The Foreign Service Journal, September 2007

Foreign Service Institute. In 1976, he was posted to Rabat as counselor for public affairs. Amb. Rentschler re- turned to Washington, D.C., in 1978 as a senior staff member and director of Western European Affairs on the National Security Council, where he served both Presidents Carter and Reagan. From 1982 to 1985, he served as ambassador to Malta. In 1986 he served as ambassador-in-residence at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Following retirement from the Foreign Service, Amb. Rentschler was director of press and communi- cations at the OECD in Paris. Thomas P. Shoesmith , 85, a retired FSO and former ambassador, died of cancer at home in Springfield, Va., on April 26. Ambassador Shoesmith was born in Palmerton, Pa., on Jan. 25, 1922. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1943, he enlisted in the Army. Following intensive Japanese-language training at Yale and Michigan Universities, he was commissioned and assigned in 1946 as a political intelligence analyst in the headquarters of the Supreme Commander Allied Powers in Tokyo. Upon discharge from the Army in 1948, Amb. Shoesmith entered the Graduate School of International Studies at Harvard University, where he received his master’s degree in 1949. Following two additional years of graduate study in political science, he entered the Department of State in 1951 as a research analyst in Japanese political affairs. Amb. Shoesmith joined the For- eign Service in 1955, and was assigned to Hong Kong in 1956. From 1958 to 1960 he was a political officer in Seoul. He received further intensive Japanese-language training (1960- 1961), after which he was assigned as a political officer in Tokyo. In 1963, he became principal officer in Fukuoka. Returning to Washington, D.C., in 1966, Amb. Shoesmith served as country director in the Office of the Republic of China Affairs in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs from 1967 to 1971. After a year as a member of the Senior Executive Seminar, he was posted in Tokyo as deputy chief of mission from 1972 to 1977 and then served as con- sul general in Hong Kong until 1981. He was promoted to career minister in 1982, and in 1983 was appointed ambassador toMalaysia, where he serv- ed until his retirement in March 1987. In retirement, he was active in the Japan-America Society, serving as its president and, for a time, simultaneously as president of the National Association of Japan-Am- erica Societies. For a number of years he tutored students in English through the Literacy Council of Northern Virginia, and continued his hobby of oil painting begun in the early 1950s. Amb. Shoesmith is survived by his wife Martha H. “Mike” of Spring- field, Va.; his son Thomas Mark Shoesmith of Shanghai; his daughter Jo Shoesmith of Harpers Ferry, W. Va.; and two grandchildren, Julia and Michael of Shanghai. Juanita Swedenburg , 82, a for- mer FSO and wife of the late FSO Wayne Swedenburg, died of conges- tive heart failure on June 9 at her home in Middleburg, Va. Mrs. Swe- denburg was also the winemaker who in 2005 won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court battle to ship wine between states. Mrs. Swedenburg was born in Springfield, Ill., and graduated from what is now Illinois State University in Normal. She pursued graduate studies at the University of Miami, the University of Michigan and the University of California at Los Angeles. After teaching high school English and French, she entered the Foreign Service in 1952. She was assigned to Saigon — then “the Paris of the East,” she recalled — where she worked in personnel and admin- istration. There she met FSO Wayne Swedenburg, and they were married in 1953. In accord with the regula- tions of the time, Mrs. Swedenburg resigned from the Service. For the next 20 years, Mrs. Swe- denburg accompanied her husband on assignments to Vienna (1953-1955), Khartoum (1956-1958), Freetown (1961-1964), Mogadishu (1964-1966) and a two-year posting to Dhaka that coincided with the 1971 Indo- Pakistani War and the independence of Bangladesh. They returned to the Washington area in 1972. After an assignment in Lagos, Mr. Swedenburg retired in 1980. The couple settled in Middleburg, Va., on Valley View Farm, where they opened a winery in 1988. The Swe- denburgs and their sonMarc did much of the work themselves. She tended their tasting room for six hours a day, seven days a week, and kept current on vineyard pests and fungi, equipment problems and the state of the harvest. In 2000, Mrs. Swedenburg be- came the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit the couple filed to overturn the ban many states have on direct interstate wine 86 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 7 I N M E M O R Y