The Foreign Service Journal, April 2009

58 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 0 9 mation Agency in 1951. His assign- ments included informational and cul- tural roles in Venezuela, Japan, Spain, Panama, Chile, Vietnam, Thailand and Washington, D.C. During his first Washington assign- ment, in the early days of manned space flight (Mercury and Gemini pro- grams), he served as USIA/NASA liai- son, channeling information on the U.S. space program to USIA posts around the world. Later, he lectured throughout Latin America on the Apollo moon program. In 1980, following retirement, Mr. Kendall volunteered at the University of California, Berkeley Institute of East Asian Studies, coordinating interna- tional conferences. He co-edited books on Vietnam, Mongolia, Japan and Southeast Asia, and published accounts of his wartime and Foreign Service ex- periences in two books, Beyond Mag- nolias—My First 30 Years and A Farm Boy in the Foreign Service. He is survived by his wife of 57 years; three daughters, Betsy and Ju- dith Kendall of Berkeley, Calif., and Nancy Hewitt of Korea; and three grandchildren, Jonathan, Georgia Li and Cherisa Hewitt; and a sister, Fele- cia Cooke. Memorial donations may be made to the American Red Cross, the American Friends Service or other charity. Claudine Betty Leifert , 66, wife of retired FSO Harvey Leifert, died on Oct. 23, 2008, at The GeorgeWashing- ton University Hospital inWashington, D.C. She had long struggled with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the cause of her death. Born in Dombresson, in the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel, in 1942, Claudine Burger wanted, from a young age, to see the world. She first traveled abroad on her own as part of a U.N.-related group of volunteers, to build a school- house on the Greek island of Kythera. She followed that up with a yearlong volunteer stint at a school in Haiti, where one of the students was Jean- Claude Duvalier, the future president known as “Baby Doc.” When her volunteer year ended, she and a friend stayed on, and she found a job with the Quebec-based company that was developing Haiti’s first national telephone system since the departure of the U.S. Marine oc- cupation force in 1934. One of her tasks was to compile, manually, the di- rectory of telephone subscribers. The two women rented a house in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Pétionville; it was back-to-back with the home of the U.S. embassy cultural affairs offi- cer, Harvey Leifert. Claudine Burger wondered who lived in that house, with its noisy gen- erator providing light to its occupant during the nightly blackouts. A loud squawk box added to the mystery, with its frequent “Charlie, this is Delta” chatter. One day, while driving to work, Mr. Leifert chanced upon his unknown neighbor at a taxi stand and offered her a ride into town. A year later, when he had received permission fromUSIA to wed a foreigner, the couple was mar- ried in Port-au-Prince. Upon arrival in the U.S. a few months later for her “Americanization” tour, the couple drove to San Francisco and back to Washington, visiting cities, prairies and national parks, the first of many trips they took together. But once settled in Washington, D.C., Claudine was confronted with an American fact of life: without a univer- sity degree — uncommon for Swiss women at that time — employers would not hire her for work for which she was fully qualified. That changed withMr. Leifert’s next assignment, toCopenhagen, whereMrs. Leifert was among the first to benefit from a Danish-American agreement al- lowing work by diplomatic spouses in each other’s capital. She used her FSI Danish and other skills in the Copen- hagen office of a Swedishmanufacturer of precision optical lenses. There followed four years in Paris, during which she participated in the new PIT program, allowing depend- ents of FSOs to work at the embassy. She served mainly in the visa and eco- nomic sections. She earned a com- mendation for her work in support of the Paris Air Show, during which the American F-16 outperformed French and Swedish fighter planes to win a huge NATO contract, in the “arms deal of the century.” Returning to Wash- ington for another tour, she joined the African-American Institute, where she planned trips around the U.S. for par- ticipants in the State-USIA Interna- tional Visitors Program. When her husband was assigned to South Africa in 1985, she became the first Community Liaison Officer at the American consulate general in Johan- nesburg. She also administered the an- nual visa qualifying exams for doctors and nurses seeking to practice in the U.S. It was the height of apartheid, and relations between the two governments were tense. Like other official Ameri- cans — but very few other countries’ diplomats there — she hosted and at- tended many interracial events, bring- ing black and white South Africans together, often for the first time. She frequently visited Soweto for USIA programs, parties and funerals. Visit- I N M E M O R Y