When Disaster Struck, She Responded

Authority on Humanitarian Assistance Traveled the Globe to Assist Those in Need

Julia Taft was a do-gooder in the best sense of the word for more than 40 years. She started working on behalf of the country's most vulnerable citizens at the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare in the early 1970s.

Then, in 1975, when Taft was 32, President Gerald R. Ford thrust her into the leadership of resettling refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos after the collapse of Saigon. "It was pretty heady stuff for her at that age," recalled her husband, William Howard Taft IV.

Coordinating the refugee resettlement program was a "daunting assignment," she once said, and she "learned a lot about humanitarian assistance -- and the government." It was what propelled her into a career of public service that took her around the world but never too far away from her family.

After helping 131,000 Indochinese refugees resettle in the United States, Taft took some time off to begin a family and work with her husband to fix up their farmhouse in Lorton. In a few years, however, the necessary, mundane delights of domestic life had to make room for the calling that gave help and hope to so many.

Taft, who died March 15 of colon cancer in Washington at 65, was a leading authority on refugee and humanitarian affairs. In the late 1980s, while directing the U.S. foreign disaster assistance program for the Agency for International Development, she dealt with floods in Bangladesh and the Dominican Republic, earthquakes in El Salvador and Armenia, and a locust plague in Ethiopia.

She often found herself in the thick of despair and devastation. She flew off on a moment's notice to Armenia in 1988 when an earthquake left 55,000 dead and many more displaced.

She continued to build her reputation as a skilled organizer, able to deliver life-saving support during her four years in the mid-1990s as president of InterAction, a coalition of more than 150 U.S.-based private groups focusing on international development, refugee assistance and humanitarian relief around the world.

At InterAction, she helped coordinate the response to the massive forced migration after the genocide in Rwanda. And as she sometimes did, she took her work home with her, giving her three children firsthand insight into current events.

She had been working long hours, said her son, William H. Taft V, and coming home screaming about the red tape and inaction on the part of the government. "She would get fed up with inaction," he added.

In the field in which she worked, Taft, who also served as assistant secretary of state at the Bureau of Populations, Refugees and Migration in the Clinton administration, was known for getting things done.

Ken Bacon, president of Refugees International, said she had the ability "to bring order out of chaos . . . that enabled her to make a difference."

"Everyone," he wrote in a blog, "admired her commitment and courage."