Cash cars: Imported secondhand cars are cheap and provide the state with much-needed income.
Herbert Kaiser, diplomat and activist, died peacefully on March 30 2018 in Palo Alto, California. He was 94.
Kaiser was a US foreign service officer from 1950 to 1983, serving in Eastern Europe and South Africa. In 1984, he and Joy Dana Kaiser, his wife of 69 years, founded Medical Education for South African Blacks, a non-profit organisation that raised funds to train medical professionals of colour in South Africa. Over the course of 20 years MESAB helped educate 10 000 doctors, nurses, and paramedics, thus helping to build a post-apartheid society.
Born in Brooklyn in 1923 to Max and Nettie Kaiser, his early years were marked by the plunge from prosperity to poverty that so many New Yorkers experienced after 1929. Kaiser 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, Kaiser worked briefly in the Brooklyn Navy Yard building the battleships Iowa, Wisconsin and Missouri, before joining the U.S. Navy in January 1942. A submariner, Kaiser served on the U.S.S. Dragonet, SS 293, and completed two combat patrols. In August 1945 Kaiser and his shipmates were in the Sea of Japan on lifeguard duty just offshore from Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the atom 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, Kaiser attended Swarthmore College where he earned his BA in History, with Honors. 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 Dana Sundgaard. They married in 1949. Soon thereafter he found employment with the U.S. State Department and was posted to the US Consulate in Glasgow, Scotland, 1950-1952.
As a career diplomat, Kaiser 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 US Embassy in Pretoria/Cape Town, South Africa was to have profound consequences following his resignation from the Foreign Service. Kaiser served as US Consul General in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (1975-1978), and Minister-Counsellor at the US Embassy, Bucharest, Romania (1980-1981). Between these various overseas assignments, Kaiser 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, Kaiser 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.
Kaiser resigned from the State Department and turned to activism in 1983. While in South Africa, Kaiser 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, Kaiser and his wife 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, Kaiser’s and MESAB’s efforts continued and expanded, even as the HIV/AIDS epidemic was sweeping through the country. By 2004, when MESAB was shuttered, the organization had helped create a 10 000-strong cadre of South African health care professionals of color. Kaiser and his wife published a memoir of MESAB (Against the Odds: Health and Hope in South Africa, Amazon, 2013).
Kaiser was subsequently honoured 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.
Herbert Kaiser 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 Katherine 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, Herbert Kaiser succeeded many, many thousands of times.