William H. Marsh *57

William Marsh, a long-term diplomat with the U.S. Foreign Service, died Sept. 26, 2017, at age 86.

Marsh graduated from Cornell in 1953, and, after two years in the Air Force, he earned an MPA in 1957 from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. He joined the Foreign Service in 1960, and served with distinction for 36 years. Marsh was deployed to Vietnam and rose to head the U.S. Embassy’s provincial reporting unit, analyzing the full situation in the countryside.

After serving in Vietnam from 1963 to 1966, he was well prepared for the Vietnam desk at the State Department. From 1972 to 1974, he served with the U.S. delegation to the Vietnam peace talks in Paris. In the 1980s, Marsh’s focus shifted to the Middle East when he was assigned to Saudi Arabia. He negotiated the deployment of AWAC aircraft to monitor Soviet activity in Afghanistan.

Marsh capped his career as the U.S. permanent representative to the U.N. Agencies for Food and Agriculture in Rome. For this, he received a presidential award for overseeing airdropped food to starving refugees during the Kosovo war.

He was predeceased in 2011 by his wife, Ruth, whom he had married in 1962. He is survived by two sons and four grandchildren.

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