The Foreign Service Journal, July/August 2018

96 JULY-AUGUST 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL degree in history, with honors. While there, he met Joy Dana Sundgaard; they married in 1949. Mr. Kaiser joined the Foreign Service in 1950 and served in Scotland, Yugosla- via, Austria, Poland, Romania and South Africa. Between these overseas assignments, he held a variety of posts at the State Department in Washington, D.C., and studied at Harvard University and the U.S. Army War College. Mr. Kaiser was fluent in Serbo- Croatian, German, Polish, Romanian, Afrikaans and Yiddish. Among his achievements were successful efforts to aid persecuted Jews behind the Iron Cur- tain—working closely with Rabbi Moses Rosen, Mr. Kaiser helped secure exit visas for tens of thousands of Romanian Jews. An out-of-area assignment to Pretoria and Cape Town from 1969 to 1972 was to have profound consequences following his retirement from the Foreign Service in 1983. While in South Africa, Mr. Kaiser contracted and was cured of a malignant melanoma. Reflecting on the imbalance between the health care he received and that which was then available to persons of color in South Africa, he and his wife decided to start a foundation to assist the training of medical personnel in that country. In 1984, Mr. Kaiser and his wife founded the nonprofit Medical Education for South African Blacks. Over the course of 23 years, MESAB helped educate thou- sands of doctors, nurses and paramedics. With the end of the apartheid regime, and with the support from luminar- ies such as Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and George Soros, Mr. Kaiser’s and MESAB’s efforts continued and expanded, even as the HIV/AIDS epidemic swept through the country. By 2007, when MESAB was shuttered, the organization had helped create an 11,000-strong cadre of South African health care professionals of color. Mr. Kaiser was subsequently recog- nized for his work, receiving honorary doctorates from the Medical University of South Africa and Swarthmore College; the Albert Schweitzer Award; and, most sig- nificantly, induction as a Member of the Companions of O.R. Tambo (silver), South Africa’s highest honor for a foreigner. Mr. Kaiser is survived by his wife, Joy; his children, Timothy, Paul and Gail; son- in-law, Mark Anderton; daughters-in-law Katheryn DeGroot Kaiser and Margaret Darmanin Kaiser; and his grandchildren, Natalie and Nicolas Kaiser, Alice and Jane Kaiser, and Claire and John Anderton. n David Klein, 98, a retired Foreign Service officer, died in San Diego, Calif., on March 3. Mr. Klein attended City College in New York. However, weakened by scarlet fever, he finished his bachelor’s degree closer to home, at Brooklyn College, in 1939. He went on to earn graduate degrees fromColumbia University in 1941 and, later, the Graduate Business School of Harvard University. Mr. Klein taught for a short while in Rye, N.Y., before joining the U.S. Army, where he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1942. Mr. Klein later joined the Army Reserve, retiring with the rank of colonel. In 1951 Mr. Klein was selected for the Soviet Area and Russian Language Program at the Foreign Service Institute. After studying at Cornell and Columbia Universities in 1952, he was posted to Moscow, where he served as an aide to Ambassadors George Kennan and Charles (Chip) Bohlen, and as a consular and economic officer. In 1955 he was assigned to Berlin as an economic officer, and then to Bonn as a political officer in 1958. Returning to Washington, D.C., in 1960, he was a Soviet desk officer and member of the Berlin Task Force before being seconded to the National Security Council under National Security Adviser McGeorge “Mac” Bundy. Mr. Klein graduated from the National War College before returning to Mos- cow in 1966, where he was an economic adviser. He then returned to Berlin as political adviser and deputy chief of mis- sion of the divided city. During six years there, he was a key player in the Four-Power Agreement on Berlin (the “Berlin Accords”) and left with the rank of minister counselor. Mr. Klein returned to Washington, D.C., to serve as assistant director for international affairs at the U.S. Arms Con- trols and Disarmament Agency, leading the U.S. delegation to the first Non-Prolif- eration Treaty Review Conference. In 1975 he retired from the Service and moved to New York to become execu- tive director of the American Council on Germany. Mr. Klein was awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit and the Distinguished Knight Order of the Cross of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Order of Merit of the city of Berlin. Active in politics, Mr. Klein headed the Democratic Party in Princeton, N.J., from 1979 to 1981. In 1988, he completed the graduate degree he started at the Harvard Business School in 1946, graduating as a Baker scholar, with the distinction of being the eldest in the class. He and his wife, Anne, retired to La Jolla, Calif., where he taught political sci- ence at both the University of California at San Diego and the University of San Diego until 2004. Mr. Klein wrote The Basmachi: A Study in Soviet Nationalities Policy and, with