LOIS ROTH ENDOWMENT

A review of the activities of the endowment. Downloads below.

Richard Arndt, Philadelphia-born, grew up in New York's Jersey suburbs. After working through his way through Princeton, he was a Fulbright Student in Franco-American literary relations at the University of Dijon, in the first year of Fulbright's French program (1949 50). He taught through the 1950s at Columbia University, where he took his PhD in French literature of the 18th-cntury in 1959. In 1961, he joined USIA and was assigned to Beirut. There he was caught by his discovery of cultural diplomacy, thanks to friends at the great American University of Beirut. To this little-known art, he made a career commitment that continues today. After Beirut came Sri Lanka (1963-66), followed by Tehran (1966-71). He was given a mid-career year at Princeton's Wilson School, focused on manpower economics, i.e. the relations of education to socio-political development. After Princeton, he worked in Latin American Affairs, then headed Youth Affairs and American Specialists in the State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (1972-74). He went to Rome as Cultural Attaché (1974-78) and to Paris (1978-80), returning to various Washingon jobs in cultural affairs including Director of Policy and Plans, then Middle Eastern affairs (1980-85). Retiring in 1985, he began three and a half years of teaching at the University of Virginia, then three more at George Washington University, to which he later returned to head a graduate seminar on UNESCO in World Affairs. He has been President of the US Fulbright Association, Chairman of the National Peace Foundation, and President of Americans for UNESCO, organizing support for a productive US role in the organization which US withdrawal all but destroyed in 1984. He also chairs the US Committee to Save Ancient Tyre and is a member of several advisory bodies. He was principal editor of The Fulbright Difference in 1992, 40 memoirs of the impact of the Fulbright experience. His book The First Resort of Kings: US Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century appeared in April 2005, quickly went into a paperback edition, and is used in university courses across the U.S. His wife Lois W. Roth, an iconic US cultural diplomat, died in 1986; in her memory, Dr. Arndt founded and has chaired the Lois Roth Endowment since 1986. Established from the gifts and bequests of friends, it manages fourteen country projects in international excchange and awards translation prizes in four countries, in cooperation with two dozen like-minded NGOs. Four children and seven grandchildren from earlier marriages are scattered around the globe.

S. J. Arndt-Briggs, born to French and American parents, grew up the Columbia campus in New York. Her mother chaired the French Department at the Brearley School, from which she was graduated in 1972. At Princeton, she majored in French literature, with summer internships in various French institutions. She returned to graduate study in anthropology, at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, first in physical anthropology, with a summer excavation in France's Périgord, then in cultural anthropology. A DAAD grant from the German government and a Fulbright grant a year later allowed her to interview scores of elderly residents of the Berlin district called Moabit for her doctoral dissertation, a study of the sense of place in Weimar Berlin (1999). She is presently acting director of the unique DEFA film archive at the University, containing all the feature films produced in East Germany from 1945 until the end of Soviet occupation and German reunification. DEFA circulates packages of these films around the country for teaching and research. She is married to Gregory Briggs, a UMass PhD in cultural anthropology and specialist in vocational education. They have two daughters aged 21 and 16, the older of whom graduates summa cum laude this year from the University of Colorado, and the younger of whom is a State champion in Mock Trial competitions.

Robert Bemis was born in Boston and educated at the Boston Latin School.  He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Haverford College, where he did his honors work on Gertrude Stein with the late Guy Davenport, and took a Master's degree in English literature, as a student of Helen C. White, at the University of Wisconsin.  After work as a journalist and critic, for The Boston Globe and the National Review (1962-1963), he taught English literature as a Fulbright lecturer in the College of Arts, University of Baghdad (1965-1967). From 1967 to 1969, he studied literature and writing and taught at the University of Texas (Austin). He entered the Foreign Service in 1970, learned Persian in Washington, and served at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran until 1975.  After learning Arabic in Beirut and in Tunis, he was director of the U.S. cultural center in Alexandria, Egypt from 1976 to 1978.  He served in several positions in the U.S. Information Agency in Washington and was then assigned as deputy counselor of public affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Rome (1982-1986).  An assignment to the National Security Council followed, as director for international and technology affairs (1986-1987).  Later, he was chief of policy planning for the U.S. Information Agency (1987-1991), public affairs advisor to U.S. Mission to NATO in Brussels (1991-1995), and chief of Foreign Service personnel (USIA, 1995-1998).  Since his retirement from the Foreign Service, he has worked as an editor and translator and as a consultant for several bureaus in the Department of State, including the Office of the Inspector-General.   He has earned a number of awards for public service, including a Presidential Honor Award for work in coordinating government-wide public affairs projects.  His languages include Persian, Arabic, Italian, and French.

