The Foreign Service Journal, April 2013

68 April 2013 | the foreign Service journal to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, P.O. Box 95, Wilkesboro NC 28697. n Christopher Van Hollen, 90, a retired Foreign Service officer and former ambassador, died on Jan. 30 at the Washington Home hospice in Washington, D.C., of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. Mr. Van Hollen was born in Baltimore, Md., on Sept 23, 1922. Following service in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he graduated from Haverford College in 1947. He went to graduate school on the G.I. Bill, receiving a doctorate in political science from Johns Hopkins University in 1951, and joined the State Department as a foreign affairs analyst that same year. In 1953 he married Edith Eliza Farnsworth, who became an analyst on Afghanistan and south Asia in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. In 1954, Mr. Van Hollen was posted to New Delhi as a political officer. He spent the next six years in South Asia, first in New Delhi, with additional accredita- tion to Kathmandu; then in Karachi and Murree-Rawalpindi. In 1961, he returned to the department where, in 1963, he was made officer-in-charge of NATO politi- cal affairs before being detailed to the National War College a year later. Mr. Van Hollen was assigned to Ankara as counselor for political affairs in 1965, returning to the department as country director for India, Ceylon and Nepal-Maldives in 1968. He became deputy assistant secretary for Near East- ern and South Asian affairs in 1969, serv- ing until 1972. During this period, East Pakistan’s 1971 secession from Pakistan to form Bangladesh in 1971 presented a dilemma for Washington, which had strong Cold War ties with Pakistan’s mili- tary government, through which it was maneuvering secretly to reopen relations with China. In the Washington Post obituary, Adam Bernstein cites Mr. Van Hollen’s account of this dilemma from his 1990 oral his- tory: “Because Pakistan was seen as a key intermediary in this process, Nixon and Kissinger were very reluctant to take any action that might upset the evolution of the U.S.-Chinese relationship through the good offices of Pakistan, which had at that time a good relationship with China.”