When Disaster Struck, She Responded

Mark Malloch Brown, former administrator of the United Nations Development Program, once called her "a champion of well-coordinated responses to emergencies and conflict situations."

She dealt with issues of poverty, crisis prevention, disaster recovery, governance and the HIV-AIDS epidemic for the U.N. agency from 2001 to 2004.

Taft advocated the deeper value of the work she did. It was a way to help people and to influence policy.

"Humanitarian assistance, periodically dismissed by some as a small arena for 'do-gooders,' has, in fact, long been used by the U.S. government as an instrument of foreign policy," she told a group in 1998.

Her call to public service started with her family. She was born Julia Vadala in New York, the daughter of Army surgeon Antony Vadala. After graduating from the University of Colorado, where she also received a master's degree in political science, she began working for Radio Free Europe. In 1970 and 1971, she was a White House fellow before joining HEW, now the Department of Housing and Human Services.

While raising a family and working through her most difficult assignments, she found encouragement in a group of friends who also were juggling work and home "at a time when it was not always easy for women to be in the workplace," said her husband, a former deputy secretary of defense and great-grandson of President William Howard Taft.

Family was a priority for her, her children recalled. No matter where she went on her various missions, she always made it home for Christmas, her favorite holiday, said one of her daughters, Julia Harris Taft.

When they were younger, Taft would ask her children to donate their toys to children caught in despair, said her eldest daughter, Maria Consetta Taft.

"I remember her having this commitment and passion for every group," her son said. "She just felt this need to connect to everybody."