
Parallel no. 6 | FALL | WINTER 2011 57
’ José
Luís Almeida pinheiro, consultant
DR