Authority on Humanitarian Assistance Traveled the Globe to Assist Those in Need
By Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 23, 2008
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."
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."