The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2019 69 If you would like us to include an obituary in In Memory, please send text to journal@ afsa.org . Be sure to include the date, place and cause of death, as well as details of the individual’s Foreign Service career. Please place the name of the AFSA member to be memorialized in the subject line of your email. In Moscow she worked for the U.S. Information Service, in Geneva for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and in Rome for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Mrs. Prosser was a member of the Associates of the American Foreign Ser- vice Worldwide. She is survived by her husband, James of Green Bay, Wis.; her son, Stephen (and spouse Jodi) and grandchildren, Jennifer and Matthew, of Oak Hill, Va. n Cynthia Thomas, 82, a retired State Department employee and the widow of FSO Charles Thomas, died on March 13 in Minneapolis, Minn., at the home of her daughter. Mrs. Thomas was born in Provi- dence, R.I., on July 20, 1936, the young- est of four children. Her father was an accountant, and her mother left a career as an opera singer when she married. After graduating from Sarah Law- rence College in 1958, she moved to Manhattan and began working as a researcher at Time magazine while pur- suing an acting career. She appeared in two off-Broadway shows staged by the Living Theatre acting company. In 1964 she met FSO Charles Thomas through a mutual friend. The couple married within weeks and moved to Mexico, where Mr. Thomas was posted as a political officer. A year later, their daughter, Zelda, was born there. Mr. Thomas was abruptly “selected out” of the Foreign Service in 1969, and two years later he committed suicide. In the mid-1970s a State Department investigation, the result of Mrs. Thomas’ campaign on Capitol Hill, found that his dismissal had been the result of a cleri- cal error, in particular the misfiling of an excellent review from his final posting at Embassy Mexico City. Pressure from Congress, Mr. Thomas’ former colleagues and a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of the family forced the State Department to overhaul its promotions system and establish a grievance board where employees could appeal the rulings of the promotion boards. In 1975 Mrs. Thomas received a formal letter of apology from President Gerald R. Ford. Mr. Thomas was post- humously restored to active duty in the Foreign Service, a designation that enti- tled his family to the salary and benefits he would have earned in the years since his death, and Mrs. Thomas was invited to join the State Department. Cynthia Thomas, who never remar- ried, served as a political officer in India and Thailand, in addition to assign- ments in Washington, D.C. She retired in 1993, settling in Washington. Declassified government files released in the 1990s suggested to Mrs. Thomas and historians who have stud- ied the case that her husband’s career had been ended to stop him from asking unwelcome questions about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Ken- nedy, Philip Shenon wrote in a March 20 obituary for Mrs. Thomas in The Washington Post . In 2016, suffering from rheumatoid arthritis and other health problems, Mrs. Thomas relocated to her daughter’s home in Minneapolis. Cynthia Thomas is survived by her daughter, Zelda Thomas-Curti; a stepdaughter, Jeanne-Marie Thomas of Rome; and three grandchildren. n MacAlan “Mac” Thompson, 77, a retired Foreign Service officer with USAID, died on Dec. 17, 2018, at his home in Thailand, of cancer. After serving in the U.S. Army, Mr. Thompson joined the U.S. Agency for International Development in 1968. He served for nine years with the USAID mission in Laos, where he worked to provide food and other assistance to communities upcountry, usually by airdrop. He was the last AID officer to leave the USAID mission in Vientiane in June 1975 as the Pathet Lao communists took control. Mr. Thompson then began working with the State Department on behalf of Indochinese refugees in Thailand. He was one of a handful of American offi- cials essential to the success of the U.S. government effort to protect, assist and resettle refugees from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam in the United States. Colleagues, friends and many refugees whom he had helped come to America remember Mr. Thompson with respect. After retiring in 1992, Mr. Thompson worked with the Thailand-Laos- Cambodia Brotherhood to build classrooms in Laos. Mr. Thompson is survived by his wife, Sunee; his son, Chalee; and a sister, Anne. Contributions in his memory can be made to the Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood at tlc-brotherhood.com . n