Charles Yost

Charles Woodruff Yost (November 6, 1907 – May 21, 1981) was a career U.S. Ambassador who was assigned as his country's representative to the United Nations from 1969 to 1971.

Yost was born in Watertown, New York.

He attended the Hotchkiss School, where he was a member of the class of 1924 that included Roswell Gilpatric, Paul Nitze and Chapman Rose, before graduating from Princeton University in 1928.

He did postgraduate studies at the École des Hautes Études International (École pratique des hautes études) in Paris.

Over the next year he traveled to Geneva, Berlin, the Soviet Union (with author Croswell Bowen), Poland, Rumania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Spain, and Vienna.

Yost joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1930 on the advice of former Secretary of State Robert Lansing, and served in Alexandria, Egypt as a consular officer, followed by an assignment in Poland.

In 1933, he left the Foreign Service to pursue a career as a freelance foreign correspondent in Europe and a writer in New York City.

After his marriage to Irena Rawicz-Oldakowska, he returned to the U.S. State Department in 1935, becoming assistant chief of the Division of Arms and Munitions Control in 1936.

Throughout the late 1940s and the 1950s, his assignments took him to Czechoslovakia, Austria (twice), and Greece.

In 1941, he represented the State Department on the Policy Committee of the Board of Economic Warfare.

Yost was appointed assistant chief of special research in 1942, and was made assistant chief of the Division of Foreign Activity Correlation in 1943.

In February of the next year he became executive secretary of the Department of State Policy Committee.

He attended the Dumbarton Oaks Conference from August to October 1944, when he worked on Chapters VI and VII of the United Nations Charter.

He then served at the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco in April 1945 as aide to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius.

In July of that year he was secretary-general of the Potsdam Conference.

In 1945, Yost was reinstated in the Foreign Service, and later that year he served as political adviser to U.S. Lieutenant General Raymond Albert Wheeler on the staff of Lord Louis Mountbatten in Kandy, Ceylon.

He then became chargé d'affaires in Thailand during the short reign of Ananda Mahidol.

In 1954, he was named minister to Laos, and he became the first United States ambassador there a year later.

In 1957, he was minister counselor in Paris.

At the end of the same year he was named ambassador to Syria.

Shortly after his appointment, Syria and Egypt formed the United Arab Republic, and the U.S. was asked to close its embassy in Syria.

Yost was then sent as ambassador to Morocco in 1958.

In 1961, he began his first assignment at the United Nations as the deputy to Ambassador Adlai Stevenson.

In 1964, Yost was promoted to the rank of Career Ambassador, the highest professional Foreign Service level, in recognition of especially distinguished service over a sustained period.

After Stevenson's death in 1965, Yost stayed on as deputy to Ambassador Arthur Goldberg.

In 1966 he resigned from the Foreign Service to begin his career as a writer, at the Council on Foreign Relations, and as a teacher, at Columbia University.

In 1969, President Richard Nixon called Yost out of retirement to become the permanent United States representative to the United Nations.

He resigned in 1971 and returned to writing, at the Brookings Institution, and teaching at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.

Yost set forth his views in a syndicated newspaper column, for The Christian Science Monitor, and in four books — The Age of Triumph and Frustration: Modern Dialogues, The Insecurity of Nations, The Conduct and Misconduct of Foreign Relations, and History and Memory.

In 1973, he was named head of the National Committee on United States-China Relations; he visited the People's Republic of China in 1973 and 1977.

In 1974, Yost was awarded the Foreign Service Cup by his fellow Foreign Service officers.

In 1979, Yost was co-chairman of Americans for SALT II, a group that lobbied the Senate for passage of the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty.

He was a trustee of the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and director of the Aspen Institute for cultural exchanges with Iran.

He took part in the unofficial Dartmouth Conferences of United States and Soviet scholars.

Yost died of cancer on May 21, 1981, at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C., at age 73.

Yost's papers are at Princeton University Library's Mudd Library in its Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.

Yost's ancestors, who were driven out of the German Palatinate by Louis XIV's armies in the late 17th century, settled in the valley of the Mohawk River in New York State.

Others were of Scotch-Irish origin and came to America with the immigration that took place around the mid-18th century.

Yost's ancestor Edward Howell founded Watermill on Long Island, New York, and his ancestor Abraham Cooper founded Oxbow, New York.

His ancestor Brigadier General Nicholas Herkimer was a Revolutionary War hero.