Herbert Kaiser
June 8, 1923-March 30, 2018
Palo Alto, California
Herbert Kaiser died peacefully at his home in Palo Alto on March 30. A diplomat and an activist, he was 94. Herb was a U.S. Foreign Service officer from 1950 to 1983, serving in Eastern Europe and South Africa. In 1985, he and Joy Dana Kaiser, his wife of 68 years, founded Medical Education for South African Blacks, a non-profit organization that raised funds to train medical professionals of color in South Africa. In 1993 they moved to Palo Alto, where they continued their initiative. Over the course of 20 years MESAB helped educate 10,000 doctors, nurses and paramedics, thus helping to build a post-apartheid society.
Born June 8, 1923 in Brooklyn, New York to Max and Nettie Kaiser, Herb was proud in later life to recollect that for much of his youth he was a welfare child. The experience of public charity spurred him ever after to repay society. After attending the Yeshiva Ohel Moshe and James Madison High School, Herb worked briefly in the Brooklyn Navy Yard building the battleships Iowa, Wisconsin and Missouri, before joining the U.S. Navy in January 1942. Shipping out from San Francisco as a submariner, Herb served on the U.S.S. Dragonet, SS 293, and completed two combat patrols. In August 1945, Herb and his shipmates were in the Sea of Japan on lifeguard duty just offshore from Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the atomic bombs were dropped. Apart from the aviators involved, the Dragonet was perhaps the U.S. unit nearest those events.
Following the war, and thanks to the G.I. Bill, Herb attended Swarthmore College where he earned his bachelo's degree in History, with honors in 1949. He would later describe his years at Swarthmore as pivotal, opening his eyes to a wider world of ideas and introducing him to his future wife, Joy. They married later the same year. Soon thereafter he found employment with the U.S. State Department and was posted to the U.S. Consulate in Glasgow, Scotland, 1950-1952. As a career diplomat, Herb became a specialist in Eastern European affairs, with postings to the U.S. Embassies in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (1955-1958), Vienna, Austria (1959-1962) and Warsaw, Poland (1965-1968). An out-of-area assignment to the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria/Cape Town, South Africa (1969-1972) was to have profound consequences following his retirement from the Foreign Service. Herb served as U.S. Consul General in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (1974-1978) and Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy, Bucharest, Romania (1980-1981). Between these various overseas assignments, he held a variety of posts at the State Department in Washington, D.C. and studied at Harvard University and the U.S. Army War College.
A natural linguist, Herb was fluent in Serbo-Croatian, German, Polish, Romanian, Afrikaans and Yiddish. He used these language skills to become closely acquainted with the countries in which he served, and he made a point of developing the widest possible range of contacts. He was thus able to inform policy-makers of subtle political nuances in East European and South African societies, and to bring American messages to many different groups. Among his achievements were successful efforts to aid persecuted Jews behind the Iron Curtain; working closely with Rabbi Moses Rosen, Kaiser helped secure exit visas for tens of thousands of Romanian Jews.
Herb retired from the State Department in 1983 and turned to activism. While in South Africa, he had contracted a malignant melanoma which was cured there. Reflecting on the odious imbalance between the health care he had received and that which was then available to persons of color in South Africa, Herb and Joy started a foundation, Medical Education for South African Blacks, in order to raise and distribute funds for scholarships and bursaries that would assist the training of medical personnel. The challenges were steep: at the time the apartheid government of South Africa was disinclined to do much for Black South Africans; conversely, African American activists in the United States wanted the world to have nothing to do with official South Africa. These obstacles were overcome through persistence and diplomacy, and by the late 1980s MESAB began to deliver significant aid to Black South African medical students, who were trained in that country. Following the end of the apartheid regime, and with the enthusiastic support of luminaries such as Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and George Soros, Herb and Joy’s efforts through MESAB continued and expanded, even as the HIV/AIDS epidemic was sweeping through the country. By 2007, when MESAB was shuttered, the organization had raised $27m to help create an 11,000-strong cadre of South African health care professionals of color. Herb and Joy published a memoir of MESAB (Against the Odds: Health and Hope in South Africa, Amazon, 2013).
Herb was subsequently honored for his work, receiving doctorates from the Medical University of South Africa and Swarthmore College, the Albert Schweitzer Award, and, most significantly, induction as a Member of the Companions of O.R. Tambo (silver), South Africa’s highest honor for a foreigner.
Herb was predeceased by his sisters, Frieda Kratter, Helen Snyder, and Doris Cosnowsky. He is survived by his wife Joy; his children, Timothy, Paul, and Gail; son-in-law, Mark Anderton; daughters-in-law Katheryn DeGroot Kaiser and Margaret Darmanin Kaiser; and his grandchildren, Natalie and Nicolas Kaiser, Alice and Jane Kaiser, and Claire and John Anderton.
Pinned to the bulletin board in his office, a small piece of paper bears these lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “To know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived – this is to have succeeded.” By this measure, then, Herb Kaiser succeeded many, many thousands of times.
Tags: veteran, public service
