A native of Worcester, Mass., Tom came to Princeton from Phillips Andover Academy. He majored in economics and joined Colonial Club, where he starred in bridge and was dean of the TV den. He was a four-year member of Army ROTC. After military service in Korea, Tom earned a law degree from Harvard in 1966.
Tom served in the State Department from 1967 to 1987 as an economics officer, posted to Jakarta, Hamburg, Rome, Paris, and lastly Amsterdam, where he was consul general at the U.S. embassy. In Washington he was director of the State Department’s operations center. He led the American Bar Association’s law and democracy project in Cambodia in the early 1990s.
Joining Checchi in 1996, Tom had project-management responsibilities for USAID-funded legal development and institutional-reform projects in Afghanistan, Indonesia, Madagascar, Montenegro, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.
Tom’s wife of 41 years, Joyce, died a month after Tom in 2009. Their daughter and only child, Siobhan, died in 2002. Only Tom’s brother, John, survives.