Harriet Mayor Fulbright holds a BA from Radcliffe and an MFA from the George Washington University, plus honorary doctorates from Long Island University and the Bank Street College of Education. She spent most of her career in education and the arts, teaching at a wide range of institutions ranging from Ewha Women's University in Korea to Moscow, where she taught English as a second language to first-graders. She taught art at several US institutions, including the American University and the Maret School in Washington, where in 1980 she was named Teacher of the Year.

She was assistant director for the Congressional Arts Caucus, then executive secretary of the World Congress of International Historians of Art 1985-86. In 1987-90 she was executive director of the US Fulbright Association, helping move it from Bryn Mawr to Washington and strengthening its foundations. In 1990-96 she was president of the Center for Arts in the Basic Curriculum, advocating educational reform. In 1994, she was Young Audiences Honoree of the Year and received Panama's highest civilian honor. She serves on a number of boards: the Fulbright International Center, University of Maryland; the Reves International Center, College of William and Mary; the Academy of Educational Development; Americans for UNESCO; and the National Foreign Language Center. In 1997-2000, she directed the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, serving also as unofficial Ambassador for the 50th anniversary of the Fulbright Program, for which she traveled to 16 countries and all over the U.S., speaking on international education.

From their marriage in 1990 until his death, she stood by the side of her husband Senator J. William Fulbright, enriching his last years.

Robert Gosende served for over 30 years in the Foreign Service of the United States in the U.S. Information Agency and the Department of State before joining the State University of New York as Associate Vice Chancellor for International Programs in 1998. Mr. Gosende's overseas experience includes tours of duty as a Cultural Affairs Office in Uganda, Libya, Somalia, and Poland and as Minister-Counselor for Press and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Embassies in South Africa and the Russian Federation. He also served as the President's Special Envoy for Somalia during the height of the humanitarian crisis in that country in 1992-93. Mr. Gosende was a Fellow at Harvard's Center for International Affairs (1978-79) and a Diplomatic Associate at the Georgetown University Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (1992). He was the Edward R. Murrow Professor of Public Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University (1994-95). He received Presidential Awards from President George H.W. Bush and President Clinton for his service as USIA's Director of African Affairs and as Special Envoy for Somalia. Mr. Gosende was elected to the National Board of NAFSA for a three year term in January of 2008. Mr. Gosende received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from American International College in Springfield, Massachusetts. He was awarded a Doctorate of Humane Letters from American International College in 1991 in recognition for his work promoting international educational and cultural exchange.

David Johnson, Professor of Planning Emeritus at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is a native of New York City. His BA and Master’s degrees in architecture and planning were earned at Yale and his PhD in regional planning was done at Cornell. Before his academic career, Dr. Johnson served on the staffs of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, the National Capital Planning Commission in Washington, and the Regional Plan Association in New York City. His teaching career began as a faculty member and department chair in planning at Syracuse, Ball State, and Tennessee. His international experience covered more than 40 countries. In 1972 he directed an environmental research project in Yugoslavia; he was a Senior Fulbright scholar at the Moscow Institute of Architecture (1978), the first American urban planner to teach in the USSR; he held a teaching and research Fulbright in Cyprus in (1998-99), focused on the use of planning and development as bridges between the Greek and Turkish communities on that divided island; he also participated in or led faculty Fulbright groups to India and Thailand; and he directed research projects on deforestation in the Amazon and desertification in Kenya. On the domestic scene he was planner for the award-winning master plan for the State Capitol and Bicentennial Mall in Nashville. He is the author of numerous articles and several books, including Planning the Great Metropolis, which examined how planning shaped the New York Metropolitan Region. He is a Past-President of the US Fulbright Association and a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners. He resides in Asheville, North Carolina with his wife, Eleanor Stephens Johnson, where they live on the Biltmore tract which Eleanor’s father helped manage. They dragged their three daughters, all Yale graduates, around the world. Out of all this came a bestselling novel by daughter Elizabeth (Kostova), and Backstage at the Revolution, a socio-historical study of the Paris Opera during the French Revolution, by their youngest, Victoria (Assistant Professor, University of Michigan). A third daughter, Jessica (Honigberg) is an accomplished musician and pianist, and an artist who is currently illustrating a children's book written by her father.

