President’s Corner: A Tribute to Julia Taft

Julia Taft, who spent more than 30 years protecting refugees and directing responses to humanitarian emergencies, died on March 15th. Her death is a huge loss, not only to her family and friends, but to all displaced people who needed a skilled, committed political operator on their side.

Julia was only 32 years old in 1975, when President Ford asked her to direct an interagency task force to resettle Indochinese refugees in the U.S. In just seven months her task force brought 131,000 Vietnamese to the U.S., protecting them from a wave of post-war persecution.

This started Julia on a life of refugee protection. In the months before her death from cancer, she was critical of the Bush administration for its slow, reluctant resettlement of Iraqi refugees, many of whom fled death threats in their country because they had worked for U.S. forces. “No matter your view of the war, welcoming the persecuted and standing by our friends is the right thing to do,” she wrote in The Washington Post last year.

She held a number of important jobs, including the director of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development, Assistant Secretary of State for Population Refugees and Migration and Director of the Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery at the UN Development Program.

In Julia’s case, the jobs did not make the woman, she made the jobs. She called herself an “operational person” who was interested in the mechanics of protecting refugees and delivering life-saving aid. It was her ability to bring order to chaos—plus her willingness to get on a plane, helicopter, jeep or riverboat to go almost anywhere—that enabled her to make a difference. Whether in the White House, a refugee camp, or a meeting with government and NGO officials, she knew how to get people moving.

Everybody admired her commitment and courage. She even received the USSR Supreme Soviet Award for Personal Courage in recognition of her response to the Armenian earthquake in 1988.

I first met Julia in 1994 when she was the president of InterAction, the umbrella group for international relief and development agencies. In that capacity, she had helped organize a humanitarian response to the massive migration that followed the genocide in Rwanda. She approached this and every other problem with an amazing combination of determination, humor and an impatience for slow humanitarian responses.

These were the same qualities she brought to her friendships and to raising her three children with her husband, William H. Taft IV.

People like Julia are impossible to replace, but she inspired us all to do better.

--Ken Bacon