The Foreign Service Journal, September 2013

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2013 91 Washington, D.C., of leukemia. Roscoe Seldon Suddarth was born on Aug. 5, 1935, in Louisville, Ky., and grew up in Nashville, Tenn., where his mother ran a boarding house. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 1956 with a degree in history. He then studied at New College at the University of Oxford in England, receiving his master’s degree in modern history in 1958. In 1972 he received a master’s degree in systems analysis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technol- ogy. In 1961 Mr. Suddarth joined the State Department Foreign Service. He met his future wife, Michele Lebas, in 1963, during his first posting, to Mali, when she won a singing contest aboard a steamboat on the Niger River. The couple married in Bamako, and a post- ing to Lebanon followed. A fluent Arabic speaker, Mr. Sud- darth became a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs. After Mali and Lebanon, he served in Yemen, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. In 1967, during his assignment as consul in Yemen, he spent three weeks as a “selected” hostage, sharing confinement with two USAID officers accused of plotting to overthrow the government. U.S. diplomats had rea- soned that if an embassy official were with them at all times, the likelihood of the USAID personnel being executed would be diminished. As Mr. Suddarth recounted the story in the October 1971 Foreign Service Journal (“Diplomacy in a Yemeni Jail”), were the officers convicted, they would face the death penalty, with the option of “choosing a firing squad or—as a more manly course—decapitation with an Islamic sword.” Fortunately, the informed gamble paid off: the two cap- tives were released after three weeks of confinement. Several years later, Mr. Suddarth helped arrange the evacuation of Wheelus Air Base in Libya and deal with the spike in oil prices following the coup that brought Moammar Gaddafi to power there. He later became executive assistant to the under secretary for political affairs, and in that role was involved in the U.S. response to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, as well as the 1981 release of the Embassy Tehran hostages. In September 1987 Mr. Suddarth was named U.S. ambassador to Jordan. Dur- ing the final months of that assignment, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein made clear his intention to attack Kuwait. After service as inspector general at the State Department and as interna- tional affairs adviser at the Naval War College, Ambassador Suddarth retired from the Foreign Service in 1995. He then served as president of the Washington-based Middle East Institute for six years. Later he was an independent director of mutual funds, while studying for a master’s degree in musicology at the University of Mary- land, which he received in 2008. Amb. Suddarth lived with leuke- mia for the last 12 years of his life, but continued to go about his daily routine. He took piano lessons from an old friend and Yale classmate, pianist John Eaton. He wrote several pieces for the FSJ , including an appreciation of the late FSO David Newsom (“Consum- mate Diplomat, Extraordinary Human Being,” September 2008). Only days before his death, he played cards and dined with friends. He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Michele, of Bethesda, Md.; two children, Anne Suddarth of Nijmegen, Netherlands, and Mark Suddarth of St. Louis, Mo.; four grandchildren; and a sister. n Charles D. Ward , a retired Senior Foreign Service officer with the U.S. Agency for International Development, died unexpectedly on April 30 at the University of Arizona Cancer Center in Tucson, Ariz., as a result of a severe infection following surgery for lung cancer. Mr. Ward was born in Clay County, Ala. With his keen intelligence, he was able to overcome the obstacles that poverty placed in his path. Following service in the U.S. Army, he attended the University of Alabama. He was then awarded a Fulbright scholarship for graduate studies at the London School of Economics and, later, a teaching fel- lowship at Harvard University. In 1962, during USAID’s early days, Mr. Ward joined the Foreign Service. He served in Liberia, Tanzania, Swaziland, Botswana, Lesotho, Yemen, Burma and Washington, D.C. He returned to Harvard twice during his career with USAID—once for a program at The Kennedy School and, later, for a year as a fellow at the Center for International Affairs. After retiring from the Foreign Service in 1988, Mr. Ward worked as a contractor for USAID-funded projects in Egypt, Somalia, Armenia, Malawi and Kenya. Mr. Ward is survived by his wife, Veronica, of Portland, Ore.; three sons, Eugene of Baltimore, Md., Steven of Portland, Ore., and Jason of Sydney, Australia; and six grandchildren. n