Charles Yost

Yost's ancestors, who were driven out of the German Palatinate by Louis XIV's armies at the end of the 17th century, settled in the valley of the Mohawk River in New York State. Others were of Scotch-Irish origin and came to this country with the immigration that took place about the middle of the 18th century.

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

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. 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 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.

"The Role of US Ambassador to the UN, Charles Woodruff Yost, in the Formation of the Middle East Policy of the Nixon Administration, 1969-1971"

"The Wasted Decade: Israel’s Policies towards the Occupied Territories 1967-1977"

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 1961, he began his first assignment at the United Nations as the deputy to Ambassador Adlai Stevenson. After Stevenson's death in 1965, Yost stayed on as deputy to Ambassador Arthur Goldberg. 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.

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

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. 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 1934, Yost married Irena Rawicz-Oldakowska in Poland. Her father was Kazimierz Ołdakowski, the pre-war director of Fabryka Broni. They had two sons, Nicholas and Casimir, and a daughter Felicity.

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.

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.

"The Story Behind the Story: Experience and Identity in the Development of Palestinians Nationalism 1917-1967"

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.