Kingman Brewster Jr.

He was a direct lineal descendant of Elder William Brewster (c. 1567 – April 10, 1644), the Mayflower Passenger, Pilgrim colonist leader, and spiritual elder of the Plymouth Colony, through his son Jonathan Brewster.

He was also descended from Mayflower Passenger John Howland.

He was a grandson of Charles Kingman Brewster and Celina Sophia Baldwin, and Lyman Waterman Besse and Henrietta Louisa Segee.

His maternal grandfather, Lyman W. Besse, owned an extensive chain of clothing stores in the Northeast known as "The Besse System."

His uncle, Stanley King, (May 11, 1883 – April 28, 1951) was the eleventh president of Amherst College, from 1932 to 1946.

Brewster was born in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, the son of Florence Foster (née Besse), a 1907 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wellesley College, and Kingman Brewster Sr., a 1906 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Amherst College and a 1911 graduate of the Harvard Law School.

She was married to Edward R. Murrow (April 25, 1908 – April 27, 1965) who was an American broadcast journalist.

His first cousin was Janet Huntington Brewster (September 18, 1910 –December 18, 1998) who was an American philanthropist, writer, radio broadcaster, and relief worker during World War II in London.

Kingman Brewster Jr. (June 17, 1919 – November 8, 1988) was an American educator, academic and diplomat.

Phillips was born August 30, 1920, in Providence, Rhode Island, the daughter of Mary and Eugene James Phillips (he was a 1905 graduate of Yale College, and a 1907 graduate of Yale Law School).

In 1923, when he was four, his parents separated and later divorced.

Brewster and his surviving sister, Mary, were raised by their mother first in Springfield, Massachusetts, and later in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

His mother was a firm influence but never overbearing.

One of Brewster's friends characterized her as "one of those people whose presence you always felt when she was in the room."

Another friend remembered that "she knew poetry, she knew music, she knew art, she knew architecture, and believe me, she knew Kingman."

Brewster wrote that his mother was a "marvelously speculative and philosophical type," a "free-thinking spirit... given to far-out enthusiasms and delighting in sprightly arguments with her more intellectually-conventional friends.

His mother remarried in 1932 to Edward Ballantine, a music professor at Harvard University and composer she had known since childhood.

Ballantine had no children of his own and was not interested in a parental role.

Brewster's uncle, Arthur Besse, stepped into the role of surrogate father.

She graduated in 1939 from the Wheeler School and attended but did not graduate from Vassar College.

He invited Lindbergh in 1940 to speak at Yale.

At the time of the invitation, Lindbergh was the nation's best-known isolationist and the most prominent private citizen opposed to the war.

He and Lindbergh strategized on the America First Committee, which Brewster had founded, along with other students at Yale, after the fall of France.

The founding members of the AFC included many of the East Coast universities' best and the brightest, from valedictorians to football all-Americans to campus newspaper editors.

Many of the men later achieved national reputations.

They included future President Gerald Ford; the first director of the Peace Corps, Sargent Shriver; future Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, and US Representative Jonathan Brewster Bingham.

The AFC became the most prominent organization in the struggle to keep America out of the European war.

Brewster also took great care to ensure that the noninterventionist movement on campus was not led by social outcasts or malcontents but by "students who had attained relative respect and prominence during their undergraduate years."

He emphasized repeatedly that his group represented mainstream campus opinion and that its views were "in agreement with the great majority of Americans of all ages."

After graduating from Belmont Hill School in Massachusetts, Brewster entered Yale College, joining the newly established Timothy Dwight residential college and graduating in 1941.

Then, he became chairman of the Yale Daily News.

During his junior year, he turned down an offer of membership in Skull and Bones, becoming a legend in Yale undergraduate lore.

Like many students at the time, he was an ardent opponent of the US entering World War II and was an outspoken noninterventionist.

Brewster idolized fellow antiwar activist Charles Lindbergh, was entranced by Lindbergh's Trans-Atlantic flight, and remained (in his words) "bug-eyed about aviation" his entire life.

In 1942, while serving in the armed forces, Brewster married Mary Louise Phillips in Jacksonville, Florida.

She died on April 14, 2004, at her home in Combe, Berkshire, England, at 83.

She was buried next to her husband in the Grove Street Cemetery.

Brewster and his wife had five children.

Their granddaughter is actress Jordana Brewster.

He served as the 17th President of Yale University and as United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom.