The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2012

70 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 1 2 Lois Lapidus Cancer Institute, c/o The Darrell Jenks Memorial, Sinai Hospi- tal of Baltimore, 2401 W. Belvedere Ave., Baltimore MD 21215. William J. Kushlis , 69, a retired Foreign Service officer, died on April 6 in Houston, Texas, of acute myloid leukemia. Mr. Kushlis joined the Foreign Service in 1970. During a 27-year ca- reer, he met all sorts of fascinating people, from presidents and Cabinet ministers to reporters, editors, stu- dents, human rights activists and lead- ers of independence movements. Mr. Kushlis was posted overseas in Switzerland, the USSR, Greece, Fin- land, Thailand and the Philippines, and served at the State Department and the Pentagon inWashington, D.C. He also served on Commission on Se- curity and Cooperation in Europe conflict prevention missions in Esto- nia and Moldova. Colleagues and friends recall Mr. Kushlis as an astute political analyst, reporter, team-player, linguist, nego- tiator and mediator. As political coun- selor in Helsinki (1988-1992), he supervised and contributed to the re- porting on the Baltic independence movements in the years preceding the breakup of the Soviet Union. He and a colleague had the honor of receiving the official request for U.S. recognition of Estonian inde- pendence from Foreign Minister Lennart Meri on Aug. 22, 1991, on the embassy’s front steps to relay to Wash- ington. Throughout his career as a political officer, Mr. Kushlis was frequently lauded for putting disparate pieces to- gether to form a coherent political pic- ture of rapidly changing events. As of- ficer in charge of Greek affairs at the State Department from 1985 to 1987, he and his colleagues in the Office of Southeast European Affairs received an award for heroism for decisively de- fusing a potentially disastrous military confrontation between Greece and Turkey. He was a Pearson Fellow for the late Senator Edward F. Kennedy, D- Mass., from 1984 to 1985. A fluent Russian speaker, Mr. Kushlis con- cluded his Foreign Service career as a senior foreign policy adviser on coop- erative threat reduction with Russia and Belarus in the Office of the Sec- retary of Defense (1994-1996). Following his retirement, Mr. Kushlis moved to Albuquerque, N.M., where he was a broker and financial adviser from 1998 to 2006. He loved to travel, ski, swim, watch movies and attend the theater, opera and concerts. He was treasurer of Quintessence, a premier Albuquerque choral group, and a member of the Albuquerque Committee on Foreign Relations, the Santa Fe World Affairs Forum and DACOR. Mr. Kushlis is survived by his wife, Patricia H. Kushlis, a retired USIA Foreign Service officer whom he met in A-100, of Albuquerque; his son, Christopher J. Kushlis (and wife, Mag- dalena Polan) of London; two broth- ers and two sisters. Contributions in his name may be made to the Santa Fe World Affairs Forum, P.O. Box 31965, Santa Fe NM 87594, to help defray speaker travel expenses, or to the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood, c/o Sister Carmen Schneider, 204 North Main St., O’Fallon MO 63366-2299, for the ed- ucation of Estonian children with spe- cial needs. Eleanor Hanson Leonard , 90, the wife of retired Foreign Service of- ficer James F. Leonard, died onMarch 13 at her home in Rosslyn, Va., with her husband at her side. Eleanor Leonard was born in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 7, 1921, and attended D.C. public schools. After graduating as the valedictorian from Woodrow Wilson High School, she went on to Wellesley College, where she received a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1943. In 1942 she took leave from Wellesley to teach meteor- ology to Army trainees. In 1943, she married her longtime beau, Arthur Lee Thompson III, whose family owned Thompson’s Honor Dairy, one of the largest indus- trial firms in Washington at that time. Their son “Lee” was born on Oct. 6, 1944. Her husband was killed in the Philippines on the last day of World War II. Mrs. Leonard became interested in the U.S. Foreign Service and, in 1947, enrolled in a summer course at George Washington University to prepare for the Foreign Service exam. There she met her future husband, James F. Leonard. She passed the Foreign Serv- ice exam with high marks, but was re- fused an appointment on the grounds that as a widow with a small child, she was sure to remarry and the Service’s investment in her would be wasted. Despite this rebuff, she accepted Mr. Leonard’s proposal, married and accompanied him on Foreign Service assignments in Damascus, Moscow, Paris, Taichung and Taipei. Mrs. Leonard learned Russian, French and Chinese during these tours, while assisting her husband in the traditional Foreign Service spouse’s duties and bringing up their son and five daughters. She greatly enjoyed a I N M E M O R Y