Samuel Lewis, former U.S. ambassador to Israel, died of lung cancer March 10, 2014. He was 83.
Lewis graduated from Yale in 1952, and received a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins in 1954. That year he joined the Foreign Service, and served in several posts abroad. From 1963 to 1964, he was a mid-career fellow at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School.
In 1977, Jimmy Carter appointed him ambassador to Israel. In 1978, President Carter hosted Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat at Camp David. Lewis was key to the peace accords reached there, ending 30 years of war between the two nations.
Lewis privately challenged Carter when the president questioned Begin’s sincerity in seeking peace. As revealed in a 1990 oral-history project, Lewis told how he persuaded Carter that Begin and all Israelis wanted peace above all. The problem, he said, was not the objective of peace, but the price the Israelis were prepared to pay in addition to the domestic political risks to Begin.
He remained as ambassador under Ronald Reagan into 1985. Later, he was the policy-planning director at the State Department under Bill Clinton.
He is survived by Sallie, his wife of more than 60 years, and two children.
Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.