The Foreign Service Journal, September 2019

78 SEPTEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL of Public Affairs. He also studied at the National War College in Washington, D.C. In 1947 Mr. Laingen participated in a project called SPAN (Student Project for Amity among Nations), which inspired him to join the Foreign Service in 1949. He served overseas in Germany, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and was appointed U.S. ambassador to Malta by President Gerald Ford in 1977. State- side, he served on the Greek desk and as deputy assistant secretary for European affairs. Ambassador Laingen was appointed chargé d’affairs in Iran by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, and was taken hostage in Tehran on Nov. 4 of that year. He and his colleagues remained in cap- tivity for 444 days. For his service in Iran he was awarded the State Department Award for Valor. During that time, his wife, Penne, created the Yellow Ribbon as a symbol of unity—and the original ribbon from the oak tree in their front yard is part of the American Folklife Center collection of the Library of Congress. Amb. Laingen is the author of Yellow Ribbon: The Secret Journal of Bruce Lain- gen (Brassey’s Inc., 1992). Following his time as a hostage in Iran, Amb. Laingen was appointed vice president of the National Defense Uni- versity, where he served until 1987 when he retired from the Foreign Service after 38 years. He continued serving in various capacities during retirement, includ- ing as executive director of the National Commission on the Public Service and for 15 years as president of the American Academy of Diplomacy, a private institu- tion dedicated to furthering the highest standards of the diplomatic service. In 2010, Amb. Laingen was presented with AFSA’s highest award, for Lifetime Contributions to American Diplomacy. He was also recognized as a “Father of the Year” by the Father’s Day/Mother’s Day Council in 1981. Amb. Laingen leaves his wife of 62 years, Penelope (Babcock) Laingen; his sons, William Bruce, Charles Winslow and James Palmer; 10 grandchildren; seven great-grandchildren; two great- great-grandchildren; and a sister, Norma Marsh. n John W. McDonald, 97, a retired Foreign Service officer, passed away peacefully on May 17 in Arlington, Va. Mr. McDonald was born on Feb. 18, 1922, in Koblenz, Germany, where his father, Capt. John W. McDonald, an army cavalry officer, was stationed during the occupation of the Rhineland at the end of World War I. Mr. McDonald earned a bachelor’s degree in 1943 from the University of Illi- nois, Urbana-Champaign. He received a law degree from the University of Illinois in 1946 and was admitted to the Illinois Bar in the same year. In early 1947 Mr. McDonald arrived at the Office of Military Government-U.S. in Berlin, one of the first civilians to work in the U.S. Legal Division of the Four-Power Allied Control Council. He joined the Foreign Service in 1949 and was named to the Allied High Com- mission and as assistant district attorney in Frankfurt. In 1950 he assumed the role of U.S. Secretary of the Law Commission of the Allied High Commission in Bad Godesberg. In 1952 Mr. McDonald moved with his family to Paris, where he worked on the Marshall Plan as staff secretary to the U.S. Mission to NATO. In 1955 he was assigned to the Office of Policy Reports and Operations in Washington, D.C., and named interim executive secretary of the International Cooperation Administration, the fore- runner of USAID, until he was formally sworn into this position in 1956. In 1959 he was assigned to CENTO (formerly the Baghdad Pact) in Ankara to oversee the building of a 3,000-kilometer microwave system along the Turkish- Soviet border and a railroad linking Turkey, Iran and Pakistan. From 1963 to 1966 Mr. McDonald worked at Embassy Cairo on economic and agricultural affairs. He returned to Washington, D.C., for a one-year program at the National War College. In 1967 Mr. McDonald was assigned to the Bureau of International Organizations. During a 40-year diplomatic career, Mr. McDonald served for eight years in Europe, four years in Washington, D.C., eight years in the Middle East and then, for the next 20 years, focused almost exclusively on multilateral affairs, including four years with the United Nations as deputy director-general of the International Labour Organization in Geneva. In 1983 Mr. McDonald joined the newly created Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs at the Foreign Service Institute. There he helped pioneer the emerging academic field of conflict resolution. Mr. McDonald was accorded the personal rank of ambassador twice by President Jimmy Carter and twice by President Ronald Reagan. He retired from the Foreign Service in 1989. Mr. McDonald then briefly taught law at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and was the first president of the Iowa Peace Institute in Grinnell, Iowa, from 1989 to 1991. In 1992, he returned to Washington to cofound, with Dr. Louise Diamond, the