Federico Mayor, born in 1934 in Barcelona, did his doctorate in pharmacy, with highest honors, at the prestigious Complutense University in Madrid. He held the chair in pharmacy at the University of Granada 1963-73, spent a year at Oxford as senior fellow of Trinity College, working with Hans Krebs in biochemistry. He was named Rector of Granada in 1968. In 1972, he was named Honorary Rector of Granada and took the chair of pharmacy at Madrid's Free University. In 1974 he joined Spain's government as Undersecretary for Education and Science and chair of the Commission on Scientific and Technical Research; he continued at the Free University as Director of the Center of Molecular Biology. By then he had a world reputation in the study of cerebral metabolism, peri-natal biochemistry and molecular pathology. In 1977 he was elected to Parliament and appointed chair of the Committee on Education and Science, as well as as presidential advisor. In 1981-82 he was Spain's Minister of Education and Science and in 1987 he represented Spain at the European Parliament in Strasbourg. His links to various organizations outside Spain included the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1965, the Club of Rome in 1981, the International Brain Research Organization in 1980, the European Academy of Arts, Sciences and Letters in 1981, the French Academy of Pharmacy in 1984, the International Cell Research Organization in 1984, the World Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985, the Venice Atheneum in 1990, the Royal Chemical Society in 1991, the American Academy of Microbiology in 1994, among others.

In 1976 he was a member of the board of UNESCO's Center for Higher Education in Bucharest and boardmember of the UN University in Tokyo. In 1978-91, he served UNESCO as Assistant Director General, then as Director General for two terms 1987-2000, during which time he turned the organization around after years of poor management. After UNESCO, he returned to Madrid, as vice-chairman of the Ramon Areces Foundation for science.

In December 2000 he launched a new global Foundation for a Culture of Peace. In 2001 he was named head of a new Spanish firm, FirstMark, working in broad-band communications with multinational partners. His honors and honorary degrees are numerous. In his quiet hours, he finds joy in writing the poems he publishes regularly.

Jill E. McGovern is Senior Consultant at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS), a research organization in Washington affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University and focused on U.S.-German relations. Previously, she served as CEO of The Marrow Foundation (1993-2007) and built the organization to a new level. Previously she had been Executive Director of the Baltimore International Festival and Senior Assistant to the President, The Johns Hopkins University. In 1975-81, she chaired the Department of Education at the College of Charleston SC. She earned a B.A. in English Literature from Northwestern University, an M.A. in Early Childhood Education from Xavier University (New Orleans), and a Ph.D. in Educational Administration from the same university. She spent two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mogmog, Ulithi, Federated States of Micronesia. In Baltimore she chaired the Board of the Babe Ruth Museum (1994-99), and remains with the Museum’s Advisory Council. She also served on the Board of the Baltimore Educational Scholarship Trust and with the Coalition on Donation. She is a member of the Board of the International Biomedical Research Alliance and the Legg Mason Funds. She is married to Steven Muller.

Henry A. Millon, founder-trustee, is founding-Dean Emeritus of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art (1979- 2001). He was educated in physics, architecture and art history at Tulane and Harvard, with a period in the US Navy. He was professor of the History of Architecture and Architetural Design at MIT until 1980 and Visiting Professor thereafter. He became Resident Art Historian at the American Academy of Rome in 1966, after residence at the Academy 1957- 60; he directed the Academy from 1973 to 1977. In 1978 he spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, was a delegate of the International Committee for the History of Art, a member of the US National Committee for the History of Art, a convener of the Architectural Drawings Advisory Group, and a member of the editorial board of the Architectural History Foundation. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Diputazione di Storia Patri, Accademia di San Luca in Rome, and the Accademia delle Scienze in Turin. Among his publications: The Triumph of the Baroque in Europe, 1600-1750 (1999), editor; The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The Representation of Architecture, with V. Lampuignani (1994); Michelangelo Architect, with C. H. Smyth (1988); Fillippo Juvara, Drawings from the Roman Period 1704-1714 (1984), editor; Key Monuments of the History of Architecture (1984); and Baroque and Rococo Architecture (1981). He is given primary credit for revealing, renovating and displaying the extraordinary wooden architect's models used in Baroque constructions in Italy and all over Europe, the basis for half a dozen or more major exhibits in which he participated.

