F OCUS - American Foreign Service Association

I N
M E M O R Y
mation Agency in 1951. His assignments
included informational and cultural
roles in Venezuela, Japan, Spain,
Panama, Chile, Vietnam, Thailand and
Washington, D.C.
During his first Washington assignment,
in the early days of manned
space flight (Mercury and Gemini programs),
he served as USIA/NASA liaison,
channeling information on the
U.S. space program to USIA posts
around the world. Later, he lectured
throughout Latin America on the
Apollo moon program.
In 1980, following retirement, Mr.
Kendall volunteered at the University
of California, Berkeley Institute of East
Asian Studies, coordinating international
conferences. He co-edited books
on Vietnam, Mongolia, Japan and
Southeast Asia, and published accounts
of his wartime and Foreign Service experiences
in two books, Beyond Magnolias
— My First 30 Years and A Farm
Boy in the Foreign Service.
He is survived by his wife of 57
years; three daughters, Betsy and Judith
Kendall of Berkeley, Calif., and
Nancy Hewitt of Korea; and three
grandchildren, Jonathan, Georgia Li
and Cherisa Hewitt; and a sister, Felecia
Cooke. Memorial donations may be
made to the American Red Cross, the
American Friends Service or other
charity.
Claudine Betty Leifert, 66, wife of
retired FSO Harvey Leifert, died on
Oct. 23, 2008, at The George Washington
University Hospital in Washington,
D.C. She had long struggled with
chronic obstructive pulmonary disease,
the cause of her death.
Born in Dombresson, in the Swiss
canton of Neuchâtel, in 1942, Claudine
Burger wanted, from a young age, to
see the world. She first traveled abroad
on her own as part of a U.N.-related
group of volunteers, to build a schoolhouse
on the Greek island of Kythera.
She followed that up with a yearlong
volunteer stint at a school in Haiti,
where one of the students was Jean-
Claude Duvalier, the future president
known as “Baby Doc.”
When her volunteer year ended,
she and a friend stayed on, and she
found a job with the Quebec-based
company that was developing Haiti’s
first national telephone system since
the departure of the U.S. Marine occupation
force in 1934. One of her
tasks was to compile, manually, the directory
of telephone subscribers. The
two women rented a house in the
Port-au-Prince suburb of Pétionville;
it was back-to-back with the home of
the U.S. embassy cultural affairs officer,
Harvey Leifert.
Claudine Burger wondered who
lived in that house, with its noisy generator
providing light to its occupant
during the nightly blackouts. A loud
squawk box added to the mystery, with
its frequent “Charlie, this is Delta”
chatter. One day, while driving to work,
Mr. Leifert chanced upon his unknown
neighbor at a taxi stand and offered her
a ride into town. A year later, when he
had received permission from USIA to
wed a foreigner, the couple was married
in Port-au-Prince.
Upon arrival in the U.S. a few
months later for her “Americanization”
tour, the couple drove to San Francisco
and back to Washington, visiting cities,
prairies and national parks, the first of
many trips they took together. But
once settled in Washington, D.C.,
Claudine was confronted with an
American fact of life: without a university
degree — uncommon for Swiss
women at that time — employers
would not hire her for work for which
she was fully qualified.
That changed with Mr. Leifert’s next
assignment, to Copenhagen, where Mrs.
Leifert was among the first to benefit
from a Danish-American agreement allowing
work by diplomatic spouses in
each other’s capital. She used her FSI
Danish and other skills in the Copenhagen
office of a Swedish manufacturer
of precision optical lenses.
There followed four years in Paris,
during which she participated in the
new PIT program, allowing dependents
of FSOs to work at the embassy.
She served mainly in the visa and economic
sections. She earned a commendation
for her work in support of
the Paris Air Show, during which the
American F-16 outperformed French
and Swedish fighter planes to win a
huge NATO contract, in the “arms deal
of the century.” Returning to Washington
for another tour, she joined the
African-American Institute, where she
planned trips around the U.S. for participants
in the State-USIA International
Visitors Program.
When her husband was assigned to
South Africa in 1985, she became the
first Community Liaison Officer at the
American consulate general in Johannesburg.
She also administered the annual
visa qualifying exams for doctors
and nurses seeking to practice in the
U.S.
It was the height of apartheid, and
relations between the two governments
were tense. Like other official Americans
— but very few other countries’
diplomats there — she hosted and attended
many interracial events, bringing
black and white South Africans
together, often for the first time. She
frequently visited Soweto for USIA
programs, parties and funerals. Visit-
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