Laurence Desaix Anderson

 February 12, 1936–February 11, 2021

A renowned diplomat, educator, and artist, Desaix passed away on February 11, one day shy of his 85th birthday. A resident of New York’s Greenwich Village, Desaix spent time each year in Paris, France; Washington, D.C.; and Sumner, Mississippi, where he grew up.

The middle child of five children of Laurence Desaix and Elizabeth Bailey Anderson, Desaix spent his summers working on the family farm, attended the Webb School in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, and received his BA in history from Princeton University in 1958. He served two years in the U.S. Navy Reserve, after which he spent ten months hitchhiking around Western Europe, traveling 24,000 miles with his home base in Paris, France.

Visiting D.C. in January 1961, he heard newly inaugurated President John F. Kennedy say, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Profoundly moved, Desaix decided that the pleasure of living in different countries, learning their cultures, and serving his country would make for a remarkable life.

After studying European literature in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the U.S. Foreign Service. Following his first assignment in Kathmandu, Nepal, he studied Vietnamese at the Foreign Service Institute and served a total of six assignments in Vietnam between 1965 and 1997, culminating in his opening the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi as chargé d’affaires in 1995.

Other assignments included service as a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Taipei and then in Tokyo. After a stint in the Political-Military Bureau in Washington, he was named deputy political counselor in the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, then was country director for Vietnam, Laos, and Kampuchea in Washington and subsequently country director for Japan. He served as deputy chief of mission under Ambassador Mike Mansfield in Tokyo before becoming Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific, with primary responsibility for Japan, Korea, China, and Mongolia. After lecturing as a diplomat-in-residence at Princeton and Rutgers universities, he served as State Department coordinator for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings hosted by President Clinton in Seattle, Washington, and subsequently became a senior member for Asia of the Policy Planning Council.

Following his service as chargé in Hanoi, Anderson retired from the Foreign Service in 1997, serving afterwards as the State Department special envoy on Cambodia and teaching at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1998.  He then was asked by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to serve as director of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), which had been established to carry out the Agreed Framework reached in 1994 by President Bill Clinton and North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. From 2007 through 2009, he conducted summer seminars for Princeton undergraduates in Hanoi. In 2012 he was inducted into the Order of the Rising Sun by the Japanese ambassador to the U.S. He had worked since 1994 with the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation and was Chairman of the Board 2015–2019. He served on the board of the Pacific Century Institute (PCI) in Los Angeles, for which he organized “Women’s Empowerment” seminars in Hanoi and Yangon, Myanmar, and was a member the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Late in his career, Desaix took up painting; his works have been exhibited at galleries in New York and Mississippi. In 2011, he and his brother, Buford, bought a building on the square in their hometown of Sumner and established the Cassidy Bayou Art Gallery, named for the bayou that flows through town. Art-exhibit openings there typically double the size of the town for several hours.

Desaix is survived by sisters Elizabeth Aldridge and Florence DeCell (Kenneth DeCell), of Washington, D.C., and brother, Buford, who with his wife, Malvina, splits his time between their farm near Tampico, Mexico, and the family home in Sumner, Mississippi; thirteen nieces and nephews scattered across the country from coast to coast; eighteen great-nieces and -nephews; and four great-great nieces and one great-great nephew.