Dr. Patti McGill Peterson, went to Washington as Executive Director of the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES), managing university relations with the senior Fulbight Program, and Vice President of the Institute of International Education (IIE). CIES, part of IIE, administers the Fulbright Scholar Program and other higher education programs.

From 1996 to 1998, she was Senior Fellow at Cornell University's Institute for Public Affairs where her work focused primarily on the nonprofit sector and its role in shaping public policy in the United States and abroad. Dr. Peterson is President Emerita at both Wells College and St. Lawrence University, where she held the presidencies from 1980 to 1996. She has served as Chair of the U.S.-Canada Commission for Educational Exchange, the American Council on Education's Commission on Academic Leadership and the Public Leadership Education Network. She is past president of the Association of Colleges and Universities of the State of New York. She speaks and publishes in the areas of public policy, the nonprofit sector and higher education in the U.S. and abroad.

William Alvarado Rivera received his A.B. with honors in Public Policy and American Institutions from Brown University, where he wrote an honors thesis on the impact of child support reform on poverty and welfare dependence in the state of Rhode Island. This led him to seek a Fulbright to Stockholm, where he studied Swedish child support and paternity-establishment policy. In Stockholm, he was one of the earliest recipients of a Roth Endowment research-support grant. He was the first alumnus to join the Endowment board, where he now handles alumni relations. After Stockholm, he moved to Stanford where he He received the J.D. from the Law School in 1995. He then moved to Washington and spent seven years in the Civil Division of the US Department of Justice, where he represented various federal agencies and officials on matters of commercial, constitutional, administrative, and privacy law. In 2002 he moved to the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). He currently serves as Chief of Litigation in the Division of Children, Families and Aging in the Department’s Office of the General Counsel. He provides legal counsel to HHS on administrative and court litigation and other matters relating to Federal programs addressing the needs of children and families, including Child Support Enforcement, Head Start, Foster Care, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. He served previously as Acting Deputy Commissioner of the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE), where he oversaw the management and operation of OCSE. When he joined HHS, he was Senior Advisor to the Commissioner of OCSE, advising on a variety of policy matters, including efforts to integrate child support enforcement with related HHS priorities, such as healthy marriage, responsible fatherhood, and community and faith-based initiatives. He is a member of the American Bar Association, the Hispanic Bar Association of the District of Columbia, the DC Bar, and the State Bar of California. He has served as a member of the Boards of the Arlington Partnership for Children, Youth and Families and the Arlington Little League. His wife Tara Isa Koslov, Brown classmate and Harvard Law graduate, is Attorney-Advisor for a Commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission. They have two daughters, Alannah and Lydia.

Steven Muller, Founder-Member, is President Emeritus of the Johns Hopkins University, a Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute, and Distinguished Professorial Lecturer at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. He served as the tenth president of the Johns Hopkins University from February 1, 1972, to June 30, 1990 and until 1983 as President of the Hopkins Hospital.  Dr. Muller is a founder of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS) and currently serves as Co-Chair Emeritus of its Trustees. He is also a Director of the Atlantic Council, a member of the Board of the International Biomedical Research Alliance, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Association of Rhodes Scholars, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.  He has served twice as a Director of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He served for years  as Chairman of the Board of St. Mary's College of Maryland, which honored him in January 2004 with the Order of the Ark and the Dove.

Dr. Muller is a specialist in comparative government and international relations, focused primarily Europe. He is the author of a textbook in comparative government and of professional articles in this field and in higher education. In recognition of his contributions to German-American relations, he was awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1980. In 1988, he was named Commendatore by the President of Italy.

In past years, Dr. Muller served as a member and Chairman of the Association of American Universities; chairman of the Association of American Medical Colleges panel on medical education (GPEP); founding Chairman of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities; a Director of the Council on Financial Aid to Education; a member of the NASA Advisory Council; and Chairman of the Council's Task Force on NASA-University Relations; and a member of two Presidential Commissions: The White House Fellowships, and World Hunger. He has also been a member of the Board of Editors of Daedalus; a Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art; a Director of the Baltimore Museum of Art; and a Trustee of the Consortium for the Advancement of Higher Education.  He twice served as a Director of the Greater Baltimore Committee.

