The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2023 89 ambassador, passed away on Jan. 3, 2023, at his home in Washington, D.C., due to complications from a fall the day before his death. Born on Aug. 6, 1927, in Long Branch, N.J., Mr. Lowenstein grew up in nearby Shrewsbury and, later, Scarsdale, N.Y. He was the son of Katherine (Goldsmith) Lowenstein and Melvyn Lowenstein, a prominent estate attorney, based in Man- hattan, whose clients included Babe Ruth. Mr. Lowenstein graduated from the Loomis School in 1945 and received his bachelor’s degree in international rela- tions at Yale University in 1949. He then entered government service and went to Paris, where he worked for the Economic Cooperation Administration overseeing the Marshall Plan for postwar European recovery. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1952 to 1955, completing his naval reserve service with the rank of lieutenant, after which he entered Harvard Law School. His legal pursuits were cut short, how- ever, by a bout with bulbar polio, which left part of his face paralyzed. By the time he recovered, he was far behind his classmates, and he left school after a year to join the U.S. Foreign Service. He received his commission in early 1957 and had assignments in Washington, D.C., Sri Lanka, and Yugoslavia, where he worked under George F. Kennan. In 1965 Mr. Lowenstein took a leave of absence from the department to work for Senator J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.) and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. With his diplomatic background, he soon became a valued member of the committee’s staff, accompanying senators on their own fact-finding trips abroad. In 1967 he went with Senator Philip Hart (D-Mich.) to South Vietnam. When he returned to Washington, he conveyed his impressions to Mr. Fulbright, who weeks later came out forcefully against the war. The senator also decided that he needed his own source of information from the field, and put Mr. Lowenstein and Richard M. Moose, another former FSO, on the case. Their report, released in a redacted version to the public in early 1970, was a bombshell. The administration’s plans, they wrote, “seem to rest on far more ambiguous, confusing, and contradictory evidence than pronouncements from Washington and Saigon indicate.” The pair returned to the region several times, coming back with more damaging revelations. In Cambodia, they discov- ered that the United States was secretly expanding its support for the country’s military against communist forces, raising fear of a spillover conflict. And in Laos, they found a secret, long-running effort by the CIA to train pro-American guerrillas. A trip to Greece, which was then under the control of a military junta, revealed that the U.S. ambassador in Athens was biased in favor of the junta and had been sending misleading reports to Washington. The Lowenstein-Moose investigations on Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Philip- pines, Greece, and nuclear weapons in Europe made national headlines, setting the precedent for later Senate inquiries. After returning to the State Depart- ment in 1974, Mr. Lowenstein became principal deputy assistant secretary of State for European affairs under Secre- tary of State Henry Kissinger. He then served as the ambassador to Luxembourg from 1977 to 1981 before retiring from the Foreign Service in 1982. He later worked as a consultant and election monitor and was vice chairman of the French-American Foundation, which he co-founded in 1976 to improve relations between the two countries. He held the rank of officer in the French Legion of Honor and was deco- rated with the Luxembourg Grand Croix of the Couronne de Chêne. Ambassador Lowenstein was married twice, with both marriages ending in divorce. He is survived by his daughter, Laurinda Douglas, of New York; his son, Price, of Bermuda; his brother, Peter, of Greenwich, Conn.; his longtime partner, Audrey Wolfe; and three grandchildren: James and Haley Lowenstein and Alex Douglas. n Ambler H. Moss Jr., 85, a former Foreign Service officer and ambassador, passed away peacefully at his home in Coral Gables, Fla., on Dec. 27, 2022. He was born in Baltimore, Md., in 1937 and completed his bachelor’s degree at Yale University in 1960. In 1970, he received his J.D. fromThe George Washington University. He was an officer in the U.S. Navy (submarines) and a life member of the American Legion and Navy League. He was a member of the Bars of Florida and the District of Columbia. Mr. Moss joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1964. He served in Spain, in the U.S. Delegation to the Organization of American States, and as Spanish desk officer in Washington, D.C., before leav- ing the Service in 1971 to work as a resi- dent attorney with the law firm Coudert Brothers in Brussels from 1972 to 1976. He returned to the State Department in 1977 as a political appointee on the U.S.–Panama Canal negotiating team and was then named deputy assistant secre- tary of State for congressional relations. He served as ambassador to Panama from 1978 until 1982, having been appointed successively by Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.