Morton Abramowitz arrived in Bangkok in 1978 as U.S. ambassador to Thailand, tasked with promoting international cooperation and advancing political interests. He would leave three years later, having brought humanitarian aid and the plight of Cambodian refugees to bear on U.S. foreign policy. The diplomat “had something that is not common among people like him,” says Michael McFaul, ’86, MA ’86, professor of political science and director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, who worked with Abramowitz at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “He had a strong commitment to human rights and the morality of American foreign policy.”
Photo: Courtesy Abramowitz Family
Morton Isaac Abramowitz, ’53, a career ambassador, former president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and co-founder of the International Crisis Group, died on November 29. He was 91.
The son of Jewish emigrants from Lithuania, Abramowitz was born in Lakewood Township, N.J. He graduated from Stanford in three years, majoring in history, and then earned a master’s in East Asian studies from Harvard.
He began his foreign service career in 1960, and worked as a special assistant and political adviser in the years leading up to his appointment as ambassador to Thailand by then-President Jimmy Carter. In 1979, as hundreds of thousands of Cambodians sought refuge from famine in the wake of genocide and the Vietnamese invasion, Abramowitz personally secured a $300,000 grant for aid from a Catholic humanitarian agency, having deemed U.S. government support insufficient. At his urging, both Thailand and the United States ultimately opened their doors to the refugees.
Abramowitz also served as ambassador during arms-reduction talks in Vienna, and, as U.S. ambassador to Turkey, he secured protections for Kurdish refugees. In 1991, Abramowitz retired from the foreign service and was named president of the Carnegie Endowment. A few years later, he co-founded the International Crisis Group, an NGO that works to prevent violence and war by tracking global conflict and providing up-to-date analysis to decision-makers around the world.
“He gravitated toward doing all he could, from whatever perch he occupied, to prevent and mitigate the human costs of conflict,” read a eulogy by Samantha Power, who interned for Abramowitz at the Carnegie Endowment and served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Abramowitz’s son, Michael, says that while his father’s humanitarianism has been attributed, in part, to his family’s losses in the Holocaust, “I tend to think it was because he was practical. When he saw someone in need and he knew the U.S. could do something about it, he thought they should.”
Abramowitz was predeceased by his wife, Sheppie. In addition to his son, he is survived by his daughter, Rachel, and three grandchildren.
Kali Shiloh is a staff writer at Stanford. Email her at kshiloh@stanford.edu.