He chaired the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.  He was a member of the Board of Directors of Alex. Brown Incorporated, Beneficial Corporation, Commercial Credit Corporation, CSX Corporation, Millipore Corporation, ORC Worldwide, Safeway Corporation, and Van Kampen Closed-End Funds.

Before moving to Johns Hopkins as Provost in April 1971, Dr. Muller served from 1966 until 1971 as Vice President for Public Affairs at Cornell University. From 1961 until 1966, he held the position of Director of Cornellís Center for International Studies. Between 1961 and 1971, he  held a tenured appointment at Cornell University as Associate Professor of Government. He has continued to teach both undergraduate and graduate students while fulfilling his administrative responsibilities.

Dr. Muller graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1948. From 1949 to 1951, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he received a B.Litt. degree in politics in 1951. He went to Cornell University in 1951 as a graduate student in Government and received his Ph.D in 1958. He served in the United States Army Signal Corps in 1954-1955. From 1956-1958, he was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Haverford College before returning to Cornell.

Born in Hamburg, Germany, on November 22, 1927, he emigrated with his family to England in 1939, and first came to the United States in 1940. He was naturalized in 1949. His first wife, Margie, was Banking Commissioner for the State of Maryland. He is now married to Dr. Jill McGovern, former Chief Executive Officer of The Marrow Foundation. Dr. Muller, who lives in Washington, D.C., has two married daughters, three grandsons, and two granddaughters.

The Lois Roth Endowment fosters and supports human exchanges across national, linguistic and cultural boundaries to enhance international understanding.  We make small investments in people in a selected number of countries, many of which Lois Roth knew—Australia, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Iran, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Turkey, and the United States.  We work with Fulbright Commissions in many of these countries.  Additionally, in tandem with the Modern Language Association of America and other non-governmental organizations, we offer prizes for literary translations into English from Persian and other world languages, and from English into French and Bulgarian. 

(05.12.08)

The Endowment honors the life and work of Lois W. Roth (1931 – 1986), American cultural diplomat.

Lois was born in New York City to Louis Wersba, a manufacturer of fine clothing, and Natalie Mann, daughter of a theatrical family; both had a discerning eye for art and theatre. Her first language was French, thanks to a nanny, but fluency in the language would always elude her. Her early education in public schools led to study at the Fieldston School, an offshoot of the Ethical Culture movement, graced by noteworthy teachers and classmates, among them the two daughters of Lois’ adoptive mother, the Swedish-American, Anne O. Thomson.

She chose to attend Elmira College, where she was enchanted by art history but little else. She transferred to Barnard College, where she drifted towards the social sciences.

An early marriage to Robert Roth, son of family friends, ended in divorce. Returning from life as a military wife in Texas and Virginia, she began graduate studies in sociology at Columbia University, under Robert and Helen Lynd, Paul Lazarsfeld, C. Wright Mills, Nathan Glazer, and other major scholars at a great moment in American social thought. One of these scholars was the Swedish sociologist, Hans Zetterberg, soon to head Sweden’s equivalent of the Gallup polls and later to serve as editor in chief for the Svenska Dagbladet.

She won a Fulbright grant to Uppsala University in the early 1950s. It was a seminal moment. She learned Swedish with ease and in depth. In the Fall if 1966, when Lois Roth had had left the American Scandinavian Foundation and was awaiting orders to proceed to the US Embassy in Tehran, she spent her evenings translating the mystery novel Roseanna by the Swedish couple Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö.  It was published by Pantheon Books in the Spring of 1967. It has remained in print for four decades.

At Uppsala University, she made life-long friends, among them Hans Blix, Swedish diplomat, foreign minister, and finally head of the IAEC.

In Sweden, Lois, by nature self-conscious and reticent, though afraid of nothing--except, as close friends knew, of public speaking—-would find the way she wanted to live her life: to be the best she could be at making serious, lasting connections across cultures, friendships that overcame the zig-zags of a transient international life. Her curiosity and her warmth were boundless, and those she knew understood and responded to both. On her return to the U.S., she joined the American-Scandinavian Foundation as special assistant to president, Lithgow Osborne, and his next two successors. She did everything--translations, publications, event-planning, hosting--and swiftly became the indispensable “Girl Friday,” in the phrase of the time. One major achievement was to help persuade the Ford Foundation to give 40 extensive familiarization grants to prominent Finns, each of whom she shepherded around the U.S. Bringing Finland into the ASF program, she became in the process a kind of celebrity in Finland: arriving in Helsinki for a visit on the same day as Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, she found her picture and story above the front-page fold, with LBJ’s below.

In 1961 like many others, she was galvanized by the Kennedy moment and applied to join the U.S. Information Agency. But women were not then taken on by USIA for lateral entry, so she entered the Agency’s foreign service only five years later. She was assigned to Tehran, serving first as deputy to the Cultural Affairs Officer and then as director of the huge Iran-America Society (IAS), a bi-national organization devoted to cultural exchanges, fine and performing arts, and English language learning. The IAS had three large buildings, half a dozen branches throughout Iran, three stages, three restaurants, two art galleries, and two libraries; it taught English to 5,000 Iranians a day and ran the only student center in Iran, across the street from Tehran University. Under her direction, the IAS became one of the single most significant centers of cultural activity in Iran, then in a ferment of cultural activity and experimentation. After five years in Tehran came the first of several demanding jobs in Washington and abroad: desk officer for the Scandinavian countries and Washington consultant for bi-national centers worldwide.

She also found herself elected Secretary of the American Foreign Service Association, at a time when the so-called Young Turks were pressing for serious reform in the State Department. In April of 1973, she married Richard Arndt, a Tehran colleague. Returning abroad, she served as cultural program officer in Rome, then Paris.

In 1980, she came back to the U.S., first to spend a year in the prestigious Senior Seminar, a year-long inter-agency program preparing participants for upper-echelon leadership roles. She was named USIA’s director for centers, books, libraries, and English teaching, then moved to head the Agency’s global program for fine and performing arts (Arts America), which she began seriously to re-imagine, devoting to it the kind of energy and why-not creativity which were the hallmarks of everything she had done.

An early bout with cancer in 1982 seemed to have been overcome and failed to slow her down. In parallel to her USIA assignments, she headed the Women’s Action Organization (WAO) and played a role in reshaping embassy life for women and spouses. As always, she continued to serve as mentor to a younger generation of foreign service officers, seeking to imbue them with her spirit and offer them the kind of training in the arts of cultural and intellectual diplomacy that was usually missing in institutional orientation efforts. Lois Roth wrote two articles which had a deep impact on the thinking of USIA’s foreign service: her article for WAO, “Nice Girl or Pushy Bitch: Two Roads to Non-Promotion,” reported on two periods of service with promotion panels ten years apart; she analyzed how women officers across many years were kept or kept themselves from promotions by stereotyping.

Her second major paper was produced originally during her years in the Department of State’s Senior Seminar: published first by State, then by Tufts University, it found its fullest expression in an updated version anthologized by Ulloth and Brasch in The Press and the State (1986). The paper, “Public Diplomacy and the Past: The Search for an American Style of Propaganda 1952-1977,” examines the tension between long-standing, competing ideas of how the U.S. conducts what is now termed “public diplomacy,” detailing the struggle between the commitment of “information” to short-term foreign policy aims and culture’s approach, reaching a decade or two ahead, and leaving service to foreign policy as an inevitable by-product. Lois died of complications from recurrent cancer in January 1986.

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The idea of an endowment to memorialize this generous life arose from the outpouring of sadness for the telling loss of a woman at the peak of her career. It has built up over more than two decades from the regular modest contributions of hundreds of her friends, later from those who were not fortunate enough to have known her but only knew of her, and from the gratitude of its early grantee-alumni. Spurts of growth resulted from bequests and living bequests which helped lift the Endowment sharply at various moments. These gifts came from friends like Anne O. and Fred Thomson, Fulbrighter-daughter Elizabeth Kostova, Lois’ sister Carolyn and John Rosenthal, USIA and State colleagues Dr. Martin C. and Faye Carroll Jr., Col. Richard R. and Myriam Hallock, and the Delevan Foundation, and various anonymous donors. The Endowment’s prestigious and devoted board has stood strongly in place since the beginning and has recently been joined by younger colleagues. Today, the Endowment is laying plans for continued growth into the future so that this unique effort can survive the lives of those who first built it.